Dispelling Some Myths: Medieval waste mismanagement?

Despite the best efforts of historians, the internet is still awash with misconceptions about the Middle Ages. Many of these ideas were the product of Victorian writers and historians reflecting Mediæval life through the lens of their own society, as was done by antiquarians before them and by historians since. However, after more than a century in popular culture, and being taught in schools, these sometimes broad, sweeping assertions remain deeply rooted in everyday consciousness. This is especially so when repeatedly reinforced online, in social media, on television and in the movies. Before addressing one such notion, it is worth remembering that the Mediæval period lasted roughly 1,000 years during which peoples’ lives and experiences varied a lot according to time, place and circumstance. So, with that in mind, did our forebears really dump their waste in the street?

Waste not, want not  Before addressing one of the more pervasive myths that people threw the content of their chamber pots out of a window onto the unsuspecting heads of passers-by in the street below, let us consider what we know of waste management in the Middle Ages. In the last few decades we think we have become so responsible with innovative recycling programmes and the repurposing or upcycling of unwanted items. But this is far from a modern idea. Mediæval people were equally as smart as us today and knew how to make full use of the resources at their disposal. Every ounce was put to good use, and towns and cities were full of artisans who mended things. One good example was discovered during the analysis of the asset tax rosters of Mediæval Frankfurt in Germany. The data revealed how commonplace it was to find jobs relating to mending and refurbishing things. Moreover, the repairers were often itinerant setting up stalls at fairs or in markets where they might mend shoes, pots, bags, tools or clothing. That these people submitted tax returns strongly suggests they were operating successful businesses.

If you have ever wondered why so few Mediæval shirts, shifts and other garments are seen in museum collections it is because people were expert in reusing and upcycling items. Indeed, textiles were integral to the Mediæval recycling industry. Any worn-out clothing, whether underwear or cloaks, bed sheets or tablecloths, or even tapestries would be resold rather than simply discarded. Such material was highly sort after not only to produce new textiles but, when finally exhausted, the ragged remnants would be used to make paper. The latter industry rapidly expanded from the mid-15th-century as the demand for paper dramatically increased after Johannes Guttenberg developed Europe’s first mechanical printing press. The paper trade became ever more profitable, and paper manufacturers would engage small subcontractors, rag-and-bone men or ragpickers to go door-to-door and buy any old clothes or scraps people might have lying about. In such a competitive market those involved required a permit in some places.

Dirty, muddy streets  In popular imagination Mediæval towns are always foul-smelling and filthy places. At least that is the impression one might get from television and film. But as Dutch author Henk ‘t Jong writes:

“An examination of ‘keuren’ or by-laws of Dutch towns in the 14th and 15th centuries reveals that sanitary legislation is there but offenses against them are relatively scarce. Surviving documentation of court cases suggests that only few persons were fined or punished for breaking these laws. From this and other proof can be concluded that late medieval townspeople did not live in filth and dirt if they could in any way avoid it.”

While many villages and towns had dirt roads that would get muddy when it rained, paved streets were also common, as were gutters to drain away rainwater. On top of that many towns had strict rules regarding what people were allowed to do and not to do with the street in front of their homes. Not keeping it clean, throwing rubbish outside your front door and so on could land you with a heavy fine.

Public toilets  Most readers are probably familiar with public toilets being communal affairs during ancient Rome’s hegemony. Such latrines (Latin: latrinae [1]) were rooms around which were ranged long wooden or stone benches with holes cut for waste to fall into a channel below where it was carried away by a constant flow of water. The vertical slot in the bench front allowed the use of the infamous “sponge-on-a-stick” to clean the user. The orientation of the hole/slot combination is highly suggestive that both Roman men and women sat to relieve themselves. Indeed, a man’s tunic would have made sitting the easier option while also having the added bonus of preserving their dignity. Many people would use these latrines at the same time sitting within touching distance of their neighbour with no dividing screen between them. Public toilets were not completely open to view, however. Some form of curtain would have shielded the entrance, and we do have evidence at some communal toilets of doors blocking the view from the street.

