‘I am a loo historian – you'll never guess what Tudors used to wipe their bums'

Daily Mirror

23-07-2025

Our 19th century super sewers turn 150 this year, but before the Great Stink, festering cesspits had to be cleared out by hand. The Mirror digs into the smelly history of toilets…
Poo now travels under London in a sewer tunnel so wide, you could drive three buses side-by-side through it. But before this new super sewer opened this year, Londoners were still flushing their waste down 1,300 miles of a creaking brick-built Victorian sewage system, with ornate cathedral-sized pumping stations.
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However, when the Public Health Act of 1875, received Royal assent 150 years ago, in August 1875, the drainage system built by civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the city was the super sewer of its time.
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It was built after the horror of The Great Stink of 1858, when the River Thames became so polluted with raw excrement, that during one long hot summer, the water levels dropped, and the malodorous smell was so noxious, it shut the Houses of Parliament.
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Nght soil workers, or gong farmers carted away the city's filth from 200,000 festering cesspits and outdoor privies, to be used as fertiliser. 'There was no integrated sewerage network system, so all the dung heaps had to be dug out by gong men,' explains Dr Dave Musgrove, content director of BBC History Magazine and the HistoryExtra podcast.
'It was an unpleasant job but reasonably well-paid, because the excrement was valuable. If you weren't rich, you had your pit, you dug it out, and it was taken away in carts and used for manuring fields.'
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The 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys wrote extensively about his chamber pot and whether it had been emptied into the cesspit beneath the house by his servant. 'He also used to relieve himself in the fireplace,' says Dr Musgrove. 'But he tells a story where he goes down into his basement and is very disappointed to step into a great heap of turds, because his neighbour hasn't emptied his pit and it's leaked into his.'
A 19th century population explosion meant the night soil men couldn't keep up with the volume of fecal matter, and piles of untreated human waste either leaked or were dumped on the shores of the Thames, turning it into an open sewer. Along with human corpses and rotting vegetation in the waterways, this was a toxic disaster waiting to happen.
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'By the early 19th century, more people were wanting to use this up-and-coming toilet flushing technology. But it meant the city had lots more liquid matter,' explains the historian. 'So they start digging sewers, digging underground or even just overground ones, and it's going into rivers and the water system is becoming contaminated.' Before 1875, people had no idea that dirty water caused the deadly cholera epidemics that raged in the country's crowded cities.
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Dr Dave Musgrove, who also hosts HistoryExtra Toilets Through Time podcast series, says: 'Throughout this period we get a slew of public health legislation, where people start to recognise that it is an issue.' Frightened city dwellers blamed the thousands of deaths on the foul miasma that hung heavy over London and other cities. In 1853 outbreaks of cholera in London, Gateshead and Newcastle killed over 10,000 people. The following year another epidemic hit South London
After one particularly virulent outbreak on August 31, 1854, when 127 people living around Broad Street in Soho died, a local anaesthetist, John Snow, suspected contaminated water was to blame, but nobody believed him. He traced it to a water pump on Broad Street, where a child had been taken ill with cholera and its nappies had been cleaned in a cesspool of water close to the Broad Street well.
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The local parish agreed to remove the pump handle as an experiment – and the spread of cholera was stalled. From then on, new sanitary laws made it compulsory for local authorities to provide sewers, control water supplies and regulate the overcrowded and unsanitary lodging houses in rookeries where most poor people lived in Victorian times.
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Most importantly, all residential construction had to have running water and an internal drainage system. But flushing toilets took ages to catch on in Britain. 'The person who is often cited as having invented the first one was the godson of Queen Elizabeth I, Thomas Harrington, who came up with what he called the 'Ajax' on a lad's weekend in the 15th century.' Although the Queen had one installed, nobody thought his idea would catch on.
The ruined Grade I listed Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire is also home to a flushing toilet built in 1596. And it's thought Henry III's 13th century garderobe in York's Clifford's Tower had a flushing spout that ran water down the lavatory hole and out of the tower.
