Not so crappy!

Even though Medieval Britons weren’t precisely the cleanest lot by trendy standards, the thought of them simply dropping trou and dumping half a pound of fecal matter into the street under isn’t precisely a good or representative image. In fact, whereas Medieval Britons weren’t yet conscious of how festering feces contributed to illness epidemics, they did know that it smelled really, REALLY bad and, eventually, there was even some thought that mentioned smelly fumes triggered the unfold of disease; thus, they made efforts to make sure the offending odors had been saved as distant from their properties as possible.

Now, to be clear, generalizing about what a large and diverse group of people did over a millennium time span is an extremely dodgy business, and we’re not saying that some Medieval Britons didn’t sometimes toss their solid waste out the window but simply saying that the documented evidence at hand seems to indicate it was nowhere near as commonplace in Britain as pop culture would have you believe.

To begin with, particularly in the age when one-story buildings were the norm, tossing your own stink out the window meant you’d have to smell it any time you chose to open said window- not a recipe for a good time in the summer, particularly, but also just a recipe for a crappy time whenever you chose to step out your door… There your poop would be, staring you in the face, perhaps kept company by your neighbors’ latest expulsion. Needless to say, even without laws against such a thing, it’s not surprising that defecating out the window doesn’t seem to have been most people’s go-to location to dump their latest dump.

That said, as multi-storied abodes began to pop up, residents of some of the higher homes occasionally do seem to have not been quite so discerning about keeping things fresh for the residents beneath them. Presumably, this played a role in laws being passed against tossing one’s own excrement out the window.

On that note, in most major cities in England, fines could and would be levied against citizens who created a stink – either metaphorically or literally – that inconvenienced their neighbors. For example, in the early 14th century, tossing anything out your window into the streets of London, whether human waste or just any sort of garbage, could see you fined 40p, which is difficult to translate to modern values accurately, but is (very) roughly equivalent to £108.

And one couldn’t just hope that nobody would notice if you tried tossing your waste out the window. Ultimately muckrakers and surveyors of the pavement were employed to make sure the thoroughfares stayed relatively clean, including disposing of any waste found in the streets (particularly needed owing to the thousands of horses and other animals tromping around major cities). Needless to say, while you could have mostly gotten away with emptying a chamber pot full of urine out your window (so long as neighbors weren’t complaining, there would be little stopping you), doing the same with solid waste would have likely meant you were going to get caught, even if you were a bit clever about the whole thing.

On that latter point, the 14th century London Assize of Nuisance (recording various disputes between individuals and their neighbors) tells of a Londoner called Alice Wade getting into trouble for rigging a pipe to her indoor latrine that washed her bodily expulsions into a nearby gutter that in turn was used to, essentially, flush a nearby latrine. Seems reasonable enough- her solid and liquid waste goes into the gutter which in turn drains into a place people do their necessaries in anyway; no need for her to have to manually carry her waste out of the home like a plebeian.

This woman was a problem solver.

Unfortunately for her, things didn’t quite go as planned on the solid-waste side of things after her below neighbors were tired of her shit, sued her and she was told to remove the pipe. (And now, let us all pause and reflect on the fact that some seven centuries after the fact, we just had good reason to dig up and discuss the record of a woman’s ingenious defecating habits, with this stinky knowledge very likely being the only thing history will ever remember about the unique individual that was Alice Wade…).

In any event, in cases where a perpetrator could not be found, fines would be levied against all homes immediately surrounding smelly waste lying in the streets. As you can imagine, people didn’t often take kindly to being fined for someone else’s crap and there’s at least one recorded example of a man being kicked half to death by his neighbors for throwing smoked fish skin out of his window onto the street; we can only imagine what they’d have done if he’d added his own fishy excrement to the tossed out mix.

Thus, with the ever-present threat of mob justice and harsh fines, sticking your butt out of a window and squeezing out a stink-bomb onto the masses below, as freeing as it might have felt, just wasn’t worth it, particularly when Britons had better (at least in terms of the “out of sight, out of mind” factor) means of waste disposal at their, well, disposal.