Communal toilets were still in use in England during the Middle Ages. Dated to the 12th-century, a wooden bench sporting three holes was found in Ludgate Hill, London during the 1980s. Large communal municipal latrines are known to have been on London Bridge, maintained by the city of London authorities, which emptied into the River Thames. At Langley Castle in Northumberland, the latrine tower featured four stalls set in a row, with low stone screens between them, but no doors are again evident. Communal toilets persisted into the Tudor period in some places. The Great House of Easement in Hampton Court Palace, for example, provided 28 seats set over two floors. Once more, there were no cubicles so men and women might find themselves sitting beside each other. This proximity, however, provided an opportunity to chat discreetly and gossip about the latest events and rumours circulating at court.

Of course, for men it has always been much quicker and easier to urinate outside, but this led to some unfortunate consequences. Courtiers urinating against the walls of Tudor palaces annoyed Cardinal Wolsey so much that in 1526 he issued the Eltham Ordinance to establish a set of rules for conduct at court. The ordnance records his strategy for combatting this behaviour whereby he ordered red crosses to be placed in areas where the activity was most prevalent. It was, of course, considered bad form to relieve oneself on a crucifix so Wolsey’s ploy fixed the problem.

By the late 18th-century, private toilets were becoming commonplace, and the “middling sort” (the middle class) embraced the flushing water closet. Even so, communal toilets were still in use. One notorious place was Bagnigge Wells near King’s Cross in north London where users would perch side-by-side on a long pole, chatting and gossiping as they relieved themselves.

Now wash your hands  Signs extolling “Now wash your hands” still appear in public toilets today. Sadly, in our experience, whether this advice is followed by some people is another matter. Perhaps, like our ancient forebears, they may not have understood the message in quite the same way. The Romans, for example, may have washed their hands after visiting the latrinum, but they may not have fully grasped the health implications of keeping hands clean. An example of this may be found in Volume 2 of Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon which describes the fictional dinner party known as “Trimalchio’s Feast” (Latin: cena Trimalchionis). For those unfamiliar with the Satyricon, it is a satire mocking the vulgar habits of nouveau riche Romans [2] through, in this instance, the exploits a rich freedman named Trimalchio who is hosting a lavish dinner party where extravagant dishes are served. The opening paragraph of Chapter 27 in Volume 2 ends with the following lines:

“Menelaus had scarcely ceased speaking when Trimalchio snapped his fingers; the eunuch, hearing the signal, held the chamber-pot for him while he still continued playing. After relieving his bladder, he called for water to wash his hands, barely moistened his fingers, and dried them upon a boy's head.”

The author’s intent may be to expose how unrefined and boorish people with newly acquired wealth were in comparison to the rich, cultured and aristocratic Roman elite. Or he could be drawing attention to the pretentiousness of the wealthiest in Roman society. Either way, the Trimalchio example is useful to highlight an apparent disconnect between personal hygiene in the past and knowledge of how infections and disease are spread. Even though extolled for their famously advanced sewer technology, the Romans did not recognise the risk of bacterial disease transmitted via excrement. Roman sewers were not built with health and hygiene in mind. Rather they were merely practical means to move waste matter away from populated areas. In doing so, of course, public health and hygiene were much improved, but this was, one might argue, an unintended consequence.

Moving forward in time, as a rule people in the Middles Ages were keen to maintain a high level of personal cleanliness. Thus, receptacles holding water might have been positioned at or near toilets for the purpose of handwashing. Similarly, recesses or niches set into toilet walls may have been to store mosses for cleaning oneself. By the time of the Tudors, most people were very careful about washing their hands, particularly before eating. Indeed, Tudor etiquette demanded that hands were washed before a meal. This might have been done on the way into the dining hall at the “ewery board” where a large ewer of water, a basin and towel would have been attended by a servant. Alternatively, servants might bring the ewer and basin to the seated guests so hands could be cleansed. Even the servants, particularly the carver of meat, were expected to be seen washing their hands. All being said, this ritual of handwashing in the dining chamber was largely symbolic since guests were expected to have washed thoroughly beforehand.

