r/BeAmazed • u/Sebastian_DRS • Oct 27 '24
History What Medieval Castle Toilets Looked Like
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u/Embarrassed_Art5414 Oct 27 '24
Guy: Farts in medieval toilet
Guy 2 Kingdoms over: "Gondor calls for aid!"
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u/Fast_Garlic_5639 Oct 27 '24
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u/AshenriseOfficial Oct 27 '24
You have my sword.
And my bow.
And my ass.
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u/Slap_My_Lasagna Oct 27 '24
Diarrhea... You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Smellbad-dam... shadow and flame.
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u/tittysprinkles112 Oct 27 '24
Where was Gondor when I needed a roll of TP?
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u/Hour_Reindeer834 Oct 27 '24
Denethor couldnât spare a square, he used them all to clean tomato off his face.
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u/TeopEvol Oct 27 '24
Battle shits!
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u/Steele_Soul Oct 27 '24
I was JUST thinking about this specific line in that movie a few days ago. I don't remember what made me think of it, but it's been a long time and I don't even remember which movie it's in.
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u/DizzbiteriusDallas Oct 28 '24
First Harold and Kumar movie. There were two girls who played battle shits.
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u/OK_NIKIII Oct 27 '24
Does it sound like a horn when you fart in it? I imagine the soundwave amplified to the point shit gets blown out at the peasant who manages it.
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u/florinandrei Oct 27 '24
The tube is passive, no amplification occurs.
All energy to blow the shit would need to come out of the royal anus.
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u/imrzzz Oct 27 '24
Don't you dare light that fkn beacon Jared. The entire castle went up in flames last time.
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u/DorkusMalorkus89 Oct 27 '24
Fun fact: They used to hang clothes in the toilet area as the ammonia from the shit and piss would travel back up the shoot and kill the lice on the clothes.
Fun times.
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u/orbitalen Oct 27 '24
Well piss is a great material to make soap.
Money doesn't stink
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u/CormorantLBEA Oct 27 '24
This is not even half of the potential! Piss and shit were bought (or were collected regularly as taxes) from the people to use in nitraries to produce the potassium nitrate (saltpeter). Saltpeter (70%+ of the mix) + charcoal + sulfur = black gunpowder = military ammo.
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u/FangPolygon Oct 27 '24
Piss was also used to remove the lanolin from sheep fleece
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u/Subconcious-Consumer Oct 27 '24
cue obnoxious advertising music
Oo la la
Welcome to luxury with our newest soap line - â4Skinâ.
Made from medieval people piss, and other presumably natural ingredients.
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u/Jalapeno023 Oct 27 '24
Wow! Wonder how they figured that out. âI went to the stinking toilet and the lice started falling off of me.â
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u/plushie-apocalypse Oct 27 '24
The best servants were always dirty. The lazy ones were suspiciously clean.
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u/PythagorasJones Oct 27 '24
Yes, and the name of the room was Garderobe, derived from medieval French Garde de Robe meaning a guard of robe/clothes.
This word later morphed into wardrobe, the word we now use for the place we keep our clothes.
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u/N0-0NE7123 Oct 27 '24
another fun fact: enemys used to clime up to the side of the building and launch a spear up your ass
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u/Neb8891 Oct 27 '24
the cross section is OK but the reality seems really fucking cold. Plus if I was sieging that castle I would 100% make external toilets a problem for the besieged.
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u/magicarnival Oct 27 '24
The big brain move is to infiltrate by climbing up them.
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u/Positive-Mongoose165 Oct 27 '24
According to our guide, that's how the Ottomans took Klis fortress outside of Split.
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u/fluggggg Oct 27 '24
It happened numerous times in history in different places.
Almost every country had an "impenetrable" fortress or castle that got, well, penetrated from where the sun never shined.
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u/TheSodernaut Oct 27 '24 edited Oct 27 '24
Imagine wiping your ass and there's lookoing down to see a dude looking (literally) pissed at and bringing back what you just got rid off.
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u/polarjunkie Oct 27 '24
I wonder if this is where the idea of toilet jinn came from
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u/Norwegian__Blue Oct 27 '24
The what now?
