The image below is often shared as an example of bad medieval hygiene, specifically to support the idea that emptying a chamber pot out of the window was a normal, generally accepted, common and/or regular occurrence in Medieval Europe.
But the truth is a little different.
First some of the technical details, the image comes from page 157 (77R) of the book titled ‘Daß Narrenschyff’ (in English best known as ‘The ship of fools‘), published in 1494 in Basel, Switzerland, by Sebastian Brant.
The book is a so called satirical allegory, so it’s a sort of critique of people misbehaving, a story with lots of situations that point out and then ridicule and satirize society and everything wrong with it.
In this book one hundred fools travel around and do all the things Herr Brant but also medieval society in general, considered dubious or just plain bad behaviour.
The specific chapter that this illustration depicts is when the fools go out at night and start making a nuisance of themselves by being loud and silly.
They make music and hope to attract the attention of women.
The title is ‘von nachtes hofieren’, which means as much as of nightly wooing or courting.
I don’t know about you, but I can totally appreciate someone serenading me, I do not want this to be done by a bunch of strangers and while I’m trying to sleep.
But the scene is rather familiar, if you’ve lived in a city you’ll quite regularly would have seen and heard groups of rather drunk and annoying men making quite a lot of noise and trying to get attention while everybody else is trying to sleep.
And that is what’s happening here.
The response they get is the response they deserve.
On the ground we see rocks, perhaps thrown by other people woken up by their tomfoolery, but the lady who lives at this address has an even better idea.
She empties a pot with liquid in it onto the yobs.
Is it a chamber pot?
We don’t know, it could be!
A chamber pot would be something she’d have by her bed so easy to grab first but it would also not be unreasonable to assume that a pot with water would be there, ready to wash the face with first thing in the morning.
I am leaning towards it being a chamber pot but the text doesn’t tell us.
Why the lady is naked?
It may be to suggest she’s perhaps not really a lady but actually a woman of dubious character, loose morals!
But it could also just be that she was sleeping naked, which was quite common back then.
So, to conclude, the image may in fact actually depict a woman emptying a chamber pot out of a window into the street, but she is not doing it because that’s what people back then did with human waste, she’s doing it because some annoying eejits are causing a racket outside her house while she is trying to sleep.
Anyone using this image to try and illustrate the medieval lack of hygiene, how filthy medieval cities were or that medieval people were flinging poo and pee out the window like it was the most normal thing in the world, is being disingenuous.
So what about people emptying chamber pots out of windows?
I’m not going to say it never happened, it did, we have records of people complaining about it.
But it was seen as disgusting and wrong, there were laws, fines and nobody thought it was even remotely normal.
It was also not a common thing and until cities became overpopulated and the yards & gardens where normally cesspits & outhouses were situated started to vanish, there simply was no need for it.
For most of the middle ages even having a second floor was rare.
Sometimes the records are also unclear about what exactly is dumped out which window, in some cases they can be talking about dirty dishwater, also not nice but well, it could be worse.
Anyway, more about that in the sources below.
Sources and more to read about this topic here:
- Medieval Myths Bingo
- Book review: ‘Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries’ by Janna Coomans
- Book review: ‘Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities’ by Carole Rawcliffe
- Ship of fools trope
- Full original scans of the book online
Fake History Hunter 
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