“Check your husband’s dunghill” – here’s why medieval society was obsessed with poo

When you think about the driving forces that contributed to progress in medieval Britain, you might think about the likes of mercantilism, war, and urbanisation. But there were other, less-obvious – and more grim – factors behind the development of the medieval economy too. Take poo, for example.

“Manure underpinned the medieval economy,” says Dr Richard Jones, professor of landscape history at the University of Leicester, speaking on the Toilets Through Time series from the HistoryExtra podcast.

Manure was key to the western medieval economy

Most manure was made up of the excrement of animals, although Jones says that people “looked for fertilising material wherever they could find it.” Near the coast, for example, people might use sand and seaweed alongside farmyard manure.

There was a “very long tradition which recognised the importance of returning nutrients to the soil,” Jones says, and manure helped farmers to keep their soil in as good a condition as possible to help “ensure good yields.”

So, while manure was a waste product, it played an important role in the medieval economy, which revolved around growing crops and raising livestock.

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Some historians argue that manure was part of the reason Europe “came to economic dominance in the medieval period,” Jones says.

In Asia, there weren’t as many large mammals, such as cows, sheep, and pigs, that produced manure to fuel farming, Jones explains. But Europe “had a lot of large domestic animals, which provided power and provided protein, but above all they provided manure in large quantities.”

Attitudes towards manure reflected the feudal system of the Middle Ages

“It was fairly commonplace practice for peasants’ animals to be ‘folded’ [penned in] on the lord’s fields, enabling him to capture the fertilising power of the community's herds and flocks,” Jones says.

Peasants farmed particular strips of land owned by lords and would graze their animals on larger common areas – also owned by the lords – meaning that much animal waste would by default be created on the lord’s property. Peasants could collect their animals’ manure when they were elsewhere, but most benefits of manure would go to the lord’s fields.

Because of its status as a valuable commodity, Jones says there’s evidence in court records of manure theft.

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But there were differing attitudes to different types of manure. There was a distinction made between what Jones calls ‘wholesome manure’ – that is, fertilising material that was made up wholly of animal waste, plants, or soil from a lord’s land – and ‘tainted manure,’ which contained waste from peasants’ kitchens and bodies.

Manure was often stored in big piles called dunghills, “some of which could be quite large and prominent,” Jones explains. There’s not much archaeological evidence of them left, since they were made of organic materials, but there are references to dunghills going back to Anglo-Saxon charters, he says.

In many of these charters, dunghills were used to identify the boundaries of estates, because they were very visible, semi-permanent features of the landscape.

Manure and medieval social status

Although the lords owned most of the manure, it was still largely associated with the lower classes – namely, peasants.

“All of the literary references to dunghills tend to be negative, and manure is a material that is very much associated with the lower orders,” Jones says. Members of the upper classes, then, “shared the same kinds of disgust that we have for this material today.”

Dunghills also had criminal connotations, because they could facilitate murder.

“The dunghill provided a fantastic place to bury and hide bodies. So, it may well be that the dunghill itself wasn't an active participant in whatever nefarious crime had taken place, but it was a convenient place to hide the evidence,” Jones adds.

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But much of the literature condemning dunghills and manure would have been written by the upper echelons of medieval society, since peasants were much less likely to be literate, so these attitudes are mainly reflective of the privileged. Jones suspects “that for peasant communities, there was much less disgust for the material – indeed, it was seen as essential.”

While dunghills would often be placed far away from the lord’s manor, on the edges of their estates, some peasants would pile dung by their front doors and were more comfortable living close to it.

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A large dunghill could actually be a positive thing. Being able to store large piles of manure meant that someone “was oversupplied with dung, and wasn’t using all of their stock,” signifying their farm was doing well.

“The size of your dunghill is an indicator of your affluence: the more animals you have, the larger your dunghill,” Jones says. “So, if you're looking for a husband, you could look at the size of his dunghill to know whether you're marrying into a family that is well off.”

Urbanisation changed people’s attitudes to manure

After the medieval period, more people gradually began to move out of the countryside and into cities. At first – before sewer systems and while there were many animals remained in urban environments – the role of manure was still respected.

“In the early modern period, we know that night soil [manure] is being collected in urban centres and recycled out in the surrounding fields,” Jones says. “There is this mutual relationship between town and country, with a virtuous cycle of return – products from the countryside are consumed by the town, turned into waste, and then are sent back to the fields.”

But as cities grew exponentially and fewer people lived directly on the land, the relationships between town and country, and people and manure, changed.

“Manure was seen as a problem rather than as an asset,” Jones says, so sewerage systems were introduced that kept waste physically separate from most people’s daily lives – as it is today.

Dr David Musgrove was speaking to Richard Jones on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.