Can you think of an ickier way to die than this? Delight me with your creativity in the comments below and remember to check out: BUY MY BOOK (Find Your Irish Ancestors Online): amzn.to/3Z2ChnG Website (with 2 FREE DOWNLOADS): www.historycallingofficial.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/historycalling Amazon storefront: www.amazon.com/shop/historycalling Instagram: instagram.com/historycalling/
Okay here's a really yucky one for you and it's a true story. About 30 years ago one of my nephew's age about 12:00 was going to the bathroom in an outhouse on my father's very ill prepared land and fell in and they were rattlesnakes down there he was just lucky he didn't get bitten I'd have died from Fright!!!
Okay I just thought of one. I use this as a form of execution in an as yet unpublished fantasy adventure manuscript. Execution by being forced to swallow molten lead. Probably counts more as nightmare fuel than icky. IDK.
As a german historian used to reading those kinds of scripts, here a little translation of the script: Also the aforementioned Landgraf Ludwig of Thuringia was in dispute with the archbishop of Mayence (Mainz); to reconcile this, the emperor scheduled a day in Erfurt, in the month of July in the year of 1184, where a an unexpected and horrendous accident occurred. The emperor with his counts/earls (Grafen) and knights who attended on him sojourned in a hall of the convent, which was a very old building, below which the monks had a common room or speaking-house(?). As the influx of people was very high and the old beams couldn't bear the weight, they broke, so all who were in the hall, with little exception, fell with the wood and other materials deep into the privily chamber. Emperor Friederich held woefully onto an iron window grating next to him, and was retrieved from there. Over 100 people, with them 6 born counts/earls (Grafen), were struck to death or crushed, or spoiled in the refuse, because help couldn't get to them in time. With those who lay at the bottom of the excrement and drowned in it was Graf Henrich von Schwartzburg, who used to say: "If this isn't true, I'll die in a crapper!"
As someone who’s built a couple of composting toilets (both for indoor use and at campsites), I have to chime in in defense of latrines. If they’re not built well, with ventilation and enough dry material, they will stink because of the anaerobic decomposition that happens (basically a perfect environment for harmful bacteria to breed). If you include enough carbon, like sawdust, dry leaves, etc. along with some soil to encourage efficient breakdown of the waste (the ideal is about 30:1 « dry » to « wet » stuff), then there’s almost no odor, it breaks down quickly, and transforms into something indistinguishable from ordinary compost-rich soil within about two to three years. The trick is just making sure that it’s not near your drinking water source in the meantime.
The process you mentioned of combining carbon and nitrogen components is very effective, and a careful ratio is virtually odorless! I had a fellow Master Composter acquaintance years ago who lived out in the boonies where water had to be trucked in and it was very expensive. Their family of four utilized two 5-gallon buckets to facitate their private business. One bucket was topped with a toilet seat, and the other was kept full of sawdust. When the deposit bucket was near full, it was hauled out and dumped into a large dedicated compost pile for "humanure" - there is a book or two on the subject. This routine was followed until they could afford to have a water well drilled. Unfortunately, the science of the proper C:N ratio for effective aerobic composting was not well understood nor embraced until several centuries after this pit-iful disaster occurred. Controlled decomposition can be a very beautiful thing.
I spent summers at camp using latrines. They weren’t my favorite bathroom ever, but they also weren’t anywhere near as awful as they sound. I chose to work at the camp for two summers. Just about any remote toilet in North America is some sort of pit toilet or outhouse, and I’m not shy about using them at all. Composting toilets are an improvement in terms of smell. Public port-a- johns are generally repulsive, especially in the heat with all the human waste and chemicals trapped in a hot box.
I can only imagine how horrible people smelled in general, that having a room situated above a latrine pit could even be tolerated. I toured Ross Castle in Ireland years ago, and the guide told us the residents would hang their clothing in the long hallway to the toilet to "wash" them of bugs. The castles hole hung over the side of the castle wall. The smell was so bad even the lice bailed! 😆 Let us say a prayer of thanks to the saint of indoor plumbing.
The reason they hung clothes up in the "garderobe" was because ammonia gets rid of lice and fleas. No idea if this really works but people did this for centuries.
Ummm outdoor latrines with the correct knowledge and composting are awesome and FINE….no smell whatsoever it’s only your modern arrogance & zero education on anything to do with his most in human history developed plumbing or compost latrines……to think that ONLY indoor plumbing is somehow the only way to use a bathroom 🙄 I mean come ON the Roman’s had awesome indoor bathrooms and “plumbing” that was 1,000yrs or more removed from supposedly peasants of the 12th century. You must not like or read much history to even say such nonsense.
@@LittleKitty22exactly! What I also meant by uneducated opinions or comments especially when it deals with history are just pointless frankly…..add nothing but confusion and assumptions. 🙄😖
My grandmother lived in a two up, two down miners house and the toilet was in the backyard. This was in the late 50’s /early 60’s. Pieces of newspaper threaded on a string were used as toilet tissue. A man used to come and empty the toilets regularly. They were horrendous in the summer. Buzzing flies and the smell 🤢Bucket in the bedroom was utilized during the night if you needed to urinate. Anything else required you to venture out in the dark to use the toilet. Stuff of nightmares!
Yes, I have family who remember using newspaper too. During lockdown 1, when loo roll was in short supply because people were panic buying, there was a moment when I wondered if we might end up reverting to that! On a side note - that poor man. What an awful job!
My great-aunt lived in a very rural area during the 60s, and she and my uncle still used an outhouse. I remember when I was three, I was terrified of going into the dark, smelly, creepy hut with a huge, gaping hole I was afraid I'd fall through. At least they had a roll of actual toilet paper in there....
I stayed at my grandparents in Cumberland, woke up in the morning, bursting to go, only to find the rear end of a cow blocking in the w.c. and I couldn’t get it to back out.😭 It had crossed a bec and a stream to trap itself in there too.
We had latrines at summer camp when I was a kid. Some weren’t quite so bad, but the ones at Girl Scout camp were eye-wateringly awful. I would hold my breath and pee as fast as I could. In the summer heat, you can imagine how nasty this was. My mother thought I was exaggerating until she attended parents’ day at the end of the session and saw for herself just how bad the camp was. (There were other problems besides the toilets, which I won’t enumerate here). Needless to say, I never went back there.
You're the third person in the last hour to mention the horrors of Girl Scout latrines. What the heck was going on with this organisation and how did it never make the national news?!
@@HistoryCalling LOL-I am sure the girl-scout lavatorhea is not National News. But the horrors occuring due to the use of them may be. Having been to The Glastobury Festival a few times I knowfor sure that lavatorhea are often news items. So much so they are famous. Of course for 150,000 festival goers there is a need of some 200 or more lavatorhea (Porta-loos). At certain times there can be queues some 20 persons long at a bank of say 15 porta lavatorheas. Incidentally. Did you know that 'Rhea was said to be a goddess who eased childbirth for women' (WikiMay28th2024). Rhea being feminin or a Godess then it is an appropriat name for the Ladies Loo whilst Lavatory being the masculine or neutor.
@@HistoryCalling The lack of clean toilets in schools was cited by a paediatric nephrologist (when I was working as a GP near Nottingham some years ago) as a contributory factor of recurrent urinary tract infections, ascending pyelonephritis and ultimately renal failure in young girls. It's perhaps a problem that transgresses time but needs to be brought to the public attention. Thank you for your brilliant video!
@@HistoryCalling This was back in the late 1970s; I should have clarified. I have no idea what the situation is like today, or even if this one camp in particular is even still operational. I attended two summers: 1977 and 1978, IIRC. I didn't want to go back the second year, but a friend I had made in my GS troop twisted my arm. Cue the first day of camp, and she returned home with a VERY long face and the gloomy realization she still had 9 more days to get through (blessedly it was a day camp and we didn't have to stay overnight!). This was a camp in the suburbs north of Boston, MA in the USA. Not going to name names to protect the innocent and the guilty. The other horrors of the place included a hill down to the swimming area so steep it's amazing nobody slipped and killed herself going downhill. (The second year, the camp had created a switchback path so that people could get down the hill more gradually and safely). My first year, a yellow jackets' nest in an old flagpole was disturbed, causing the bees to swarm out: I was stung three times. The pond where we went swimming was horrible: slimy muck underfoot at one end, a gravel pit underfoot at the other. All this on top of the most disgusting latrines that can be imagined. The place basically put me off camping for the rest of my life. I will never understand the appeal.
Funnily enough during WW2 a German U-boat was captured off the coast of Scotland because of a toilet disaster, U1206 began to flood after it's skipper incorrectly used the recently installed high-pressure toilet which could be flushed while the craft was submerged. Embarrassing but not fatal.
For whatever reason, Germans insisted on toilets that were so complicated they had to have people trained to operate them and only they were allowed to flush them. The problem is because of the difference in pressure between outside of the U boat and inside and the fact that you have to open a pipe that is inside, to the outside, to let the sewage out. Captain apparently thought he knew everything and knew how to flush the toilet. He didn't. The sea rushed in through the toilet.
