by Richard Sugg
Here is the typical morning routine of a French schoolboy in 1568: ‘“I woke up, got out of bed, put on my shirt, stockings, and shoes, buckled my belt, urinated against the courtyard wall, took fresh water from the bucket, washed my hands and face … ”’.119 The historian who relates this, Norbert Elias, has many other examples of the period’s distinctive toilet habits. An instance uncertainly attributed to the fifteenth century warns the reader: ‘before you sit down, make sure your seat has not been fouled’. This might look like fairly obvious, universal advice for anyone a little wary of public lavatories. But the warning in fact derives from a guide to table manners. The seat in question seems to have been not a lavatory, but an ordinary dining chair. Who fouled it? Perhaps a cat or dog. But – as the case of James I reminds us – it may well have just been a guest who was too drunk or too lazy to get up and loose their urine somewhere more suitable.
No less startling is the opinion of the early sixteenth-century scholar and educational reformer, Desiderius Erasmus: ‘it is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating’. (This advice did not stop Madame de Prie receiving the Marquis De Argenson whilst sat on her new bidet in 1710.120) Similarly, a German book of manners from 1570 advises that ‘one should not, like rustics … relieve oneselfwith-out shame or reserve in front of ladies, or before the doors or windows of court chambers’. Note the implications of the phrasing here: it seems that one can relieve oneself ‘in front of ladies’, provided one does it with ‘shame and reserve’ (presumably, with one’s back turned). In some contexts, it was not merely rustics who were forced to behave without shame or reserve: ‘“you are indeed fortunate to shit whenever you please and to do so to your heart’s content! … We are not so lucky here. I have to hold on to my turd until evening; the houses next to the forest are not equipped with facilities. I have the misfortune of inhabiting one and consequently the displeasure of having to shit outside, which gravely perturbs me because I like to shit at my ease with my ass fully bared. Item all manner of people can see us shitting; there are men who walk by, women, girls, boys, abbeys, Swiss Guards … ”’. So complained the Duchess of Orléans from Fontainebleau in October 1694.121
An Italian work of 1589 warns, ‘“let no one, whoever he may be, before, at, or after meals, early or late, foul the staircases, corridors, or closets with urine or other filth, but go to suitable, prescribed places for such relief”’.122 (Note the phrase ‘whoever he may be’. This seems to imply status, as if the highest born are especially likely to piss or shit wherever they please.) Even when people did use ‘prescribed places’, many were in the habit of standing on or over the toilet – and, perhaps, often aiming poorly. As eighteenth-century French schoolmasters increasingly sought to stamp out this habit it was arranged that they should, accordingly, be able to see the floor and ceiling of the lavatory cubicles from their chairs … 123
Perhaps most remarkable of all is a guide to manners dating from 1558. ‘It does not’, admonishes the author, ‘befit a modest, honourable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence of other people, nor to do up his clothes afterward in their presence’. And
for the same reason it is not a refined habit when coming across something disgusting in the street … to turn at once to one’s companion and point it out to him. It is far less proper to hold out the stinking thing for the other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other to do so, lifting the foul-smelling thing to his nostrils and saying, “I should like to know how much that stinks” … 124
Even assuming that the waggish gentleman here is gloved, the scenario is arresting. It seems almost certain that the disgusting ‘something’ is either human or animal faeces. The joker is ready to pick it up, and his companion is – evidently – prepared to show considerable tolerance as it is thrust into his face. How much, then, did the Renaissance city stink during a long dry summer? Imagine the foulest urine-soaked alleyway, one hot Sunday morning. Garnish it with a dead cat, some rats, and perhaps even a mule.125 Stir in the contents of human and animal bladders and bowels, and heat until vomiting point … you are now just beginning to uncover a few threads of the richly coloured tapestry of urban smells, circa 1600.
