If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (22 page)

But it was the Normans who introduced the first fixed-position indoor toilets to be seen in Britain since Roman times. The Norman White Tower at the Tower of London, built just after the Conquest, has garderobe shafts in the thickness of its walls, all positioned on the north or east elevations of the building. These sides faced away from the city of London, so its newly subjugated residents wouldn’t be able see the stains left by their conquerors’ faeces.

The little closets called garderobes were also literally places to ‘guard robes’ (keep clothes), because hanging your robe in an ammonia-rich environment like over the loo would kill the fleas. In fact, a well-brought-up person might still ask the way to the ‘cloakroom’ instead of the toilet when visiting a strange house today. The well-appointed garderobe could be quite a pleasant place: the ninth-century author of
The Life of St Gregory
recommends it for uninterrupted reading.

A velvet-covered seatless ‘close stool’ like William III’s model at Hampton Court Palace

At the Tudor court there were three main ranks of toilet. Royal and noble people used the close stool, a
padded, seat-less chair placed over a pewter or ceramic chamber pot, often placed in a dedicated ‘stool room’. Henry VIII possessed several close stools, stuffed with swansdown, covered with velvet and decorated with gilt nails and fringes. The stool room had two doors, one leading to the owner’s bedroom and one to the outdoors for servants to remove the waste. (This easy access made the stool room a favoured place for trysts between Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, and her alleged lover Thomas Culpepper. Charles I also planned to sneak his lady friend Jane Whorwood into ‘the stool room which is within my bedchamber’ during his imprisonment on the Isle of Wight, in order to ‘smother’ her with embraces.)

The next rank down, courtiers senior enough to have their own rooms, also possessed their own personal chamber pots. The physician Andrew Boorde decried the smell of these ‘piss pots’ and thought them unhygienic. The Tudor ‘piss pot’ excavated in the Privy Garden which remains on display at Hampton Court has been scientifically proved still to contain traces of genuine Tudor urine.

But the lowest servants at Hampton Court used the great communal toilet capable of seating fourteen people at once named the ‘Common Jakes’ or the ‘Great House of Easement’. This giant facility discharged into a tank which was washed clean by the waters of the moat. Even so, the tank emitted a dreadful smell and frequently had to be scrubbed clean. The unfortunate servants who performed this role were known as the ‘gong scourers’ (‘gong’ was another euphemism for toilet).

Rather than walk to the Great House of Easement, though, people at court still insisted upon relieving themselves in the fireplaces and passages. There were hundreds of male servants, and not enough official toilets. In occasional vain attempts to improve hygiene, the palace management would have crosses chalked onto the walls in the hope that people would be reluctant to desecrate a religious symbol. Urinating into the kitchen
fireplaces was also made the subject of a special prohibition, implying that it had previously been a common practice.

Bizarre as the Great House of Easement sounds, the vast communal toilet had been a feature well known in the ancient and medieval worlds. In Britain, twenty Roman soldiers at once could have used the latrine at Housesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall. And medieval London contained no less than thirteen shared public toilets, the best known among them being the gigantic, fifteenth-century, eighty-four-seater in Greenwich Street named ‘Whittington’s Longhouse’ after Dick Whittington, mayor of London. It was situated on the street now called Walbrook (then still literally a brook) and was flushed out by the Thames at high tide.

Obviously Londoners used chamber pots in their own homes, and the emptying of the pot out of a house’s upper window gives one of the rival explanations of the word ‘loo’, meaning toilet. ‘
Gardez l’eau!
’ was the call to warn passers-by. Alternatively, and to my mind more convincingly, the ‘loo’ may be the ‘
lieu
’, the French name for the ‘place’ of easement. Some houses had garderobe closets suspended over streams at the back. It was a constant struggle to keep the city clean, and by 1300, Sherbourne Lane, once adjacent to ‘a long bourne of sweet water’, had been renamed by the locals as ‘Shiteburn Lane’.

And many town dwellers simply used the open street to excrete. This wasn’t just a medieval problem. In the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys’s wife suffered from some kind of bowel complaint, and once he ‘was forced to go out of the house with her to Lincoln’s Inn walks, and there in a corner she did her business’. A century later, when Casanova visited London, he was surprised to see the ‘hinder parts of persons relieving nature in the bushes’ even in St James’s Park.

We know most about toilet habits at the highest levels, because until 1700 the king himself was constantly accompanied, even when relieving himself. At Henry VIII’s court, one courtier apologises for not attending a meeting because he simply couldn’t get away from toilet duty, there being ‘none here but Master Norris & I to give attendance upon the king’s highness when he goes to make water in his bed chamber’. It was understood that his most intimate servants would ask Henry VIII for favours ‘in the evening, when he was comfortably filled with wine, or when he had gone to the stool, for then he used to be very pleasant’.