I'm having a hard time imagining how a German U-boat surrendered because of a septic screw up... On the other hand, it probably saved their lives from what would come...
Sometimes I wish I could hop back in time to see what eras were really like. Then I watch videos like this and thank goodness I was born with inside potable running water!
I'm a former nurse, EMT and medical lab technician. Your warning made me laugh, then I grabbed dinner and am sitting down to watch. I've heard worse than from colleagues than this latrine stuff, while eating, many times. I guess we are able to separate ourselves from such things on the job while dealing with disgusting real life situations. The thought of nobles finally seeing things from the peasants' POV is actually humorous. addendum: That was not that gross. You explained it tactfully, for the uninitiated's temperament. My question: How did someone in Germany conract malaria? Was it endemic or did the guy travel to malaria-infested places beforehand? Thanks! Love this channel, and just subscribed!
Europe wasn’t malaria free until the 1970s and it was endemic back then. It’s gone now because of insecticides, etc. I Googled it a while ago because I was watching something about Henry VIII’s medical history and he suffered from it and I was confused 🤔
Thanks Alan. Glad I gained you as a subscriber and didn't send you running for the hills. Yes, I would imagine having worked in healthcare you don't scare easily. I don't know about malaria I'm afraid. Sorry :-(
I was a science major in college and worked in a lab for a couple of years. My mom worked in a pathology lab. Almost nothing can turn my stomach. I watched this video while eating dinner and didn't turn a hair. HC was amazingly tactful/ funny in her narration!
Malaria existed in Southern Europe and North Africa until not long ago. Also, at the time (1184), Europe (and the entire Northern hemisphere) was experiencing the Medieval Warm Period, with temperatures much warmer than today (to the extend they were growing wine in England). Malaria would have been going round like there's no tomorrow. The climate only cooled down during the Little Ice Age (ca 1250 - 1860).
Also, remember not to light your pipe or cigarette in a latrine to smoke out the odour, you might be blasted all over the farmyard when those fumes ignite! Ventilation is vital. People save their wood ash from their stoves and fireplaces to sprinkle into the pit to make things bearable. Awful but essential places, those.
Well, I can read the old German text, and here is what I gleaned from it. It seems the Kaiser Friedrich (Barbarossa) called this meeting in Erfurt in July 1184. It happened at the monastery of St. Peter. He brought his court and all his knights. All of them were in one large hall. It was a popular event and (towns) people came in in droves. And then the old beams gave out. Kaiser Friedrich held on barely to a window iron, from which he was rescued. Over 100 people, including 6 Counts were struck dead or squashed to death because help did not come in time. Among the ones on the bottom of the excrements, who drowned in them, was the Count of Schwartzburg who was in the habit of saying and swearing: "If this is not true, then I'll die in a shithouse!" This ids a rough translation, I left a few things out.... Hope that helps! Karin, German herbalist, Laramie, Wyoming
Great story well told. Brings back memories of a similar recent incident. A farm worker told his boss there was a manhole cover missing in a bunch of stinging nettles at his farm. The farmer went to inspect and suddenly fell in the hole which turned out to be a cess pit full of excrement his own and water. He fell head first and banged his shoulder on the side wall during his fall which dislocated his shoulder. Suddenly he was floating in water surrounded by excrement etc 5 feet below entrance with no way out. His phone was wet so knackered, so he shouted in vain whilst feeling the cold water slowly drain the strength from his body. The farm was isolated so no one heard him. Fortunately a new housing development had recently been built a few hundered yards away. One of the residents happened to come out on this Monday morning to mow his lawn and heard faint sounds of 'HELP HELP' in the distance so walked across the field in his direction. The fire brigade and an ambulance were summoned and rescued him just in the nick of time as he was about to drown. The Guys name is Andrew Hunter and he lives in Bedfordshire UK. One very lucky guy!
@@pearlsaminger9544 Yes exceptionally lucky. The guy who heard him had recently been made redundant so was pure chance he was at home on Monday morning. As luck would have it hewent out to cut his lawn. and heard cries for help. Bet he's still at the top on the farmers Christmas list! The farmer retired shortly afterwards, maybe due to thinking it was time to relax and enjoy life...
My dear, I am 72. Grandma and Grandpa didn't HAVE indoor toilet. It was the outside privy or the chamber pot! At my house, we didn't get the indoor plumbing till I was 7. Yes, the late 1950s! After that, the outdoor privy was still the place of choice when playing outdoor so you didn't have to go in. That are/were what they were!
Usually there was a collection of newspaper cutting's ready at hand. We had an outside toilet late fifties or early sixties. Who back in those days would ever have imagined to invention of super soft loo roll. Being service families children we still used only goverment issue paper. It seemed also to be the standard issue in all the schools. Just and example of how much we were cared for in those days. Years before Thatherism and the ending of free school milk and to many the beginning of the demise of society as we knew it.
I still remember an old aunt of mine who died in the 1990s when I was very young and she had an outdoor loo at her house. It was plumbed in (though I'm sure it hadn't always been) so you could flush it, but boy or boy was it cold in the winter having to go out there. She was hardy though. She was 91 when she died and still using that outdoor loo.
@@MikeGreenwood51Old, outdated catalogs were hung on a string so the pages were available for the obvious purpose. Never used them myself, but corncobs were also used--after the kernels had been rubbed off, of course.
In 2007, at Gaza, there was a sewage tsunami that killed five people, injured many and flooded a village. Apparently a sewage treatment containment wall burst causing the brown wave of death. It sounds close to the same horror's of Erfurt, but at least it was rich nobles and not common poor folks that meet a very sticky ending. Either way, not a fun event, especially rescuing them, yuck.
Having used several ‘outhouses’ in my time, as they’re called in the states, terrible death as a descriptor doesn’t come close to the horror, I’m sure. I had seen a story of worker in a canning factory killed in a dreadful manner. As the cans of tuna are sealed, they’re loaded en mass into a large autoclave for final sealing and sterilization. This incident saw the man accidentally sealed in along with the cans and unable to be heard or able to free himself. Neither being an instant death, both equally awful. I shiver at both.
Here is a horrifying real true story. At least I find it horrifying. Happened back in the Nineteen-Seventees circa '74 in the summer when I was a teen working in a cardbord box factory pre college just after my final school year. The man did not some how die but it's enough to make a person almost sweat to think of it. Well this was a big factory used for making cardboard from paper. Paper rolls the size or a car and about 3 times as heavy. First the paper was made in to corrigated cardboard then the cardbord was cut to a rectangulor sizes and stacked on pallets then transported to a large long machine for final cutting, shapeing and possible for some printing. The maching was nearly the length of a sizable train carrige with two massive steel rollers at the beginning. Maybe each steel roller was nearly a ton in weight and could be raised apart to which ever thickness or thinness was needed. The apeture could be paper thin or large enough for think cardboard. On the day of the incident the aperture was maybe just about 3 mms (12th of an inch about). Just tight enough to seize a sheet of card fed in. From those heavy first rollers which were about 3 meters long the card was then set in to the correct guide rails. So there we have the scene. Two massive rollers rotating at speed and a machine operator sliding a single sheet of cardboard in repeatedly. All emphasis seemed to be on speed of production. But the giant hungry machine had a history of accidents and so certain safty devices had been installed over the decades which some operators learnt to by-pass. On this machine there was a large hand sized red 'STOP' button at eye level close to and ready for a quick shove by the operator in case the machine needed a quick shut down due to any accident. The button was hand sized and robust about 10cms (3 inches) across. Then the scream of agonising pain occured. The machine operator had put his fingers too close to the massive shinny steel rotating rollers with it's massive apertite which only diminished when the machine was turned off. The set aperture was set to help smooth out thin carboard so had no give at all. The fingers went in finger nails first and then more fingers and then further up the hand. The problem here is the machine operators hand is in the roller jaws and the machine emergency stop button is to the machine side designed to be stopped by a quick hand hit. There would have been other operators at other nearby machines only about 15 to 20 seconds away. But otherwise the operator with his hand trapped was alone at his one man machine. So some one must have got to the machine. The whole factory was shut down for the session whilst the fire brigade were called. Not sure why it needed the fire brigade. But maybe to cut his hand out. Or because the factory operators needed ememgercy officiallys in attendance as the job was to big for the factory nurse. I can still remember the pain of having a single finger trapped about 10 years earlier. So I can imagine the whole hand and crushing of bones to be nauseatingly agonising. I can imagine the strange relationship at the time as the basic human fail safe of fainting when sevear pain hits the body may not have worked either as the operator in that second maybe subconsciousley would not have wanted to faint. You just wouldn't want to faint whilst your hand was in between 2 tons of rotating steel due to the fear of being dragged in wholly. Apart from the operator we were all back at work the next day. Being only fifteen and not as large as the adults. One day when some card or something got stuck. They asked me to crawl in to the dust extracting vent to clear the blockage. In that instance I saw the whole factor floor with some 200 or more machines all on standby ready for the young youth (me) to crawl in. Looking very much like a network of ventilations shafts the dust extraction shafts ran back and forth across the whole factory cealing. So thousands of meters (yards). Sorry but some how I just did not trust every one and out of terror of the factory starting up the second the blockage was cleared and myself being sucked up the extraction shaft to where ever it went. I refused to enter. To me my job was not as important as myself. Luckily every one seemed to immediatly accept my refusal as reasonable.
