DISCUSSION

As is so often the case, on the subject of conduits we have more evidence from London than from most English towns. Yet although it has been claimed that London's was the earliest documented system for supplying fresh water of any medieval European city, as noted elsewhere this is not true even for the English urban scene. Nor is it correct to claim that it was the secular authorities, not religious institutions, who took the first initiative in that regard at London, again as shown otherwise elsewhere. Even in London, monastic houses and cathedral authorities were pioneering aqueducts in advance of the civic government.

Nonetheless, the interlinked problems of sanitation and fresh water supply must have been that much more acute in heavily populated London, and prompted the authorities to a plan of action. The first public water supply there traces its roots to 1237, when the city acquired from Gilbert de Sandford property (notably springs) near the distant River Tyburn, which emptied into the Thames at Westminster. There they built, with Sandford's permission, a reservoir to collect the water from the springs; the reservoir provided the pressure by which water would be propelled along pipes, to carry it into the intramural area.

Construction of the conduit did not begin until 1245, perhaps because of the need to work out a route with appropriate gradient into the city, to negotiate the rights of way, and to raise funds. Part of the funding came from a large donation by the merchantile communities from three European cities, who were accorded special trading privileges in return. Sandford's grant, gave the city latitude in deciding where it would place the conduit across his lands, and rights of access for maintenance. Whether this was so easily obtained from other owners of lands the conduit crossed remains an unknown. According to Riley [op.cit., 503] the course followed by the conduit was from Sandford's property south to near the present site of Buckingham Palace, then eastwards to Charing Cross, and thence along the Strand and Fleet Street into the city via Ludgate, skirting St. Paul's before being led up to Cheap.

Eastwards along Cheapside ran the Great Conduit, leading to a long, rectangular building, mostly subterranean, at the eastern end of Cheap near the frontage of the house of St. Thomas of Acre. Into this building citizens descended to draw water. This structure was part of the initial thrust in the 1240s, and remains from a later rebuilding (1286) still survive. By the latter date there existed a warden appointed to look after the conduit; by 1292 the number had increased to four. City revenues were allocated to its maintenance, and these funds managed by a small committee. When the occupations of wardens is known, or suggested by their surnames, we notice that many were, appropriately, from metalworking trades. One historian has suggested that, during this period when a more professional form of government was developing in London, "The council's major achievement was the establishment of a civic water-supply ... The management of this public service became a model for all civic enterprise." [Gwyn Williams, Medieval London: from Commune to Capital, rev. ed., London: Athlone Press, 1970, 84].

From these beginnings a conduit system developed, channelling water to several wards, where were located boundary markers, called "standards", housing cisterns to collect the piped-in water. One was at the mid-point in Cheapside, at the western boundary of Cheap Ward. A small charge may have been levied on citizens wishing to carry off water from there. The busy areas of Cheapside as well as the populous and wealthy western suburb of Fleet Street were also served by the close of the fourteenth century, and the system was further extended in the next century. The conduit house in Cheap was lockable; in 1325, the conduit wardens – there now being three – were each given keys when they took their oaths of office. It seems to have been common to lock conduit houses overnight, to prevent unlawful uses of the water and doubtless to discourage people from wandering the streets at night.

By 1350 the number of conduit keepers was two and their financial account for receipts and expenditures during their term of office (seemingly two years) shows on-paper revenues of £3.17s.8d from rents of 10 properties, although several of these had not yet been paid, doubtless due to disruption caused by the Black Death, and of £11.15s.4d from licence fees for tankards. The city had its own supply of tankards for rent, stamped to provide official guarantee of their measure; the wardens hired a building in which to store them. Other of their costs included:

• cleaning the cistern eight times a year
• repairs to the Cheapside fountain and the pipes there, as well as to the intermediate outlet and pipes at the Fleet Bridge
• an examination of the conduit after rumours that the water was corrupted (perhaps a panic response to the outbreak of plague)
• extension of the water supply into the king's stables near Charing Cross

The revenues were easily sufficient to cover the expenditures at this time.

Overseeing repairs was probably a frequent part of the wardens' tasks. In 1388 a complaint was made by the residents of Fleet Street about frequent breakages of the pipes – whether from effects of weather, accidents, or vandalism was not specified – that resulted in water flowing out into cellars, rotting house-timbers, and damaging trade goods. The city authorities permitted the neighbourhood to construct, at its own cost, an enclosure over the pipes at what may have been the offending location, a tavern (perhaps suggesting the pipes were damaged by drunks and brawlers?). Although the wardens hired workers to repair the pipes, the responsibility could also be placed on householders; in 1379 each householder was ordered to finance one man to work on ditch-cleaning and repair of the conduits and walls.

In 1367 the city tried leasing out the administration of the conduits, for a ten year period, for £13.6s.8d a year. The lessees – evidently attracted by the surplus of revenues over expenditures (if the account of 1350 was typical) – were however required not to increase the fees traditionally paid by citizens for drawing water, and aldermen and sheriffs were not to be charged a fee at all. The lessee was responsible for costs of maintaining any part of the conduit above ground, while the city retained responsibility for maintaining the subterranean portions. After the conclusion of the initial lease, the city authorities decided to take the water-supply back into their own hands. Their demand on the wealthier residents of each ward, in 1378, of an obligatory "donation" towards conduit repair costs suggests that the conduit may not have been well maintained by the lessees, who were either inclined to cut corners or found revenues less equal to expenditures than they had anticipated. Or perhaps the donations were intended for a planned extension of the system into Cornhill. While the city may have been able to fund maintenance of the conduits, even if resorting to special levies, major extensions of the system were normally funded by the beneficiaries or through bequests from wealthy citizens (which became more common in the fifteenth century).

