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Updated: June 30, 2025
The narrowest and most antique of the old streets of York are close to All Saints' Church, and the first we enter is the Shambles, where butchers' shops with slaughter-houses behind still line both sides of the way. On the left, as we go towards the Minster, one of the shops has a depressed ogee arch of oak, and great curved brackets across the passage leading to the back.
Happily it has long been wiped out, this blot on the city's scutcheon. Its half-dozen streets were unspeakable mud, its air was stenches, its buildings were incredibly foul slaughter-houses and shedded pens of swine, sheep, beeves, cows, calves, and mustang ponies.
There were five or six thousand Arabs in tatters here, grovelling in the sunshine and noisily trafficking, amid jars of black olives, pots of honey, bags of spices; and great heaps of cigars; huge fires were roasting whole sheep, basted with butter; in open air slaughter-houses stark naked Negroes, with ruddy arms and their feet in gore, were cutting up kids hanging from crosspoles, with small knives.
The huge slaughter-houses that fed a good part of the world were silent and empty, for lack of animal material. The stock yards had nothing to fill their bloody maw, while trains of cars of hogs and steers stood unswitched on the hundreds of sidings about the city.
Lambs and sheep, possessing finer natures than goats and pigs, would appear to be less earth-bound, and, in all probability, only temporarily haunt the spots that witnessed their usually barbarous ends. Most slaughter-houses are haunted by them as, indeed, by many other animals.
They found in the course of their inquiry that decayed vegetables, bad flour, and putrid meat, were specially purchased and provided for the use of the strangers! Such as had strength to escape from these slaughter-houses fled from them as from a plague, and roamed through the city, exciting the compassion perhaps the horror of the passers by.
"What job?" asked the India-rubber Man, suddenly turning his head and speaking with his mouth full. "Fore medical distributing station. I've done a meat-course at Smithfield market ... slaughter-houses before breakfast, don't you know? I thought I could stick a good deal " The Paymaster opened his eyes suddenly. "I tell you, it was what the sailor calls bloody ... just bloody."
A very racy and peculiarly English character might be made out of a man like this, having his life-concern wholly with the disagreeables of a great city. He seemed to be a good and kindly person, too, but earthy, even as if his frame had been moulded of clay impregnated with the draining of slaughter-houses. December 21st.
I thank him for that, while I excuse his confounding of sounds that he hears in England from America, and agree that what we need in that valley to tell its story, to interpret it, is not a specialist in statistics nor an annalist, not a critic who looks at the smoke of the chimneys and visits the slaughter-houses only, but a poet who will have the patience to consult both the statistician and the annalist, a patient poet with the "loyalty of a child" toward his theme.
It may be generally summed up, of this inferior people, that they have no idea of anything. Of a great Institution like Smithfield, they are unable to form the least conception. A Beast Market in the heart of Paris would be regarded an impossible nuisance. Nor have they any notion of slaughter-houses in the midst of a city.
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