dreaded_beast said:
Regarding, outhouses, what happens to all that waste anyway, does it just accumulate and sit there?
As a player, after exploring a castle or someones dwelling, I've always wondered, where is the toilet? There always never seems to be one.
Same thing for bathing areas.
Look at
A Matter of Convenience. Extensively bookmarked and with a glossary, it covers the history of the disposal of bodily functions over the ages.
Some excerpts:
Around 2500-1500 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization appears to have had
latrines that hand-flushed into the street drains (Wright, 10). The drain system emptied into a main
cesspool that was apparently cleaned out regularly by public workers Colman, 14). The mechanical
flush toilet was invented for the first time about 200BCE. The ground floor of the Palace of Knossos in Crete had a latrine with a wooden seat, an earthenware pan, and a reservoir for flushing water (Wright, 7). The
water closet was not invented again until Sir John
Harington developed a valve toilet in 1598, one of which was installed in the palace of his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, at Richmond (Wright, 75). The idea was then almost forgotten again for over a century, and water closets remained very rare in England until almost 1800 (Wright, 103-07
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Castles and manor houses were generally equipped with
garderobes with stone or wooden seats above a shaft within the pit that had to be cleaned out at intervals (Wright, 49). In medieval cities, garderobes sometimes overhung a street with a central open sewer, although the authorities much preferred the use of pits. A pit of about 80 cubic feet emptied every three months could accommodate the sewage, rubbish, and ashes generated by two households (Pudney, 43). However, privy pits were often either too small for their contents or too infrequently cleaned out. People walking down the street often had their clothes stained by the material flowing out of an adjacent privy--particularly at night when the flow could not be seen (History of Plumbing).
Cesspits were also used for the communal privies provided for the majority of the population without indoor facilities. The contents of these pits were cleaned out at intervals and hauled out of the city (Wright, 52). It took 13 men 5 nights in 1281 to clean the privy at the Newgate Gaol. The "nightmen" or "gong fermors" who performed this task received about three times the prevailing wage for unskilled labor (Pudney, 50). Due to negligence or false economy, sometimes considerable amounts of material were allowed to accumulate in communal or private facilities. It was not unusual for someone to fall through rotten boards in a privy and drown in the pit (Harris, 18-19). The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I had to be saved from such a fate at Erfurt in 1184. One of his companions, who perished, had been in the habit of swearing, "If I do it not, may I sink in a privy." (Putney, 92-93)
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Chamberpots, as was said before. That and outhouses was how it was done even in advanced Western cities until the first part of last century; such things still exist in other areas today. You fill it up during the night, then a servant (or you) take it to empty out in a pit in the morning. In the poorer districts, you have another place to put it: you dump it out the window into the alley or street. (Some Western cities had a ditch in the middle of the main streets that was an open-air sewer - the further East you went, the cleaner things were).
In the 14th century, it wasn't unusual to put them within a 'closestool', or a toilet-like arrangement with a lid and padded seat. You just lifted the chamberpot out and took it off for disposal.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
