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although medieval britons weren't exactly the cleanest lot by modern standards though
contrary to popular belief despite some well-known exceptions they did in general
bathe in some form or another relatively regularly the idea of them just dropping
a trowel and dumping half a pound of fecal matter in the street below isn't exactly a fair
or representative image in fact while medieval britons weren't yet aware of how festering
feces contributed to disease epidemics they did know that it smelled really really bad
and eventually there was even some thought that said stinky fumes caused the spread of disease
thus they made efforts to ensure that the offending odors were kept as far away from their
homes as possible now to be clear generalizing about what a large and diverse group of people did
over a millennium time span is an extremely dodgy business and we're not saying that some medieval
britons didn't sometimes toss their solid waste out of the window after all laws against doing
just that which we'll talk about shortly didn't come from nowhere and there certainly are many
documented accounts people doing this in said massive time span though you'll note that many
have said documented instances describe liquid rather than solid waste we're simply saying that
the documented evidence at hand seems to indicate it was nowhere near as commonplace in britain
as pop culture would have you believe to begin with particularly in the age when one story
buildings were the norm tossing your own stink out of the window meant that you'd have to smell
it anytime that you chose to open said window not a recipe for a good time in summer particularly
but also just a recipe for a crappy time whenever you chose to step out of your door i mean there
your poop would be staring at you in the face perhaps kept company by your neighbor's poo
lovely needless to say even without laws against such a thing it's not surprising that defecating
out of the window doesn't seem to have been most people's go-to location to dump their latest dump
that said as multi-story abodes began to pop up residents of some of the higher homes occasionally
do seem to have not been quite so discerning about keeping things fresh for the residents beneath
them presumably this played a role in laws being passed against tossing one's own excrement out of
the window on that note in most major cities in england fines could and would be levied against
citizens who created a stink either metaphorically or literally that inconvenienced their neighbors
for example in the early 14th century tossing anything out of your window into the streets of
london where the human waste or just any sort of garbage could see you find 40p which is difficult
to translate into modern currency accurately but is very roughly equivalent to 108 pounds or
142 dollars and one couldn't just hope that nobody would notice if you tried tossing your
waist out the window ultimately marker acres and surveyors of the pavement were employed to
make sure the thoroughfares stayed relatively clean including disposing of any waste found
in the streets particularly needed owing to the thousands of horses and other animals tromping
around major cities needless to say well you could have mostly gotten away with emptying a
chamber pot full of urine out of your window as long as your neighbors weren't complaining
there was little stopping you doing the same with solid waste would likely have meant you were going
to get caught even if you were a bit clever about the whole thing on that latter point the 14th
century london size of nuisance recording various disputes between individuals and their neighbors
tells of a londoner called alice wade who got into trouble for rigging a pipe to her indoor
latrine that washed her bodily expulsions into a nearby gutter that in turn was used to essentially
flush a nearby latrine seems reasonable enough a solid and liquid waste goes into the gutter
which in turn drains into a place people do their necessaries in any way no need for her to manually
carry her waste out of her home like a plebeian this woman evidently a bit of a problem solver
unfortunately for her things didn't quite go as planned on the solid waste side of things to wit
whereas of old in the parish of saint michael queen hive a gutter running under certain of the
houses was provided to receive the rain water and other water draining from the house's garters and
street so that the flow might cleanse the privy on the hull alice wade had made a wooden pipe
connecting the seat of the privy in her solar with the gutter which is frequently stopped up by the
filth they're from and the neighbors under whose houses the gutter runs are greatly inconvenienced
by the stench judgment that she removed the pipe within 40 days etc and now let's just pause and
reflect for the moment that some seven centuries after the fact we just had a good reason to dig
up and discuss the record of a woman's ingenious defecating habits with this stinky knowledge very
likely being the only thing history will ever remember about the unique individual that was
alice wade it's kind of depressing in any events in cases where a perpetrator could not
be found fines would be levied against all homes immediately surrounding smelly waste lying in
the streets as you can imagine people didn't take kindly to being fined for someone else's laziness
and there's at least one recorded example of a man being kicked half to death by his neighbors for
throwing smoked fish skin out of his window onto the street we can only imagine what they'd have
done if he added his own fishy excrement to the tossed out mix thus with the ever-present threat
of mob justice and harsh fines sticking your butt out of a window and squeezing out a stink
bomb into the masses below as freeing as it might have felt just was not worth it particularly when
britons had better at least in terms of the out of sight out of mind factor means of waste disposal
at their well disposal so where did all the poop from populated regions go in an age before massive
sewer systems and ubiquitous indoor plumbing in short rivers and fields in houses where they
had no indoor plumbing to speak of britons would usually do their business in a bucket or a chamber
pot which would either be dumped directly into a river or a gutter designed to transport said
waste to the river the hope being that when the rain fell it would wash the poop away to its new
underwater home where it was out of sight and out of mind in more affluent homes that had
rudimentary plumbing the two peas would make their way to either a private or communal cesspit often
buried underground to reduce the smell these cesspits or gongs as they were known from
the old english gang meaning to go were designed such that liquid waste would be absorbed into the
