A manic flurry of legislation marked the first 30 years of British rule in Malta; most of it well-meaning, some of it effective, part of it self-serving. For over the first half a century of British rule, the new monarchs retained the previous civil, commercial and criminal laws and setups of the Order of St John as the basic codes of the islands. The new colonial authorities kept most of them in place, with some minimal tweaking. But at the same time, the years 1813 to 1843 witnessed an unrelenting cascade of proclamations, ordinances and government notices to regulate the everyday workings of the new administration. Though promulgated by the British, all this subsidiary legislation was issued in Italian.

One local erudite jurist (uno dei nostri dotti giuresconsulti), seeing how unmanageable and rare this 30 years’ accumulation of minor legal enactments was becoming, in 1844 thought it profitable to gather them all together and to reprint and publish them in two handy volumes. In all, they run to well over a thousand pages. I rather believe every member of the legal professions in Malta rushed out to buy a copy of this brand new and indispensable Repertorio, now quite rare.

The anonymous erudite jurist, we learn from the introduction, was too taken up to compile an analytical index by subject, so the printer Francesco Cumbo took this task upon himself and then had his work revised and corrected by uomini intelligenti. Overall, they did an excellent and reader-friendly job, tough sometimes the cross-referencing can be infuriatingly circular.

Try to look up Pigs, and the index instructs you: see Police. You dutifully look up Police, only to be told: see Pigs. Similarly with Boatmen – see Quarantine. Check Quarantine and you are redirected to… Boatmen! Consult the index for Roads. It will send you to Buildings. Obediently you go to Buildings, only to be told to look up Collector of Revenue. By now, you start finding this merry-go-round less than amusing.

The printer Francesco Cumbo remains overall a transparent ghost who needs to be profiled better. He ran one of the busiest presses in Valletta and seems to have been patronised mostly by the pro-colonialist, Protestant-leaning, Masonic authors and the anti-papal publishers of printed media. But, surprisingly, even some of the local patriots and religious traditionalists occasionally made use of his services. He had discovered the Maltese secret of how to gorge himself on both sides of the divide.

What does this minor legislation refer to? The subjects regulated fan across the widest of spectrums. From silversmiths to currency, from governors of Gozo to fishmongers, from the plague to bankruptcies. Difficult to think of one human activity not covered. Obviously, it would be impossible for me to give more than a cursory overview of any one subject at a time.

I see these two volumes as a veritable goldmine for the study of the micro-history of Malta in the early British period.

A 19th-century photograph of a popular street in Valletta, Strada San Patrizio, skirting the Manderaggio.

One major headache of the colonial government seems to have been urban hygiene. In the times of the Order, the streets of Valletta had acquired the reputation of being perhaps the cleanest in Europe. Paved with hardstone or lava, no open sewage gutters in the centre or on the sides, with proper cambers for rainwater drainage and stringent regulations against littering, visitors wrote in amazement about Valletta’s marvel of urban cleanliness.

All that changed radically during the early British period. Pigs and goats roamed the streets in droves and with abandon, and the uncontrollable masses of derelict human drifters turned every public thoroughfare into a huge festering latrine. A common spectacle in Valletta was homeless beggars relieving themselves publicly in the street, “those sights most foul, those odours most sickening” observed William Kingston in The Cruise of the Frolic, published in London in 1860.

What follows is a brief overview of the legal measures put in place to ensure health through urban hygiene in Valletta. I will not touch on emergency measures during the great plague of 1813. That could well be another chapter.

A Scene in Valletta in Early British Malta, by George Whitmore.  Private Collection

An official 1819 government notice says it better than any storyteller would: “His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor is very surprised to note that in so beautiful a city as Valletta, the inhabitants care so little about its material cleanliness, and that every street has, in fact, been reduced to such a state of filth that harms the health and the well-being of all classes.

“It would seem, at the same time, that the police have been most negligent in enforcing the regulations made in this regard on March 16, 1818, to which His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor has now been pleased to add the following:

“Every occupier of a house will be held responsible for ensuring that the area in front of his residence will be swept and washed every morning, immediately after sunrise, and that the garbage is piled in one place where it may be conveniently removed on carts and barrows by the employees charged with cleaning.

