Though not without a bitter resistance on the part of the clergy, men began to think that pestilences are not punishments inflicted by God on society for its religious shortcomings, but the physical consequences of filth and wretchedness; that the proper mode of avoiding them is not by praying to the saints, but by insuring personal and municipal cleanliness.

In the twelfth century it was found necessary to pave the streets of Paris, the stench in them was so dreadful At once dysenteries and spotted fever diminished; a sanitary condition approaching that of the Moorish cities of Spain, which had been paved for centuries, was attained.

In that now beautiful metropolis it was forbidden to keep swine, an ordinance resented by the monks of the abbey of St.Anthony, who demanded that the pigs of that saint should go where they chose; the government was obliged to compromise the matter by requiring that bells should be fastened to the animals' necks.
King Philip, the son of Louis the Fat, had been killed by his horse stumbling over a sow.

Prohibitions were published against throwing slops out of the windows.

In 1870 an eye-witness, the author of this book, at the close of the pontifical rule in Rome, found that, in walking the ordure-defiled streets of that city, it was more necessary to inspect the earth than to contemplate the heavens, in order to preserve personal purity.