Medieval waste management in pictures

I imagine that when most people who are not medievalists think of sewage in the Middle Ages (er, if they do at all), they think of the line about one minute into this clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here!"

But medieval structures, especially the expensively built ones, had some pretty impressive systems for their waste management. Here, let me show you a couple of examples.

The first set of pictures is once again from the castle Carreg Cennen in Wales. First, you see a castle privy, minus the wooden seat that would have provided a slightly more comfortable place to rest one's bottom than what remains of the stone edifice:


If you're wondering what those white, glowing spaces on the right are, either something happened in the data transfer to my hard drive and erased a portion of my picture (most of which I cropped out), or else this is an extra-special haunted loo. I like to think the latter is the case.

OK, so that's the loo. But where does it go? Here's my friend G. to demonstrate:


Here's a closer look:


That's right, G. is being a giant piece of sh*t. Heh heh.

Ahem.

In this castle the outlet seems to be in the outer yard. Let's hope it was behind the horse stables or something, but it still means some poor guy was in charge of cleaning it up every so often. Ew. But the yard there slopes down towards the cliff side, so maybe the poor sap just needed to wash it downhill with a bucket.

Meanwhile, the Cistercian monks at Kirkstall Abbey, outside of Leeds, had a better system. And today's museum curators know what will get the attention of kids and Dr. Virago -- a monk on the loo! Look! --


Actually, technically he's a lay brother, but whatever. "Monk on the loo" is a much funnier phrase (though not as funny as "monkey on the loo" would be.) And no, he's not pooping on people's heads. He's on what would have been an upper floor. Where his waste goes is the clever part. The toilets in this dormitory for the lay brothers were constructed over a trench that ran between the walls. Here's a picture of fragments of those walls which I borrowed from the Abbey web site:


That trench was fed by water from further up the hill (where the monks had a mill) and ran under the entire monastery complex. Here are a couple pictures of the now exposed trench:



Eventually the trench let out in the nearby River Aire, which I realize is not all that great, but I still find the system kind of fascinating. And hey, maybe it's why the wild flowers it this final picture are so abundant!