Virtual Grub Street: A Brief History of the Castle Jakes.

Latrines at the
Castle of Marcoussis.

In this Series:

A Brief History of the Castle Jakes.
Sleeping in the Jakes: Civilized Life in the Middle Ages.

This article first appeared in Virtual Grub Street on 7/7/19.

While our popular histories have no place for exploring the ins and outs of answering nature’s call in the Middle Ages, the subject keeps popping up in the historical records. Over the centuries, a small group of intrepid detail-ists have gathered together a small collection of facts into their works.

Viollet le Duc, the great French architect, is the go-to guy, now for two centuries, on the subject of the castle jakes. We learn from his Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture that Landsperg Castle,[1] on the Rhine, erected early in the 12^th century,[2] sported single toilets, strategically placed around the castle, in corbels hollow on the bottom. The human waste fell down the castle wall to the ground below. Undoubtedly, the area below the corbel was avoided by all.

The intact corbel that survived long enough for le Duc to study, had a long stone tail at the bottom. We are informed that the stone was placed there in such latrines in order to block arrows from the bows of besieging forces from inflicting a rather embarrassing death-wound on one or another tenant’s exposed posterior.

What came before this design is a bit more difficult to determine. No structural latrines tend to be in evidence. Chambers pots in chambers and under stairwells are supported by circumstantial evidence. Servants would have been tasked with emptying them in some appropriate place.

Le Duc chose the mid-14^th century Langley Castle, in Northumberland, for an example of the next stage of the castle jakes. At Langley, instead of a single corbel, each successive floor projected out some four feet further than the floor below from a tower to the southwest. The projections were built-out into latrines, each with a clear path to the ground. In modern real estate terms, the castle featured a half-bath at the end of each floor.

The next stage is represented by the Castle of Marcoussis,[3] some 25 kilometers south of Versailles, built in 1409. Marcoussis also featured stacked projections. Each floor, however, had four discrete stalls defined by arches. More still, the bottom of the latrine was not open to the ground. It was enclosed in a semi-circular tower housing flues from each level that dropped to a cesspit excavated in the basement. In order to prevent fumes from the pit traveling upward into the latrines, an outermost flue rose to an upper window to provide ventilation.

Pierrefonds Castle[4] was being built at nearly the same time as Marcoussis. Its latrine tower, and its enclosed flues, are detached from the main castle edifice, however, in order to suppress odors still more effectively. The cesspit is ventilated by a vent directly out of the basement wall.

Colchester Castle, in England, also has a detached tower. This makes it likely that the latrines were added in the 15^th century. The surrounding walls, however, hold secrets of the castle’s Roman origins and it is not clear that it didn’t have a very different plumbing history than any other castle. Were the latrines reconstructed from the materials of a totally destroyed Temple of Claudius? Or did connection points to the cloaca beneath it allow for ancient amenities available only here in the entire country? All other castles in England were built once and rarely if ever expanded.[5] But none included Roman stones and stucco and had access to an existing Roman sewer. This apparently added 15^th century tower appears to violate those rules entirely.

That said, none of these assignments of certain styles to certain centuries should imply that there was the least standardization. Hampton Court, built in the 15^th century, featured a 14 seat Great House of Easement that discharged directly into the moat. This likely because water was conveniently at hand and the throwback approach to the problem cost considerably less money.

Royalty and the highest nobility would not be caught dead at the Great House. Instead they utilized chamber pots and richly upholstered stools, emptied by servants. Some variation on this arrangement was surely practiced in each castle throughout Europe.

Windsor Castle was built quickly, in the 11^th century, on the plan of an existing Saxon wooden palisade. The dirt ground floors of the palisade remained dirt until the 18^th century when cesspools are also said to first have been installed. The yards around it that were brought within the castle precincts also offered ground floors of dirt. This made it preferable for pits to be dug in the ground and wooden (sometimes stone) enclosures to be built around them.

Entries in accounting roles make clear that many latrines around the Windsor complex were built over pits excavated in the ground. A fifteenth century entry shows payment for cleaning the pit of a latrine. In 1344, a Richard Munday was paid for building a wooden cover over a cesspit of some sort below the chambers of a Lord Vescey, indicating that sufficiently wealthy courtiers did improve their circumstances.

When upgrades were done to the castle, in the 18^th century, enclosing elevated latrines, in the castle walls, was recorded. Those latrines are said to have been there since time immemorial. The resulting flues terminated below ground in 51 cesspools.[6] Latrines, flues and cesspools were in turn removed during the reign of Queen Victoria.

[1] le Duc, Voillet. Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe ... (1863), Vol. VI, pages 163-170.

[2] Incledon, Charles V. The Taunus; or, Doings and undoings, a tour (1837). 625. “It is supposed to have been built about 1112 by a celebrated robber knight, and to have, after the death of the knight, (assassinated by one of his own retainers at the instigation of a powerful noble whose wife he had carried off and kept confined in his castle),…”

[3] le Duc, VI. 166-8. Illustration @ 168.

[4] Le Duc, VI. 167-169. Illustration @ 169.

[5] Structural modification to castles proper began to be practice more from the reign of Edward VI. As will be seen, Windsor Castle defies this as all norms.

[6] Rawlinson, Robert. “Windsor Castle. Report on the Sewerage, Water Supply,…” etc. The Builder, Volume 21. 41-3 @ 42.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

Sleeping in the Jakes: Civilized Life in the Middle Ages. June 30, 2019. “But why before the “Third Dormitory”? And why was the Third Dormitory built two stories up on stone column-and-arch stilts?”
A Thousand Years of English Terms. June 2, 2019. ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”. There was no clock to be o’. But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’
History of the Medieval Fork… or Lack Thereof. March 28, 2019. “The Italian and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, doe alwaies at their meales use a little forke, when they cut their meate.”
Shakespeare’s Barnacles. March 3, 2016. “Prospero will wake, he fears, before they can murder him, and will cast a spell on them.”
The King's Esnecce. January 13, 2019. “It comes as no surprise, then, that when Maud’s son, Henry Plantagenet, Count or Duke of most of the western territories of France, and, by terms of the treaty, heir to Stephen, next rose to the throne as Henry II, he was quick to arrange for the safest possible means of transit across the channel.”
Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.