Latest news with #HistoryExtra
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- General
- Daily Mirror
‘I am a loo historian – you'll never guess what Tudors used to wipe their bums'
Our 19th century super sewers turn 150 this year, but before the Great Stink, festering cesspits had to be cleared out by hand. The Mirror digs into the smelly history of toilets… Poo now travels under London in a sewer tunnel so wide, you could drive three buses side-by-side through it. But before this new super sewer opened this year, Londoners were still flushing their waste down 1,300 miles of a creaking brick-built Victorian sewage system, with ornate cathedral-sized pumping stations. However, when the Public Health Act of 1875, received Royal assent 150 years ago, in August 1875, the drainage system built by civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the city was the super sewer of its time. It was built after the horror of The Great Stink of 1858, when the River Thames became so polluted with raw excrement, that during one long hot summer, the water levels dropped, and the malodorous smell was so noxious, it shut the Houses of Parliament. Nght soil workers, or gong farmers carted away the city's filth from 200,000 festering cesspits and outdoor privies, to be used as fertiliser. 'There was no integrated sewerage network system, so all the dung heaps had to be dug out by gong men,' explains Dr Dave Musgrove, content director of BBC History Magazine and the HistoryExtra podcast. 'It was an unpleasant job but reasonably well-paid, because the excrement was valuable. If you weren't rich, you had your pit, you dug it out, and it was taken away in carts and used for manuring fields.' The 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys wrote extensively about his chamber pot and whether it had been emptied into the cesspit beneath the house by his servant. 'He also used to relieve himself in the fireplace,' says Dr Musgrove. 'But he tells a story where he goes down into his basement and is very disappointed to step into a great heap of turds, because his neighbour hasn't emptied his pit and it's leaked into his.' A 19th century population explosion meant the night soil men couldn't keep up with the volume of fecal matter, and piles of untreated human waste either leaked or were dumped on the shores of the Thames, turning it into an open sewer. Along with human corpses and rotting vegetation in the waterways, this was a toxic disaster waiting to happen. 'By the early 19th century, more people were wanting to use this up-and-coming toilet flushing technology. But it meant the city had lots more liquid matter,' explains the historian. 'So they start digging sewers, digging underground or even just overground ones, and it's going into rivers and the water system is becoming contaminated.' Before 1875, people had no idea that dirty water caused the deadly cholera epidemics that raged in the country's crowded cities. Dr Dave Musgrove, who also hosts HistoryExtra Toilets Through Time podcast series, says: 'Throughout this period we get a slew of public health legislation, where people start to recognise that it is an issue.' Frightened city dwellers blamed the thousands of deaths on the foul miasma that hung heavy over London and other cities. In 1853 outbreaks of cholera in London, Gateshead and Newcastle killed over 10,000 people. The following year another epidemic hit South London After one particularly virulent outbreak on August 31, 1854, when 127 people living around Broad Street in Soho died, a local anaesthetist, John Snow, suspected contaminated water was to blame, but nobody believed him. He traced it to a water pump on Broad Street, where a child had been taken ill with cholera and its nappies had been cleaned in a cesspool of water close to the Broad Street well. The local parish agreed to remove the pump handle as an experiment – and the spread of cholera was stalled. From then on, new sanitary laws made it compulsory for local authorities to provide sewers, control water supplies and regulate the overcrowded and unsanitary lodging houses in rookeries where most poor people lived in Victorian times. Most importantly, all residential construction had to have running water and an internal drainage system. But flushing toilets took ages to catch on in Britain. 'The person who is often cited as having invented the first one was the godson of Queen Elizabeth I, Thomas Harrington, who came up with what he called the 'Ajax' on a lad's weekend in the 15th century.' Although the Queen had one installed, nobody thought his idea would catch on. The ruined Grade I listed Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire is also home to a flushing toilet built in 1596. And it's thought Henry III's 13th century garderobe in York's Clifford's Tower had a flushing spout that ran water down the lavatory hole and out of the tower. But while we were still going alfresco in philistine Britain, the world 's first flushing loos were actually invented in Bronze Age Crete. 