They tell of those early medieval days when the houses were almost all of wood and roofed with straw-thatching or wooden tiles; when the chimneys and bridges alike were built of wood.  Only here and there a stone house roofed with brick could then be seen.  The streets were narrow and crooked, and even in the fifteenth century mostly unpaved.  In wet weather they were filled with unfathomable mud, and even tho in the lower part of the town trenches were dug to drain the streets, they remained mere swamps and morasses.  In dry weather the dust was even a worse plague than the mud.  Pig-styes stood in front of the houses; and the streets were covered with heaps of filth and manure and with rotting corpses of animals, over which the pigs wandered at will.  Street police in fact was practically non-existent.  Medievalism is undoubtedly better when survived.

[Footnote A:  From “The Story of Nuremberg.”  Published by E.P.  Dutton & Co.]

WALLS AND OTHER FORTIFICATIONS[A]

BY CECIL HEADLAM

A glance at the map will show us that Nuremberg, as we know it, is divided into two almost equal divisions.  They are called after the names of the principal churches, the St. Lorenz, and the St. Sebald quarter.  The original wall included, it will be seen, only a small portion of the northern or St. Sebald division.  With the growth of the town an extension of the walls and an increase of fortification followed as a matter of course.  It became necessary to carry the wall over the Pegnitz in order to protect the Lorenzkirche and the suburb which was springing up around it.  The precise date of this extension of the fortifications can not be fixt.  The chronicles attribute it to the twelfth century, in the reign of the first Hohenstaufen, Konrad III.  No trace of a twelfth-century wall remains; but the chroniclers may, for all that, have been not very wide of the mark.  The mud and wood which supplied the material of the wall may have given place to stone in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  However that may be, it will be remembered that the lower part of the White Tower, which is the oldest fragment of building we can certainly point to dates from the thirteenth century.  All other portions of the second wall clearly indicate the fourteenth century, or later, as the time of their origin....

Beyond the White Tower the moat was long ago filled up, but the section of it opposite the Unschlittplatz remained open for a longer period than the rest, and was called the Klettengraben, because of the burdocks which took root there.  Hereabouts, on a part of the moat, the Waizenbraeuhaus was built in 1671, which is now the famous Freiherrlich von Tuchersche Brewery.  Here, too, the Unschlitthaus was built at the end of the fifteenth century as a granary.  It has since been turned into a school.