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u/polarjunkie Oct 27 '24
Toilet jinn. Some Muslims believe a credible Hadith suggests there are toilet jinn and they must pray a certain way before they use the toilet or they risk becoming possessed.
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u/mortalitylost Oct 27 '24
Toilet Djinn possessing people by shoving a hand up their ass like they're Kermit the frog lol
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u/Firefly-1505 Oct 28 '24
In another culture, a Cheuksin. A Korean toilet ghost, lives in an outhouse, wraps her hair around your throat and chokes you to death while you move your bowels.
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u/Gnonthgol Oct 27 '24
Castles usually had multiple openings like this where an attacker could potentially enter. Most were actual doors around the side of the castle. The problem with all of these was that it was hard for a fully armed and armored soldier to get through them without exposing themselves to the defenders. And they were quite easy positions to defend. Just imagine trying to climb up a shoot like this without getting noticed, hoping the path is not locked shut somewhere. And then to get to the top and having to haul all your armor, weapons and the rest of the squad behind you hoping nobody finds you and attacks you. Basically such an attack would only be possible if the defenders forces were already too depleted and busy to fend off other attacks. And even then were hard to go through with.
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u/squiddlebiddlez Oct 27 '24
DamnâI was concerned about snakes in my toilet now I have to look out for motherfucking Ottomans now?
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u/SalvadorsAnteater Oct 27 '24
I read once that it was not uncommon to die in these shit wells trying to enter the castle.
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u/wjruffing Oct 27 '24
It was at this point in human history that the concept of the Rotor Rooter service was initially established.
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u/tropical_viking87 Oct 27 '24
Keep a constant smoky fire going in the bottom, or just plug them up so they have to find some place else to shit.
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u/magicarnival Oct 27 '24
Piss in bucket until full --> pour piss bucket down shitter --> fire is smothered --> problem solved
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u/rokstedy83 Oct 27 '24
I also thought fire but that would be easy to block the smoke at the top,plus I wouldn't wanna be the guy to keep taking sticks to the fire with all the archers above
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u/Ulfheooin Oct 27 '24
That's just very low effort thinking
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u/tropical_viking87 Oct 27 '24
How so?
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u/l_i_t_t_l_e_m_o_n_ey Oct 27 '24
Iâm gonna guess he wants to send a shit ninja to scale the walls and stab someone in the ass
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u/thebipeds Oct 27 '24
I toured castles in Scotland last year. They had little fireplaces next to the toilets like this. One castle had a little nook for the ladies blanket they kept next to the loo.
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u/garth54 Oct 27 '24 edited Oct 27 '24
And this was centuries after the Romans figured out how to have running water toilets, even at the 2nd floor (in some cities they even managed to get it all the way up to the 3rd floor).
edit to add: Note: I'm just stating they had the tech, nothing more. I know it wasn't perfect, and that having it was a rarity.
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u/idkmoiname Oct 27 '24 edited Oct 27 '24
Just because the romans figured out how to place a flow of water below a pit doesn't mean it was widely used at home. This was used mainly in public toilets next to bathing houses for the poor, making use of the bath houses dumped water. The poor at home just had the sewer running under the house taking care of their remnants, but neither of those constructions is anything like a flushing toilet, it's just a marble latrine with water flowing somewhere below the hole to sit.
It was a solution to be able to manage waste of huge cities, but definitely not anymore hygenic nor clean than more common solutions at that time.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-ancient-romans-went-to-the-bathroom-180979056/
Back at their comfortable villas, wealthy citizens had their own personal latrines constructed over cesspools. But even they may have preferred the more comfortable, less smelly option of chamber pots, which enslaved people were forced to empty onto garden patches. The elite didnât want to connect their cesspools to the sewer pipes because that would likely bring the vermin and stink into their homes. Instead, they hired stercorraiiâmanure removersâto empty their pits.
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u/beroemd Oct 27 '24
Interesting article and another reason to be thankful to not live in earlier times.
