According to orders of leet, however, a better system should have prevailed. The sergeants collected every quarter a penny from each citizen dwelling in a house with a hall door, and a halfpenny from every shop, to provide a cart which carried away the filth from the streets.[529] Moreover all the citizens were enjoined to clean that portion of the pavement which lay in front of their dwellings every saint's day under payment of a fine of 12d. This order was hardly a popular one, and the sergeants were continually taking distress from those who would not pay the quarterly cart-rate, or raising fines for the omission of the festal cleaning. For the good folk evaded all sanitary regulations whenever they might do so with impunity. As for those misdoers who threw filth into the common river, to inquire concerning them was a hopeless task.[530] This was, as the mayor and corporation owned to prior Deram when he loudly complained thereof, one of the worst evils of the city. Coventry seems, however, never to have fallen into such an evil plight as Hythe did in the fifteenth century. Here, owing to the abominable habit of casting refuse into the streets, to say nothing of blocking them with all imaginable obstructions,[531] they were more like evil-smelling swamps than highways fit for traffic. Measures, somewhat primitive in character,[532] were taken to guard against an outbreak of fire, which so frequently wasted mediæval cities, where the plaster and timber of the houses, with their projecting storeys almost touching one another across the narrow streets, afforded excellent fuel for the flames. A stone house was a rarity, and in the fifteenth century bricks were as yet not in general use. The leet forbade the building of wooden chimneys or the roofing of houses with straw in lieu of tiles.[533] Moreover late mayors and other officers with "commoners of thrift," were forced to provide leather buckets, "such as the aldermen think sufficient" to hold the water wherewith to quench the flames. In order to prevent the supply of water--brought in a leaden pipe from a spring without the city[534]--from being exhausted, a lavish use of it was not permitted. The conduits, whereof there was one in Cross Cheaping, and another, called the Bull, probably by the Bablake Gate,[535] were kept locked during the night, and brewers were forbidden to take water thence for their brewing, or any one to wash linen and clothes therein.[536] The practice whereby individuals, by means of a grant sealed with the common seal, obtained a licence to take water continually from the conduit for their private use, was looked on most unfavourably, and finally forbidden by the leet.[537] No doubt the people who wished to obtain this permission were the wealthy brewers and victuallers who were answerable for so many disturbances in Coventry.