'The Minoan Palace of Knossos had a very advanced plumbing system that was built around 2000 BC,' says Dr Musgrove. Cesspits are gold dust to archaeologists, as they reveal so much about the people who used them. 'The people who built the Neolithic site of Stonehenge lived in a village a couple of miles away called Durrington Walls in a settlement of round houses,' Dr Musgrove continues. 'Human poo was excavated, which was riddled with parasites – possibly from eating meat that hadn't been cooked well – but there was no particular designated toilet area.' That changed with the Roman invasion. You can still visit the well preserved Roman communal loos at Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire or Housesteads Roman fort at Hadrian's Wall ,where soldiers sat chatting side-by-side at the communal latrines while rainwater flushed away their waste. After the Romans leave things go downhill. 'In the early medieval period British society sort of fractures, but excavations in Coppergate in York in the 1980s found evidence of Viking toilets – and the famous Jorvik turd.' The Vikings lived in tightly packed areas, and had yards where people just dug holes and did their business, with little wicker dividing walls. Dr Musgrove adds: 'You can see the mineralised coprolite Viking 9th century poo at the museum, where they've recreated those toilets with Bogar who's been sitting on this loo for 40 years.' The Jorvik turd also tells us a lot about the Viking diet. 'It's quite a big poo – 5cm wide by 20cm long,' chuckles Dr Musgrove. 'Whoever produced it enjoyed a diet rich in bread and meat but not many vegetables.' In the Middle Ages toilets were holes in the ground in communal spaces over a river or a stream. 'They were basically doing their business into the water,' says the historian. 'But there weren't concentrations of people living in one place, so sewage wasn't much of an issue.' Community toilets continued in the Tudor period when Henry VIII built a two-story loo for courtiers at Hampton Court called the House of Easement, which held 28 people at once. 'There were private toilets for important people in castles,' adds Dr Musgrove. 'But those were still quite basic spaces in the wall and human waste would drop down a pipe into a cesspit – or just drip down the outside of the walls.' We've come a long way since those smelly days, but before we congratulate ourselves on having super sewers, transporting our effluent safely away from our homes, it's important to scotch the myth of our ancestors chucking urine-filled chamber pots out of over-hanging medieval windows onto people's heads on the cobbles below. 'Even hundreds of years before the 1875 act, communities did their level best to separate themselves from their faeces,' says Dr Musgrove. 'There were many by-laws to stop us fouling our own spaces even in the Middle Ages, so we shouldn't imagine the streets of Britain's cities were just covered in filth all the time.' Something our leaky water utility companies could no doubt learn from even now. The back story on loo paper Anyone unlucky enough to have used Izal tracing paper loo paper at school will appreciate how important a nice soft double ply is. The first loo paper appeared in 1887 when Joseph C. Gayetty of New York sold medicated flat sheets called The Therapeutic Paper, and the first perforated rolls were sold in 1890 by the Scott Paper Company. But it took a long time for these to become popular because most people were accustomed to using any old paper. 'Once we started printing stuff from the 15th century onwards, people quite quickly started using it for the purposes of wiping – and sometimes as a political gesture,' explains Dr Musgrove. 'If there was something you disagreed with, you might offer that to people to wipe their bottom.' Before that, the early Romans loved a communal khazi and it's thought they also shared a communal sponge. But Dr Musgrove admits: 'We don't actually know whether the sponge on a stick was used for wiping Roman bottoms – or for cleaning the toilets.' Moss was very popular in the Middle Ages for bum wiping. 'There was a thriving trade in bringing moss into medieval towns because it was a valuable product – nice and soft on your backside. Archaeologists have also found evidence of rags in toilet soil.' But the hardcore Tudors used 'oyster and mussel shells – more for scraping than wiping,' according to Dr Musgrove. Alarmingly, holly has also been found in some cesspits. 'That would have made the user quite anxious,' the historian says.
Daily Mirror
5 days ago
- General
- Daily Mirror
Men paid to dig out holes full of poo in grim and smelly job
It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it – before the 19th century super sewer, which turns 150 this year, festering cesspits had to be cleared out by hand – or at least a bucket and a cart by gong farmers Poo now travels under London in a sewer tunnel so wide, you could drive three buses side-by-side through it. But before this new super sewer opened this year, Londoners were still flushing their waste down 1,300 miles of a creaking brick-built Victorian sewage system, with ornate cathedral-sized pumping stations. However, when the Public Health Act of 1875, received Royal assent 150 years ago, in August 1875, the drainage system built by civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the city was the super sewer of its time. It was built after the horror of The Great Stink of 1858, when the River Thames became so polluted with raw excrement, that during one long hot summer, the water levels dropped, and the malodorous smell was so noxious, it shut the Houses of Parliament. Nght soil workers, or gong farmers carted away the city's filth from 200,000 festering cesspits and outdoor privies, to be used as fertiliser. 'There was no integrated sewerage network system, so all the dung heaps had to be dug out by gong men,' explains Dr Dave Musgrove, content director of BBC History Magazine and the HistoryExtra podcast. 'It was an unpleasant job but reasonably well-paid, because the excrement was valuable. If you weren't rich, you had your pit, you dug it out, and it was taken away in carts and used for manuring fields.' The 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys wrote extensively about his chamber pot and whether it had been emptied into the cesspit beneath the house by his servant. 'He also used to relieve himself in the fireplace,' says Dr Musgrove. 'But he tells a story where he goes down into his basement and is very disappointed to step into a great heap of turds, because his neighbour hasn't emptied his pit and it's leaked into his.' A 19th century population explosion meant the night soil men couldn't keep up with the volume of fecal matter, and piles of untreated human waste either leaked or were dumped on the shores of the Thames, turning it into an open sewer. Along with human corpses and rotting vegetation in the waterways, this was a toxic disaster waiting to happen. 'By the early 19th century, more people were wanting to use this up-and-coming toilet flushing technology. But it meant the city had lots more liquid matter,' explains the historian. 'So they start digging sewers, digging underground or even just overground ones, and it's going into rivers and the water system is becoming contaminated.' Before 1875, people had no idea that dirty water caused the deadly cholera epidemics that raged in the country's crowded cities. Dr Dave Musgrove, who also hosts HistoryExtra Toilets Through Time podcast series, says: 'Throughout this period we get a slew of public health legislation, where people start to recognise that it is an issue.' Frightened city dwellers blamed the thousands of deaths on the foul miasma that hung heavy over London and other cities. In 1853 outbreaks of cholera in London, Gateshead and Newcastle killed over 10,000 people. The following year another epidemic hit South London After one particularly virulent outbreak on August 31, 1854, when 127 people living around Broad Street in Soho died, a local anaesthetist, John Snow, suspected contaminated water was to blame, but nobody believed him. He traced it to a water pump on Broad Street, where a child had been taken ill with cholera and its nappies had been cleaned in a cesspool of water close to the Broad Street well. The local parish agreed to remove the pump handle as an experiment – and the spread of cholera was stalled. From then on, new sanitary laws made it compulsory for local authorities to provide sewers, control water supplies and regulate the overcrowded and unsanitary lodging houses in rookeries where most poor people lived in Victorian times. Most importantly, all residential construction had to have running water and an internal drainage system. But flushing toilets took ages to catch on in Britain. 'The person who is often cited as having invented the first one was the godson of Queen Elizabeth I, Thomas Harrington, who came up with what he called the 'Ajax' on a lad's weekend in the 15th century.' Although the Queen had one installed, nobody thought his idea would catch on. The ruined Grade I listed Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire is also home to a flushing toilet built in 1596. And it's thought Henry III's 13th century garderobe in York's Clifford's Tower had a flushing spout that ran water down the lavatory hole and out of the tower. But while we were still going alfresco in philistine Britain, the world 's first flushing loos were actually invented in Bronze Age Crete. 'The Minoan Palace of Knossos had a very advanced plumbing system that was built around 2000 BC,' says Dr Musgrove. Cesspits are gold dust to archaeologists, as they reveal so much about the people who used them. 'The people who built the Neolithic site of Stonehenge lived in a village a couple of miles away called Durrington Walls in a settlement of round houses,' Dr Musgrove continues. 'Human poo was excavated, which was riddled with parasites – possibly from eating meat that hadn't been cooked well – but there was no particular designated toilet area.' That changed with the Roman invasion. You can still visit the well preserved Roman communal loos at Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire or Housesteads Roman fort at Hadrian's Wall ,where soldiers sat chatting side-by-side at the communal latrines while rainwater flushed away their waste. After the Romans leave things go downhill. 