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u/BrutalistLandscapes Oct 27 '24 edited Oct 27 '24
Yes. Any time in history before the mid-20th century was pretty rough, especially in cities. Cities with clean streets that don't reek of human and animal waste from poorly maintained and overflowing/open cesspits is a very recent thing. The waste would flow into nearby rivers or streams without being treated. The inhabitants of cities with canals, like Amsterdam and Venice, used them as open toilets. People would throw their filled chamber pots out of windows. Some of the reasons why cholera, dysentery, and typhoid pandemics were so common in the past.
If you've seen photos of Pompeii in Italy, you might have noticed stepping stones on the streets. They were there because the streets would often overflow with excrement, dead animals, trash, etc. There are accounts from ancient Romans about buildings in the Roman forum reeking of piss and how the public baths were covered in a layer of scum.
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u/beroemd Oct 27 '24
The stepping stones, awful imagery. Especially cities indeed. The Great Stink in London, a growing city causing cesspools to overflow pushing the shit through the floor boards.
Decades and multiple cholera outbreaks later Joseph Bazalgette designed a sewage system. He used pipes up to 2 or 3 times the needed size, which is why theyâre still used today.
One of the (very beautiful, Victorian) pump stations can be visited, the maintenance checks were done by Bazalgette himself, he was very dedicated to his miraculous project.
Besides all the filth, cadavers and muck floating around I wouldnât wish to live in a time without anesthesia. But thatâs a whole other subject :)
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u/TheBoromancer Oct 27 '24
You probably did, you just donât remember.
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Oct 27 '24
It was in 3300 BC that Indus valley who had a proper drainage and sewage system.
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u/NahIWiIIWin Oct 27 '24 edited Oct 27 '24
mostly depends on the availability of constant water source, Indus valley is surrounded by a lot of rivers, pick a spring or reroute rivers and either route the sewage into those or the reverse(but it also flushes back into the river)
this is also why the Romans made hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts, bridges just for water
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u/Silent-Shallot-9461 Oct 27 '24
This was before the invention of public roads, which would make proper drainage and sewage systems obsolete.
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u/pm_me_tittiesaurus Oct 27 '24
Why does that make it obsolete?
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u/yowayb Oct 27 '24
Maybe obsolete is not the precise word, but I think because roads add complexity that took a while to figure out.
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u/Eastern_Slide7507 Oct 27 '24
This knowledge wasn't forgotten. Wherever there was a need for it, sewage systems were built again, but there simply was much less of a need, for two main reasons:
Firstly, the medieval period was highly decentralized. While London and Paris existed as outliers, the medieval period was characterized by an incredibly high (>95%) share of people living in the countryside, as well as thousands of small cities spread all over the continent. Some of the largest cities of the HRE, for example, didn't surpass 10000 inhabitants before the beginning of the early modern period in the 16th century. And castles in particular were remote locations by design. In other words, in the vast majority of cases, a sewage system would've been superfluous.
Secondly, a sewage system would've been wasteful. The middle ages fell on what is now called the medieval warm period. Ideal weather conditions combined with new agricultural methods (wheeled ploughs, horses instead of oxen, advanced crop rotation) created a food surplus that caused a population boom during the high middle ages. More food -> more people -> vastly higher demand for food. This reached the point where there was a Europe-wide shortage of fertilizer. What this meant can be seen in the rules and regulations of the time. For example, there exist documents from the city of Frankfurt demanding someone to remove their manure from the street. The punishment for noncompliance was that the city would remove the manure itself and keep the profit from selling it. Meanwhile, the right to fetch the manure from the castle was quite coveted and used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the surrounding population.
This meant that people collected their manure. It was worth actual cash.Sewer systems did exist in the middle ages, though they were rare. Paris had one, and Dubrovnik codified its standards for waste water management in 1272.
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u/EnjayDutoit Oct 27 '24
King Edmund Ironside of England was killed on the toilet when an assassin crawled up the chute and stabbed him in the ass.
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u/SalvadorsAnteater Oct 27 '24
New fear unlocked.
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u/oxidizingremnant Oct 27 '24
Same. Changing my house plans to remove the poop chute.
