Were medieval toilets as filthy as you think?

Walk through a busy European town in the 14th century, and numerous powerful and distinct smells would assail your nostrils. Horses trot along, leaving heaps of dung in the streets. Loud market stalls hawk fish and meat that quickly spoil in summer heat. Leather is tanned in vats filled with pungent liquid.

To modern noses, the scents would be sharp and unfamiliar. But one thing you wouldn’t necessarily smell would be an open latrine. The idea that medieval people routinely emptied chamber pots straight into the street as their primary method of waste disposal isn’t quite accurate.

Medieval towns were governed by councils or guild authorities who issued local bylaws, including regulations on waste disposal, drainage and street cleaning. Across cities such as London, Paris and York, civic authorities specifically banned residents from throwing waste into public roads.

Indeed, as historian Katherine Weikert explains on the HistoryExtra podcast series Toilets Through Time, “we like to think of the Middle Ages as being filthy, but people were cognisant that faeces and urine needed to be somewhere else.”

In other words, waste management was a top priority in the later Middle Ages – even if the standards of sanitation weren’t as sophisticated as they are today.

What did a medieval toilet actually look like?

“In general, [a medieval toilet would] probably have had some kind of seat over a pit or a cess,” says Weikert. “It may have been not too dissimilar to what we think of as an outhouse.”

That pit, perhaps timber- or stone-lined, might have been set in a yard. Construction depended on wealth and location: stone-lined pits were more durable and easier to clean than simple earth-dug holes. In townhouses, the seat might be in a structure projecting out from an upper floor, with a vertical chute dropping waste into a cesspit below.

However, there was no flush mechanism, and no water trap to block odours. Waste simply sat in the pit until it decomposed or was removed – by which time it would be pretty pungent.

“The cesspit would get cleared out every now and again, probably when it filled,” Weikert explains. “The more you clear out your cesspit, the less it smells.” A regularly maintained pit would be unpleasant but bearable, whereas a neglected one would likely be quite overwhelming. In some towns, waste removal was regulated and licensed, with designated dumping grounds outside city walls.

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These cesspits also tell us more than just how people used the toilet. They also reveal things people brought with them. “We get so many great archaeological finds in cesspits,” says Weikert. “People dropped things in the toilets, just like we drop our phones in the toilet today. That phenomenon is more than 1,000 years old.”

Items found preserved in cesspits include everyday objects such as bits of broken pottery, jewellery, seeds and fabric fragments. Analysis of pit contents has even helped reconstruct medieval diets and trade networks, revealing an array of imported spices, fruit stones and fish bones.

Toilets through time

Member exclusive | What was it like to do your business in a Roman communal toilet? Why was the devil thought to lurk in medieval privies? And did constipation turn Henry VIII into a tyrant? In this four-part mini-series, David Musgrove heads down the u-bend in the company of leading historical experts to see what we can learn from the most universal of all experiences: going to the loo.

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Castles and the garderobe

In medieval castles and larger stone buildings, toilets might have been more architecturally integrated.

The characteristic castle latrine was the garderobe – a small stone chamber built into the thickness of an exterior wall. A stone or wooden seat sat above a vertical shaft that ran down the outside face of the building. These featured commonly in fortified residences from the 12th century onwards, when stone castle construction became widespread in western Europe.

Waste dropped into a moat, a pit, or occasionally running water. Draughts moving through the shaft helped carry odours downward and away. Some chutes were angled to reduce the incidence of smells drifting back into living quarters.

The space had another practical function. “If you were wealthy, you could hang your clothes in the garderobe,” observes Weikert. “The smell would help keep moths away, and bugs out of your clothes.”

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Some of the most sophisticated medieval sanitation systems were built in monasteries, which followed strict daily schedules and housed large communities of monks, requiring organised solutions. At Cistercian houses such as Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, long rows of latrine seats were constructed above a continuously flowing stream, so running water flushed waste away naturally. Stone-lined channels directed the current beneath the building, creating what was effectively a communal flush system.

The Cistercians, a reforming monastic order founded in the 11th century, were known for careful planning of their abbeys with a focus in incorporating advanced water management systems.

Smell, air and medieval medicine

Just because a medieval settlement smelled different (and, to an extent, worse) from towns and villages today, that doesn’t mean that people were complacent about the odours.

Medieval medicine drew heavily on ancient Greek and Roman humoral theory, which posited that health depended on keeping bodily fluids – humours named as blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – in balance. This intellectual framework, inherited from ancient physicians such as Hippocrates and Galen, remained influential in Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

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Closely connected was the concept of miasma – the belief that disease spread through corrupted and foul-smelling air.

“The smell is something people were also very aware of,” Weikert explains. People were advised to face into the wind while relieving themselves “so that the smell goes in the opposite direction.”

Clearly, even then waste management was understood to have a health dimension. Outbreaks of plague and other diseases reinforced the belief that invisible airborne corruption could cause sickness, reinforcing the importance of controlling odours and airflow.

Medieval sanitation involved, Weikert says, “management of both the waste and the smell – the side effects of the waste.”

So, were medieval toilets uniquely awful?

By modern standards, medieval toilets were basic. Sanitation was shaped by availability, wealth, geography and population density. Where running water could be channelled, it was. Where it couldn’t, pits were dug and cleared instead.

Medieval toilets might smell bad, especially if neglected, and streets could be unpleasant. But rather than being awash with filth, medieval societies were keenly aware of – and concerned by – waste management.

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

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