Incidents like that are why modern Western machines are now generally designed so that a worker *cannot* lock themselves inside without several safety interlocks being deliberately disabled. And why things like LOTO (Lock Out/Tag Out) procedures and interlocks exist (and have been extended to mechanical machines when they were originally only included on high voltage electrical equipment).
Coming from a structural repair background that included working in confined spaces among others, I have seen working conditions improve immensely concerning the safety of workers. I can’t recall where this incident had taken place but it did happen in the last decade, I believe. The lack of personnel’s safety in both design and function of such a dangerous piece of equipment is appalling, to be sure.
As a wild deer (Odocoileus Virginianus) hunter in Virginia, I stayed in a cabin with an outhouse way down in the woods. Some mornings would be below zero F. I found out why people had full length under ware, called long handles, with a trap door in the rear. That door allowed you to expose no more than necessary to the bitter cold. Made a big difference.
Yeah. It makes me jealous of babies and toddlers who can just poop in their nappies, safe in the knowledge that some poor adult will clean them up so that they can do it all over again ... for roughly 3 years!
It’s not just “3rd world” countries that have latrines. They’re common in parts of Australia with no plumbing, nature reserves for example. They’re called dunnies or drop dunnies. Dunny is also slang for a toilet generally. Falling in one would be a horrendous way to go. I used to be a little scared of that whenever I had to use one as a kid. *edited for autocorrect
We have them in Canada too! Mostly while camping, or generally far away from civilization. I think they get gross when the 'input' rate is faster than the decomposition rate. The best latrines will even come with a scenic view!
Yep, the US has them too in national parks and campgrounds. Especially in the mountains, it makes sense, since the passes can close too suddenly to shut down plumbed bathrooms properly, leading to burst pipes everywhere! (
The ones in national parks are terrifying. The long drops just freak me out. We were up in Karajini in the Pilbara (north west of the country) those things are at least 6m deep I swear! Just imagine, you're 130 kms away from the nearest flush toilet & you're there for a week with your whole family & you came with you're Mum in her car so you have no car 😱
I mean I had to really resist the urge to include more toilet jokes. I kept reminding myself that they were real people and I shouldn't be too disrespectful. Twas difficult at times though.
I was a Scout (made the rank of Eagle Scout in 1994) and adult volunteer (Assistant Scoutmaster, Commissioner, and Order of the Arrow advisor - retiring in 2012). I have done my business in latrines (both old school and newer ones with chemical pits) and camping toilets. Port-a-Johns, provided they are properly cleaned and maintained, will smell better than the bathroom at dive bars.
Well done, as always HC. Thank you for your broad topic base and your strong desire to get to the real truth behind legends, it makes learning with you very interesting.
German native speaker here. Original quote at 4:42 "Als er [Heinrich]... in einer Oberstube zu Rath saß..." = "As he [Heinrich] held council (Rath) in a room on the upper floor (Oberstube)..."
I have been a historical reenactor for 50 years (17th Century.) People say to me "you should have been born then." My immediate come back is usually something on the lines of: "We wear the interesting clothing of the period, and get to swish swords about and shoot blank rounds from blackpowder muskets and cannons at each other. We do the fun bits without the lice and the fleas and the sickness and the killing. This is not to mention the lack of painless dentistry and indoor plumbing."
I’ve come across many pit toilets still in Canada and the US, so not just the third world. They’re common in very remote parks, or campsites and they are disgusting. If you’re lucky, they will provide peat moss, or something similar that you pour down it after you go and that makes the pit not smell as bad.
Oh gross. I didn't think we still had them in the west, though someone else told me you might happen across them in a few places in Australia. I wish they could just provide chemical toilets, as gross as they are too.
@@eilenekellogg-ki2br I only mentioned peat moss because I rented a cabin once that had a bucket of it for the outhouse. I’ve never had to maintain one myself, so maybe lime is better 🤷♀️
@@HistoryCalling I recommend “8 Funniest Moments in Ship History” from Oceanliner Designs. Idk how many times I’ve watched it lol, it’s entertaining. The young man who runs the channel is Australian.
I've been in a really shi*** mood lately, but this had me laughing & 'running' around the room...not really, butt like all your stories, it really was a good one!😘😂
4:57 😨😨😨😨😱 (“And others of lesser names” - REALLY?! They died drowning in POO, the least the author could do is respect them enough to not call them too unimportant to name 😅)
Quite a change from your normal fare but quite amusing. I appreciate your delicate choice of words to describe the scene. Dying this way is disgusting but not as horrible as being hung in chains or thrown into an oubliette
@@HistoryCalling I can imagine. When I was a teenager in th middle 1960's my dad was stationed in Germany and I learned to speak German to some degree. It was hard enough to get my head around some of the words as they seemed like run on sentences. I cannot imagine Medieval German.
@@1roanstephenIt very much depends on how medieval the text actually is. I could read the text in the video with some minor problems, but when i was in school, texts older than 1500 where basically unreadable.
Ok, that is indeed not funny at all and a real tragedy. :-( I'd never heard of that happening in real life in the modern world. I'm surprised they are dug deep enough for that.
WRT the latrine toilets in schools in South Africa, they are in some primary schools with little children. It is reported in the print media. Those type of toilets are referred to as long drops. Luckily we have a National and Ptovincisl general elections here on Wefnesday this week which we are all prsying it will bring about a positive chsnge.
Obviously, you haven't experienced a permanent rural outhouse with the oppressive summer heat ripening the contents below that are accompanied by annoying buzzing flies. Sometimes everything can't be accomplished in one held breath, and when you're forced to inhale again, you're not inhaling pure air into your lungs. Been there, done that, survived a broken man.
. It's a magnified version of walking into any public restroom right after someone with digestive problems has visited. You try not to think where the molecules you're breathing just came from. (Something to think about every time you walk into ANY restroom. Remember, you started it by posting this video. 😊)
After reading the translation provided by @KekisvonGriesbach, i actually believe that many more people might have died. Since the source references that 6 of the victims were counts and that corresponds to the contemporary accounts, it seems plausible that there might have been more victims that the monks deemed 'unimportant' because they weren't wealthy.
I'm not sure how well it comes across in my translation, but the german original provides the number of "more than 100 people" which in common understanding here would most likely refer to anywhere between 101 and 120. I hope that helps :)
Rath is not a place name, it means council (written Rat in modern orthography). This was not a discreet meeting between the involved noblemen, but a full "Hoftag". The whole desaster did not take place IN St. Peters Church (churches did not have latrines) but in the monastry St. Peters church belonged to. And yes, there was floor beneath the room where the noble men met, but that ceiling collapsed as well.
Many years ago I was working for a road maintenance company ane one summers day we were stopped at a roadside rest area having our lunch. This old couple stopped and went to use the porta potties. The old fellow took some time to come out of the facility and when he did he had some words with his wife. She then came over to us and asked if we would do them a favor, seemed her husband had lost his glasses down the hole. Needless to say we all refused to decend and retrieve the glasses.
Porta-johns are fairly common on military ranges (which includes manuever training areas, not just gun ranges). And every now and again, some unlucky troop will drop a weapon or other "sensitive item" down the hole. SOP is to have the troop who dropped it get it out. This is *part* of why US Army units generally prohibit taking one's weapon into the porta-john outside a combat zone (the other being suicide prevention, as the "Little Blue Command Tents" are often the only private place available where a troop might have his weapon *and* potential access to ammo).
Shocking and humorous! I have only one question. Did they not understand that many people standing overtop excrement was not a good thing? The smell must have been horrendous. As a side note, I saw a documentary about the excavation of old hospital grounds. It’s been a while so the details are a tad fuzzy. I believe it was in England. May have been Scotland. The soil still held active diseases after 400 years. It was fascinating. Makes me wonder if the sights of these latrines still hold diseases.
I think it just never occurred to them that the floor would give way. Hmm, I don't know about old latrines. They must get dug up sometimes during archaeological digs though, so I imagine someone has the answer.
Wow HC that was quite interesting and weird. To think something like that happened. There are quite a few different ways to die more harshly. Have you ever watched a 1000 ways to die and I did at one time have the book. My question is did they remove the bodies or leave them there and fill it in? Thanks HC look forward to next week.
The garderobe in Doune Castle kept me amused for ages. Monty Python and The Holy Grail was filmed at the castle and the garderobe had a suspiciously handy recess, for old leaves or medieval literature or even rejected scripts or something.
I lived on a goat farm within a modern city that had no running water. Outhouse 2019 to 2021 i lived there and luckily i had a toilet in my trailer that had to be emptied after every use. Third world indeed. Lol. There's an account of this in my episode 1 of Weird Blues Tales about 1 Horn the mama goat. Thanks for all you do.
The smell of an outhouse is definitely something that sticks with you. We used to use one every summer at the racetrack dad drove at (quarter mile car racing) as a hobby. They finally replaced the outhouse for real toilets in the late 90s. Even though it's been over 25 years, I can still smell it.