'In the early medieval period British society sort of fractures, but excavations in Coppergate in York in the 1980s found evidence of Viking toilets – and the famous Jorvik turd.' The Vikings lived in tightly packed areas, and had yards where people just dug holes and did their business, with little wicker dividing walls. Dr Musgrove adds: 'You can see the mineralised coprolite Viking 9th century poo at the museum, where they've recreated those toilets with Bogar who's been sitting on this loo for 40 years.' The Jorvik turd also tells us a lot about the Viking diet. 'It's quite a big poo – 5cm wide by 20cm long,' chuckles Dr Musgrove. 'Whoever produced it enjoyed a diet rich in bread and meat but not many vegetables.' In the Middle Ages toilets were holes in the ground in communal spaces over a river or a stream. 'They were basically doing their business into the water,' says the historian. 'But there weren't concentrations of people living in one place, so sewage wasn't much of an issue.' Community toilets continued in the Tudor period when Henry VIII built a two-story loo for courtiers at Hampton Court called the House of Easement, which held 28 people at once. 'There were private toilets for important people in castles,' adds Dr Musgrove. 'But those were still quite basic spaces in the wall and human waste would drop down a pipe into a cesspit – or just drip down the outside of the walls.' We've come a long way since those smelly days, but before we congratulate ourselves on having super sewers, transporting our effluent safely away from our homes, it's important to scotch the myth of our ancestors chucking urine-filled chamber pots out of over-hanging medieval windows onto people's heads on the cobbles below. 'Even hundreds of years before the 1875 act, communities did their level best to separate themselves from their faeces,' says Dr Musgrove. 'There were many by-laws to stop us fouling our own spaces even in the Middle Ages, so we shouldn't imagine the streets of Britain's cities were just covered in filth all the time.' Something our leaky water utility companies could no doubt learn from even now. The back story on loo paper Anyone unlucky enough to have used Izal tracing paper loo paper at school will appreciate how important a nice soft double ply is. The first loo paper appeared in 1887 when Joseph C. Gayetty of New York sold medicated flat sheets called The Therapeutic Paper, and the first perforated rolls were sold in 1890 by the Scott Paper Company. But it took a long time for these to become popular because most people were accustomed to using any old paper. 'Once we started printing stuff from the 15th century onwards, people quite quickly started using it for the purposes of wiping – and sometimes as a political gesture,' explains Dr Musgrove. 'If there was something you disagreed with, you might offer that to people to wipe their bottom.' Before that, the early Romans loved a communal khazi and it's thought they also shared a communal sponge. But Dr Musgrove admits: 'We don't actually know whether the sponge on a stick was used for wiping Roman bottoms – or for cleaning the toilets.' Moss was very popular in the Middle Ages for bum wiping. 'There was a thriving trade in bringing moss into medieval towns because it was a valuable product – nice and soft on your backside. Archaeologists have also found evidence of rags in toilet soil.' But the hardcore Tudors used 'oyster and mussel shells – more for scraping than wiping,' according to Dr Musgrove. Alarmingly, holly has also been found in some cesspits. 'That would have made the user quite anxious,' the historian says.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Medieval tapestry's penis count remains a bone of contention
The Bayeux Tapestry is a remarkable example of medieval art. The embroidery piece depicts events leading up to the Norman conquest of England and spans nearly 230 feet. It is believed to have been completed soon after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 CE. But even as a renowned and intricately detailed artifact, it's not without its controversy. Namely: How many penises are on it? In 2018, University of Oxford professor George Garnett said that the number stands at 93 male genitalia—88 on horses and five on men. But tapestry expert Christopher Monk believes one more penis deserves some extra scrutiny. In this case, a running soldier near the tapestry's lower border who features a noticeable accessory hanging from beneath his tunic. 'I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia–the missed penis, shall we say?' Monk said on a recent episode of the podcast HistoryExtra. Garnett, however, remained doubtful about Monk's evidence. The Oxford scholar instead contended the mystery shape is actually a scabbard, and pointed to a gold orb that he believes is the pommel's brass cap. 'If you look at what are incontrovertibly penises in the tapestry, none of them have a yellow blob on the end,' argued Garnett. [ Related: Medieval toilet helps uncover lost home of the England's last Anglo-Saxon King. ] Either way, one needs to examine the original embroidery still housed in Bayeux, France, to properly analyze the total penis count. Although an 18th century replica exists at the UK's Reading Museum, the era's social standards necessitated a censored version of the tapestry that omits most of the genitalia. But why include all those penises in the first place? Like their total count, the official explanation remains elusive. Medieval art is laden with symbolism (including everything from colors, to flowers, to animals), and the Bayeux Tapestry is no exception. According to some historians, the appendages may have been meant to convey 'manliness' and virility. Case in point: the artwork's largest equine penis belongs to the horse gifted to Duke William preceding the Battle of Hastings, thus symbolizing his right to the throne. Meanwhile, others contend the anatomical inclusions allude to Aesop's Fables and other classical and satirical tales of the era. 'There are lots of interesting theories—we don't know really, to be honest,' historian David Musgrove said on the podcast. 'But it's very interesting that they're there.'