surrounding soil occasionally conveniently located near public wells while the solid waste would
accumulate over a period of many months ultimately these needed to be emptied by hand a job commonly
performed by individuals known as gong farmers perhaps unsurprisingly given their profession gong
farmers were exceptionally well paid sometimes earning in a day what most laborers earned in a
week and in times of plague potentially even more they also infrequently found valuables among the
waste that they were free to keep though it's noted that they occasionally found skeletons
from murder victims and unwanted babies so pros and cons we guess the job wasn't without its
risks besides the obvious disease risk factor that accompanies hopping into a bit of poop and
shoveling it out the fumes could sometimes cause a gong vomit to faint in the muck or they might
otherwise just fall into a gong too deep to stand in as an example of how big some of these pits
could be there is a record of it taking 13 men five full nights to empty out a privy at newgate
jail in 1281. we also know that because some privies designed with the gongs directly beneath
were not emptied frequently enough the floorboards above could become saturated as a result the board
sometimes collapsed occasionally resulting in deaths via drowning in waste while technically
one should float quite easily in such a scenario we can only imagine said individuals struggling to
get their heads above the filth after falling in and there may have been some suctioning
effects pulling them under in their panic or they otherwise were simply overcome by the fumes before
help could come moving outside of britain famously emperor frederick the first was once rescued from
such a fate in 1184 by grabbing onto a window as the floor collapsed and he hung on for dear life
until help came although certain members of his court standing nearby were not so lucky back in
britain one richard the racker is remembered in history thanks solely to sitting down on his own
privy one day and having the rotted boards break under him causing him to fall into
the muck below and to quote drown in a dreadful manner as recorded in the london coroner's role
of 1326 dreadful indeed back to the gong farmers amplifying the risks of their profession was the
fact that they worked exclusively at night so that the smell of harvesting and carting the
poop around wouldn't bother the day walkers of the world we imagine having fire as the sole source of
lighting doing such work also probably created a nice little bonus danger to the profession though
we couldn't specifically find any documented record of a gong farmer dying as a result of
gas pockets exploding though for little it's worth there are some references who claim such
did happen but without citing a specific known instance as for where the poop went after being
harvested given the volume they were dealing with gong farmers generally weren't allowed to just go
and dump the barrels of muck directly in the river instead they were supposed to take the waste to
designated spots away from the city or town these spots could be anything from public land to ships
which would carry the waste off to a farther away destination either way this concentrated mass of
waste often ended up being used as fertilizer lazy gong farmers however do seem to have occasionally
dumped it directly into a stream or river though the consequence for being discovered doing this
in some regions was decidedly unpleasant for example there is a record of one gong farmer who
improperly disposed of some waste and he was made to stand immersed in fecal matter up to his neck
and then dripping with said waste was further forced to stand on public display for a time
as punishment it should also be noted that public latrine facilities did exist often either emptying
directly into a river such as the ones on london bridge or otherwise collecting in a cesspit that
would routinely be emptied as needed however as the population swelled to massive numbers in
certain cities like london the number of these facilities just couldn't keep up with demand
as we move beyond the middle ages with sewage infrastructure and technology progressing
slightly the people of british cities nevertheless continued to commonly dump their chain pots into
rivers compounding the problem was that cesspits would occasionally overflow into the streets with
said waste often just ending up in nearby rivers and streams anyway because of it
in london specifically this century's old habit of making human waste poseidon's problem finally
in the 19th century bit residents on the behind the problem started thanks to an unnaturally warm
summer which resulted in centuries of fetid waste caking the shores of the thames being exposed
this then all baked in the sun causing a smell so bad that the government first simply attempted to
relocate themselves to a new city but then when that ingenious plan failed they finally ordered
the construction of a proper sewage system to take care of the swelling populace's poop a
sewage system that is still in use today in fact and pretty much immediately upon its creation
began saving literally thousands of lives per month for much more detail about that please do
check out one of our most interesting videos in my opinion the great stink of 1858 so to conclude
while dumping one's fecal matter out of the window appears to be something that at least occasionally
happened in the middle ages in britain the evidence at hand seems to indicate that this
was a relatively rare occurrence the majority of human waste that found its way into the streets
tended to be just from things like overflying cesspits which the more affluent used as part of
their rudimentary indoor plumbing systems as for the rest of the populace of cities they generally
pooped into containers the contents of which would then be usually deposited into a nearby river or
stream or there was a gutter system that directly led to such and now for a bonus fact despite the
centuries of technological innovation made since the middle ages the streets of victorian london
were likely more filthy than those of the city in medieval times this was due to the widespread
adoption of horse-drawn carriages which caked the streets of the city in a near permanent sheet of
horse dung and urine this was despite the efforts of countless workers in charge of keeping the
streets clean for reference here it's estimated that approximately a thousand tons of horse tongue
per day were deposited into the streets of london in the late 19th century the urim was also known
to discolor shop fronts and the amount of soot in the air from factories was said to be able to turn
sheep black in a few days so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did please
do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching