There were public latrines in the streets and cesspools at the back of every house; carts went about for the collection and removal of things which require removal; they emptied their contents sometimes in the river, unless they were stopped; sometimes in “laystalls,” of which there continued to be many outside the walls. One need do no more than indicate the sanitary condition of a great town without any sewers. Pepys, in one of his observations upon the effects of the Fire, says that the Royal Exchange “is now made pretty” by having windows and doors before all the shops to keep off the cold. So that before 1666 the shops in the Royal Exchange were mere stalls open to the cold and wind. This, I take it, was the condition of nearly all the shops at that time; they had no doors, and if any glass in front, then only in the upper parts. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS CHAPTER I FOOD AND DRINK In considering the manners and customs of London during the seventeenth century we are met with the difficulty that a long civil war, followed by a visitation of Plague and a dreadful Fire, cuts the periods into two parts, and that after the war is over and the King restored we find great changes, in religious thought and ideas, in manners and customs, in society and fashions. The seventeenth corresponds in this respect with the nineteenth century; in our own time we have emerged out of eighteenth-century ideas, which prevailed until displaced by the silent though rapid revolution of the Victorian age. In the seventeenth century there is a similar revolution, but violent and created by the sword. The City of 1670, as we have seen by our study of the map, resembled in very few details the London of 1640. We must endeavour to bear that point very carefully in mind. And if we take the latter, rather than the former half of the century for consideration, it is because the former half offers little change from the London of Queen Elizabeth. The rents of houses varied, of course, with the site and the size. It would appear that for £30 a year one could rent a house of moderate size in any but the most expensive parts of the town. On Ludgate Hill or in Cheapside the rents were a great deal higher.