“Latrines (luoghi di comodità or luoghi comodi in Italian, hence Maltese loki) will be set up for this purpose, and those who have so little regard for common decency as to make use of the public roads for the abuses above-mentioned will be fined according to their condition or detained for 24 hours on bread and water should the person not be in a position to pay the fine.

“Occupiers of houses are expected to pay particular attention to ensure the enforcement of these regulations, and to report to the police any person who contravenes them in front of their homes. Those who report abuses will be entitled to half the fine.”

Those who report abuses will be entitled to half the fine

This government notice proves instructive in more ways than one. The drafting avoids legalese – it uses colourful language anyone can understand. And it underscores two characteristics that few Maltese, despite the passage of two centuries, will find unfamiliar – firstly, that good regulations abound, but they remain anyway a dead letter as no one then bothers to enforce them. And secondly, that the inhabitants will only perform civic duties if lured by a money reward.

In Valletta’s Streets in the Early 19th Century. Private Collection

The police regulations of the previous year also paint a dismal picture of the cleanliness of Valletta. They start off by explaining that henceforth it will be the police who will be responsible for the hygiene of the roads. People were allowed to pick up and keep for themselves any manure or excrement found in the streets, provided they removed it immediately. Anyone was similarly authorised to take and keep anything thrown onto the road from houses or markets.

Inhabitants were ordered to place in the street all excrement and other garbage at sunrise. If they did not, they had to wait for the next day at the same time. If disposed of at any other time, contraveners would be summoned and fined by the inspector general of police, as the commissioner of police was then known (at the time, the Corsican Francesco Rivarola). If it proved difficult to establish who had contravened this regulation, all the neighbours would be deemed responsible. Residents were instructed to pile the manure in one place to facilitate its removal.

The people employed by the police to clean the roads had to start work at dawn, starting from the principal streets. They would be supplied with carts and wheelbarrows, which they could only empty in a designated place. Streets in Valletta and the Three Cities would be cleaned twice a week, or more often if necessary. But it was assumed that the bulk of the excrement would be collected by private individuals (to be tuned into and sold as fertilising manure).

A Maltese Beggar in the Early British Period. Courtesy of the National Library, Valletta.

Anyone undertaking new constructions or demolition was strictly obliged to cart all building debris outside the gates of the city, and to leave it in places specially designated by the police. Should stone or other building material be abandoned outside the authorised areas, the builders would be obliged to remove any obstruction to the road at their own expense.

All licensees of shops and stalls, fruit and vegetable vendors in particular, were enjoined not to leave anything in the street, or to allow any customer to do so.

All occupants of houses and rooms not provided with sewage canals or where the canals had been damaged, were ordered to report this to the police for the owners or landlords to be obliged to repair them.

The inner cleanliness of homes was strongly recommended and punitive regulations to this effect were to be strictly enforced in case of breach “of this most necessary” of obligations. Landlords would also be held responsible for any breaches by tenants.

An 1818 government notice informed the public that the existing private contract for the cleaning of Valletta, Floriana and the Three Cities across the harbour would be axed as from the following day, March 15, with regard to Valletta and Floriana, and from April 1, for the Three Cities – a rather abrupt termination, with less than one day’s notice. The obligation to clean these five localities now passed to the police force under certain regulations still to be published.

A Poor Countryman Relieving Himself in the Open, by Jacques Callot. Private Collection

More draconian measures were introduced in February 1820. The lieutenant governor “noticed the extreme filth” of the streets of the Three Cities, due to the fact that owners allowed pigs and other animals to roam freely in the public roads. The government notice authorised anyone finding these animals in the streets of Vittoriosa, Cospicua, Senglea and Floriana to take them in full ownership.

The last pre-1843 government notice regarding urban hygiene in Valletta appears equally authoritarian. In 1832, home visits by the police had revealed that many houses in Valletta had small underground chambers where the occupiers dumped body waste and refuse – letame e sporcizie. The notice warned that the police would forcibly wall up these chambers wherever they existed. All refuse had to be placed in canisters or baskets and in the morning left on the doorstep, from where the contents would be removed and carted away daily by the police.

Matters improved over the years. But I wonder if John Dryden Jr, son of the remarkable poet, who visited Malta after touring neighbouring countries, would today exclaim as he did in 1701 in Un Viaggio in Sicilia e a Malta, that “nothing is more wholesome or cleaner than the streets of Malta”.