Actually, the same thing happened in the US. A thunderstorm hit during recess at a grade school. The girls ran into a latrine or outhouse, and the floor collapsed. Same result. It happened in the later 1800s, I believe.
Enjoyed this video more than I should 🤭 "The hand of God in what had happened" cracked me up 🤣 Erfurt is a nice city to visit - nowadays. By the way: your pronunciation is really good! Take it from a German.
Ah, thank you so much. I always stress out about saying words in other languages, so I'm delighted that I did well with the German words and names in this video. Glad to hear Erfurt is not overshadowed by this gruesome story. :-)
I considered asking for help on my community tab with this one actually as I had a terrible time with the medieval German, but I didn't want to give away what my video topic was.
Where I grew up, there were still a great many who didn’t have indoor plumbing of any kind. Some had a nice water pump in the yard, others had to haul water from a nearby creek. All had what was called an outhouse. My aunt and uncle had made two holes in theirs. One smaller one for children and one larger one for teens and adults. The larger hole had the addition of a comfy toilet seat screwed into place above the hole. Outhouses were not pleasant that’s for sure. Most had a large bucket of lime with a scoop in it sitting in the corner. After you made a stink you’d put a scoop of lime down the hole. It did help control that pungent odor but it did not make it disappear. Some folks didn’t bother with the lime and you could smell the little building from quite a distance. All folks had their outhouses at least fifty feet from their house and usually dug a new hole every year or two to relocate the pit, ( using the dirt from the new hole to finish filling in the old poo pit), and then just relocating the little house atop the new hole. They were scary to have to go out and use in the night. They were freezing cold in the winter and in the summer, besides being hot and miserable, you also had to deal with flies and Yellowjackets (that for some reason liked it down in the hole). I was very luck ,( and knew it), that we had indoor plumbing and electricity, which a lot of folks still didn’t have, although most did have both electricity and indoor plumbing by the time I was in high school. In case you’re curious I grew up in the mountains of Montana , USA. 🙂 Oh ya, and you sometimes got slivers from the wood seats and it was scary when I was younger and they didn’t have a small hole for little bums, ( it was hard to balance on the front edge of the hole when I was used to a real toilet at my house).
Very glad to hear you managed not to fall down the hole! Not so glad to read about the possibility of splinters in the bottom. Ouch! Nevertheless, you will be glad to know you haven't put me off Montana. I've seen it on TV etc, think it looks beautiful and would still love to visit some day :-) I don't know what yellowjackets are though. I Googled it, but all I got was some TV show.
@@HistoryCalling Montana is absolutely beautiful! I’m partial to the western side of the state where the mountains and trees and an abundance of lakes big and small abound, as well as super friendly folk. 😃(since that’s my stomping grounds). Yellow jackets are a very ornery type of bee. Not as mean as a hornet but right close.
I can remember my German grandmother being horrified at the idea of indoor plumbing, granted she didn’t know how it could possibly work. And she was someone who was an extremely clean person. I can also remember when rest areas only had outhouses. We’ve come a long way-many things to be grateful for
In Canada in the 20th century (very recently) houses and cottages in the countryside and summer homes on lakes usually had outhouses which were a toilet with a hole dug underneath. I’ve used them many times. I’m sure they are still used in some places. However many summer cottages are now modern and have indoor plumbing
@@HistoryCalling "Schadenfreude" is a word that means "deriving amusement from someone elses msfortunes .. I just changed the beginning of it to "shart" ie a plume of diarrhoea propelled rapidly by intestinal gas... (it was a joke)
I literally just heard about this event 2 weeks ago and now you made a video about it! Absolutely love it! Would you ever been interested in a video about the 1315 great famine?
Gross warning. I work in hospice care. Unfortunately I can think of something worse, having an infection decomposing you from the inside out. I had a gentleman who had the unfortunate experience of developing an infection in his intestines from inflammation and it partially blocking his bowels. The inflammation got bad enough to rupture them into his abdominal area. He was already on hospice care and was not well enough for surgery. Having your insides turn to festering goo has got to be towards top of the list. He passed away a few days later.
When I was at boarding school in the 60s, we had an emergency latrine set out side. I have experienced the horrors of using a latrine pit toilet. The heat and foul stink is a memory that has lasted me a lifetime. And the headmasters cat fell in one year. Regards from South Africa
What a giggle. I knew what was going to happen by 4:00! My wife writes stories set in the 13th to 18th centuries so we made studies about latrines of the period especially garderobes. You featured a good example at 2:34. Many garderobes had poo pits but others emptied into the moat or rover over which the castle had been built . Pele towers such as used by border reivers on the Anglo-Scottish border had internal garderobes for security. We've read of garderobes being used as means of accessing the castle so this was a good strategy, if of somewhat dubious health benefit.
Yes, I was chuffed to find that photo as I don't have any myself that show a hanging latrine like that. What an awful way to enter a Castle. I think I'd rather just let them keep it! :-)
I think that there probably were a large number of individuals present. Otherwise, I don't think the floor would have collapsed. This is especially the case, as the building appears to have only been forty years old at the time of collapse.
As a child growing up, we had no functional plumbing, but a gravity fed water source, We had no toilet, but we did have a two seater outhouse with a big old Sears catalog in it.that catalog served for two purposes, I think you might know what I mean by that. The outhouse was located next to the cornfield about 200 feet away from the house. We had to move the outhouse periodically from time to time and our shower was in the basement up against the base of the chimney. It was gravity fed by a water tank up above,the temperature of the water tank was what the temperature of the water that you took a shower with. Oh,the good ole days.🤪
When I was very young, about 50 years ago, we had a latrine in a small shed behind our house. It was awful and sometimes rat-tailed maggots crawled up from the pit ending up on the floor and the wooden plank. To combat these maggots, creolin was poured into the latrine. My grandmother in another town had also a latrine in the garden and they still used newspapers. Later, this was replaced by toilet paper that came in two colors, pink and grey. That toilet paper was almost as bad as the newspapers, it was very coarse and felt like sanding paper...
I had expected to find out that it had been a methane explosion rather than a building collapse. I wonder if the humidity from the pit had rotted the beams.
I'm the proud owner of an outhouse (over a pit) on an old ranch in Wyoming. We still use it. It was built by the Civilian Conervation Corps during the depression.
I moved into a huge old mansion four years ago that hadn't been lived in for years. There was oft times a bad smell but the owners told me it was when it rained a lot but over time it got way worse. One day when having a plumber do some work we discovered that the house, as grand as it was, was not connected to the waste system and in fact all the 'poo' was just dropping under the house for years. I ended up giving notice as the owner didn't see the problem. I could have had the house legally declared uninhabitable but I chose to just go. My brother in law had a similar experience when he bought an old house and discovered that the cellar under his house was used as a waste pit and was half full of waste ! He had to spend a fortune having it taken out and then they discovered that under the cellar was another cellar, he had them both condemned.
I got locked in a port-a-potty in the 90s with my cousin and sister. It felt like it lasted for an hour but it was probably five or 10 minutes. It was before they were redesigned in the US and was about the size of a phone booth. We were all quite young and small, which is why my cousin took me in with her to help my sister. The door stuck. No one else was in the park and I had always been a bit afraid of port-a-potties anyway. We kept trying the door and somehow it came unstuck and didn’t tip over, though it was a close thing. I never entered one of those ones again.
My Grand Dad in Jacksonville,Alabama had a Outhouse when we rolled up from Virginia in 1975. I was maybe 5 and I telling you that fly infested hole at the bottom was stuff that still gives me nightmares.
composting toilets seem to have come from those, but are a much nicer experience. They are often used in Finland and I have never been to one that smelled bad or was not well kept. Interesting video.
This does reminds me of a story in my family relating to the second world war in County Durham, my uncle Arthur went out to the toilet which was in the back yard, exactly timed for a German bomb getting dropped close by, why’ll uncle Arthur was well into his Business, the bomb totally destroyed the toilet building leaving uncle with his trousers round his ankles with not a mark on him but totally open for all the world to see, I imagine he wouldn’t have to do any straining that day, left like a statue on a pedestal. Arthur suffered no ill effects apart from temporarily deafness, the Methodist minister said it was a miracle and they should put up a statue in the center of the village of Arthur sitting on his toilet, you could just imagine the war memorial with the statue of Arthur on the toilet next to it
Well, I knew I could count on you for the nitty gritty facts. lol. I have often wondered about the John's in some castles that I've seen. True, they were years improved form their older days but they all left me with the thought that some missing people were not really lost but had an unfortunate mishap when doing their nightly duty. This could account for many of History's Mysteries... missing Brides, lost treasures and hopefully Not , the lost Princes. I can think of stupid ways to die ... but I'm not sure they could be more horrible. I think there is the making of a mystery series. On the Way to the Toilet...
You have very quickly become my favorite creator, so thank you! I had a question, was there social consequences to being a mistress to the king during the medieval/ renaissance era? What happens to a woman who had children out of wedlock with the monarch? What becomes of her social status?
