this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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If the latrine was in the cellar under the first floor. Can you imagine the awful smell in that cathedral?
It also hadn't been cleaned out in a long time. I think they were supposed to do it yearly, but they hadn't done it in five.
The past smelled like shit, everywhere.
The past smelled like Delhi on a hot day, except all the time, everywhere.
In Europe that is. In some other places, people did not build their temples on top of … their pools of excrement
misconception. There are many crappy ai imges of them falling through the cathedral floor. there are sources against that and also its very illogical. church ground is holy after all. the fall was most likely outside of a building, somewhat nearby the cathedral. also based on what we know it normally didnt smell. i mean imagin living somewhere and smelling poop every day. you will find a solution to block the smell rather quickly ^^
Says the person who is sorry for smelling!
because people keep telling me to shower xD but seriously. at no point in history did people voluntarily live in reek. since citys formed people manages human waste pretty efficently.
Weren't there cities where people just threw waste from their window onto the street below?
There are stories that people were pissing and shitting in hallways and corners of the palace of Versailles.
This is heavily taken out of context. there is a picture source of people empting their night (toilett) bowl onto the streets onto the heads of fellow people. only problem, this source is from a saterical piece. most likely that was considered comedy back then. like porttraing a wrong world or unbelivably stupid people. we also got similar sources about people carrieing sunlight with baskets into a house without windows. yet noone acts as if that was reality (so far lol).
My tip for checking such rumours is to find actual pictures from the time. in books, or paintings, you overwhelmingly see citys with no dirt or trash on the roads. also citys streets where made of stone in contrast to modern belive.
On top of all of this we got fee letters all the way back to the 11th century, taxing people for failing to remove dung or other unpleasant stuff from their property. You could get a pretty hefty fine for beeing smelly.
Which makes sense, since medicine of the time singled out miazmas, aka. bad smells, to be the primary way of sicknes to infect humans. Medival humans were way more concerned about bad smells than we today. it was liked to the black death and all sorts of desieses.
(Thank you so much for asking, you can see i spend years of hyperfocus on this and am very passionate to fight against the "dark" middle ages picture for it simply beeing wrong) (also all i say mosty relates to the roman emoire, i know less about france)
Thank you for your answer. Here, page 57-58, it mentions people throwing their waste onto the street at night in Ancient Rome. There's even legal advice from the time relating to being hit by waste.
Yeah, disposal of waste in the streets is a recurring problem in pre-modern cities. Strongly enforced sanitation measures don't show up until the 15th century AD, and waste disposal STILL remains a serious problem into the late 19th century.
yeah its a cool twist kinda. people thinking of ancient rome as the pinecal of culture and the medival holy roman empire as the dark ages of humanity. yet the poop throwing myth goes into the ancient time.
Gonna be honest all my focus went into 10th-15th century, so i have little knowledge about juvenal and such ^^
Never been to New York, eh?
oh yeah fair point xD maybe we are evolving backwards
God, all of the past probably stank terrible