The result of all this was that major urban centers such as London were characterized by streams of all sorts of waste and refuse, and provided hazards to health and sanitation on all sides.

Where streets were narrow, the gutter often ran down the center of the street, and slops of all sorts were customarily thrown from upper stories into the streets, splattering unfortunate passers-by with foul and germ-infested debris.

Writers chronicling the conditions of those two centuries preceding industrialization were not slow in pointing to the consequences - plagues, pestilence, and famine. 

In fourteenth-century Enland, the "black death" killed over three-quarters of the population, and in Europe some 25,000,000 are thought to have died in the epidemic.

A plague in 1664 to 1665 just preceding the industrial breakthrough took over 68,000 lives in London alone, which was roughly 15 percent of London's approximate population of 460,000 at the time.

It is no wonder that people of means, including the royal court, commonly fled London during the warm summer months to escape the "noxious vapors" that seemed to come with the fogs and the mists.

To add to the distress, crime was rampant, and punishment was both rigorous and public.

London at one time was known as a "city of gibbets".  A gibbet is a gallows, and one was erected at many street intersections.  Felons were not only executed on them, but the bodies were left to swing in the breeze as a warning to would-be criminals. 

Sometimes the body was beheaded, and the head mounted on a pike and displayed for a period of time, also as a warning.

Travelers could expect to find dead bodies at intervals alongside the roads.  Traveling was mostly on foot, with only the wealthy or politically privileged (generally the same) riding on horseback or in coaches.