The twelfth century and the nineteenth

In many ways life for most people continued remarkably unchanged from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century.  Sure, there was now a whole New World full of new foods (corn, potatoes, tomatoes, turkeys, chocolate...), and books were printed rather than handwritten, and there was gunpowder, and more organized institutions meant more people got a basic education and were taxed more regularly, and the cities were bigger, and more laws got written down.

But in 1800 the majority of Europe's population still lived in country villages and farmed, using human power and animal power rather than mechanical power.  If they wanted to go somewhere, they went on foot or horseback, and the roads were unmarked and a muddy mess.  They heated and cooked with fire, made their own clothes, used latrines, and sent messages over long distances by having someone travel with the message.

Even though we now live in an age of rapid technological change (the web is only about 25 years old, and a generation ago no one had cell phones, much less apps), in many ways the nineteenth century has us all beat for rapid technological change.

The things we take for granted, the things that separate "civilized" life from "third world" in our thinking, are electricity, telephones, indoor plumbing with running water, and furnaces/AC, plus being able to get quickly down the road.  We also take for granted factory-made goods, from clothing to cell phones to cars.  These are all nineteenth-century inventions.  Before trains, before all the rest of it, the daily life of an ordinary person at the beginning of the nineteenth century would have been a lot like life in the Middle Ages.

But the twelfth century was also a great age of invention.  Architects were trying new and exciting techniques to build churches taller and lighter than they'd ever been built before.  Windmills and watermills revolutionized the grinding of grain and hence the ease of making bread, as well as performing other useful mechanical chores.  Cities and commerce grew rapidly.  Metallurgy was greatly improved, leading to better tools, weapons, and cook pots.  Advances in plowing and crop rotation increased agricultural yields.

But you'd still rather live in the nineteenth century than the twelfth, you say.  Or would you?  The twelfth century had a functional society.  It can't have been comfortable by our standards, and child mortality was high, and the food was awfully bland, and everyone probably smelled of wood smoke.  But there were support systems and a general knowledge of how things were supposed to work.

The problem with the nineteenth century is that it disrupted everything.  Monoculture agriculture, supposedly more efficient, led to such disasters as the great Irish famine.  There were multiple revolutions and the origins of communism as reactions to a perception that everything was getting much worse very fast.  The growth of cities and factories were a big part of it.  One can talk on an elevated level about the separation of the worker from the product of his work, but it was more simple than that.

People were crowded into cities with a level of unsanitary crowding that never would have been allowed in a medieval village.  (New York City had a problem with dead horses piling up in alleyways.)  People worked not out of the home but in the factory, where 16 hour days were common and the thought of safety devices on the machinery was laughable (to management).  Pollution filled the air and the rivers, again at a level that medieval people would never have allowed.

And I would think that for those who did not have running water or furnaces or electricity, when those around one did, life would really have been grim.  (I'm talking here about Europe--don't even get me started on the situation for slaves in the American antebellum south.)

The well to do did just fine in the nineteenth century, but I've got to think that for the mass of the population, those whose ancestors had been on the farm just a generation or two earlier, it must have been awful.  Cities promised a chance to get ahead, but most weren't able to get ahead, and it was too late to go back.

So would I rather live in the twelfth century?  Actually I prefer the twenty-first, but that's just me.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Latrines

All societies have to figure out what to do with the end-products of digestion.  We're not cows, who just let it fly wherever they are, or dogs, who won't foul their own den but consider the outdoors their rightful place to do what needs to be done (including making a scent-statement for other dogs).

(Interesting side point:  if beings from another planet were watching dog-walkers, and noticed that the dogs being walked just did what they wanted, while the humans cleaned up after them, who would the aliens decide was the true Master?)

The Middle Ages had chamber pots and latrines.  We have no idea how lucky we are to have city sewers and septic systems.  Push the flush lever, and you  never have to think about it again.  Medieval people didn't have it so easy.  They preferred not to think about such things, but being clean and odor-free was a lot harder.

On a farm, the manure pile would serve for the family's use as well.  In a town house, there would often be a privy in the back yard, built over a deep hole.  In a castle, there generally wasn't a handy manure pile, and you didn't really have the option of stepping out of the building.  (In fact the stables would have a manure pile, but the number of humans living in a castle would overwhelm the pile's ability to absorb human waste along with that of the horses.  And castle folk thought of themselves as much more refined than to use the manure pile anyway.)

Castles had latrines, located off main rooms, where one could go to do one's business and where chamber pots could be dumped.  They were rather discreetly located, and there were generally different sets for the noble family and for the warriors and workers.

Latrines might be built in the outer walls, letting things dribble down the wall, but from the thirteenth century onward castle builders were very careful not to put the latrines in any sort of defensible wall.  Everyone remembered what happened at Château Gaillard in Normandy (pictured below), where the attackers got into the castle by climbing up through the latrines.

In addition of course no one wanted their castle to be stinky, so things dribbling down a wall, especially an interior wall, would be frequently cleaned.  One sometimes hears that a castle's moat functioned as a sewer, but this is not true, although it would certainly not be savory.  Being surrounded by a sewer was not something any medieval lord would put up with (besides, most castles didn't have moats).

Alternately, a cesspit could be constructed within a wall.  It would be made with an easy way to clean it out.  Cesspits became the standard in cities during the early modern period, when urban growth made the backyard with its privy an expensive use of real estate.

The stench of a badly maintained latrine or cesspit was considered theologically a reminder of the weakness of human flesh, something that evoked both death and the powers of evil.  Miracle stories are full of demons lurking in latrines and emitting foul odors.

The picture below shows a high-end two-seater in a fourteenth-century castle.

Miscellaneous fun fact:  There is no actual name for that big white porcelain thing in the bathroom that is neither a sink nor a tub.  Americans usually call it a "toilet," but this is a euphemism.  It used to be that people would "make their toilet," meaning comb, brush, put on makeup, get properly dressed, and someone "stepping away" would be said to be going to the "toilet room," even if they were already dressed and brushed.  The Brits still call the room, not the fixture, the toilet.  ("Toilet water," mild perfume, still keeps the original meaning, in spite of a lot of adolescent sniggering.)

Brits call the fixture the "loo," a shortening of "lavabo," but that means sink, a place to wash up.  Or they call it a WC, short for "water closet," the small room (closet) with plumbing.  You will also see the term WC on the Continent.  The Germans may even refer to the "wasser," but that just means water.  You may see the term "commode," which is French for useful--an arch way of saying you need to use the "useful object."  Even more arch is the term "facilities," as in "the facilities of modern civilization."

Even the room is referred to euphemistically.  "I have to go to the bathroom."  You need to take a bath?  Really?  "The ladies' room."  "The gentlemen's room."  No indication in the term of what the ladies and gentlemen will be up to.  I had a teacher in elementary school who referred to the "cloakroom," though no cloaks were involved.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on medieval hygiene, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.