To conceal personal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and profusely used.

The citizen clothed himself in leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating impurity, might last for many years.

He was considered to be in circumstances of ease, if he could procure fresh meat once a week for his dinner.

The streets had no sewers; they were without pavement or lamps.

After nightfall, the chamber-shatters were thrown open, and slops unceremoniously emptied down, to the discomfiture of the wayfarer tracking his path through the narrow streets, with his dismal lantern in his hand.
Aeneas Sylvius, who afterward became Pope Pius II., and was therefore a very competent and impartial writer, has left us a graphic account of a journey he made to the British Islands, about 1430.