Romantics who dream of going back in time and living in medieval England should bring at least noseplugs with them. The fact is that the everyday life of the citizens of medieval London was far from the requirements of sanitation. Modern films and textbooks tend to gloss over certain aspects of life at the time and for obvious reasons.
1. Garbage and feces
When an ordinary British family was overflowing with night vases and trash bins, and it was time to get rid of their contents, people were legally required to somehow collect their waste and take it outside the city. But in fact, no one was going to waste time on this - all the garbage dumped right at the front door.
People dumped garbage and feces in front of their homes.
Therefore, in front of residential buildings, whole fetid mountains of rotting waste and products of human life were piled up. The contents of the chamber pots often spilled directly from the windows onto the heads of passers-by. Nobody even tried to prohibit people from throwing garbage on the street until the XIV century. Then King Edward II for the first time in England introduced a law prohibiting throwing waste on the road. But even then, his expectations were not met.
“All the dirt accumulated in front of the houses must be removed within a week,” the law said. - and pigs are not allowed to go out into the streets. But none of this had much effect. Garbage continued to accumulate in the streets, and people essentially defecated in front of their doorstep. Rich people wore incense-soaked handkerchiefs near their noses when they went outside. This continued until the king began to hire special workers to cleanse the city from dirt.
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2. Gutter problems
Even though the roads smelled terrible during the Middle Ages, things were much worse after the rain. The streets of medieval England were essentially mud and cobblestones, with ditches on their sides for rainwater to drain. It would be a great design if people didn't throw their trash anywhere.
During the rains, the sewer was poured into the streets.
The people of medieval England threw everything in a rainwater ditch. They were so clogged that they were completely useless during the rain. The clogged ditches overflowed, and then their entire contents flooded the streets. When the sky cleared, the roads were covered with wet debris, and the feces slowly dried out in the sun, "fragrant" throughout the city.
3. "Healing" urine
If a medieval soldier was wounded in battle, he should have expected an extremely strange way of sterilizing the wound by doctors. Even if someone just cut himself, the doctor, following the recommendations of the king's personal surgeon, urinated on the wound. What's more, fresh urine was used to heal ulcers, burns, bites, etc. It was very frustrating, but it really worked. Ammonia in urine can help prevent infection, and in life-or-death situations, it was worth a lot.
Doctors urinated on patients' wounds.
Interestingly, it wasn't just British doctors who urinated on open wounds. One of the craziest stories comes from the Italian physician Leonardo Fioravanti, who used his urine to save a soldier's life after his nose was chopped off in battle. Fioravanti quickly lifted the man's severed nose off the ground, brushed the sand off it, urinated on it, and sewed the nose back.
4. Bathing and plague
For most of the medieval era, people actually bathed quite often. They regularly went to public baths and looked after themselves. However, this all changed after the Black Plague. In the chaos, when two-thirds of the world died from a terrible disease, the surviving population of Europe began to panic. People frantically tried to find at least some cause of the disease, and blamed it on … bathing.
People thought they would get sick if they bathed.
Some doctors have said the plague is spreading because people wash too often. They argued that water weakens people's bodies and widens their pores, making people more susceptible to ulcers and disease. Therefore, people were encouraged to stop bathing altogether.
5. Codpiece
Around the 14th century, the British developed a new, extremely strange hobby. In the 1300s, codpiece, a cloth bag sewn onto the groin, was the hottest thing. Men wore as tight and thin leggings as possible to make the bulge between the legs as noticeable as possible. As time went on, the fashion became even stranger.
"Convex" men's fashion.
Instead of just showing off what nature has endowed them with, men began to wear hairpins on codpiece to make them look as big as possible. Knights in the 16th century even wore them during battles. Their armor was often fitted with a massive, exaggerated metal tip between the legs, which had no practical purpose.
6. Dirty floors
If a person was not rich, then his house did not have a floor. In most houses in medieval England, there was nothing more than tamped ground underfoot, covered with reeds and grasses. The land and plants helped keep the home warm, but it came at a price. Pieces of food fell into the grass underfoot, where they remained, luring rats and insects into the houses. And people rarely cleaned all this, they swept as much as possible. However, the bottom layer of sod, where debris accumulated, remained untouched, often for decades.
Families slept on dirty floors.
One traveler from Holland once complained that in English houses on the floor "you can find phlegm from expectoration, vomit, urine of dogs and men, waste from the production of ale, fish bones and other abominations that should not be mentioned." This is pretty disgusting in itself, but there is something worse. In such houses there were no beds, so people slept on the floor, that is, every day they were laid on a several ten-year layer of vomit, droppings and rotten food.
7. Eagle droppings
Childbirth was never a pleasant experience, but it used to be much worse. In the Middle Ages, doctors really had few ideas on how to make sure that the woman did not die during the demolitions. The only thing they could do pretty well was rely on divine intervention. Monks and midwives sat next to the pregnant woman and prayed, calling on the child to be born "alive and without killing the mother." In other cases, they relied on magic.
Doctors smeared eagle droppings with women in labor.
Sometimes they fed the women with vinegar and sugar, after which they smeared them with eagle dung. After that, they simply prayed for a miracle. In the abbey in Yorkshire, the "sacred belt" was constantly kept, which "allowed the woman to survive in childbirth." Even when Henry III's wife became pregnant, the king ordered the monks to bring him this sacred belt. But none of this seemed to be reliable. It is estimated that one in three children died before age five, and about 20 percent of all mothers died during childbirth.
8. Medieval contraceptive
There were some strange contraceptives in medieval England. Women in need of contraceptives or abortions visited healers who made magic amulets against pregnancy. Inside such an amulet were two weasel testicles, a child's tooth and a severed toe of a miscarriage. They also sold love potions, which were similar in composition. Their love potions contained extracts from "the purest and most unspoiled essences" - miscarriages.
Miscarriages have been used as a contraceptive.
9. Lice
Perhaps not surprisingly, after all this, it turned out that people during the Middle Ages had a big problem - lice. It is fairly well known that everyone in medieval England struggled with lice and fleas, from the rich to the poor. It was a common thing to get together with your friends and family to collect lice from each other's bodies.
All were infested with lice.
This was especially true for people who traveled a lot. Letters from some of the Crusaders have survived, praising the women laundresses traveling with them, claiming that they not only washed their clothes, but were very dexterous in catching fleas.
The problem only got worse over time, and it was not limited to England. An English pilgrim named Margery Kempe wrote home in disgust that poor people in Germany spend their evenings stripping naked, sitting in a circle and picking lice from each other.
10. Rotting Thames
In the Middle Ages, it was a common practice among butchers to collect all their unused, rotten meat, collect it, drag it onto the bridge and dump it into the river. Throwing rotten parts of animals into the river was so common that one bridge earned the nickname "Meat Bridge" and it was the most disgusting place in the entire country.
The River Thames was full of rotting meat.
The bridge was famous for being covered with dried blood and bits of animal corpses that fell out of butcher carts. It wasn't until 1369 that a law was passed prohibiting this, but it did not bring any real benefit. Even after it became a crime to dump meat into the Thames, people complained about the severe pollution of the river. It took almost 500 years for people to stop dumping waste into the Thames in the 19th century.
Based on materials from listverse.com