Well, it’s been a week, so hopefully you’re not still weary of hearing about Samuel Pepys and excrement, because today is the highly exciting 363rd anniversary of Sammy visiting his cellar only to find himself standing in his next-door neighbour’s shite.
The note at the bottom of the page of that edition of the diaries (University of California Press, 1970) explains:
In other words, Mr Turner had a privy in his house which emptied into his cellar, and either his cellar was quite small or he hadn’t had it emptied for so long that it was brimming with shit — so much so that some had escaped into Samuel Pepys’ cellar.
Five days later, Samuel records that “This night the vault at the end of the cellar was emptied”, which must have been a great relief to all concerned.
On a… related note, if you should ever need to book a function room at New College, Oxford, you can book the Long Room. It’s quite a decent size; room for a grand piano. It does possess a slightly… subterranean air, though, does it not?
This building, you see, housed New College’s latrines. That is, they were on the storey above. The Long Room, directly below the latrines, gradually, and for many hundreds of years, filled up. Mollie Harris, author of the fine tome, Cotswold Privies, explains:
The ancient universities had some of the same problems. At New College, Oxford, the detached mediaeval building which housed the latrines still survives. Robert Plot mentioned the Long Room in his book, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, of 1677: ‘I hoped it not improper to mention a structure called The Long House. I could not but note it as a stupendous piece of building, it being large and deep that it has never been emptied since the foundation of the college, which is about 300 years since, nor is it likely to want it.’
In fact the fifteenth-century Compustus Rolls do record the occasion of cleaning out of the Long Room in 1485.
There, that’s a thing you know now (unless you did before). Either way, you really are most welcome.