The supply of water brought in by conduits was evidently – not just at London but in other towns, such as Bristol, Coventry and Lynn – insufficient to serve both domestic and industrial needs. The disincentive of line-ups, perhaps combined with difficulty in paying even the small user fee (possibly not applied in the case of on-the-spot imbibing of small quantities), may have been what encouraged poorer residents to continue using the Thames for washing themselves or their clothes, or collecting water for domestic use, as evidenced by records of those who drowned while so doing. One of the wharves, La Lauenderebrigge was so known because of the laundering activities that went on there. The ordinance of 1345 translated above suggests that the conduit was primarily intended to serve householders.

The above oath of the conduit warden is unusual in that its focus is not on the tasks he had to perform, but the abuses he had to prevent. One of these concerned irresponsible use of conduit water by brewers and fishmongers, and these two occupational groups remained a problem for decades to come. As early as 1312 brewers were forbidden to take water from the conduit for their professional needs, but this problem was not so easily overcome, and the city changed its policy periodically: at times it preferred to tolerate access by brewers (and other heavy consumers) in return for special user fees. In 1337 Cheapside residents complained to the city husting that they could not get the same service from the Great Conduit that they had in the past,

"because that men who keep brewhouses in the streets and lanes near the said Conduit, send day after day, and night after night, their brewers to the said Conduit with their vessels, called 'tynes', and make the ale which they sell with the water thereof; and so in like manner they make malt with the same water, to the loss of the commonalty : and they ask that this common damage may be corrected, and that the said Conduit may from henceforth be kept for the public good, as of old it used to be kept."
[Riley, op.cit., 200-01]

The court ordered any such vessels brought to the conduit to be confiscated. This solution was evidently not sufficient to stop the brewers taking more than others perceived as their fair share of the water, and eight years later we have the report of the sergeant, given above, prompting an outright ban on brewers and fishmongers using the conduit.

When disputes and complaints arose, the authorities generally gave preference to domestic needs, requiring heavy users of water – notably brewers and dyers – to obtain their supplies by other means. These prohibitions may not have helped much the poorer Londoners, who continued to trudge down to the river; in 1417 the civic authorities had to forbid owners of wharves and stairs on the Thames from trying to charge those users for access to the riverside. Just two years before, the city again had to clamp down on brewers using the Great Conduit; by that time, however, the city had given up on a total ban and was leasing the "great upper pipe" of the conduit to brewers and others, but it could at least order those persons not to use the "small pipes below" [ibid., 617]. We should not focus too much on the brewer as the villain of the piece, however. Lynn's prohibition in 1390 against over-consumption of water did not single out any particular trade. And at Wells, where pipe-laying had begun in 1448, the next century saw restrictions on anyone collecting water in tubs during hot spells.

A longer-term solution to the high demand on the conduit system was to improve the system itself, by bringing in more water and extending the conduits into other parts of the city. In 1355 the pressure of demand on the conduit ought to have been eased somewhat when Alice Chobham allowed the city to choose any piece of land on her estate at Tyburn from where it could access a further spring. This was at the same period when plague was reducing the population and therefore demand on the water supply.

The complaints heard in the previous two decades are absent in the second half of the century. Yet the permission granted to the men of Farringdon ward to build an extension onto the Great Conduit evidences the Corporation's concern that such extensions risked reducing the flow in the main conduit. The abortive attempt to extend the conduit to Cornhill, after 1378 (for which the executors of Adam Fraunceys, mayor 1352-54, had offered to put up £333.6s.8d) also would have put additional burden on the Great Conduit. During the fifteenth century a new effort was made to serve Cornhill from the Tyburn-fed source, and Fleet Street too, and new sources of water were tapped: springs at Paddington fed one conduit (a project begun in 1439 but not finished until 1471), while another at Highgate had by mid-century been harnessed to serve Cripplegate, a highly-populated ward, partly inside and partly outside the walls. In the same period the existing pipes and heads underwent renovations, and the Cornhill extension was finally achieved.

But the increase in volume must later have been offset by growing demand from householders for a private supply, even though such private pipes were very narrow – usually compared to a swan's or goose's quill. This growth in desire for running water for the private household created the need to police unauthorized tapping into the public pipes; offenders were punished by the usual public humiliation assigned for offences against the community. Thus in 1478 William Campion was discovered, after a suspicious drop in water pressure elsewhere, to have dug through the cellar of his house in Fleet Street and tapped into the conduit pipes for the benefit not only of his own household but those of his neighbours; he was paraded ignominiously through the streets with a model conduit, dripping water, set on his head. Yet the authorities gradually began to give in to such demands, from those prepared to pay licence fees.

A yet more extensive conduit system was created in the sixteenth century, but by the end of the seventeenth – and particularly after the damage caused by the Great Fire – much had been removed, because the conduits, located in the middle of the streets, created a difficulty for traffic.