‘
Gardez l’eau!
’ The call warning pedestrians that a chamber pot was about to be emptied may provide the explanation for our word ‘loo’

So royals and indeed many other important aristocrats were accustomed to relieving themselves before others. Instructions for the late-seventeenth-century household of William III reveal that enormous efforts were made to ensure that the king never had to go to the loo alone. During visits to the ‘Secret or Privy Room, when we go to ease ourself’, he ordered that he should be accompanied by the ‘Groom of the Stool (if present) and in his absence the Gentleman of our Bedchamber in waiting, & in his absence the Groom of our Bedchamber in waiting’. At the Palace of Versailles in eighteenth-century France, the homosexual Duc de Vendôme gave audiences while sitting upon his close stool, and fawning guests would call out that he had the ‘
culo d’angelo
’ as he wiped his bottom. Even Samuel Pepys, much lower down the social scale, did not seem to consider that his own bowel movements were restricted to private moments: he kept his own ‘very fine close-stool’ in his drawing room. (Probably he was proud of it.)

The declining power of the monarchy might be traced through the decreasing levels of respect paid to royal toilets when the eighteenth century is compared to the sixteenth. One cannot imagine that anyone at court was bold enough to make free with Henry VIII’s close stools, or with Elizabeth I’s (her special ‘stool carriage’ transported them in her wake from palace to palace). Yet during the coronation of George III in 1761, the Duke of Newcastle was spotted using the queen’s own appointed toilet behind the altar: he was caught ‘perk’d up & in the very act upon the anointed velvet closestool’.

There’s a quotation from the witty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that’s often used to suggest that grand court ladies too didn’t mind urinating in the presence of other people. The French ambassador’s wife, for example, was notorious for the ‘frequency and quantity of her pissing which she does not fail to do at least ten times a day amongst a cloud of witnesses’. But do note that the lady is from France. It was almost a given, in eighteenth-century England, that most French habits were immoral, dirty or both.

However, the voluminous skirts of eighteenth-century ladies did allow them to make use of the gravy-boat-like jugs known as ‘bourdaloues’, or ‘carriage pots’. They take their name, we’re told, from a fêted French preacher. He was so popular that hordes of ladies would arrive hours before his sermons began, and therefore needed discreet relief while waiting.

The great advantage of the chamber pot or close stool was that you could use it in the privacy of your bedchamber, in a closet or ante-room, or anywhere else you pleased. It remained in use for so long because it was exceedingly convenient. Its only disadvantage was that someone had to empty it. This person, often female, was known as a ‘necessary woman’ (she emptied the ‘necessary’). A seventeenth-century servant-maid was required to see ‘that your close stools and chamber pots be duly emptied, and kept clean and sweet’. In the royal palaces, there were whole teams of ‘necessary women’ who emptied the chamber pots and cleaned the bedchambers, and were paid additionally for their mops, brooms and brushes on top of their wages.

Remarkably, they went on performing their labours for at least two hundred years after you might think they could reasonably have stopped: at the invention of the flushing toilet.

22 – The Wonders of Sewers

The Civilization of a People can be measured by their Domestic and Sanitary appliances.

George Jennings, installer of flushing public
toilets at the Great Exhibition, 1851

Britain’s first flushing toilet was built in late Elizabethan times, but the idea didn’t catch on until the nineteenth century.

Sir John Harrington was its pioneer, installing the first flusher at his home near Bath, and then another at the Palace of Richmond for Elizabeth I. (There’s a theory that Americans call the toilet ‘the john’ in honour of Sir John.) Harrington wrote a book about his achievements called
A New Discourse on a Stale Subject: Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax
, published in 1596.

The title was a joke. ‘Ajax’ in this case was not the hero of classical mythology, but ‘a jakes’, the common euphemism for a toilet. Harrington’s version had a cistern, seat and stool pot below. Opening a cock in the cistern caused water to rush down and flush the system out, and he claimed that this needed doing only once a day, even ‘though twenty persons should use it’. I’ve helped to make a reconstruction according to Harrington’s instructions, and the flush was impressively powerful – it successfully carried away a handful of cherry tomatoes.

I’m less convinced you would only need to flush it once every
twenty uses, and Harrington did admit that ‘the oftener it is used and opened the sweeter’. He suggested that pitch and wax, applied to the pot, would also help keep it fresh. But Harrington’s invention was a blip in the history of sanitation, and few people adopted his idea.

Flushing water closets could be found here and there, usually in great houses or palaces, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Queen Anne’s husband George, for example, had ‘a little place with a seat of easement of marble with sluices of water to wash all down’, and at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire no fewer than ten water closets were installed during a remodelling in the 1690s, with fittings of brass and bowls of local marble. Yet these were oddities, frequently commented upon with wonder by those who saw them, and they remained remarkable.