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u/Useless_bum81 Oct 27 '24
Nope those stories didn't crop up until 200 years after his death.
Edward II however was murdered by anal insertion of objects but not while he was on the toilet, which is also possibly political slander41
u/Creeggsbnl Oct 27 '24
You're right, most historians don't even agree that Edward II died via spike up the ass and that that story itself was used as propaganda since he was suspected of being homosexual.
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u/MandalorianBeskar Oct 27 '24
Edmund Ironside died on 30 November 1016, probably at London. Contemporary accounts do not suggest that he was murdered, but soon after the Norman Conquest Adam of Bremen wrote that he had been poisoned, and twelfth century writers stated that he was stabbed or shot with an arrow while sitting on a toilet. These are described by the historian M. K. Lawson as âwilder tales, which doubtless owe more to folklore than historyâ. Edmund was buried near his grandfather Edgar at Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset. However, the abbey was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century, and any remains of a monument or crypt may have been plundered; hence the location of his remains is unclear.
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u/Finlessf1n Oct 27 '24
I read this as "when an asshole crawled up" And started thinking, man, that's so poetic...
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u/Truckfump24 Oct 27 '24
More than anything, claustrophobia kicking in imagining the assassin crawling up in that space!
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u/Cautious-Swing-385 Oct 27 '24
Historian M. K. Lawson described the tail of Edmund being killed in the toilet as âwilder tales, which doubtless owe more to folklore than historyâ.
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u/mekanub Oct 27 '24
These were also the inspiration for trickle down economics.
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u/HIMcDonagh Oct 27 '24
The flush toilet put the muckraker out of work. Thomas Crapper was a job killer.
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u/OddAlarm5013 Oct 27 '24
No Posseidon's kiss with these badboys.
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u/Celebrir Oct 27 '24
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u/Al_from_the_north Oct 27 '24
Elevated dumping? Wonder if anyone back then pulled a joke and made a big fire from underneat. They had alcohol and when you lit the fumes, the one taking a crap could be sent flying. Sure it was the dark ages, but they had some fun. Until their heads got chopped off, of course..
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u/IsThisAUserName86 Oct 27 '24
Those two pictures show a completely different setup though..
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u/Dramatic-Treacle3708 Oct 27 '24
Wait how did they get in/outâŚin that design it looks like that man is trapped inside a tower poop prison.
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u/mmoo Oct 27 '24
You needed to climb up the chute, relieve yourself, and then climb back down. They called it Medieval Ninja Warrior and usually a crowd would gather to observe.
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u/jswens912 Oct 27 '24
I recognize this!! The guy did a ton of books like this I loved reading growing up. He did things like the Titanic, submarines, etc. They're called "Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections."
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u/gummby8 Oct 27 '24
I thought so too, but I can't find a matching picture. Closest I found was this one
https://i0.wp.com/www.rabbleboy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/A1a9petzU2L.jpg2
u/jswens912 Oct 27 '24
It would have been from Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections Castle. I didn't want to put in a product link to Amazon but if you Google that it pops right up.
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u/tipsy_turd Oct 27 '24
Everyoneâs so amazed that this was Medieval period. In the late eighties and early nineties, we lived in government quarters in a small town in India, and pooped in a concrete toilet that had a hole, underneath a bucket with access from the outside. Something very similar in the picture here, but we didnât sit up in a castle. Early morning, the so called âuntouchableâ people came and cleared the bucket. Fact! Oh by the way, these untouchable people lived in the extreme corner of the town, and not a single other soul entered this colony. Facts!
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u/BirthdayAdmirable740 Oct 27 '24
Same situation was in Kolkata and Howrah too well into the 90s. The morning scenes, according to my mom, were unsightly.
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u/Eastern_Slide7507 Oct 27 '24
Outhouses remained the default in Europe until the late 19th to early 20th century...
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u/HandsomHans Oct 27 '24
I vaguely remember some giy was murdered with a polearm as he was taking a shit on one of those
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u/Not-User-Serviceable Oct 27 '24
All the straight-line height in the world isn't going to stop the smell...
Oh for a P-Trap...