Odd this day

27 April 1307

YES, OF COURSE: it’s the 717th anniversary of a legal battle in medieval England over whether royal groom Thomas Scott could piss in the street with impunity — an incident which undoes most of what we think we know about sanitation in The Olden Days.

‘Amerced’ means fined

Obviously, it was the scrapping as much as the pissing that caused the problem, but the important thing to note here is that Thomas Scott didn’t have to piss in the street, despite the image we have those times.

I am in debt to Tim O’Neill for alerting me to this tale. That link leads to a thread on… a social media platform where decency fears to tread, but it has some fascinating detail on exactly why and how we’re wrong about medieval filth. Basically, it’s not a simple question of more muck the further back you go. O’Neill says:

…people then felt the same as us about walking in crap. This is why depictions of city and town streets in medieval art tend to show them as usually paved and pretty clean. Small cities meant the smaller populations were generally able to handle sanitation themselves, though town and city councils did do some work maintaining public toilets and carting away garbage from communal areas like markets.

There were also “ordinances controlling messy and smelly industries, like slaughterhouses, fish and meat markets and tanning”, and if they broke the rules, they could be “fined or shut down”.

Medieval cities and towns had more space and more room for yards, cesspits and refuse piles than later, larger urban centres. As usual, the Middle Ages get blamed for things that actually only appeared much later, on the assumption that if things were crowded, filthy and disgusting in the cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and they were) they *must* have even worse in the Middle Ages because “medieval = bad”.

This assumes that history is a linear, teleological progress of increasing sophistication and advancement, so the further back you go, the worse everything gets. Though for some reason this doesn’t apply to the Romans, who were all very clean and fragrant — despite the fact they really weren’t and ancient Rome was a pestilential, stinking hellhole.

There are also

the Hollywood stereotypes from medieval and fantasy movies and TV shows, which is where most people get their conception of history.

Anyway, he recommended a book, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities, by historian Carole Rawcliffe. Which, obviously, I couldn’t resist.

Apparently, there were ‘pissyngholes’ all over the place, especially on bridges, so your bodily excretions could drop directly into a river and be magicked away. (Yes, that is a principle that still seems to hold in some quarters, not least the boardrooms of water companies, but I digress.)

There were five ‘places of easement for the common people’ on Hull’s waterfront in the 15th century, and a ‘long house’ was

built on the bank of the Thames by the executors of Richard Whittington

— yes, that guy — and

catered for significant numbers at a time.

…which means panto scripts need updating to record his contribution to sewerage.

Yes, that is ‘Phil’ from EastEnders wearing eyeliner

And something I thought I’d learnt from Horrible Histories had to be unlearnt on flicking through this book. I thought ‘gong-farmers’ — people who emptied privies and cesspits — were the lowest-paid and lowest regarded people, and smelled bad and lived in squalor. But

the emptying of cesspits could prove … expensive … being generally delegated to ‘gong fermours’ whose high rate of pay reflects the disagreeable nature of their work.

So, cast aside your stereotypical view of streets running with shite — there weren’t quite so many people flinging bucketfuls of plop out the window as you thought. Mind you, the book does say there’d been complaints about

the filthy narrow lanes leading down to the Thames … since at least the 1270s

So, there was room for improvement. Anyway, here’s an illustration from around 1280 of… er, no, no idea, but it seems to involve bodily functions

…so I can just about get away with claiming it’s relevant.