For all the Duchess’s complaint, we have perhaps already begun to sense that for many the habits described above were not simply a matter of brute necessity. True, the lack of complex underground sewers and of effective antibacterial agents were basic facts of life. The fumes of animal blood and offal, smoking out into the neighbouring air around the shambles, or slaughterhouse, were equally inescapable. But in many other areas people lived in filth as a matter of routine tolerance, or of active and rational choice. Soap did exist. Yet, while people washed small areas of their bodies (most often, those which would be seen) almost no one ever bathed.126 This was thought to be positively harmful. Francis Bacon marvels at the habitual bathing of the Romans, and notes that the Turks, similarly addicted to this vice, could escape its effects only because their diet of rice specially toughened their bodies against the invasion of the water.127 Around 1671, John Burbury marvelled, similarly, at the excessive ‘cleanliness of the Turks, who, as they had occasion to make urine … afterwards washed their hands, as they do still before and after their eating, which with them is as often as their prayers, four or five times a day’.128
Queen Elizabeth, notes Lawrence Wright, had very fine ‘bathing-rooms’, but took a bath just once a month, ‘“whether she need it or no”’.129 Keith Thomas, noting that in 1653 ‘the diarist John Evelyn resolved’ to wash his head ‘once a year’, goes on to cite a popular proverb of the day: ‘“Wash thy hands often, thy face seldom, but thy head never”’.130 Smith notes how the 1648 attempt of Dr Peter Chamberlen to introduce London public baths was contemptuously scotched by Cromwell’s administration, which feared the consequent ‘“physical prejudice, effeminating bodies and procuring infirmities”’, and the expected moral ‘“debauching … of the people”’.131 In the eighteenth century, French doctors still ‘condemned the harmful effects of thoughtless use of water. Overfrequent ablutions and … baths’, they believed, ‘weakened animalization and therefore sexual desire’.132
While the affluent or rich might in some cases change their clothes now and then, the poorer sort would retain the same set for weeks on end. Perfume was used by some members of both sexes. But it was intended chiefly to ‘protect oneself and to purify the surrounding air’ – that is, to ward off disease, and to secure one’s own olfactory comfort, rather than that of others. And, if you ever did travel in Dr Who’s TARDIS to Renaissance London, you might want to know a bit more about its choices of perfumes before using them yourself. There was, for example, a ‘long-lived fashion for animal perfumes with an odour of excrement’. (Hence the use of secretions from the anal glands of the zibeth, or civet cat, which we met above.) Add to this the fact that musk, ‘a waste product originating in the putrid guts of the musk deer’ was especially popular; that, if your musk had lost its scent, you should refresh it by hanging it over ‘“a humid floor … particularly near a privy”’; and that the promisingly named ‘Eau de Mille Fleurs’ included human excrement as a key ingredient, and you begin to realise that perfume may have been part of the problem, rather than its solution.133 As Michael Stoddart notes, ‘at the time of her death the walls of the Empress Josephine’s rooms were so heavily impregnated with the sexual lure of the Himalayan musk deer’ that men working there suffered nausea and fainting spells.134
The Dead, the Sick, and the Jail
So much, then, for the living and the relatively healthy. Let us imagine for a moment that a smell is a sound. How loud was the stench of the past? We can estimate modern olfactory environments as a kind of background hum or whispering, punctuated by a few harsher percussions. In a rich man’s house circa 1600, your nose could barely hear itself think. In a one-room hovel, shared with several children, chickens and cattle, the din rose to a mind-shattering cacophony. Meanwhile, the dead contributed their own
special flavours to this complex and gamey olfactory recipe. They rotted on gibbets, as we saw in chapter three (with the bad trick played on the honest butcher in fact being an updated version of a punishment supposedly practised by certain Roman emperors – in that latter case you could be tied to a corpse until you perished). They stared down sightlessly from city gates.
Beneath them, dead dogs, cats, and mules were left rotting in streets, alleyways and courtyards. Rats, which often lived within the relatively porous walls of pre-modern houses, died there on occasion, decaying pungently out of reach.135 In Paris, the notoriously ill-designed and overcrowded cemetery of Les Innocentes overpowered its neighbours so violently by the late eighteenth century that (as Patrick Suskind puts it) the citizens arose to ‘actual insurrection’ and forced its closure.136 In 1839, whilst making a survey of London burials, George Walker described the private London burial chamber of Enon Chapel in Clement’s Lane. This was ‘separated from the chapel above only by floorboards’, and Walker ‘graphically described repellent black flies living off the putrefaction of the bodies … in the summer … the stench was simply intolerable’.137
We have heard how, after the Battle of Marston Moor the stench of corpses ‘almost poisoned them that passed over the moor’.138 In that case the author uses ‘poisoned’ quite literally, reflecting the general belief that such smells were contagious – hence the tolling funeral bell in the weeks following the battle. In other cases the reek of death became a deliberate military weapon in its own right. Back in the early centuries of Christianity, Vandal hordes besieging castles would heap up corpses beneath the walls, ‘that by the stench thereof they might force them to surrender’.139 In the fourteenth century one army was supposed to have actually catapulted corpses over the walls in order to compel the submission of those within. Such tactics no doubt continued as the Wars of Religion ravaged Europe after the Reformation.140 In keeping with this theory of contagion, it was believed that plague could be caught via smell alone. One author wrote that, in 1635 (a particular nadir of the Thirty Years War) ‘such an infection happened through the stench of the dead unburied bodies, that in the Bishopric of Metz alone there died of this and hunger twenty four thousand people’.141 Only in the 1880s would the scientific authorities of France emphatically abandon belief in olfactory contagion: ‘“we can repeat that everything that stinks does not kill, and everything that kills does not stink”’.142
Somewhere in between these two relatively well-defined zones of the living and dead there lay shadowy and fertile limbos. Hospitals, sickrooms and prisons had smells all their own. If the reek of disease was not always deadly, it was often hardly less overpowering. In the fourteenth century Catherine of Siena (c. 1370) was treating a sick nun. This woman (notes William Miller) ‘had a cancer on her breast that put forth such an awful smell that no one would attend her in her sickness’. Catherine was the only volunteer. And even she, we are told, more than once vomited spontaneously at the extremity of this stench.143 Nature itself must have multiplied similar cases such as this across Europe up to and through the nineteenth century. But some doctors also tried their best to add to the overwhelming aromas of disease. For precise medical reasons, the eminent Dutch physician Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck warned that a sufferer from smallpox should be left unmoved and unchanged for up to fourteen days: ‘far better it is to suffer the shifts of the patient, moist with sweat, to dry of themselves with the heat of the bed, and for the patient for some days to bear with the stench of the sweat, and the pustles coming forth, than to change his linen and be the cause of his own death’. If ‘there be an urgent necessity for the patient to change his linen’, they should then ‘have the same foul linen’ which they had discarded just before their sickness. Newly washed linen is most dangerous of all, van Diemerbroeck warns. Why? Well – naturally enough – because of the lingering smell of soap.144
Dead pigeons must have also become quite aromatic after remaining some time by a patient’s body. On 22 September 1689 a Dr Cotton applied these not to the feet but to the head of one Mrs Patty, a woman who was suffering from violent convulsions. We have no idea what she felt about this. But we do know that the birds were there on her pillow for almost five days. If a week is a long time in politics, five days is a pretty fair while to be intimate with rotting pigeons. We can at least rest assured that this affluent woman was attended by the finest doctors, as one of her consultants was in fact Thomas Willis. The treatment would have been thought successful, as the birds were removed only when the patient ‘appeared somewhat better in her senses’ on the morning of the 26th.145 At times the human body, afflicted with a putrescent living death, could outdo the stench of mere dead birds. Just before he died, the amputation victim seen by John Evelyn had gangrene so severe that one could have ‘run a straw through’ the rotted leg. And, Evelyn adds, ‘I do not remember that ever in my life I smelt so intolerable a stink’ as that of this man’s sundered leg – consequently ordering that it should ‘immediately be buried in the garden’.146
