This is very recent but ties in with our discussion on medieval sanitation. In that there was some curiousity over how long their (ie 1400) conditions survived. In a recent booklet on a Herefordshire village I find: May 1877. School Inspector: When I entered, the atmosphere simply stank. The wall is so damp that a new map of England has already much rotted off the canvas, and good sized fungi were growing out of the wall......And in 1909 a grant was refused as the drain,waste water from the masters house,and the boys urinal were discharging into an open ditch. Two years later - 1911 - it was ordered that the lavatory pails be screened from view and to provide doors to the latrines. They finally got modern lavatories September 1949. ********************************************************************************** The point of this is to stress we should not always sneer or go ugh at our predecessors way of life; this description could easily have fitted or been worse than a serfs hovel back in 1400.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 12:53:09 +0000
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