IV. Document-Based Question: Use the document and your knowledge of feudalism
and the Middle Ages to answer the questions below.
Excerpt from The Worlds of Medieval Europe. In this excerpt, the author describes living conditions in medieval cities.
Medieval cities could be foul (dirty) places. The only way to get rid of human waste was to dump it into the street. Refuse (garbage) from the shops was thrown there, too: spoiled
vegetables, fish entrails (guts) , chicken feathers, sawdust form carpenters’ shops, dyes from textile shops, ashes from metalworkers furnaces. Street sweepers worked at night, sweeping all the waste into a channel cut into the center of the street, through which a stream of water ran...Without modern streetlights….cities were dark at night and therefore unsafe. Most cities had organized night patrols by the 13th century….but they supplied only the slightest check on crime. Most towns therefore..forbade (did not allow) people to be out after nine o’clock.
Source: The Worlds of Medieval Europe, Clifford R. Backman, 2009, Oxford University Press
1. Where did people in medieval cities dump their garbage? _______
2. Most cities forbade people to be out past _______ because it was unsafe at night.