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 The towns were no doubt horrid places. The fortification of one or more ‘boroughs’ in each county had been begun by the son and grandsons of King Alfred in their wars against the Danes. Besides a wooden castle on a mound of earth, there would probably be some sort of wooden paling round the towns; and in the twelfth century palings would be replaced by stone walls. London, York, Chester probably kept their old Roman walls of stone and occasionally repaired them. As for cleanliness and what we now call ‘sanitation’, there was none. All refuse was thrown into the streets, which only rain-storms washed, and where pigs, dogs and kites scavenged freely. Each trade or craft had its own street, and a walk down ‘Butchers Row’ would probably be unpleasing to modern noses. But there was strong patriotism in the towns, and great rivalry between them. A townsman from Abingdon was a suspected ‘foreigner’ to the citizens of Oxford. In Sussex to-day the old folk in some villages speak of a hop-picker from another village as a ‘foreigner’.

Both in town and country the food, even of the poorest, was fairly plentiful. Salt meat, mainly pork, and in Lent salt fish, was the rule, and was washed down by huge floods of strong beer. There were no workhouses and no provision for the poor except charity, but charity