Water in the City: The Aqueducts and Underground Passages of Exeter

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Everyone in Exeter has heard of its underground passages. Over the past thirty years, these ancient subterranean structures have become one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions and thousands of visitors from all over the world now file through them every year, led by expert guides [see figure 1]. Standing in the smart modern visitors’ centre near the top of the High Street today, it is easy to forget—as one listens to the buzz of excited conversation in many different languages rising and falling above the soundtrack of the audio-visual display—that, throughout much of their history, Exeter’s underground passages were cloaked in obscurity, and that the narrow vaults through which so many people now throng every week were once the exclusive domain of a handful of skilled artisans. It is easy to forget, too, that, in their heyday, these celebrated passages formed just one part of a far larger system—a complex network of gravity-flow aqueducts, or ‘conduits’, which channelled pure spring water into Exeter from the neighbouring parish of St Sidwell’s.¹

Of the thousands who visit the passages today, most set off for the city centre once their tour is over—to hit the shops, perhaps, to find something to eat, or to visit one of Exeter’s many other historic attractions. Few, if any, turn in the opposite direction and make their way to Well Street, which lies a few minutes’ walk away, in the city suburbs. This is perfectly understandable, because, on the surface at least, there is nothing particularly special about Well Street. It is a quiet suburban thoroughfare which contains a pub, a newsagent and a garage, together with many residential properties [see figure 2]. Its very name, Well Street, is somehow unremarkable—the sort of name that the brain scarcely registers as the eye flits over it. Yet that same name bears witness to almost a thousand years of history, for it was from the wells—or spring-heads—of Well Street that the three most important aqueducts of medieval Exeter all derived their water supply, while it was along Well Street itself that generations of Exeter plumbers passed as they set off to construct, to re-model and to maintain these complex water systems. Had it not been for the determination of medieval engineers to develop more effective ways of channelling the water derived from the aqueducts in Well Street into Exeter, the underground passages would never have been built. The histories of Exeter’s aqueducts and of Exeter’s underground passages are inextricably intertwined, therefore; indeed, they are essentially one. This book recovers that history—and in the process provides the most detailed case study to date of the growth and development of gravity-flow water systems in a pre-modern English city.

After decades of neglect, the history of water supply during the Middle Ages is now beginning to attract an increasing amount of attention from scholars, a fact which surely reflects the pressing environmental concerns of our own age and the growing realisation that, in the face of climate change, even the inhabitants of rich Western societies may no longer be able to take an abundant supply of water for granted. Over the last fifteen years a succession of important books and articles has been published on what Derek Keene has termed ‘issues of water’ in the medieval world—most notably, perhaps, Paolo Squatriti’s elegant monograph on water and society in medieval Italy, Roberta Magnusson’s outstanding study of water technology in Italy and England during the Middle Ages and Keene’s own pioneering article on water in medieval London.² At the same time, a number of stimulating studies of hydrological history during the early modern period—including Mark Jenner’s article on changing patterns of water-use in Tudor and Stuart London—have appeared.³ These works, and others like them, have helped us to come to a much better understanding of the complex interactions which occurred between the natural environment, technology and institutions in late medieval and early modern cities, and of how the drive to improve the public water supply which was evident in so many of those communities may be viewed as ‘an expression of a growing civic culture’.⁴

Most of the scholars who have tackled such themes have paid close attention to aqueducts. These may be conveniently, if rather inelegantly, defined as complex hydraulic structures, made up of several different component parts, which exploited the power of gravity to convey pure water from an initial point of intake to a subsequent point of distribution. Aqueducts were expensive to build and still more expensive to maintain, but they conferred obvious practical benefits on their owners—as well as very considerable social prestige—and such systems began to appear in many parts of England during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. A good deal has been written about England’s medieval aqueducts, and we possess a number of fine articles and pamphlets which consider the history and the physical remains of individual conduit systems.⁵ In addition, C.J. Bond has published two excellent surveys of monastic aqueducts in Britain, while Magnusson’s monograph, already alluded to above, provides a brilliant portrait of the English medieval aqueduct in the round.⁶ What we continue to lack, however, is a detailed study of the evolution of multiple conduit systems in an individual English urban community over time, and that is what the present book sets out to provide—by recovering the history of the medieval and early modern aqueducts of Exeter.⁷

