In the Middle Ages, everyone emptied chamber pots into the street, often from windows

In the Middle Ages, everyone emptied chamber pots into the street, often from windows

What you may have been told

During the Middle Ages, our dirty, filthy, disgusting ancestors would open their windows and empty buckets full of waste into the street below; even the contents of their chamber pots went the same way. And this often would hit passers-by, who ended up being covered in that muck, but they didn’t care as everybody was always dirty anyway. As a warning, some of the better brought-up folks would at least shout ‘Gardyloo!’ before chucking a pile of vileness out the window.

The debunking

Of course, I am not saying it never happened, but the idea that this was common, happened all the time and people tolerated it is a myth.

Overpopulation wasn’t a problem in most cities and towns till the Renaissance and Early Modern era. The majority still had an agricultural character and most houses were not that different from farms – residents had their own plot of land or yard with space for an outhouse and dung heap or cess pit; they kept animals, had a vegetable patch and a herb garden. What they rarely had was a first floor with windows to throw stuff from. They had no real reason to empty a chamber pot out of their window, as they could just chuck it in the yard. Even if someone wanted to be a filthy Freddy, this would happen on the ground floor – the awfulness would not come from above.

We have to also remember that people would never, ever have been fine with being showered with someone’s urine or, you know, something worse. If anything, our ancestors would have been even angrier than we would be – after all, we can throw our clothes in the washing machine and take a shower while we let the police take care of the person who threw the contents of their chamber pot on us. A medieval person would have had to handwash their clothes and perhaps, if they could, have a quick bath by jumping into a canal or pond — all actions that took a lot more time and effort back then.

Getting the law to deal with this person would also not be that easy, mind you. As most medieval people carried a knife, you might be tempted to deal with this scoundrel yourself, causing even more trouble for everyone involved. So why would you risk a fine or even being stabbed by whoever happened to be walking underneath your window if you could just as easily dump it on your compost heap at the end of your garden? Or save it and then sell it, as it had value! Urine and faces could be used in many ways, including as compost or as an ingredient as part of an industrial process – like tanning, laundering, cloth making and so on. Being able to sell your waste was another reason not to throw it out.

When cities and towns started growing and getting overcrowded at the end of the Middle Ages, land became more valuable because more people wanted to live there, so people started to build higher houses, with gardens and yards getting smaller and eventually disappearing when someone decided to build a house there. Of course, when there are more people there is going to be more waste, and when there are fewer places to get rid of that waste, you’re going to have problems.

You can imagine that when you suddenly have to carry your waste to a special dumping area or wait for it to be collected, the temptation to throw it somewhere where you’re not supposed to would be strong. City records show people complaining and getting very angry with neighbours who made a mess or caused discomfort. In fourteenth-century London, fines could be levied against anyone living near the place where filth was found, so if you saw your neighbour dumping waste in the street you knew you’d be at risk of a fine for what he did! On the other hand, if you told on someone who was being mucky, in some places you could receive a portion of the fine they had to pay, so it was lucrative and you helped keep your neighbourhood clean.

We have records that show that a chap caught merely urinating in the street was almost beaten up by locals for doing something so filthy, and a man who threw just a bit of fish skin on the street caused the owner of the house to be fined for it, who then got so angry he attacked the litterer. If anything, old records seem to suggest that medieval Europeans tried really hard to keep cities and towns clean, and most examples of things getting rather filthy come from much later.

During the sixteenth century (so technically just after what we generally consider to be the Middle Ages), we see several new laws popping up regarding the handling of waste. For instance, in Belgium there was a very specific law stating that windows overlooking a neighbour’s yard or garden needed bars so a piss pot’ could not be emptied out of this window. This shows that this dirty habit did happen in that region at that time, at least often enough for this law to be thought necessary.
So although it clearly happened often enough for specific laws to be created in one small part of medieval Europe, it still was not something that, at least in Antwerp, seems to have turned the streets into one massive cesspit, according to what other records suggest. And even when it did happen, it would normally take place in side alleys and backstreets; people weren’t just dumping it out of windows on to people in busy streets below.

At the same time, we shouldn’t look at laws and assume they were always made because something was a huge problem: some laws are about things that are minor inconveniences, or they’re only meant for a small section of society. And some laws were about something problematic at the time but are still around even though the problem no longer exists.

Of course, things often went wrong, and there were plenty of incidents where people ended up complaining about a filthy stench or waste everywhere. But the idea that this was a fact of daily life for all of medieval Europe is the myth we’re debunking.

The reason we have all these records is because problems were noticed and people complained because they didn’t accept what was going on; they insisted on things changing.

During the Middle Ages, people connected smell with health.

Bad air was assumed to be unhealthy. So besides just not liking so angry he attacked the litterer. If anything, old records seem to suggest that medieval Europeans tried really hard to keep cities and towns clean, and most examples of things getting rather filthy come from much later.

During the sixteenth century (so technically just after what we generally consider to be the Middle Ages), we see several new laws popping up regarding the handling of waste. For instance, in Belgium there was a very specific law stating that windows overlooking a neighbour’s yard or garden needed bars so a piss pot’ could not be emptied out of this window. This shows that this dirty habit did happen in that region at that time, at least often enough for this law to be thought necessary.
So although it clearly happened often enough for specific laws to be created in one small part of medieval Europe, it still was not something that, at least in Antwerp, seems to have turned the streets into one massive cesspit, according to what other records suggest. And even when it did happen, it would normally take place in side alleys and backstreets; people weren’t just dumping it out of windows on to people in busy streets below.

At the same time, we shouldn’t look at laws and assume they were always made because something was a huge problem: some laws are about things that are minor inconveniences, or they’re only meant for a small section of society. And some laws were about something problematic at the time but are still around even though the problem no longer exists.

Of course, things often went wrong, and there were plenty of incidents where people ended up complaining about a filthy stench or waste everywhere. But the idea that this was a fact of daily life for all of medieval Europe is the myth we’re debunking.

The reason we have all these records is because problems were noticed and people complained because they didn’t accept what was going on; they insisted on things changing.

During the Middle Ages, people connected smell with health.

Bad air was assumed to be unhealthy. So besides just not liking bad smells, like all humans who have noses do, our ancestors had an extra reason to want to try to fight unhygienic situations. But still, every time people write about medieval hygiene they depict it as being non-existent. Films and TV shows wallow gleefully in the filth.
There’s a famous medieval illustration of a topless woman literally emptying her chamber pot from a window over some musicians. Surely that’s a convincing bit of evidence to show that it happened … or is it?

In actual fact, it comes from the book Das Narrenschiff (“The Ship of Fools’), which is all about bad behaviour and ridiculous and strange situations. The woman empties her pot over a bunch of annoying idiots, who are playing loud music under her window at night. Which is icky and disgusting but clearly isn’t meant to be a depiction of some common daily occurrence. Imagine if, one day, future generations base how they think we all lived on some footage of drunk people misbehaving on a Saturday night in any UK city centre.

So waste was not hurled willy-nilly from windows. It was mostly dumped in one’s own yard, given to a collector or taken to a communal dump or designated river, stream or gutter meant for this purpose, which would have flowing water in it, thus not causing much of a stink (unless it got clogged; that would be horrible). It was only when cities became overpopulated that this relatively well-functioning system started to break down every now and then.
The Middle Ages always get blamed for these horrible situations while Roman cities had the same problems, and quite a few medieval towns were a lot cleaner than the slums of Victorian London.

Source ~ ‘Fake History 101 things that never happened’ by Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse