Before the invention of the toilet

in the past three hundred years, human science and technology have advanced by leaps and bounds, which has completely separated the life of modern people in both East and West from the Middle Ages, which lasted more than a thousand years before that. We have invented countless drugs and devices to make us live healthier and longer lives, but no drug has saved as many lives as a toilet. The toilet (and the urban sewerage system) deserves to be one of the greatest inventions in the history of civilization.

the real toilet was not invented until the late 18th century, and it was not until the Victorian era in the 19th century that modern toilets became standard in most houses in Britain. How did Europeans defecate during the long Middle Ages? Where did the export waste go?

the answer is: whatever. In the early Middle Ages, towns in Europe were so small that people either defecated anywhere on the streets or poured them into the streets or rivers. In sparsely populated villages, urgent internal problems are even more unrestrained. However, an unwritten rule is "one stone's throw", which means that the place to solve the problem should be at least one distance from all archery, and it is unthinkable to build a toilet at home. Getting too close to your neighbors or even working indoors is seen as an act of provocation and sabotage. For example, figure 1, this 14th-century manuscript illustration depicts Sarassen (Arab) soldiers defecating and desecating in a church.

on the whole, the life of monastic monks is much more civilized and hygienic than that of ordinary people in the Middle Ages. They partially preserved the sanitary habits and engineering skills of the Romans, despite occasional theological debates about whether bathing is harmful to the soul and whether God's filth is sacred, at least monks generally use aqua privies or water toilets similar to those still found in rural China. The Christchurch monastery in Canterbury, England, had a comprehensive water supply and sewerage system as early as the 12th century, which could provide water flushing for collective toilets. Many monasteries like figure 2 build toilets on streams or on the shore, allowing running water to take away the waste. The monks even had old wool or rags as toilet paper-which was more advanced than the Romans, who used to wipe their buttocks with a sponge and wash them for later generations to use.

the biggest problem with water toilets is that it is difficult to determine the location. If the toilet is repaired too far from the water, when the tide goes out, there is not enough water to wash the poop away, and it will pile up; if the toilet is repaired too close to the water, the buttocks will enjoy automatic flushing service at high tide. I'm afraid that the toilet will be swept away by the river. Later, toilets spread to ordinary people, using wicker instead of solid stone, and this problem became even more prominent. The one on the toilet in figure 3 made a shudder in his heart!

this danger can be avoided by building toilets on bridges high enough, such as London Bridge in the early days, instead of two towers confronting each other, it was a crowded river town full of houses. Residents on London Bridge also have to solve their personal problems. The public toilets here fall directly into the Thames. If the crew passing under the bridge dare to look up at the sky of London at a 45-degree angle, nine times out of ten, they will have a mouthful. So there is a proverb: "the wise man crosses the bridge, the fool crosses the bridge." The only moment when people who have to pass under the bridge are relieved when the bombers above accidentally fall into the river from the manger-judging from the warning in figure 4, such tragedies may still happen from time to time!

what about the lords and ladies who live in the castle? Every time you run out of the castle to be released, it is both troublesome and dangerous. You can't go out and pour the toilet when the enemy is besieging, can you? Therefore, the castle is the first place in Europe to build toilets in the bedroom. Most of the toilets in the castle are hidden in towers, and the honorable aristocrats call them the euphemism of "dressing room" (wardrobe). In fact, it is very simple: the tower extends outward, and a slate on the side digs a hole, then it falls directly into the moat below through the mouth of the hole. When the weather is fine, you can also enjoy the high-altitude scenery in the pit as shown in figure 5. The moat of most castles is not a river-at best it is a trench or a circle of stagnant water. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the moat, which accepts daily gifts from the castle residents, stinks and silts up quickly. Despite the stench, the lords soon discovered that the manure-filled moat provided an extra Barrier for the castle. Only the most fearless warrior is willing to wade through waist-deep dirty water, climb the wall with cannonball bombing, and break through the defenses from the poop pit.

Urban dwellers are far from having such a good living environment. After the population growth, the whereabouts of excreta has become a serious problem. At first people carried the dung buckets out of the city and dumped them, which naturally gathered in the nearest place. As a result, huge dung piles piled up under the walls of Paris in the 12th century, so that the enemy could climb the dunghill and climb into the wall, and the citizens had no choice but to raise the wall. It didn't work to pick it out on their own, so the residents of the yard dug a deep hole in the backyard, filled in the waste, and hired a dung digger to clean it up after a period of time; if there was no yard, they opened the window and dumped it directly in the street, hoping Rain Water could wash it away. The emptying of chamber pots, coupled with littering everywhere, has blocked many streets in London for a long time with dunghill piles. Pedestrians on the street must always beware of an overhead window open, followed by a "water is coming" and dirt bugs spilled. Figure 6 this situation continued until the eighteenth century.

Feel extremely enchanting in black formal dresses. Once you make up your choice, relax, we will take care of everything.

it is conceivable that the sewage of European cities in this period was cross-flow and stinky. Groundwater pollution from manure pits, coupled with daily contact, has led to the prevalence of various epidemics, especially cholera and plague, with each outbreak claiming thousands of lives. People with status are not immune. Although they often hold a bouquet of fragrant flowers in front of their noses (figure 7), or mount windows with rose petals, as in the Houses of Parliament in London, these measures have little effect on the prevention and control of the epidemic. The lack of understanding of pathogens makes most treatments futile. At that time, people in European cities were sickly and short-lived, and they were often plagued by plague. no wonder aristocrats liked to live in manors in the countryside.

actually as early as 15In 1996, Shakespeare's time, Sir Harrington, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, invented a flushing toilet and specially made one for the use of the Queen in the palace. At the same time, Shakespeare's own feces, along with those of other Londoners, probably silted up in London's smelly gutters, big and small, and became hotbeds of disease. Unfortunately, the first flush toilet in history was not popular with the Queen because it flushed so loudly that it would let the whole palace know that the Queen had just gone to the toilet. Such a delay lasted for two hundred years until the Scottish watchmaker Cuming and the inventor Brama improved Harrington's invention and patented it for mass production. The invention of the toilet was accompanied by London's ambitious sewer renovation plan to discharge everything flushed away from thousands of households out of the city. In less than five years, the death rate of Londoners has fallen by nearly half, and there has been no more outbreak of a large-scale plague. It is no exaggeration to say that London's status as a first-class international metropolis is established from the moment of toilet entry!