Julian of Ascalon, Julian of Ascalon (sixth century (c. 530s))

A short treatise by an architect of Ascalon on the rules of building between neighbours in the towns of Palestine (distances, views, smoke, smell, noise and water), preserved because a fourteenth-century jurist copied it into his law book.

Nothing is known of Julian except his name, his city and his profession. His treatise records local customs that had the force of law in the cities of Palestine in the age of Justinian, and it survives as part of the Hexabiblos of Constantine Harmenopoulos, a judge of Thessaloniki, compiled in 1345 (Book II, title 4).

The rules are practical and specific. They set distances between new work and old; protect a neighbour’s light and his view of the sea or the country; and keep nuisances apart from dwellings (bakeries and baths for their fire and smoke, dyers and fullers for their smells and water, lime-kilns and threshing floors for their smoke and chaff), taking account of the prevailing wind. They show a city governed less by a plan than by a web of neighbourly rights.

The book, part by part

I Neighbours and nuisances

Distances for hazardous and offensive trades; light, views, wind and water.

Rules: Smoke, smell and fire kept from houses

Rules drawn from Julian of Ascalon

Smoke, smell and fire kept from houses

Set ovens, baths, kilns, dyers, fullers, tanners and threshing floors at a fixed distance from their neighbours’ houses, and where the wind will not carry their smoke, smell or chaff into them.