Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 February 1904 — LONDON IN 1700. [ARTICLE]

LONDON IN 1700.

Wk« Traitor*' Heads Adorned Loadoa Bridge and Temple Bar.

London in 1700 was a comparatively small city of about 600,000 inhabitants, the rough and ill kept main roads to which had been but slightly improved since Tudor times. The ghastly spectacle of many of the trees on the Southwark road bending under their burden of hanged men had indeed been slightly modified, hut none the less the decomposing heads of ‘‘traitors” still filled the atmosphere about London bridge and Temple Bar with myriads of baneful microbes.

Our Immediate forbears were evidently not overparticular about sights and smells. They were accustomed to see men sitting in the pillory pelted with rotten eggs and possibly included among their immediate circle not a few who had been deprived of their noses and oars for expressing too freely their opinions, political and religious. The drains were in an appalling condition. The innumerable churchyards were so full of coffins that they often projected through the turf. Bear and bull baiting, dog fights and boxing matches were attended even by royalty as late as 1820, and five years later all the “dandies” in London were paying high prices to stand in the carts round Tyburn to behold twenty-two of their fellow creatures hanged for misdemeanors which in our time would be punished with a few days’ imprisonment.— Saturday Review’.