Premodern city streets were chaotic spaces of filth, animals, and casual cruelty

Evidence

The sheer filth of the streets appalls you. Everywhere there seems to be refuse, garbage, human and animal excrement. And then you note for the first time the large numbers of animals in the streets-pigs eating the garbage, insects attracted to the excrement, dogs tearing at bones. There are larger animals too, horses and oxen drawing carts through the crowded, narrow streets, and other animals being driven to the marketplace. And everywhere children: playing in the streets, running up and down the narrow alleyways; taunting the lame and maimed beggars, poking sticks at an obviously feeble-minded man who is helpless to protect himself. Here and there they are joined in their “games” by an adult, and your modern “sensitivities” are stung by the discovery that human beings can find the suffering of others so amusing. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 167

Categorization

• CANDY: Children mocking a feeble-minded man while adults join in is a vivid, lightly macabre detail that carries the whole premundane street scene in one image.