On 25 January 1421, John Leeder, the newly elected mayor of Coventry, England, issued a mayoral proclamation outlining how the city would be run. This proclamation included regulations for the food trades and focused on various ways to maintain the city and the urban environment.
This reveals that late medieval city dwellers were quite aware of their urban environmental conditions. The proclamation, later regulations issued by Coventry’s city council, and existing court records indicate that people who threw waste in the street or river were labeled as miscreants and fined for breaking pollution laws even in late medieval times.