But while we were still going alfresco in philistine Britain, the world 's first flushing loos were actually invented in Bronze Age Crete. 'The Minoan Palace of Knossos had a very advanced plumbing system that was built around 2000 BC,' says Dr Musgrove.
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Cesspits are gold dust to archaeologists, as they reveal so much about the people who used them. 'The people who built the Neolithic site of Stonehenge lived in a village a couple of miles away called Durrington Walls in a settlement of round houses,' Dr Musgrove continues. 'Human poo was excavated, which was riddled with parasites – possibly from eating meat that hadn't been cooked well – but there was no particular designated toilet area.'
That changed with the Roman invasion. You can still visit the well preserved Roman communal loos at Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire or Housesteads Roman fort at Hadrian's Wall ,where soldiers sat chatting side-by-side at the communal latrines while rainwater flushed away their waste.
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After the Romans leave things go downhill. 'In the early medieval period British society sort of fractures, but excavations in Coppergate in York in the 1980s found evidence of Viking toilets – and the famous Jorvik turd.'
The Vikings lived in tightly packed areas, and had yards where people just dug holes and did their business, with little wicker dividing walls. Dr Musgrove adds: 'You can see the mineralised coprolite Viking 9th century poo at the museum, where they've recreated those toilets with Bogar who's been sitting on this loo for 40 years.'
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The Jorvik turd also tells us a lot about the Viking diet. 'It's quite a big poo – 5cm wide by 20cm long,' chuckles Dr Musgrove. 'Whoever produced it enjoyed a diet rich in bread and meat but not many vegetables.'
In the Middle Ages toilets were holes in the ground in communal spaces over a river or a stream. 'They were basically doing their business into the water,' says the historian. 'But there weren't concentrations of people living in one place, so sewage wasn't much of an issue.'
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Community toilets continued in the Tudor period when Henry VIII built a two-story loo for courtiers at Hampton Court called the House of Easement, which held 28 people at once. 'There were private toilets for important people in castles,' adds Dr Musgrove. 'But those were still quite basic spaces in the wall and human waste would drop down a pipe into a cesspit – or just drip down the outside of the walls.'
We've come a long way since those smelly days, but before we congratulate ourselves on having super sewers, transporting our effluent safely away from our homes, it's important to scotch the myth of our ancestors chucking urine-filled chamber pots out of over-hanging medieval windows onto people's heads on the cobbles below.
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'Even hundreds of years before the 1875 act, communities did their level best to separate themselves from their faeces,' says Dr Musgrove. 'There were many by-laws to stop us fouling our own spaces even in the Middle Ages, so we shouldn't imagine the streets of Britain's cities were just covered in filth all the time.'
Something our leaky water utility companies could no doubt learn from even now.
The back story on loo paper
Anyone unlucky enough to have used Izal tracing paper loo paper at school will appreciate how important a nice soft double ply is.
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The first loo paper appeared in 1887 when Joseph C. Gayetty of New York sold medicated flat sheets called The Therapeutic Paper, and the first perforated rolls were sold in 1890 by the Scott Paper Company. But it took a long time for these to become popular because most people were accustomed to using any old paper.
'Once we started printing stuff from the 15th century onwards, people quite quickly started using it for the purposes of wiping – and sometimes as a political gesture,' explains Dr Musgrove. 'If there was something you disagreed with, you might offer that to people to wipe their bottom.'
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Before that, the early Romans loved a communal khazi and it's thought they also shared a communal sponge. But Dr Musgrove admits: 'We don't actually know whether the sponge on a stick was used for wiping Roman bottoms – or for cleaning the toilets.'
Moss was very popular in the Middle Ages for bum wiping. 'There was a thriving trade in bringing moss into medieval towns because it was a valuable product – nice and soft on your backside. Archaeologists have also found evidence of rags in toilet soil.'
But the hardcore Tudors used 'oyster and mussel shells – more for scraping than wiping,' according to Dr Musgrove. Alarmingly, holly has also been found in some cesspits. 'That would have made the user quite anxious,' the historian says.