The Independent
25-04-2025
- General
- The Independent
The Bayeux Tapestry inspires fresh debate over ‘missed' penis in depiction of historical battle
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts one of Britain's most famous clashes, the Battle of Hastings in which William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson for the English throne. Now, the cloth is subject to a new battle as two historians have gone head-to-head over the number of penises included on the historical work, kept in Bayeux, France. Oxford academic Professor George Garnett counted 93 penises on the embroidered fabric in 2019, with 88 belonging to horses and another five to men. But Bayeux Tapestry scholar and expert on Anglo-Saxon nudity Dr Christopher Monk believes he has found one extra on another man in the tapestry. Speaking to HistoryExtra, Dr Monk said: 'I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia – the missed penis, shall we say? The detail is surprisingly anatomically fulsome.' Professor Garnett maintained on the HistoryExtra podcast that he was still correct, as he believed the potential penis was the scabbard of a man's dagger due to the 'yellow blob' at the end, which he took to be brass. He said: 'If you look at what are incontrovertibly penises in the tapestry, none of them have a yellow blob on the end.' As well as debate over this additional appendage, many scholars are still discussing why the Tapestry includes the male members. While most of the horse penises are believed to portray them as stallions, Professor Garnett highlights there are three horses where their endowments are emphasised. Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror are portrayed as mounting horses with particularly large penises 'William's horse is by far the biggest,' Garnett said. 'And that's not a coincidence.' The human penises remain a mystery, as they can be found in the borders of the Tapestry above and below. Professor Garnett has agreed with an argument made by his fellow Tapestry scholar, Professor Stephen D White, who has said that some of the illustrations in the border refer to Aesop's Fables. The Oxford scholar said: 'We know the designer was learned – he was using [ancient Thracian] Phaedrus's first-century Latin translation of Aesop's fables, rather than some vague folk tradition.' The professor believes the depictions of nudity in the Tapestry are there to make a point: 'Sexual activity is involved, or shame, and that makes me think that the designer is covertly alluding to betrayal.'
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Penis count debate rages over Bayeux Tapestry
Debate is raging amongst historians over the number of penises included on the Bayeux Tapestry. The original embroidery is still kept in Bayeux, France, and depicts the Norman conquest of England, but a replica created in the late 19th Century is held at Reading Museum. Most of the penises were not transferred onto the replica by the Leek Embroidery Society, which made it, after it was given censored etchings, engravings and photos of it to work from. Oxford academic Prof George Garnett counted 93 penises in 2018 – with 88 belonging to horses and another five to men. But Dr Christopher Monk said he had counted one more on another man. Prof Garnett said he believed he was still correct and that the potential penis was the scabbard of a man's dagger because "right at its end is a yellow blob", which he took to be brass. "If you look at what are incontrovertibly penises in the tapestry, none of them have a yellow blob on the end," he told the History Extra podcast. Either way, Prof Garnett said the Bayeux Tapestry, at 70m (230ft) long and about half a metre high (1.7ft) is "by far the most splendid and largest surviving" textile art from the period. The men's penises are included in the border of the embroidery, but there is no agreement about why they are there. "It might be that [the penises] are just there for fun and for levity, that's what some scholars say," Dr David Musgrove, from the podcast, said. "Some say the figures are making some sort of commentary on the action in the main scene, some sort of subversive commentary, perhaps even casting doubt on the probity of some of the characters in the main scene. "Some people say they're something to do with Aesop's fables. "There are lots of interesting theories – we don't know really, to be honest. But it's very interesting that they're there." You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram. Why did Victorians censor the Bayeux Tapestry? History Extra
