NOTES ON ANCIENT WATER-PIPES.
117
of which I found three last year, being an addition to the
list of Essex mollusca. Though I had dredged over the same
ground for many years, not a single specimen had ever been
found previously. Last year I collected for the first time in the
River Colne a number of the beautiful blue Medusa, Cyanea
lamarckii.
NOTES ON ANCIENT WATER-PIPES.
By A. MORLEY DAVIES, B.Sc, F.G.S.
THE following notes are offered as a supplement to Mr.
T. V. Holmes's interesting article on "Tree-Trunk Water
Pipes" (ante pp.60-75).
I think it will be found that there was no extensive use of elm-
wood pipes in or about London before the time of the New
River. All references to water-pipes during the middle ages
that I have seen refer to them as of lead. The earliest known
plan of a system of water-pipes is probably that of the Monastery
of Christ Church in Canterbury, which dates from before 1167.
It is preserved at Trinity College, Cambridge, and reproduced in
Willis's Architectural History of the Conventual Buildings of the
Monastery of Christ Church in Canterbury. In a record quoted
in that work the water is said to be brought from the distance of
a league outside the city "tut suz terre par pypes de plum,"
These leaden pipes were doubtless made in the same way as
those found at Pompeii, which are pear-shaped in cross section,
and made from sheet lead folded together (Mau's Pompeii: Its Life
and Art.)1
Leaden pipes seem to have been used for the early conduit
pipes in London from 1236 on. The accounts of the Keepers
of the Conduit in 1350 include 8 marks and 12 pence for one
"fozer" (about a ton) of lead, but there is nothing about wood
(Riley's Memorials, p. 265.) When extensive works were about
to be undertaken by the Corporation in 1443, the Royal Charter
granting them the necessary rights allowed them to "comman-
deer" 200 foudras plumbi. (Rymer's Foedera, vol. xi. p. 33.)
John Norden in his Surveyor's Dialogue (1607) describes
an imaginary survey of a manor, which is of great value as a
picture of country life at the time. When the Surveyor is
approaching the manor-house, he remarks:—
1 See note on the invention of method of casting pipes of lead, ante p. 75.—Ed.