If the sick, in some of these cases, began to hope for death, they were not alone. In 1686 Louis XIV coerced the Duke of Savoy into assisting with the persecution of the Waldenses, a heretical sect whose members dwelt in the valleys of Piedmont. After refusing to abandon their faith, 3,000 of the Waldenses were killed, and the remaining 12,000 thrown into prison. When their historian, Gilbert Burnet, stated that the imprisoned survivors were hardly more fortunate than the slain, he was scarcely exaggerating:
corruption … had engendered abundance of lice that would not let the prisoners sleep night nor day … there were several sick persons … that were … eaten up alive with worms; for by continual lying, as not being able to rise or lift themselves up, these poor people were become so mangy, that their very skin being already putrified, parted from their flesh and mouldered away in pieces: they left them thus flayed and miserably languishing till death put a period to all their sufferings.147
This kind of environment may have been a little harder for the genteel than it was for ‘ordinary criminals’ – a point worth noting, given that the imprisonment of eminent men (Donne and Cellini are just two examples) was a fairly routine hazard of the era. Not all such figures complained openly about their temporarily degraded living conditions. But one response is particularly memorable. In the eighteenth century, ‘the comte de Struensee, taken out of his dungeon to be beheaded, cried out: “Oh, the happiness of breathing fresh air!”’.148
The conditions of many early modern prisons do indeed seem to have amounted to a kind of living hell. To the abundance of rats, lice and spiders we must add not only darkness, but severe extremes of heat and cold. If you had no immediate friends or relatives nearby you stood to go without food (which was not the jail’s responsibility) or a change of clothing. If it was summer, plague and dysentery bristled through the mire of piss and shit like electricity down wires. If it was winter, matters may not be much more pleasant. On one occasion, the French magistrate, Dr Cottu, visited a dungeon in Reims prison:
I felt I was being stifled by the horrible stench that hit me as soon as I entered … At the sound of my voice, which I tried to make soft and consoling, I saw a woman’s head emerge from the dung; as it was barely raised, it presented the image of a severed head thrown onto the dung; all the rest of this wretched woman’s body was sunk in excrement … Lack of clothing had forced her to shelter from the stringencies of the weather in her dung.149
This incident is so extraordinary as to challenge the capacities of the modern imagination. A few decades ago, admittedly, farm workers would often deliberately stand in fresh cow pats on chill mornings. But – to make a kind of impromptu blanket out of around five cubic feet of human shit … ? Cottu’s vivid image – a severed head perched on a dung heap – forces us to realise not only that the woman was more comfortable in this situation, but that it was possible for a prison to achieve this level of degradation: a mound of excrement so large that it could cocoon an entire
human body.
Sensory Invasion
If we remained in any doubt, the above example should persuade us that the inhabitants of pre-modern Europe generally had a considerably higher stink threshold than most of us. (Even Cottu, after all, had to endure this for some time, and it is not merely whimsical to emphasise that it was not his excrement.) To some extent, this tolerance must have been a matter of sheer brute necessity. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier put it, in his attack on eighteenth-century Paris:
If I am asked how anyone can stay in this filthy haunt of all the vices … amid an air poisoned by a thousand putrid vapours, among butchers’ shops, cemeteries, hospitals, drains, streams of urine, heaps of excrement … in the midst of the arsenic, bituminous, and sulphurous parts that are ceaselessly exhaled by workshops … I would say that familiarity accustoms the Parisians to humid fogs, maleficent vapours, and foul-smelling ooze.150
Doubtless some people suffered more than others. And perhaps each person had their own catalogue of most intolerable odours. We will see in a moment that mere physical familiarity was by no means the only factor involved. But let us pause just briefly to consider the special qualities of smell as a whole.
Like noise, smell invades us. Other senses do not involve the same aggressive penetration: we can avoid tasting, touching or looking at things that repel us. But sound and smell cannot very easily be shut out (although in the latter case we seem sometimes to try, as when our bodies noticeably shrink or stiffen under intense olfactory pressures). At least in relative terms, the way in which most of us routinely experience unwanted noise is quite similar to pre-modern exposure to bad smells. Yet, while it is thought that noise pollution – and amplification in general – tends to deaden aural sensitivity, the reverse seems to have been true in the rich, almost canine environment of the pre-modern world.