THANK YOU SO MUCH @bargunner for the very generous donation and kind comment. To answer your question, it depended on how the King treated her. Henry VIII and Charles II made sure their mistresses were either well married off (if they weren't married already) or financially secure for instance. From what we can tell though, Edward IV doesn't seem to have been terribly interested in his exs, given how little we ever hear of them.
@@HistoryCalling As a historian, I rather enjoy exploring the lesser known incidents, nations, peoples, etc that get passed over for the big flashy ones like Henry VIII and his children (though I never get tired of reading or hearing about such things).
HC, I think you've discovered a gold mine of content for many videos going forward. The full (and epic) title of your secondary source (8:25) reads "Historical Chronicle or Description of the Most Remarkable Stories Occurring from the Beginning of the World until the Year 1619, whereby the Most Important Events; the Origins, Rise and Fall of the Great Monarchies, Kingdoms, Electorates and Other Principalities, Free Polities, Countries and Cities; the Biographies of All Emperors, Popes, Kings, Electors and other Princes, Famous Cardinals, Bishops, Heroes, Scholars and Artists; as well as Wars, Battles, Sieges, Victories, Conquests, Defeats, Peace Treaties, Alliances, Coronations, Triumphal Entries, Celebrations, Riots, Betrayals, Murders, Executions, Conflagrations, Floods, Storms, Shipwrecks, Earthquakes, Times of Plenty and Penury, Deaths, Funeral Processions, Castra Doloris, Natural Wonders, and other strange events, from the Beginning of the World, in Europe and Other Parts of the Earth, Ordered according to the Four Monarchies, with a (?) Timeline, in Eight Parts".
I have actually used an outhouse or latrine before when I was a kid. It was at the boyscout camp that I was camping at with my girl scout troop. It was so bad that it is memorable to this day even though it was well more than two decades ago. It was very unpleasant to say the least. It made me rather pee myself than use it.
I've known latrine as an out house and my family had one at our camp house which didn't have electricity. Before we had that it was essentially a poop bucket you'd take with you onto the camp site.
At least a bucket probably only has one 'deposit' in it at a time though and it presumably came from yourself and was then cleaned out for the next use? That's what I'm hoping for for your sake at least.
Here in the U.S, West centeral states we had outhouses (latrine). When I was young back in the 1970s I remember a park in Nebarska that had a public outhouse
Swiss here, two points: a) Compost toilets are a modern form of latrine and if properly handled they are actually cleaner and less smelly than portapotties. (They use wood shavings to be thrown between the huan waste)... b) Rathe is highly likely an old german writing of Rat => council, if it has the add on "zu" this is highly likely not a place name but means "as he was sitting in the council/having a council", though it could possibly also hint towards the "Rathaus" the town hall. Allthough I doubt that townhalls had a cesspit directly below their council halls, this is probably some other building which has been choosen due to the ammount of involved people etc and thus might have been overloaded.
Yes I agree. back in the 1930s until we had flush. we had a bucket of sandy soil and when we had used the pit Lavatory we through in a shovel full to cover. one day someone had done there business and done a poop so big about 12 inches it stuck out of the bucket. My Uncle said the man who did that must have Jacked him up in the air spinning him around and lifted his boots off the ground I never heard so many grown ups in fits of laughter as that day.
collapsing floors still happen, especially with older structures. There was a very tragic wedding reception in Italy, where the floor collapsed, but in a way that funneled the people into the remains of a very old well that had been under the newer (yet still old) addition where the reception was happening. The bride and groom survived but many of the family members died and my memory may be wrong but the casualties were around 50? Even one is too many, as it was people being crushed by more people into a well with old everything in it.
Can you think of an ickier way to die than this? Delight me with your creativity in the comments below and remember to check out:
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Drowning/suffocating in a pit of aged duck/pig/bat excrement?? 😬
Okay here's a really yucky one for you and it's a true story. About 30 years ago one of my nephew's age about 12:00 was going to the bathroom in an outhouse on my father's very ill prepared land and fell in and they were rattlesnakes down there he was just lucky he didn't get bitten I'd have died from Fright!!!
O
Like something that would happen in Blackadder.
Okay I just thought of one. I use this as a form of execution in an as yet unpublished fantasy adventure manuscript. Execution by being forced to swallow molten lead. Probably counts more as nightmare fuel than icky. IDK.
As a german historian used to reading those kinds of scripts, here a little translation of the script:
Also the aforementioned Landgraf Ludwig of Thuringia was in dispute with the archbishop of Mayence (Mainz); to reconcile this, the emperor scheduled a day in Erfurt, in the month of July in the year of 1184, where a an unexpected and horrendous accident occurred. The emperor with his counts/earls (Grafen) and knights who attended on him sojourned in a hall of the convent, which was a very old building, below which the monks had a common room or speaking-house(?). As the influx of people was very high and the old beams couldn't bear the weight, they broke, so all who were in the hall, with little exception, fell with the wood and other materials deep into the privily chamber. Emperor Friederich held woefully onto an iron window grating next to him, and was retrieved from there. Over 100 people, with them 6 born counts/earls (Grafen), were struck to death or crushed, or spoiled in the refuse, because help couldn't get to them in time. With those who lay at the bottom of the excrement and drowned in it was Graf Henrich von Schwartzburg, who used to say: "If this isn't true, I'll die in a crapper!"
Thank you so much. You're much better than Google translate :-) I had a terrible time trying to manage the old German for this video.
@@HistoryCalling I'm happy to help! :)
Saved me from having to translate. I concur with your translation, I only skimmed once I saw you had already translated.
Epic. Danke!!
Thank you!! 😃
As someone who’s built a couple of composting toilets (both for indoor use and at campsites), I have to chime in in defense of latrines. If they’re not built well, with ventilation and enough dry material, they will stink because of the anaerobic decomposition that happens (basically a perfect environment for harmful bacteria to breed). If you include enough carbon, like sawdust, dry leaves, etc. along with some soil to encourage efficient breakdown of the waste (the ideal is about 30:1 « dry » to « wet » stuff), then there’s almost no odor, it breaks down quickly, and transforms into something indistinguishable from ordinary compost-rich soil within about two to three years. The trick is just making sure that it’s not near your drinking water source in the meantime.
Oh, that makes sense! And explains why I've been to some that were horrible and others that you couldn't even tell.
The process you mentioned of combining carbon and nitrogen components is very effective, and a careful ratio is virtually odorless! I had a fellow Master Composter acquaintance years ago who lived out in the boonies where water had to be trucked in and it was very expensive. Their family of four utilized two 5-gallon buckets to facitate their private business. One bucket was topped with a toilet seat, and the other was kept full of sawdust. When the deposit bucket was near full, it was hauled out and dumped into a large dedicated compost pile for "humanure" - there is a book or two on the subject. This routine was followed until they could afford to have a water well drilled.
Unfortunately, the science of the proper C:N ratio for effective aerobic composting was not well understood nor embraced until several centuries after this pit-iful disaster occurred.
Controlled decomposition can be a very beautiful thing.
Also a urine diverter would help eliminate that nasty interaction
If say I dug a 30 ft hole and there's only me using it how long would it take to fill up??
I spent summers at camp using latrines. They weren’t my favorite bathroom ever, but they also weren’t anywhere near as awful as they sound. I chose to work at the camp for two summers. Just about any remote toilet in North America is some sort of pit toilet or outhouse, and I’m not shy about using them at all. Composting toilets are an improvement in terms of smell. Public port-a- johns are generally repulsive, especially in the heat with all the human waste and chemicals trapped in a hot box.
I can only imagine how horrible people smelled in general, that having a room situated above a latrine pit could even be tolerated. I toured Ross Castle in Ireland years ago, and the guide told us the residents would hang their clothing in the long hallway to the toilet to "wash" them of bugs. The castles hole hung over the side of the castle wall. The smell was so bad even the lice bailed! 😆
Let us say a prayer of thanks to the saint of indoor plumbing.
Hmm, don't think I've ever been to Ross Castle. Not sure you've sold it to me though :-)
The reason they hung clothes up in the "garderobe" was because ammonia gets rid of lice and fleas. No idea if this really works but people did this for centuries.
@@LittleKitty22 Urine emits ammonia, so it makes sense to hang clothes close to the toilet.
Ummm outdoor latrines with the correct knowledge and composting are awesome and FINE….no smell whatsoever it’s only your modern arrogance & zero education on anything to do with his most in human history developed plumbing or compost latrines……to think that ONLY indoor plumbing is somehow the only way to use a bathroom 🙄
I mean come ON the Roman’s had awesome indoor bathrooms and “plumbing” that was 1,000yrs or more removed from supposedly peasants of the 12th century. You must not like or read much history to even say such nonsense.
@@LittleKitty22exactly! What I also meant by uneducated opinions or comments especially when it deals with history are just pointless frankly…..add nothing but confusion and assumptions. 🙄😖
-You changed your name to Latrine?
- It used to be Shithouse
😂😂😂 anyone remember?
"Good change!"
Latrine, such an unusual name 😂😂😂
Love that show ❤
I, King Richard, do decree that from this moment forward, that all toilets will be known as... Johns!
