"Fifth flat, the Misses Elliots, milliners.
"Garrets, a great variety of tailors and other tradesmen."[1]
There were no water pipes, there were no drain pipes, there were no cess-pools, and there were no covered sewers in the streets. At a fixed hour of the night all the impurities were carried down the common staircase in tubs, and emptied into the street as into a common sewer, or else, in defiance of the law, cast out of the window. "Throwing over the window" was the delicate phrase in which this vile practice was veiled. It was "an obstinate disease which had withstood all the labour of the Magistrates, Acts of Council, Dean of Guild Courts for stencheling,[2] tirlesing,[3] and locking up windows, fines, imprisonments, and banishing the city."[4] The servants were willing to serve for lower wages in houses where this practice was winked at. It gave rise to numerous quarrels which caused constables more trouble than any other part of their duty.[5] According to the account given by the English maid in Humphry Clinker, when "the throwing over" began, "they called gardy loo to the passengers, which signifies Lord have mercy upon you."[6] A young English traveller, who, the first night of his arrival in Edinburgh, was enjoying his supper, as he tells us, and good bottle of claret with a merry company in a tavern, heard, as the clock was striking ten, the beat of the city drum, the signal for the scavenging to begin. The company at once began to fumigate the room by lighting pieces of paper and throwing them on the table. Tobacco smoking, it is clear, could not have been in fashion. As his way to his lodgings lay through one of the wyncls he was provided "with a guide who went before him, crying out all the way, Hud your Hannde."[7] The city scavengers cleansed the streets as fast as they could, and by opening reservoirs which were placed at intervals washed the pavement clean.[8]
To this intolerable nuisance the inhabitants generally seemed
- ↑ Reekiana, by Robert Chambers, p. 227: "The house was situated at the head of Dickson's Close, a few doors below Niddry Street." I have found all these names, except Stirling's, in the recent interesting reprint of the Edinburgh Directory for 1773–4, published by William Brown, Edinburgh, 1889.
- ↑ "Stenchel. An iron bar for a window." Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary.
- ↑ Tirlesing is not given by Jamieson.
- ↑ The City Cleaned and Country Improven, Edinburgh, 1760, p. 5.
- ↑ The City Cleaned and Country Improven, pp. 6, 8.
- ↑ Humphry Clinker, ii. 227. Gardy loo is a corruption of gardez l'eau, a cry which, like so many other Scotch customs and words, bears witness to the close connection which of old existed between Scotland and France.
- ↑ Burt's Letters from a Gentleman, etc., i, 21.
- ↑ Topham's Letters from Edinburgh, p. 152.
