A few weeks ago, I had a little scamper around Palazzo Davanzati, a 14th-century merchant’s house in Florence.
The Davanzatis bought the house in 1580 from a family of wealthy wool merchants who’d had it built 200 years earlier.
On the first floor is the great hall, a gigantic room for business meetings with absurdly high ceilings. It makes Crispin Odey’s old wood-panelled meeting room in Mayfair look like a council Portakabin.
I was struck by the first and second floor. They both feature a privy or lavatory room – a private corner chamber with a wooden loo seat.
This civilised facility might come as a slight surprise to those who believe that sanitary waste disposal systems were invented in London in 1860 by Victorian engineer Peter Bazalgette.
In Palazzo Davanzati, the lavatories (I’m a very snooty, U mouse and never use the word ‘toilet’) connected via pipes to a cesspit. They might even have joined up with a medieval sewer running into the Arno River.
The Florentines were just as fastidious as we are now when it came to stinking piles of human excrement – and so were medieval Londoners. Archaeologists have discovered several cesspits in the capital, as well as public latrines.
Excrement expert Craig Taylor, in his essay The Disposal of Human Waste: A Comparison Between Ancient Rome and Medieval London, says a London ‘longhouse’, built in the 1420s, contained two rows of 64 seats. The latrines were connected to cesspits, in turn connected to the Thames or emptied by entrepreneurs. They then carted their load to the countryside by river or road and sold it to farmers for manure.
This business was captured by one single company in the 15th century:
‘In 1466, the city authorities granted John Lovegold a monopoly on cleaning the privies. He was granted this right for ten years because, Lovegold explained, “the business hitherto been done imperfectly and at an exorbitant charge.” ’
Some medieval people took the problem of waste disposal into their own hands.
‘Alice Wade in 1314 decided that she would attach a wooden pipe from her private privy in her room to the gutter running under the street. The rainwater collected in the underground gutter was used to cleanse the privy on the Hithe but was becoming blocked with the human waste from Alice’s pipe. This was certainly an ingenious idea, but she had forgotten that her waste may have, and indeed did, clog the pipes she was attempting to use. She was ordered to remove the pipe within 40 days.’
Perhaps Alice had had to pay a fine before – hence her ingenuity. By the end of the 14th century, Londoners were fined two shillings for flinging slops into the street.
Sometimes a block of flats would share a ‘backhouse’, an outdoor loo arrangement that would connect to either a cesspit or a sewer.
The less well-off would use chamber pots and indoor lavatories. Once a week, they would put the solid stuff outside their front door, where it would be collected by one of Lovegold’s agents.
Ancient Greece had plenty of public and private lavatories. A latrine was recently discovered at Delos, along with sewer canals and evidence of some sort of flushing system.
The Romans were inspired by the Greeks and became great sewer-builders, constructing the Cloaca Maxima in the 6th century BC. This was later extended with paved channels, connected both to gutters and to the Tiber.
In the first century AD, the geographer Strabo wrote admiringly that the Cloaca Maxima was filled with ‘close-fitting stones in some places with room enough for wagons loaded with hay to pass through them’.
By the 4th century AD, 144 public lavatories were installed in Rome. They accommodated 10 to 20 people each, and there were no screens between stalls. So it was that going to the loo could be a social occasion.
Some public latrines were installed at the baths. So the Romans were fairly well catered for when it came to lavatorial facilities. Well-off houses sometimes connected their loos to the sewer, while the poorer sort would wait to get their waste collected by the stercorarii, who would transport it to the countryside, as in medieval London.
A flushing loo was invented in the 1590s in England, but did not catch on until the Great Exhibition of 1851.
When teamed up with Bazalgette’s new sewer, and various sewage-treatment facilities, this is the basis of the quite amazing system of poo removal now enjoyed by eight million Londoners – pioneered many centuries ago, not least in the Palazzo Davanzati.