@@mindmedic9435 😂😂
My grandmother lived in a two up, two down miners house and the toilet was in the backyard. This was in the late 50’s /early 60’s. Pieces of newspaper threaded on a string were used as toilet tissue. A man used to come and empty the toilets regularly. They were horrendous in the summer. Buzzing flies and the smell 🤢Bucket in the bedroom was utilized during the night if you needed to urinate. Anything else required you to venture out in the dark to use the toilet. Stuff of nightmares!
Yes, I have family who remember using newspaper too. During lockdown 1, when loo roll was in short supply because people were panic buying, there was a moment when I wondered if we might end up reverting to that! On a side note - that poor man. What an awful job!
My great-aunt lived in a very rural area during the 60s, and she and my uncle still used an outhouse. I remember when I was three, I was terrified of going into the dark, smelly, creepy hut with a huge, gaping hole I was afraid I'd fall through. At least they had a roll of actual toilet paper in there....
@@HistoryCalling Well The ROMANS just used a rag on a stick in their communal lues and it was shared by all.
I stayed at my grandparents in Cumberland, woke up in the morning, bursting to go, only to find the rear end of a cow blocking in the w.c. and I couldn’t get it to back out.😭 It had crossed a bec and a stream to trap itself in there too.
Same with my Nan, and that was in the middle of Birmingham, uk.She only moved out early ‘70s. Still just the outside John.
“Festering poo pit” has me giggling too hard and feeling 5 years old 😂
That's what I like to hear here on History Calling :-)
A great name you have, considering the subject matter! 😂
😂
That got me giggling too 😂
I am so with you . Infact my Grandson is 7 and I'm sure he will giggle when I tell him about the killer toilet.
We had latrines at summer camp when I was a kid. Some weren’t quite so bad, but the ones at Girl Scout camp were eye-wateringly awful. I would hold my breath and pee as fast as I could. In the summer heat, you can imagine how nasty this was. My mother thought I was exaggerating until she attended parents’ day at the end of the session and saw for herself just how bad the camp was. (There were other problems besides the toilets, which I won’t enumerate here). Needless to say, I never went back there.
You're the third person in the last hour to mention the horrors of Girl Scout latrines. What the heck was going on with this organisation and how did it never make the national news?!
@@HistoryCalling LOL-I am sure the girl-scout lavatorhea is not National News. But the horrors occuring due to the use of them may be. Having been to The Glastobury Festival a few times I knowfor sure that lavatorhea are often news items. So much so they are famous. Of course for 150,000 festival goers there is a need of some 200 or more lavatorhea (Porta-loos). At certain times there can be queues some 20 persons long at a bank of say 15 porta lavatorheas. Incidentally. Did you know that 'Rhea was said to be a goddess who eased childbirth for women' (WikiMay28th2024). Rhea being feminin or a Godess then it is an appropriat name for the Ladies Loo whilst Lavatory being the masculine or neutor.
@@HistoryCalling The lack of clean toilets in schools was cited by a paediatric nephrologist (when I was working as a GP near Nottingham some years ago) as a contributory factor of recurrent urinary tract infections, ascending pyelonephritis and ultimately renal failure in young girls. It's perhaps a problem that transgresses time but needs to be brought to the public attention. Thank you for your brilliant video!
@@HistoryCalling This was back in the late 1970s; I should have clarified. I have no idea what the situation is like today, or even if this one camp in particular is even still operational. I attended two summers: 1977 and 1978, IIRC. I didn't want to go back the second year, but a friend I had made in my GS troop twisted my arm. Cue the first day of camp, and she returned home with a VERY long face and the gloomy realization she still had 9 more days to get through (blessedly it was a day camp and we didn't have to stay overnight!). This was a camp in the suburbs north of Boston, MA in the USA. Not going to name names to protect the innocent and the guilty. The other horrors of the place included a hill down to the swimming area so steep it's amazing nobody slipped and killed herself going downhill. (The second year, the camp had created a switchback path so that people could get down the hill more gradually and safely). My first year, a yellow jackets' nest in an old flagpole was disturbed, causing the bees to swarm out: I was stung three times. The pond where we went swimming was horrible: slimy muck underfoot at one end, a gravel pit underfoot at the other. All this on top of the most disgusting latrines that can be imagined. The place basically put me off camping for the rest of my life. I will never understand the appeal.
i went soccer camp in northern mn for a week and i never pooped once because it was so gorssed out out by the super smelly outhouse there
This is one of my favorite horrible history stories. I’m excited to hear you tell it.
Enjoy (if that's the right word). :-)
Funnily enough during WW2 a German U-boat was captured off the coast of Scotland because of a toilet disaster, U1206 began to flood after it's skipper incorrectly used the recently installed high-pressure toilet which could be flushed while the craft was submerged. Embarrassing but not fatal.
I've never heard that story. What an embarrassing way to get caught indeed (with your pants down, so to speak!)
For whatever reason, Germans insisted on toilets that were so complicated they had to have people trained to operate them and only they were allowed to flush them. The problem is because of the difference in pressure between outside of the U boat and inside and the fact that you have to open a pipe that is inside, to the outside, to let the sewage out.
Captain apparently thought he knew everything and knew how to flush the toilet.
He didn't. The sea rushed in through the toilet.
I'm having a hard time imagining how a German U-boat surrendered because of a septic screw up... On the other hand, it probably saved their lives from what would come...
@@ShaighJosephsonfaite une recherche sur Wikipedia avec le n° du sous marin
I'm amazed you were able to narrate this video without bursting into laughter 🤣
There is a little toilet joke near the end :-)
The hallmark of a professional historian! 😊
I demand to hear outtakes 😂
@@HistoryCalling would you call it...toilet humour?
Sometimes I wish I could hop back in time to see what eras were really like. Then I watch videos like this and thank goodness I was born with inside potable running water!
I have that exact same feeling :-)
I'm a former nurse, EMT and medical lab technician. Your warning made me laugh, then I grabbed dinner and am sitting down to watch. I've heard worse than from colleagues than this latrine stuff, while eating, many times. I guess we are able to separate ourselves from such things on the job while dealing with disgusting real life situations.
The thought of nobles finally seeing things from the peasants' POV is actually humorous.
addendum:
That was not that gross. You explained it tactfully, for the uninitiated's temperament.
My question: How did someone in Germany conract malaria? Was it endemic or did the guy travel to malaria-infested places beforehand? Thanks! Love this channel, and just subscribed!
Europe wasn’t malaria free until the 1970s and it was endemic back then. It’s gone now because of insecticides, etc. I Googled it a while ago because I was watching something about Henry VIII’s medical history and he suffered from it and I was confused 🤔
@@jeanallan8106 One would think that Europeans would be at least partially immune to it then. Wow. Thanks
Thanks Alan. Glad I gained you as a subscriber and didn't send you running for the hills.
Yes, I would imagine having worked in healthcare you don't scare easily.
I don't know about malaria I'm afraid. Sorry :-(
I was a science major in college and worked in a lab for a couple of years. My mom worked in a pathology lab. Almost nothing can turn my stomach. I watched this video while eating dinner and didn't turn a hair. HC was amazingly tactful/ funny in her narration!
Malaria existed in Southern Europe and North Africa until not long ago. Also, at the time (1184), Europe (and the entire Northern hemisphere) was experiencing the Medieval Warm Period, with temperatures much warmer than today (to the extend they were growing wine in England). Malaria would have been going round like there's no tomorrow. The climate only cooled down during the Little Ice Age (ca 1250 - 1860).
Also, remember not to light your pipe or cigarette in a latrine to smoke out the odour, you might be blasted all over the farmyard when those fumes ignite! Ventilation is vital. People save their wood ash from their stoves and fireplaces to sprinkle into the pit to make things bearable. Awful but essential places, those.
Well, I can read the old German text, and here is what I gleaned from it. It seems the Kaiser Friedrich (Barbarossa) called this meeting in Erfurt in July 1184. It happened at the monastery of St. Peter. He brought his court and all his knights. All of them were in one large hall. It was a popular event and (towns) people came in in droves. And then the old beams gave out. Kaiser Friedrich held on barely to a window iron, from which he was rescued. Over 100 people, including 6 Counts were struck dead or squashed to death because help did not come in time. Among the ones on the bottom of the excrements, who drowned in them, was the Count of Schwartzburg who was in the habit of saying and swearing: "If this is not true, then I'll die in a shithouse!"
This ids a rough translation, I left a few things out.... Hope that helps!
Karin, German herbalist, Laramie, Wyoming
Great story well told.
Brings back memories of a similar recent incident. A farm worker told his boss there was a manhole cover missing in a bunch of stinging nettles at his farm. The farmer went to inspect and suddenly fell in the hole which turned out to be a cess pit full of excrement his own and water. He fell head first and banged his shoulder on the side wall during his fall which dislocated his shoulder. Suddenly he was floating in water surrounded by excrement etc 5 feet below entrance with no way out. His phone was wet so knackered, so he shouted in vain whilst feeling the cold water slowly drain the strength from his body. The farm was isolated so no one heard him.