Founded during the Roman period, the city of Exeter stands on a broad hill or spur, the slopes of which descend steeply towards the River Exe on the west and towards the Longbrook valley on the north. To the south-east lies a more gentle valley, carved out by the stream known as the Shutebrooke, while, to the east, the elevated area on which the city stands is joined by a narrow ridge of land to the similarly high ground to the east. The Romans built a strong defensive wall around the city, much of which still survives, while in 1068 William the Conqueror erected a castle in the northern corner of this ancient enceinte, upon the little volcanic knoll known as Rougemont. Exeter has always been the administrative capital of the South West peninsula and has long been its spiritual centre, too. The seat of the bishopric was established here in 1050, while the magnificent cathedral which still dominates the skyline of Exeter was begun during the following century.⁸ The cathedral stands in the south-east quarter of the city and is surrounded by an extensive close, while medieval Exeter also contained many churches, chapels and monastic foundations [see figure 3]. The most important of these last were: St Nicholas Priory, a Benedictine house which was established in the west quarter of Exeter, on a site between present-day Fore Street and Bartholomew Street, a little before 1100 [see figure 4]; St John’s Hospital, which cared for the sick and the poor and was established on a site just inside the East Gate around 1180; the Black Friars—the house of the Dominican friars or ‘friars preachers’—which was established in the eastern part of the city, on the site of the present-day Princesshay shopping centre, by 1232; and the Grey Friars—the house of the Franciscan friars—which was originally established during the same decade at Friernhay, in the western corner of the city, but was later moved to a new location a little beyond the South Gate around the year 1300.⁹

Churchmen wielded a great deal of power in medieval Exeter, controlling several separate ‘fees’, or specially franchised areas: St Stephen’s fee, for example, which belonged to the bishop; St Sidwell’s fee, which belonged to the secular canons of the dean and chapter; and Harold’s fee, which belonged to the prior of St Nicholas. By far the largest part of the city, however, was governed by the mayor and the ‘common council’—a small group of rich and highly influential laymen, most of whom owed their position to the profits of mercantile trade.¹⁰ The headquarters of the council—and, indeed, of the civic administration as a whole—lay at the Guildhall in the High Street.¹¹ This elegant municipal structure—together with the castle, the cathedral, the city walls and the many parish churches—can be clearly seen on Remigius Hogenberg’s superb engraving of 1587, the earliest map of the city [see figure 5].

Throughout the period covered by this book, Exeter was both rich and populous. Historians have calculated that there were some 2,000 people living in the city at the time of the Norman Conquest and that this figure had grown to around 3,100 by 1377.¹² During the fifteenth century, moreover, Exeter enjoyed an unprecedented period of growth. Thanks to a sustained boom in the local cloth trade, Exeter’s population swelled to somewhere between 7,000 and 8,500 people by 1525.¹³ As the foremost scholar of medieval Exeter has observed, ‘no other provincial city in England grew so fast in the fifteenth century’, and by the beginning of the Tudor period Exeter may well have been the fourth—conceivably even the third—largest provincial city in the entire kingdom.¹⁴ Over the next 200 years Exeter’s population continued to expand, albeit at a slightly slower rate: to around 10,000 by 1641, to around 12,000 by 1660 and to around 14,000 by 1700.¹⁵ All of these people needed access to fresh water. In Exeter, as in other cities, the inhabitants relied on what we might term ‘traditional’ sources for the bulk of their supply: on the River Exe, for example, on the local brooks and on the many well-shafts which were sunk deep into the hill upon which Exeter was built [see figure 6]. From the twelfth century onwards, however, a growing number of local people also enjoyed access to gravity-flow aqueducts which brought ‘live’ or piped water into Exeter from the springs beyond the city walls. At the end of the seventeenth century new forms of hydraulic technology were introduced in Exeter—just as they had already been in many other urban communities elsewhere—with the result that the conduits which had hitherto supplied the city were gradually supplanted. Yet even before this process was complete, and the water supply to the last of Exeter’s ancient aqueducts was finally cut off, scholars were already turning their attention to the history of the multiple conduit systems which had been such a central part of the city’s life for so long.

One of the pioneers in this field was the Victorian antiquary Charles Tucker, whose commendable outrage at the demolition of the medieval ‘conduit-house’—or aqueduct intake complex—at the top of Well Street by navvies constructing the Exeter to Waterloo railway line in 1858 first spurred him into print. In an article published that same year in the Antiquaries Journal, Tucker began by lamenting the fact that ‘by an act of wanton Vandalism, which cannot be too severely reprobated, all vestiges of this unique castellum aquae have been destroyed’. He then went on to provide a careful description of the conduit-house, illustrated by a detailed plan which, he noted, had been drawn up by a local engineer, W. Dawson, ‘before the whole of this extremely interesting conduit was most ruthlessly swept away by the railway contractors’.¹⁶ Tucker concluded his article with a series of references to the medieval aqueducts of Exeter which he had drawn partly from original documents and partly from the work of the celebrated Exeter antiquary George Oliver.¹⁷ Tucker’s article established a basic chronological framework upon which others interested in the history of Exeter’s aqueducts were later to build, while Dawson’s plan—together with several watercolours of the conduit-house in the process of demolition which he had painted in 1857–58—may well have helped to alert a wider local audience to the speed with which their aqueous heritage was now disappearing.¹⁸

Tucker’s article made no reference to the underground passages, however, and it seems probable that, by the mid-Victorian period, the true purpose of these structures had already begun to be forgotten by most Exeter people. Certainly, the author of a local memoir, first published in 1877, felt it necessary to inform his younger readers that, during the 1820s, water derived from the springs outside the East Gate had ‘flowed through pipes down the High Street in a subterranean passage’.¹⁹ During the late nineteenth century the underground structures which had originally been built to channel the aqueducts came to be generally known as ‘subways’ or ‘passages’, and it will be noticed that neither of these titles possesses any obvious connection with the subject of water technology—again suggesting that, in the popular mind at least, the true purpose of the underground passages was beginning to slide out of view. This process must have been still further accelerated after the cathedral aqueduct—the last of the city conduits to run through the ancient passageways—was finally disconnected in the early twentieth century.²⁰ Meanwhile, popular interest in what were by now being termed these ‘curious passages’ was starting to grow and, from as early as 1893, groups of ‘explorers’—mainly civic worthies, antiquaries and journalists—began to make occasional forays into ‘underground Exeter’ in the hope of ‘unravelling the mysteries of the subterraneous passages’.²¹ The vivid reports of these expeditions which subsequently appeared in the local press naturally caused the passages’ fame to grow.²²

Shortly before the First World War a detailed calendar of Exeter’s rich civic archives was drawn up by J.H. Wylie on behalf of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. During his stay in the city Wylie unearthed a number of important documents relating to Exeter’s medieval conduits, and the publication of his calendar, in 1916, gave further impetus to the study of the city’s historic aqueducts.²³ Meanwhile, another scholar, Ethel Lega-Weekes, had been carrying out research into Exeter’s medieval water supply, some of the fruits of which had appeared in her monograph on the cathedral close, published in 1915.²⁴ Lega-Weekes’s work was supplemented a decade later by that of A.G. Little and R.C. Easterling, who turned up some new references to the aqueduct which had once supplied the Black Friars’ monastery.²⁵

By the late 1920s, then, scholars had already accumulated a good deal of information about the history of Exeter’s aqueducts. At the same time, local people were becoming both more aware of the existence of the underground passages and more determined that these ancient structures should be preserved. So much is made clear by the words of another local antiquary, Beatrix Cresswell, writing in 1927, who not only observed that ‘Exeter . . . possesses . . . a labyrinth of passages . . . [which] thread their way, low, damp and dirty, under the High Street’, but also stressed that the inhabitants of Exeter ‘[are] very proud of them and very jealous of them, as recent attempts to tamper with them for the purposes of . . . improvement disclosed’.²⁶ It was shortly after this that a group of local archaeologists, the members of the self-styled ‘Exeter Excavation Committee’, launched a full-scale investigation into the subterranean structures though which the aqueducts had once been brought into the city—an investigation which would determine how those structures would be viewed by the wider world for more than half a century to come. The committee members conducted a full-scale survey of all of the accessible sections of the passages in 1931 and published a report of their findings in the Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Exploration Society during the following year.²⁷ This report contained the first detailed plan of the passages, together with a series of other drawings and photographs [see figure 7]. In addition, it included a short history of Exeter’s aqueducts, drawn up with the assistance of Ethel Lega-Weekes—thus inaugurating that happy tradition of collaborative research between historians and archaeologists on the underground passages which has continued to flourish in Exeter until the present day.²⁸

Having established the physical make-up and extent of the passages, the authors of the report concluded with an assessment of the probable ‘date, purpose and origin’ of those structures. ‘If the deductions we have made are correct’, they declared, then ‘the passages were made for the purposes of bringing water into the city . . . and they date from different periods’.²⁹ This is a judgement with which all subsequent researchers have concurred. The authors’ conclusion that one of the two main underground passages had been built to supply the cathedral with water while the other had been built to supply the city has also stood the test of time. Finally, the committee members suggested that ‘the earliest passage was probably an un-piped conduit leading from St Sidwell’s well to the cathedral precincts and was in existence in 1226’.³⁰ The image thus summoned up—of an eleventh- or early twelfth-century passage that extended all the way from Well Street to the cathedral close and along the floor of which water ran freely, as it would do in a drain or culvert—was to prove remarkably enduring, as we shall see—and so was the authors’ suggestion that the apertures which occasionally appear in the roof of the passages were ‘dipping places’ from which water could be obtained by people with buckets in the streets overhead.³¹

Fourteen years later the findings of the Exeter Excavation Committee were incorporated by F.W. Robins in his influential monograph The Story of Water Supply (1946). As its title suggests, Robins’ book ranges widely over space and time, tracing the history of hydraulic technology throughout Europe and the near East from biblical times right up until the twentieth century, and the author’s particular expertise in this field caused him to appreciate—as perhaps some of the earlier local investigators had not—the highly unusual nature of Exeter’s underground passages; thus Robins observed at one point in his discussion that ‘the extent, size and accessibility of these aqueduct tunnels makes them especially interesting’.³² When it came to interpreting the age and purpose of the passages, however, Robins was content simply to echo the findings of the 1930s investigators, commenting, for example, that ‘these stone-lined tunnels originally acted as un-piped conduits’ and that ‘the water conduits . . . [were] bare stone-lined tunnels with rounded bottom channels, to which access was given . . . from the street level for procuring water by dipping’.³³ Because Robins’ book swiftly became one of the standard works in English on the history of water supply, the notion that Exeter’s underground passages had been free-flowing water channels now became very widely disseminated indeed.

In the short interval between the publication of the Exeter Excavation Committee’s report and the publication of Robins’ book, Exeter itself had undergone a catastrophe. The historic city centre had been devastated as a result of the ‘Baedeker Blitz’ of May 1942 and the wholesale demolition of damaged properties which had followed, while the area around London Inn square and the East Gate arcade, at the top of the High Street—where the main entrances to the pre-war underground passages lay—had been effectively razed to the ground. Post-war ‘development’ saw even the city wall on the south side of the High Street being demolished, with the result that the underground passages were left as the sole surviving historic structures in this particular area [see figure 8]. Indeed, had it not been for the sterling work of the Exeter Excavation Committee in raising the passages’ public profile before the war—work which had resulted in some parts of the network being opened to visitors, and the structure as a whole being classed as an ancient monument—it seems all too likely that the passages, too, would have been entirely destroyed and thus lost to posterity.³⁴ As it was, their history continued to be elucidated amidst the dust and rubble of post-war reconstruction.

During the winter of 1950 the lines of both the city and the cathedral passages were exposed during preparatory work ‘for the re-building of the war-damaged areas around Bedford Circus’.³⁵ Lady Aileen Fox, an experienced archaeologist, who was well aware of the pioneering work carried out by the Exeter Excavation Committee twenty years before, was called in to investigate. On the basis of her excavations, Fox assigned the construction of the particular section of the cathedral passage which she had explored to a post-thirteenth-century date, and probably to the years 1346–49. The previous suggestions that the passages might date back to the eleventh or twelfth centuries—or even to the Roman era—were thus undermined. While Fox was still prepared to describe the apertures in the roof of the passages as ‘dipping places’, moreover, she was careful to point out that, in the particular section of the city passage which she had investigated, the floor seemed ‘unlikely to have been a stone construction’, so ‘in this portion it may be assumed that the water flowed in a lead pipe’.³⁶ The earlier theory that both passages had been free-flowing water channels throughout their entire length was thus thrown into doubt by Fox’s investigations. Fox ended her report by observing that ‘it is increasingly apparent that there is still more to be learnt about the water supplies of Exeter in the Middle Ages’ and urging that ‘no opportunity of observing and recording of structures connected with them should be neglected’—an exhortation which was to be taken to heart by future generations of Exeter archaeologists.³⁷

Soon after Fox had completed her work, a new entrance to the passages was built in Princesshay—on the site of the pre-war public entrance in the East Gate arcade—and the structures were opened up to visitors once more, as they have remained ever since.³⁸ Accounts of the passages now started to crop up in all sorts of general histories, but these accounts usually owed more to the findings of the 1930s investigators than to those of Lady Fox. In 1960, for example, W.G. Hoskins stated that the passages ‘were probably first constructed about 1200’.³⁹ Six years later, D. Portman wrote that the cathedral passages were of early thirteenth-century date, and—again following the 1932 researchers—that the city passages dated from ‘the early fifteenth century’.⁴⁰ In 1987 Walter Minchinton published a history of water supply in Exeter—the first study of its kind, and one that relied very heavily indeed on the previous work of Robins and others—which claimed that the passages had initially been constructed between 1150 and 1180.⁴¹ A general history of Exeter published in the mid-1990s assured its readers that ‘the first written references to the underground passages . . . date from 1226’.⁴² Nor has it been local historians alone who have tended to exaggerate both the age and the extent of Exeter’s underground passages; in 2000 it was claimed in no less august a work than The Cambridge Urban History of England that ‘in the early fifteenth century’ the citizens of Exeter ‘constructed . . . a separate underground passage from a well outside the city walls, down the High Street, to a conduit erected in 1441’.⁴³ Had such a subterranean passage really existed it would have been a highly impressive structure, extending for a distance of well over a mile!

Yet although statements like these are still commonly met with in standard histories—both of Exeter itself and of water supply more generally—they no longer reflect the state of knowledge on the ground. Since 1983, when John Allan and Chris Henderson—the latter being the then director of Exeter Museums’ Archaeological Field Unit, latterly Exeter Archaeology—carried out a crucial excavation on the line of the first cathedral aqueduct, archaeologists and historians have been moving towards a much clearer understanding of how both the underground passages and Exeter’s historic conduit systems as a whole evolved.⁴⁴ During the 1990s a series of limited circulation reports on this subject were produced by Exeter Archaeology and its collaborators.⁴⁵ These reports brought together evidence which had been derived from excavation, documentary research in the archives and detailed survey of the fabric of the passages themselves [see figure 9], and were designed to pave the way for the detailed work of synthesis which the present volume represents. Some of the discoveries which have been made at Exeter over the past quarter century have been alluded to in general histories of water supply—in the volume produced by the Frontinus Society on Die Wasserversorgung in der Rennaissancezeit, for example, and in Magnusson’s monograph.⁴⁶ Even so, the recent advances can hardly be said to have penetrated the historical mainstream, and one of the chief purposes of this book is to bring them to the attention of a wider audience.

* * *

This book is divided into three parts. The first part provides a narrative account of the history of Exeter’s aqueducts and underground passages between the late twelfth century—when medieval gravity-flow systems first appear in the local archaeological record—and the late seventeenth century, after which time the aqueducts were increasingly replaced by other technology clusters. The second part explores the rich multiplicity of roles which the civic conduits played in Exeter’s daily life between c.1500 and c.1700: the period during which the local aqueducts—like aqueducts elsewhere in England—may be said to have enjoyed their heyday. The third and last part reproduces those portions of the city archives which relate to expenditure on Exeter’s aqueducts and underground passages from 1420, when the first city conduit was built, to the end of the Tudor period, by which time the citizens had managed to acquire no fewer than four separate gravity-flow systems.⁴⁷ At the heart of the book—figuratively, as well as literally—lie the Exeter receivers’ accounts, a uniquely rich series of documents which survive from the mid-fourteenth century onwards.⁴⁸ A short discussion of the receivers themselves, and of the nature of their office, is provided in the introduction to Part III.

