This Noisy Old World

Writers and noise are not a good combination. While some of us write to carefully chosen music and others prefer as much peaceable silence as is possible, no writer enjoys the general racket of modern life. Nothing can wither a perfectly good visit from a Muse faster than a monstrous trash truck, working its thumping and crashing way up the street. Teenagers cranking up rap music, weed-whackers and power-washers, high-decibel fire sirens and low-flying aircraft, all play havoc with writerly concentration.

And there’s at least one Wench (who, me?) who has been known to charge outside in her bathrobe to confront mystified lawn-crews with leaf-blowers about their misguided commitment to blast every last blade of new-mown grass to ear-splitting oblivion.

Modern folk like to think of this general din as one of the banes of contemporary life, another of our special crosses to bear for being so technologically advanced. “Noise pollution”, we call it, a splendidly polysyllabic term for something our more peaceful great-grandparents wouldn’t recognize.

Ah, but we history-geeks know otherwise. The past –– especially the urban past –– was one noisy place. True, the noises were a very different sort, but the distraction was there just the same. A famous 18th century illustration by William Hogarth called “The Enraged Musician” shows an earlier creative-type, pitifully tormented by the sounds of the London street outside his open window.

I’ve always tried hard to incorporate sound into my writing, one more way to evoke the past. Yet it seems my imagination has fallen far short of reality. I’ve just discovered a splendid new non-history book (oh, be still my history-nerd heart!) called Hubbub : Filth, Noise, & Stench in England, 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne (Yale University Press, 2007).

This is not history for the faint of heart, or the weak of stomach, either. (All the following examples and quotes come from Hubbub.) Stuart & Georgian Londoners would have had to contend with constant traffic noise: metal-bound wheels and shod horses against paving stones, squeaking, creaking wagons and carriages, trumpets to herald arrivals and departures of coaches, and the bellowed oaths of drivers and footmen. Traffic noise was so bad that by the late 18th century, city churches and court houses were being designed without windows on the street levels in an attempt to quiet the spaces within.

Each morning terrified livestock was herded through the streets to market and slaughter, but hundreds of other unneutered animals ran wild through the city: stray dogs, spit dogs, and family pets alike played and barked and fought. Squabbling cats were also everywhere. So were goats and squealing pigs, and even city-dwellers were awakened by roosters before dawn. Early morning was also the time when the dog-skinners (I cannot begin to fathom a market for dog-skins, but then our ancestors were far more unsentimentally resourceful than we) were chasing down yelping strays.

Peddlers and vendors of every kind shouted their wares, striving to outdo one another. Apparently the pleasing sing-song cries of legend often degenerated into wordless roars. Milk-sellers were particularly known for their shrillness, and the writer Joseph Addison noted one seller who became infamous for her “inarticulate scream.” There were also frequent noisy brawls between vendors over sales turf, fights that were encouraged as free sport by cheering spectators.

Scores of church bells in the city rang for services, deaths, fires, and celebrations, and to tell the time. Street musicians played fiddles, whistles, flutes, and hurdy-gurdys, or simply sang; a loud, piercing voice was highly prized. Puppet shows, jugglers, acrobats, and other street performers added another layer of sound. Trumpets and drums were used to “drum up” an audience, and were also employed by the recruitment officers for the navy and the army outside of taverns. Politicians, charlatans, and itinerant preachers alike made impromptu speeches on street-corners and from balconies and windows.

Land and real estate was valuable, and most houses for rich and poor alike shared common walls. Without the muffle of 21st century curtains, sound-proof tiles, or wall-to-wall carpeting, voices echoed freely in most rooms and into the next. Add to that the open windows (before modern houses became so hermetically sealed for “climate control”), and there wouldn’t have been many secrets left between neighbors.

London was a growing city, and the sounds of construction were everywhere: hammering and sawing carpenters and roofers may not have had high-pitched power-tools, but they still contributed their share of noise. Other trades that involved striking like blacksmiths, masons, tinsmiths, coopers and coppersmiths added the clanging sounds of hammers on metal, while the rumbling grinding of mill-wheels was literally so deafening that the stereotypical miller had lost his hearing entirely.

The “great guns” (cannons) near the Tower of London were fired to celebrate royal births, weddings, victories, and other holidays. Shooting off muskets was a more common “noisemaker” that needed little excuse, and grand displays of fireworks (from the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranleigh as well as for civic displays) routinely exploded into the night sky over the city. More ominously, the broadsides exchanged at sea between the Dutch and English ships during the Dutch wars of the late 17th century were so loud that they could clearly be heard like distant thunder in London.

Things weren’t much quieter after dark, either. Watchmen with rattles or bells cried the hour throughout the night. “I start every hour from my sleep,” complained one visitor, “at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants.” Curfews were often created, and seldom enforced.

And in a city full of ale-houses, rumshops, and taverns that were serving customers well past midnight, those celebrants stumbling home in the wee hours contributed to the noise, too. “Great hallowing and whooping in the Fields,” noted one sleep-deprived gentleman, “by such Persons who have spent the Day Abroad, and are now returning home Drunk.”

Relative peace doesn’t seem to have arrived until three or so in the morning, when the “Whores, Bullies, and Thieves have retir’d to their Apartments; noisy drunken Mechanicks are got to their Lodgings; Coachmen, Watermen, and Soldiers are mostly asleep.” But by then, it’s not long until dawn, when the markets and trades come back to exuberant life, and begin the whole day’s cycle all over again.

You know, maybe those leaf blowers aren’t so very bad after all . . . .