From health to wealth, here are the strange secrets medieval toilets reveal about life in the Middle Ages

A cesspit isn’t where most people would choose to look to learn more about the story of the Middle Ages.

Cesspits – lined shafts or dug-out pits designed to hold human waste – were a very ordinary feature of medieval towns and settlements. The Middle Ages saw towns’ populations growing in number and density, and that meant more waste – waste that needed managing. So, in towns from Anglo-Saxon Southampton to Viking York, pits were dug, lined with timber or stone, and periodically emptied. They were unglamorous but absolutely essential.

Perhaps surprisingly, for archaeologists, these old waste chutes have become some of the richest sources of evidence for how people lived. Because cesspits were used daily by ordinary households rather than reserved for elite figures of society, they can preserve the material culture of everyday medieval life.

“We need to remember that people dropped things in toilets then, as now,” says historian Katherine Weikert, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

The dense organic material at the bottom of a cesspit cushions whatever falls into it. “We often find things that are unexpected. You can find something in a cesspit and it’s intact. It lands in a smoosh, then it gets covered up.”

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Under certain conditions, these have become a treasure trove for archaeologists. “If that cesspit doesn’t get cleared out or gets abandoned, it’s just there waiting to be found, which is amazing.”

In these sealed environments, various fragments of everyday life survived, waiting to be uncovered: pottery, leather, seeds, scraps of material and, in some cases, objects whose journeys began far beyond Britain.

A silver coin from Córdoba

One of Weikert’s favourite examples of an important archaeological find from within a cesspit comes from ninth-century Southampton, then known as Hamwic – an Anglo-Saxon trading centre on England’s south coast.

Hamwic flourished between the 7th and 9th centuries as a port linking England to continental Europe and Scandinavia. Excavations have revealed workshops, imported pottery, glassware and evidence of long-distance exchange. Hamwic was one of several so-called ‘emporia’– which were seasonal or semi-permanent trading hubs that connected regional producers with international merchants.

“There is a cesspit that was excavated there, and the archaeologists found a silver coin made in the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba,” says Weikert.

The Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba, based in what is now southern Spain, was one of the most powerful and prosperous states of early medieval Europe and the wider Islamic world. Founded in the 8th century after the Islamic conquest of Iberia, it became a major centre of trade, scholarship and urban development. Its silver coinage – typically dirhams – circulated widely throughout Europe and was valued for its prestige.

“This is a very valuable silver coin from far away, from Islamic Spain, moving from Córdoba to Southampton in the ninth century, only to be dropped in a cesspit,” Weikert says.

Perhaps the owner of the coin didn’t notice. Or perhaps they did, and judged the rescue effort to be too unpleasant. Climbing into a cesspit to retrieve a coin would have been physically possible, but fraught with obvious hazards.

The presence of the coin in Hamwic demonstrates how connected Anglo-Saxon England was to the Mediterranean world. Silver travelled across religious and political boundaries, passing through merchants’ hands, across markets and along sea routes. Islamic silver is known to have circulated widely in northern Europe during this period, sometimes melted down and re-struck into local coinage.

“It’s such a great example of what we can find in toilets,” Weikert says. “What we find there gives us a massive picture of transnational trade and travel and people and life. It’s brilliant.”

The York coprolite: a medieval health record

In 1972, construction work in York uncovered an exceptionally well-preserved piece of fossilised human excrement. This dated to the 9th century, when the city was part of the Viking kingdom of Jórvík; Jórvík was a major urban centre under Viking rule, linking the British Isles to wider Viking trade routes across the seas.

It quickly became known more colloquially as the ‘York poo’. This, as Weikert explains, “is a good example of how we can also learn about dietary trends.”

“Scientific testing on it demonstrated that this person’s diet was largely composed of bread and meat,” she says, “which is slightly unusual because other people in that area had diets that included fruits, vegetables and other grains.”

Toilets through time

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The sample also revealed evidence of ill-health.

“It also demonstrated that this person had intestinal worms and could have suffered from things like anaemia, even blocked bowels if the infestation was advanced,” Weikert explains.

Intestinal worms were common in pre-modern societies. “These worms can be spread in a number of ways, including faecal-oral contact, which can happen in many different contexts,” she notes, such as through contaminated water, unwashed hands or poorly cooked food. Without modern sanitation or germ theory, medieval communities had limited means of preventing such infections.

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Weikert says that this would have been painful for the person concerned, and that “they probably had stomach pains and cramping.”

It is even possible that diet and illness were linked. “It could be that the bread, rather than the meat, was part of the diet to try to help heal or at least alleviate some of that discomfort.”

Findings such as this demonstrate the value of cesspits as archaeological sites. Due to them having been used by ordinary households rather than curated as treasure hoards, they capture an unfiltered view of medieval life. For archaeologists, cesspits are invaluable precisely because they serve as an unbiased lens into what medieval people lost, traded and ate.

Katherine Weikert was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

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