The receivers’ accounts provide the bulk of the documentary evidence on which our knowledge of Exeter’s civic aqueducts and underground passages is based, and extracts from these records take pride of place among the transcripts which appear in the third part of this volume [see Document 1].⁴⁹ Alongside them appear copies of two other important documents which relate to Exeter’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conduit systems. The first of these is an ‘extraordinary’, or one-off, account which records the charges which were incurred by the citizens during the renovation of the aqueduct known as the ‘New Conduit’ in 1441. The second is another extraordinary account, this time recording the sums laid out on renovating Exeter’s chief civic fountain during 1535–36 [see documents 2–3]. The transcripts are accompanied by a glossary which explains some of the more obscure terms used by the pre-modern account-keepers.

The chapters with which the book begins are designed partly to set the documents in context and partly to serve as a free-standing history of Exeter’s aqueducts and underground passages. Thus Chapter 2 traces the medieval origins of the city’s gravity-flow systems and concentrates on the aqueducts which were built by the cathedral canons and the local monastic houses between the late 1100s and the early fifteenth century. It also looks at the construction of the earliest sections of the cathedral passage. Chapter 3 explores how the townsfolk first came to build an aqueduct of their own, during the 1420s, describes how that system subsequently evolved over the following century and pinpoints the date at which the first city passages were built. Chapter 4 shows how the local conduit-systems were affected by the Reformation, and how—in the wake of that religious, cultural and political cataclysm—the former monastic aqueducts were appropriated by the townsfolk. Chapter 5 investigates the events of the early Stuart era—the period during which Exeter’s aqueduct network reached its greatest physical extent—and the devastation which was wrought on that network by the events of the Civil War. Chapter 6 provides a brief overview of the history of Exeter’s aqueducts and underground passages during the 300 years between the Restoration and the Second World War—an overview which shows how the component parts of the city’s ancient gravity-flow systems were gradually dismantled and destroyed between 1660 and 1945, until only the passages themselves remained. Finally, Chapter 7 returns to the heyday of the civic conduits in order to investigate the many roles which they played in the life of the early modern city. The many maps and plates which accompany the text help to illustrate the story and to bring the Exeter aqueducts to life. Together, text, documents and illustrations permit the reader to trace the rise and fall of these remarkable water systems in more vivid detail than has ever been possible before.

PART I

THE HISTORY OF EXETER’S UNDERGROUND PASSAGES AND AQUEDUCT SYSTEMS

CHAPTER 2

THE AQUEDUCTS OF MEDIEVAL EXETER, 1180–1420

Aqueducts in Exeter have a very long history. They first appeared on the site of the city during the mid-first century AD, when Roman engineers built a gravitational aqueduct to bring water into the legionary fortress from the higher ground to the east, and conduits working on similar principles could still be found in Exeter during Queen Victoria’s reign.¹ Over this 1,800-year period the city aqueducts continued to derive their water from the same general area—that is, from St Sidwell’s parish, to the north-east of the city, where there are many springs at the head of the Longbrook valley on the geological boundary between the shales of the Culm Measures and the sandstones of the Exeter district. At the very broadest of levels, then, the historical continuities are striking. But it must be emphasised straight away that there is not the slightest evidence of structural continuity between the Roman aqueducts and their successors. Despite many claims to the contrary, there is nothing to suggest that the Roman and medieval engineers necessarily utilised the self-same springs. And the frequently repeated assertions that it was the Romans who built the underground passages are simply false. However impressive and efficient the Roman system of water supply may have been, it had fallen into desuetude during the Dark Ages, if not before. The engineers of the Middle Ages had to start from scratch, therefore, and it is in their endeavours, rather than in the mists of classical antiquity, that the origins of Exeter’s medieval aqueducts will be found to lie.