Fortunately a new housing development had recently been built a few hundered yards away. One of the residents happened to come out on this Monday morning to mow his lawn and heard faint sounds of 'HELP HELP' in the distance so walked across the field in his direction. The fire brigade and an ambulance were summoned and rescued him just in the nick of time as he was about to drown. The Guys name is Andrew Hunter and he lives in Bedfordshire UK. One very lucky guy!
A local story ... I'm going to look this one up. Omg , that happened in 2006 , he was very lucky to have been heard shouting.
@@pearlsaminger9544 Yes exceptionally lucky. The guy who heard him had recently been made redundant so was pure chance he was at home on Monday morning. As luck would have it hewent out to cut his lawn. and heard cries for help. Bet he's still at the top on the farmers Christmas list! The farmer retired shortly afterwards, maybe due to thinking it was time to relax and enjoy life...
the most dangerious are the gases which here appearatly und luckily not gathered
A very sad case near me was a farmer who fell in a pig slurry pit. The gases got him and his brother found him deceased.
My dear, I am 72. Grandma and Grandpa didn't HAVE indoor toilet. It was the outside privy or the chamber pot! At my house, we didn't get the indoor plumbing till I was 7. Yes, the late 1950s! After that, the outdoor privy was still the place of choice when playing outdoor so you didn't have to go in. That are/were what they were!
Usually there was a collection of newspaper cutting's ready at hand. We had an outside toilet late fifties or early sixties. Who back in those days would ever have imagined to invention of super soft loo roll. Being service families children we still used only goverment issue paper. It seemed also to be the standard issue in all the schools. Just and example of how much we were cared for in those days. Years before Thatherism and the ending of free school milk and to many the beginning of the demise of society as we knew it.
I still remember an old aunt of mine who died in the 1990s when I was very young and she had an outdoor loo at her house. It was plumbed in (though I'm sure it hadn't always been) so you could flush it, but boy or boy was it cold in the winter having to go out there. She was hardy though. She was 91 when she died and still using that outdoor loo.
@@MikeGreenwood51Old, outdated catalogs were hung on a string so the pages were available for the obvious purpose. Never used them myself, but corncobs were also used--after the kernels had been rubbed off, of course.
What country did you live in? My great grandparents in Chicago had toilets in their homes already in the 1890's! and they were poor!
USA. Rural southern Indiana then
In 2007, at Gaza, there was a sewage tsunami that killed five people, injured many and flooded a village. Apparently a sewage treatment containment wall burst causing the brown wave of death. It sounds close to the same horror's of Erfurt, but at least it was rich nobles and not common poor folks that meet a very sticky ending. Either way, not a fun event, especially rescuing them, yuck.
Having used several ‘outhouses’ in my time, as they’re called in the states, terrible death as a descriptor doesn’t come close to the horror, I’m sure.
I had seen a story of worker in a canning factory killed in a dreadful manner. As the cans of tuna are sealed, they’re loaded en mass into a large autoclave for final sealing and sterilization. This incident saw the man accidentally sealed in along with the cans and unable to be heard or able to free himself.
Neither being an instant death, both equally awful. I shiver at both.
Oh my word, that's awful :-(
Wasn't it someone doing maintenance and the line was supposed to have been shut down or am I thinking of another horrible death?
Here is a horrifying real true story. At least I find it horrifying. Happened back in the Nineteen-Seventees circa '74 in the summer when I was a teen working in a cardbord box factory pre college just after my final school year. The man did not some how die but it's enough to make a person almost sweat to think of it.
Well this was a big factory used for making cardboard from paper. Paper rolls the size or a car and about 3 times as heavy. First the paper was made in to corrigated cardboard then the cardbord was cut to a rectangulor sizes and stacked on pallets then transported to a large long machine for final cutting, shapeing and possible for some printing. The maching was nearly the length of a sizable train carrige with two massive steel rollers at the beginning. Maybe each steel roller was nearly a ton in weight and could be raised apart to which ever thickness or thinness was needed. The apeture could be paper thin or large enough for think cardboard. On the day of the incident the aperture was maybe just about 3 mms (12th of an inch about). Just tight enough to seize a sheet of card fed in. From those heavy first rollers which were about 3 meters long the card was then set in to the correct guide rails. So there we have the scene. Two massive rollers rotating at speed and a machine operator sliding a single sheet of cardboard in repeatedly. All emphasis seemed to be on speed of production. But the giant hungry machine had a history of accidents and so certain safty devices had been installed over the decades which some operators learnt to by-pass. On this machine there was a large hand sized red 'STOP' button at eye level close to and ready for a quick shove by the operator in case the machine needed a quick shut down due to any accident. The button was hand sized and robust about 10cms (3 inches) across.
Then the scream of agonising pain occured. The machine operator had put his fingers too close to the massive shinny steel rotating rollers with it's massive apertite which only diminished when the machine was turned off. The set aperture was set to help smooth out thin carboard so had no give at all. The fingers went in finger nails first and then more fingers and then further up the hand. The problem here is the machine operators hand is in the roller jaws and the machine emergency stop button is to the machine side designed to be stopped by a quick hand hit. There would have been other operators at other nearby machines only about 15 to 20 seconds away. But otherwise the operator with his hand trapped was alone at his one man machine. So some one must have got to the machine. The whole factory was shut down for the session whilst the fire brigade were called. Not sure why it needed the fire brigade. But maybe to cut his hand out. Or because the factory operators needed ememgercy officiallys in attendance as the job was to big for the factory nurse.
I can still remember the pain of having a single finger trapped about 10 years earlier. So I can imagine the whole hand and crushing of bones to be nauseatingly agonising. I can imagine the strange relationship at the time as the basic human fail safe of fainting when sevear pain hits the body may not have worked either as the operator in that second maybe subconsciousley would not have wanted to faint. You just wouldn't want to faint whilst your hand was in between 2 tons of rotating steel due to the fear of being dragged in wholly. Apart from the operator we were all back at work the next day.
Being only fifteen and not as large as the adults. One day when some card or something got stuck. They asked me to crawl in to the dust extracting vent to clear the blockage. In that instance I saw the whole factor floor with some 200 or more machines all on standby ready for the young youth (me) to crawl in. Looking very much like a network of ventilations shafts the dust extraction shafts ran back and forth across the whole factory cealing. So thousands of meters (yards). Sorry but some how I just did not trust every one and out of terror of the factory starting up the second the blockage was cleared and myself being sucked up the extraction shaft to where ever it went. I refused to enter. To me my job was not as important as myself. Luckily every one seemed to immediatly accept my refusal as reasonable.
Incidents like that are why modern Western machines are now generally designed so that a worker *cannot* lock themselves inside without several safety interlocks being deliberately disabled. And why things like LOTO (Lock Out/Tag Out) procedures and interlocks exist (and have been extended to mechanical machines when they were originally only included on high voltage electrical equipment).
Coming from a structural repair background that included working in confined spaces among others, I have seen working conditions improve immensely concerning the safety of workers. I can’t recall where this incident had taken place but it did happen in the last decade, I believe.
The lack of personnel’s safety in both design and function of such a dangerous piece of equipment is appalling, to be sure.
Wow. You certainly have a strong stomach, HC! What a story! Thanks for bringing us this diamond in the rough! 😊
Yup, there was no eating while I researching this one :-)
As a wild deer (Odocoileus Virginianus) hunter in Virginia, I stayed in a cabin with an outhouse way down in the woods. Some mornings would be below zero F. I found out why people had full length under ware, called long handles, with a trap door in the rear. That door allowed you to expose no more than necessary to the bitter cold. Made a big difference.
"I thought it almost might be better to p**p my pants" is a classic "we have all been there" moment.
Yeah. It makes me jealous of babies and toddlers who can just poop in their nappies, safe in the knowledge that some poor adult will clean them up so that they can do it all over again ... for roughly 3 years!
It’s not just “3rd world” countries that have latrines. They’re common in parts of Australia with no plumbing, nature reserves for example. They’re called dunnies or drop dunnies. Dunny is also slang for a toilet generally.
Falling in one would be a horrendous way to go. I used to be a little scared of that whenever I had to use one as a kid.
*edited for autocorrect
I didn't know that, but thank you for sharing. I think that sounds like a very appropriate fear myself.
We have them in Canada too! Mostly while camping, or generally far away from civilization. I think they get gross when the 'input' rate is faster than the decomposition rate. The best latrines will even come with a scenic view!
Equally as common in the US as in Canada and in the same places (nature reserves, remote camps, etc).
Yep, the US has them too in national parks and campgrounds. Especially in the mountains, it makes sense, since the passes can close too suddenly to shut down plumbed bathrooms properly, leading to burst pipes everywhere! (
The ones in national parks are terrifying. The long drops just freak me out. We were up in Karajini in the Pilbara (north west of the country) those things are at least 6m deep I swear! Just imagine, you're 130 kms away from the nearest flush toilet & you're there for a week with your whole family & you came with you're Mum in her car so you have no car 😱
I so admire your self control … I’m ROLLING ON THE FLOOR!! 😄😄😄
I mean I had to really resist the urge to include more toilet jokes. I kept reminding myself that they were real people and I shouldn't be too disrespectful. Twas difficult at times though.
