Fishing for gold: how eels powered the medieval economy

[Judi Lynn]

1. From the same publication, you'll be sorry: 5 of the worst smells in medieval London

By historical standards, London today is a clean city. Effluent drains through the sewers, domestic waste gets collected, everyone showers daily. But as Dan Snow explains, that certainly wasn't the case in the medieval era. So what were medieval London's stinkiest stinks?



April 30, 2011 at 11:49 am

This article was first published in the April 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine

1. The people

The population would have absolutely stunk. They did not wash very often. They often didn’t have more than one set of clothes. There was very little idea of personal sanitation, and in the summer they would all have been hot and sweaty.

The only source of water for washing was the river and we know gong farmers, people that emptied the latrines, would have gone and washed there. But of course the river was also the receptacle for all the mess. We think people would have avoided washing in the winter. After a period of warmer weather from about the 10th to the 13th centuries, it got quite cool again and so sometimes the Thames would have been frozen for weeks on end, so there would have been limited opportunities to bathe there. I think you’d probably avoid bathing in the river if it was cold.

Given how much perfume the richer people wore, I think it’s fair to assume that some of the slummy areas, the overcrowded areas, were pretty stinking, partly thanks to the inhabitants. Nonetheless, our information is that people did regard washing as rather effete. Bathing just wasn’t that regular – it’s a total inversion of our modern obsession with daily washing.

2
The Thames

The river was basically the only means of getting sewage, certainly liquid waste, out of the city. The river was the way they got drinking water but also where they dumped all their waste. No wonder the fish died – it would have been absolutely foul.

The off-cuts, the various bits of offal, things that weren’t going to be eaten from the butchers, these were wheeled down in wheelbarrows to the Thames and dumped off a specially constructed pier in an attempt to put them in the middle of the river, the fastest-flowing part. Corpses would have been knocking about in the river too.

More:
https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/medieval-londons-worst-smells/