Bodiam Castle had twenty-eight toilets, and every one of them emptied into the moat that made it the most photographed castle in England. The mirror on the postcards was the drain.
The garderobe, the medieval toilet, shared its name and often its room with the wardrobe, because ammonia rising off the pit killed the moths that ate a fortune in clothing. Builders hung stone toilet boxes off castle walls on corbels and stacked whole towers of latrines above shared pits. The Teutonic Knights at Malbork Castle built the Dansker, a free-standing toilet tower over the River Nogat, reached by a fortified bridge with its own drawbridge. Krak des Chevaliers had a latrine tower with piped water that came closer to plumbing than anything in England.
Then there are the men who kept it all working. Gong farmers climbed into cesspits by night and dug them out by hand. A skilled one in fourteenth-century London cleared four shillings in a night while a laborer earned three pence a day, and the money bought a short life: the pits threw off gas that killed in one breath, so the experienced men lowered a lit candle first. In 1326 Richard the Raker drowned in his own pit. In Erfurt in 1184, the floor of a packed court assembly held above a cesspit gave way under King Henry VI, and around sixty nobles died in the sewage below.
The famous toilet deaths of kings are a separate story, and half of them are invented. James I of Scotland died at Perth in 1437, trapped in a drain he had ordered sealed three days earlier because it kept swallowing his tennis balls. Wenceslaus III of Bohemia was stabbed in a garderobe in 1306 and the Přemyslid dynasty ended with him. Edmund Ironside's privy assassin was invented a century after his death, and the soldiers who took Richard the Lionheart's Château Gaillard in 1204 came in through a chapel window, not up the latrine chute. The chute made a more comfortable culprit. At the top of the whole system sat Henry VIII on a velvet close stool, attended by the Groom of the Stool, one of the most powerful offices at court, while boys called gong scourers scrubbed the twenty-eight-seat Great House of Easement below Hampton Court. Versailles, built centuries later, managed less.
📍 TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - One Word for Wardrobe and Toilet
0:56 - Bodiam Castle: 28 Toilets, One Moat
1:44 - How a Garderobe Actually Worked
2:47 - Medieval People Washed More Than You Think
3:32 - Cliff Toilets and Wall Urinals: Orford, Peveril, St Andrews
5:30 - The Dansker: Malbork's Fortified Toilet Tower
6:42 - The Sewage Moat Myth
7:42 - Gong Farmers: The Men in the Pit
8:21 - Four Shillings a Night: The Pay
9:26 - The Candle Test: Gas That Killed in a Breath
10:13 - Erfurt, 1184: The Floor Gives Way
12:08 - Saltpeter: A Kingdom's Waste Becomes Gunpowder
13:32 - James I of Scotland: Trapped in His Own Drain
15:24 - Edmund Ironside and the Invented Assassin
16:52 - Château Gaillard: The Latrine That Never Was
18:48 - Which Toilet You Were Allowed to Use
19:55 - Henry VIII: Velvet Above, Boys Below
20:35 - Versailles Goes Backward
📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1239/toilets-in-a-medieval-castle/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_farmerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disasterhttps://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/journal/69/excavation-medieval-garderobe-snargate-street-dover-1945https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/crac-chevaliers/en/latrine-tower📋 ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
This video is about how medieval castles handled human waste: the garderobe toilet, castle sanitation, and the deaths it caused. It covers Bodiam Castle in East Sussex (1380s) and its 28 toilets draining into the moat, garderobe chutes and corbels, the latrine tower of the Château de Vincennes, the Dansker toilet tower of Malbork Castle built by the Teutonic Knights over the River Nogat, Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, gong farmers in fourteenth-century London earning four shillings a night, Richard the Raker's death in 1326, hydrogen sulfide gas in cesspits, the Erfurt latrine disaster of 26 July 1184 in which around sixty nobles died under King Henry VI, saltpeter and gunpowder, the murder of James I of Scotland at Perth on 20 February 1437, the death of Wenceslaus III of Bohemia in 1306, Edmund Ironside in 1016, the fall of Château Gaillard in 1204 under Philip Augustus, Henry VIII's velvet close stool, the Groom of the Stool, the Great House of Easement at Hampton Court, gong scourers, and the Palace of Versailles. Medieval history, Middle Ages, Tudor period, castle architecture, medieval daily life.
#MedievalHistory #CastleHistory #BodiamCastle #HenryVIII #MiddleAges #DarkHistory