The first cathedral aqueduct

The men who oversaw the construction of England’s first medieval aqueducts were monks and senior clerics—members of religious institutions which required copious supplies of fresh, clean water for ritual, as well as for ordinary domestic purposes, and which were both wealthy and technically proficient enough to contemplate the establishment of complex gravity-flow systems.² During the twelfth century the great monastic orders and cathedral chapters began to construct aqueducts in places right across the kingdom: at Canterbury by 1160, for instance; at Winchester probably even earlier; at Lichfield by 1166 and at Evesham, Gloucester and Waverley by the 1180s.³ Archaeological evidence suggests that Exeter’s cathedral canons were not far behind. On the site of St Nicholas Priory, in the west quarter of the city, there have been found nine capitals and three bases of a lavatorium, or stone water-basin, built in Purbeck stone which can be dated on stylistic grounds to the years around 1170–80 [see figures 10–11].⁴ This elaborate structure—at which the monks would have performed their daily ablutions—can only have been connected to a piped water supply, but where did the water come from? The priory cartulary, or register, provides an important clue, recording that in 1226 Serlo, the first dean of Exeter Cathedral, granted the prior of St Nicholas ‘one third of the well of St Sidwell’.⁵ This information is of crucial significance because St Sidwell’s ‘well’, or spring, lay on the dean and chapter’s land in St Sidwell’s parish, some 450 metres beyond the East Gate of the city. For the priory, which lay in the centre of Exeter, to have been granted the use of this water strongly implies the existence of an aqueduct. Nor is this all, for a document of 1346 specifically refers to water being brought into the cathedral close from St Sidwell’s via (lead) pipes and then being divided into three parts—one part going to the dean and chapter, one part going to the priory and one part going to the citizens.⁶

The reference to water being brought into the city from St Sidwell’s reveals that the first medieval aqueduct, like its Roman predecessors, was fed from springs on the rising ground beyond the East Gate. St Sidwell’s well—the original source of the cathedral supply—stood some 150 metres north-east of St Sidwell’s church in present-day Well Street [see figure 12].⁷ Like many other springs during the Middle Ages, it was ‘a focus for religious devotion’.⁸ According to medieval legend, water had first gushed out of the earth here after St Sidwell herself—a young woman of exemplary virtue, whose unusual name appears to derive from the two old English words ‘sidu’ (morality) and ‘full’, meaning literally ‘virtuous one’—had been martyred on the same spot [see figure 13].⁹ References to the parish of ‘Sanctae Satavole’ stretch at least as far back as the twelfth century, while St Sidwell’s well is first referred to in the grant of 1226 noted above, but had probably existed for many years before this.¹⁰ A second reference to the structure appears in the cartulary of St John’s Hospital, where it is recorded that, in 1267, a certain John of Dawlish left one and a half acres of land ‘for the repair and maintenance of St Sidwell’s well’.¹¹ Dawlish’s grant is strongly reminiscent of bequests which were to be made towards the upkeep of the city aqueduct during the 1400s, and confirms that St Sidwell’s well was already being utilised for the purposes of public water supply. If the situation in Exeter conformed to the general trend of hydraulic developments elsewhere in England, then the cathedral system may well have been built during the final third of the twelfth century. We must presume that a reservoir to collect the spring water was first constructed above St Sidwell’s well and that a small stone ‘conduit-house’ was then erected above the reservoir itself, in order to protect the water from pollution or interference.¹² Certainly, a conduit-house stood on this site by the Tudor period [see figure 12]. Once the well-head had been finished, a lead pipeline or conduit was then built to convey the water from its source to its initial destination in the cathedral close. By c.1180 the aqueduct had probably been extended to supply the priory, and by 1226 a further extension had been built to provide a supply to a public well in the lower part of the city, of which more below. The inception of the latter arrangement may well have been the occasion of the new grant of 1226.

The course which the twelfth-century aqueduct followed between St Sidwell’s well and the cathedral close is not fully known, but enough information exists for a tentative route to be sketched out [see map 1]. In 1983 archaeological excavations on a site in King William Street, some thirty metres north-west of St Sidwell’s church, revealed a seventeen-metre length of steep-sided trench some three metres deep [see figure 14]. This feature clearly represented the trench in which the lead pipe of an aqueduct had been laid: an interpretation supported not only by the presence of a yellow clay bedding layer at its bottom—puddled clay was commonly used at this time to reduce leakage from water pipes—but also by the discovery of a piece of melted lead in the fill.¹³ The evidence of the 1983 excavation suggested that, at this point, the aqueduct had been keeping to a south-westerly course, heading directly from St Sidwell’s well towards East Gate, a theory which received support from the discovery of an apparently similar trench in excavations in London Inn square, immediately outside East Gate, in 1987.¹⁴ On reaching the defensive ditch which lay just beyond the city wall, at a point on the south-east side of East Gate, the conduit made a sharp turn to the south-east to run along the outside of the ditch