Flushed with success  It would be unwise to claim that Sir John Harington invented the flushing toilet as he was not the first to devise such a contraption. Born in Kelston, Somerset in 1560, Harington’s father was a poet while his mother worked as a gentlewoman of Queen Elizabeth I’s Privy chamber. When an infant Sir John was baptised by the Queen herself, she calling him her “saucy Godson”. Like his father, Harrington also became a poet, albeit not an entirely successful one. Even so, he was constantly encouraged by her majesty about his writing until, in 1596, he published a political allegory against the monarchy and was duly banished from court. Exiled in Bath until 1599, Harington built himself a house within which he devised and installed the first flushing lavatory comprising a pan with an opening at the bottom, sealed with a leather-faced valve. A series of knobs, lifters and weights that opened the valve allowed water from a connected cistern to flush away the waste. His invention was described in his work “A New Discourse of a Stale Subject called the Metamorphosis of Ajax” – Ajax being a play on “jakes” the slang word for a toilet. When the Queen eventually visited Harington, she was shown his invention and we know that afterward Elizabeth ordered a flushing toilet to be installed in Richmond Palace.

While Queen Elizabeth seemed keen on Harington’s invention, most people preferred using chamber-pots. These were usually emptied from an upstairs window into the street below, or so the myth goes. Indeed, it is said that in France, the cry “gardez à l’eau” warned people in the street below to take evasive action, and that this phrase may be the origin of the English nickname for the lavatory, “the loo”. However, www.etymonline.com has the following entry which is probably more correct:

Empty chamber pot from window  Whatever the origin of the word, and before the advent of flushing toilets, did people in the Middle Ages really throw their rubbish and bodily waste into urban thoroughfares? Generations of school children have been taught that people emptied chamber-pots out of windows into the street. That this nonsense persists is in part due to the feelings of disgust the image engenders in modern people so used to a sanitary life. Indeed, today we are less inured to pungent aromas and more distanced from human waste than in the past. Even so it would be wrong to say that the Mediæval populace were any less sensitive to foul odours or disgusted by human waste than us. While they may not have understood scientifically how human waste could spread disease, they knew from observation and lived experience that it did. This awareness meant Mediæval towns and cities had many ordinances and laws on waste disposal, cesspits, and toilets. One such ordinance in London made residents directly responsible for the upkeep and cleanliness of their street outside their houses. Mediæval records show that those who failed to follow the rules could be heavily fined. As historian, atheist, sceptic and rationalist, Tim O’Neill wrote in answer to this very question:

“The fines that could be imposed on them if they didn’t do this could be extremely onerous. One account talks of an outraged mob badly beating a stranger who littered their street with the skin of a smoked fish, since they didn’t want to have to pay the heavy fine for his laziness. In an environment like that, people are hardly going to be dumping buckets of excrement out of their windows.” (O’Neill, 2013)

For most of the Mediæval period towns and cities were not as overcrowded as they would become in post-Renaissance Europe. The very agrarian nature of early urban centres meant that many houses had some form of a garden or yard attached. Larger houses are known to have enclosed latrines attached to or behind the home emptying into deep cesspits. Known as “jakes” (cf. above) or a “gong”, one of the worst possible jobs in the Middle Ages had to be the “gongfermours” or “gong farmers”. These were the men employed to empty the foul-smelling cesspits who, not surprisingly, were well-paid to do so. Equally unsurprising, at the end of the day Mediæval London’s gongfermours would take a much-needed dip in the River Thames.

Smaller residences made do with a bucket or “close stool” over a basin. Both would be emptied daily, typically into one of the streams that flowed into the nearest river. This made some of these streams, like the Fleet in London, rather foul-smelling and gave one in the city of Exeter the lyrical name of “the Shitbrook” (O’Neill, 2013).

It was when towns and cities started growing and became ever more overcrowded that things started to go wrong. The earlier single-storey houses began to be replaced by taller houses with multiple upper floors. Building space became increasingly valuable such that gardens and yards shrank in size or disappeared altogether. This meant fewer residents had the space for their own well or land to erect, let alone use, an outhouse or cesspit to dispose of waste. Moreover, the household cottage gardens that had previously supplied herbs and vegetables to individual families were slowly supplanted by readily accessible shops and marketplaces in the towns and cities. There was no longer a need to “grow your own” if folk could buy the family’s provisions from local traders.

