Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/388

 338 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE men have discovered the process of employing molten lead to join pipes together, "for lead lasts forever underground." Again, while the streets were often dark and narrow and sometimes filled with refuse, and while the towns were crowded and unhealthy, we must remember that they had no skyscrapers and not many tenement houses, that a beau- tiful countryside usually lay just beyond the walls, and that since the town area was small a short walk would bring one from any part of the town to green fields and fresh air. Men, women, and children in medieval towns did not, like the denizens of the crowded slums in some modern cities, go from one end of the year to the other with scarcely a glimpse of nature or a moment under the open sky. The first habitations of the townsmen were probably little superior to the huts of the peasants. That they were small and of perishable materials is indicated by an old English law which directs that a house which has been contaminated by the presence of heretics shall be carried outside the walls and burned. But since the town walls afforded a protection which the peasant's fields and dwelling lacked, as the burghers grew prosperous through trade and industry, they naturally satisfied both their per- sonal ambition and their civic pride by building better and larger and more durable houses and filling them with sub- stantial furniture. Indeed, a master- workman required a residence large enough to include his shop and sleeping- apartments for the apprentices who lived with him as well as quarters for himself and his family. Of course very few houses from as long ago as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are in existence to-day, and from those which have survived we perhaps derive a too favor- able impression of medieval domestic architecture, since only the best-built houses would last that long. On the other hand, it is mainly in small, out-of-the-way places that such houses have been left unchanged, so that they are not representative of the mansions in the largest medieval cities. Moreover, their present decrepit and disfigured condition gives little idea of how they looked when new. Allowing for