In properties where a garden or yard survived only those occupying the ground floors of these taller houses might still have had access to a cesspit. Those living on the floors above did not and, in such circumstances, it is not hard to imagine that people forced to carry their waste to a special dumping area or wait for it to be collected might be tempted to throw it somewhere the rules forbade. Pictured is one of the few images depicting someone emptying what could be a chamber-pot from a window that is often used to illustrate this bad habit. It was published in Basel ca. 1497, at the very end of the Mediæval era, in Sebastian Brant’s “Das Narrenschiff” (“Ship of Fools”). The translated caption however reveals that the emptying of the chamber-pot is not being done out of laziness or habit but is instead a subtle way for the householder to express their opinion of the musicians making a racket late at night.

Post the Mediæval period, several new laws were enacted to manage waste in 16th-century Antwerp, Belgium. One very specific law stated that windows overlooking a neighbour’s yard or garden needed bars so a “piss pot” could not be emptied out of the window. So, as we have seen, if anything the surviving documents suggest that Mediæval Europeans tried very hard to keep cities and towns clean. In fact, it is even recorded that foreign visitors were full of praise for the cleanliness and neatness of the Low Countries.

While here in Britain, the idea of English medieval towns and cities being filthy, muddy and insanitary has been overturned in a 2019 study by Carole Rawcliffe, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. She argues that through the efforts of crown and civic authorities, mercantile élites and popular interests, English towns and cities aspired to a far healthier, less polluted environment than previously supposed (Rawcliffe, 2019). All major sources of possible infection were regulated, from sounds and smells to corrupt matter. The study of public health in pre-Reformation England challenges several entrenched assumptions about the insanitary nature of urban life during “the golden age of bacteria”. Rawcliffe’s interdisciplinary approach drew on material remains as well as archives to examine the medical, cultural and religious contexts in which ideas about the welfare of the communal body developed. Far from demonstrating indifference, ignorance or mute acceptance in the face of repeated onslaughts of epidemic disease, the rulers and residents of English towns devised sophisticated and coherent strategies for the creation of a more salubrious environment. Among the plethora of initiatives whose origins often predated the Black Death can be found measures for the improvement of the water supply, for better food standards and for the care of the sick, both rich and poor.

In conclusion  There always have been (and always will be) indolent people who dumped their waste into the streets and communal spaces. But the evidence suggests that in much of Mediæval Europe such “crimes” were rare and that both law enforcers and neighbours would react harshly to offenders. Waste was mostly disposed of in one’s backyard cesspit, taken to a communal dump or special stream, river or gutter meant just for this purpose [3], or taken away by a paid refuse collector. When cities became overpopulated, this relatively well functioning system sometimes stopped working as it should and although the problems were often fixed, they became more frequent.

Things clearly went wrong and there were plenty of accidents and incidents where people complained about a filthy stench or waste everywhere. But the idea that this was a common part of daily life across Mediæval Europe is a myth. Mediæval people connected smell with health such that bad air and smells were assumed to be unhealthy. This albeit simplistic notion gave our forebears the extra incentive to avoid or combat unhygienic situations. In short, they were not that different from us. Bon appétit!

References:

Jong, H. (2008), “De mythe van de vuilnisbelt”, published in Millenium 22, pp. 68-91.

Kehnel, A. (2024), “How did medieval people deal with waste?” in “Q&A”, BBC History Magazine (Christmas edition), p. 33.

O’Neill, T. (2013), “How Did People in the Middle Ages Get Rid of Human Waste?”, www.slate.com, available online (accessed 4th December 2024).

Rawcliffe, C. (2019), “Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities”, Martlesham: Boydell Press.

Endnotes:

1. From www.etymonline.com, the noun “latrine” enters English c. 1300 as “laterin” meaning a privy. It is probably from Latin latrina, latrinum, a contraction of lavatrina “washbasin, washroom,” from lavatus the past participle of lavare “to wash” plus -trina, a suffix denoting “workplace”. The word's reappearance in 1640s probably is a re-borrowing from French.

2. Nouveaux riche (French for “new rich”) is a pejorative term for one who has recently become rich and who spends money conspicuously.

3. Water flowing along such streams, rivers or gutters would have minimised odours and flushed waste away from living areas. Naturally, if the system became clogged, the result would be less than pleasant.