I was a Scout (made the rank of Eagle Scout in 1994) and adult volunteer (Assistant Scoutmaster, Commissioner, and Order of the Arrow advisor - retiring in 2012). I have done my business in latrines (both old school and newer ones with chemical pits) and camping toilets. Port-a-Johns, provided they are properly cleaned and maintained, will smell better than the bathroom at dive bars.
Well done, as always HC. Thank you for your broad topic base and your strong desire to get to the real truth behind legends, it makes learning with you very interesting.
You're welcome. This one was certainly something a bit different for me.
This diversified content is most welcome. Your sanitized treatment of this foul event is breath taking. Thanks. Lvya much
I like to keep things fresh (or not so fresh as the case may be with this particular topic!)
@@HistoryCalling You do a great job! 👍
Oh now THAT is a title I am immediately clicking on!
Thank you and enjoy :-)
I couldn't help myself either!
Better than ''Attack of the killer tomatoes!''?
German native speaker here. Original quote at 4:42 "Als er [Heinrich]... in einer Oberstube zu Rath saß..." = "As he [Heinrich] held council (Rath) in a room on the upper floor (Oberstube)..."
Thank you :-)
I have been a historical reenactor for 50 years (17th Century.) People say to me "you should have been born then." My immediate come back is usually something on the lines of: "We wear the interesting clothing of the period, and get to swish swords about and shoot blank rounds from blackpowder muskets and cannons at each other. We do the fun bits without the lice and the fleas and the sickness and the killing. This is not to mention the lack of painless dentistry and indoor plumbing."
When I was little our house was not on the city sewer and our toilet pans were collected weekly by the "dunny cart" (I am an Aussie).
Greetings from the land up over.
Aw man I just got a bowl of chilli and was so happy you had posted… and then that disclaimer.
Don't say I didn't warn you ;-)
Dear lord, the stench in that building above the Latrobe must have been horrific
I’ve come across many pit toilets still in Canada and the US, so not just the third world. They’re common in very remote parks, or campsites and they are disgusting.
If you’re lucky, they will provide peat moss, or something similar that you pour down it after you go and that makes the pit not smell as bad.
Oh gross. I didn't think we still had them in the west, though someone else told me you might happen across them in a few places in Australia. I wish they could just provide chemical toilets, as gross as they are too.
I was told that you always put lime down the hole.
@@eilenekellogg-ki2br I only mentioned peat moss because I rented a cabin once that had a bucket of it for the outhouse. I’ve never had to maintain one myself, so maybe lime is better 🤷♀️
👏👏🤣 A "festering poo pit" will not deter HC from her quest for truth. Horrific and entertaining! No better combo! Thanks, HC.
Exactly Stephen. An historian's gotta go where an historian's gotta go :-)
@@HistoryCalling I recommend “8 Funniest Moments in Ship History” from Oceanliner Designs. Idk how many times I’ve watched it lol, it’s entertaining. The young man who runs the channel is Australian.
4:30 ...reliable on the (w)hole." I see what you did there! 😆
That wasn't even intentional :-) There is a toilet joke near the end though which is.
😂😂😂😂
I've been in a really shi*** mood lately, but this had me laughing & 'running' around the room...not really, butt like all your stories, it really was a good one!😘😂
Sorry to hear you've been in a bad mood, but I'm glad this video about literal s*** managed to cheer you up a bit :-)
4:57 😨😨😨😨😱
(“And others of lesser names” - REALLY?! They died drowning in POO, the least the author could do is respect them enough to not call them too unimportant to name 😅)
That's medieval chroniclers for you :-)
Quite a change from your normal fare but quite amusing. I appreciate your delicate choice of words to describe the scene. Dying this way is disgusting but not as horrible as being hung in chains or thrown into an oubliette
Yes, it was a topic a friend out here in the real world recommended to me and I thought 'why not'? :-)
@@HistoryCalling It was masterfully done. Were you nervous about presenting it?
No, just stressed out trying to translate the medieval German. It was awful!
@@HistoryCalling I can imagine. When I was a teenager in th middle 1960's my dad was stationed in Germany and I learned to speak German to some degree. It was hard enough to get my head around some of the words as they seemed like run on sentences. I cannot imagine Medieval German.
@@1roanstephenIt very much depends on how medieval the text actually is. I could read the text in the video with some minor problems, but when i was in school, texts older than 1500 where basically unreadable.
In South Africa little school children are still today falling into these lat🎉rine pits and drowning. It is absolutely shameful
Ok, that is indeed not funny at all and a real tragedy. :-( I'd never heard of that happening in real life in the modern world. I'm surprised they are dug deep enough for that.
WRT the latrine toilets in schools in South Africa, they are in some primary schools with little children. It is reported in the print media. Those type of toilets are referred to as long drops. Luckily we have a National and Ptovincisl general elections here on Wefnesday this week which we are all prsying it will bring about a positive chsnge.
Obviously, you haven't experienced a permanent rural outhouse with the oppressive summer heat ripening the contents below that are accompanied by annoying buzzing flies. Sometimes everything can't be accomplished in one held breath, and when you're forced to inhale again, you're not inhaling pure air into your lungs. Been there, done that, survived a broken man.
Oh dear. No, I haven't endured that. The closest I've come was an outdoor toilet (in an outhouse, with a roof), but it still had modern plumbing.
. It's a magnified version of walking into any public restroom right after someone with digestive problems has visited. You try not to think where the molecules you're breathing just came from. (Something to think about every time you walk into ANY restroom. Remember, you started it by posting this video. 😊)
This is why building codes and weight capacity is important
Absolutely. Let us never complain about health and safety as regards toilets again.
After reading the translation provided by @KekisvonGriesbach, i actually believe that many more people might have died. Since the source references that 6 of the victims were counts and that corresponds to the contemporary accounts, it seems plausible that there might have been more victims that the monks deemed 'unimportant' because they weren't wealthy.
I'm not sure how well it comes across in my translation, but the german original provides the number of "more than 100 people" which in common understanding here would most likely refer to anywhere between 101 and 120. I hope that helps :)
Thanks both. Yes, it's a shame we don't know a more precise number but thank you again for the translation, as that really helps :-)
Rath is not a place name, it means council (written Rat in modern orthography). This was not a discreet meeting between the involved noblemen, but a full "Hoftag".
The whole desaster did not take place IN St. Peters Church (churches did not have latrines) but in the monastry St. Peters church belonged to. And yes, there was floor beneath the room where the noble men met, but that ceiling collapsed as well.
Many years ago I was working for a road maintenance company ane one summers day we were stopped at a roadside rest area having our lunch. This old couple stopped and went to use the porta potties. The old fellow took some time to come out of the facility and when he did he had some words with his wife. She then came over to us and asked if we would do them a favor, seemed her husband had lost his glasses down the hole. Needless to say we all refused to decend and retrieve the glasses.
Quite right. To say that was beyond your job description is putting it mildly. Why was he sticking his head down that hole anyway?!
@@HistoryCalling Probably looking down as he peed, glasses slipped off and bye bye.
Porta-johns are fairly common on military ranges (which includes manuever training areas, not just gun ranges). And every now and again, some unlucky troop will drop a weapon or other "sensitive item" down the hole.
SOP is to have the troop who dropped it get it out.
This is *part* of why US Army units generally prohibit taking one's weapon into the porta-john outside a combat zone (the other being suicide prevention, as the "Little Blue Command Tents" are often the only private place available where a troop might have his weapon *and* potential access to ammo).
Sounds like a prank by the old timer 😂
I wonder how many phones get dropped down the Port-a-jons at outdoor concerts now a days?
Shocking and humorous!
I have only one question.
Did they not understand that many people standing overtop excrement was not a good thing?
The smell must have been horrendous.
As a side note, I saw a documentary about the excavation of old hospital grounds.
It’s been a while so the details are a tad fuzzy.
I believe it was in England.
May have been Scotland.
The soil still held active diseases after 400 years.
It was fascinating.
Makes me wonder if the sights of these latrines still hold diseases.
I think it just never occurred to them that the floor would give way. Hmm, I don't know about old latrines. They must get dug up sometimes during archaeological digs though, so I imagine someone has the answer.
😂 thankfully i have had my tea . ( dinner *)
He died on the throne. . Must have come from somewhere. ( this ? )
Yeah, this isn't one to watch if you're eating dinner :-)
KILLER TOILET videos at last - ty HC
I know. I thought I'd kept you all waiting long enough ;-)
Wow HC that was quite interesting and weird. To think something like that happened. There are quite a few different ways to die more harshly. Have you ever watched a 1000 ways to die and I did at one time have the book. My question is did they remove the bodies or leave them there and fill it in? Thanks HC look forward to next week.
My impression is that they retrieved the bodies. No, I've never even heard of that show. Sounds gruesome though.
The garderobe in Doune Castle kept me amused for ages. Monty Python and The Holy Grail was filmed at the castle and the garderobe had a suspiciously handy recess, for old leaves or medieval literature or even rejected scripts or something.
I lived on a goat farm within a modern city that had no running water. Outhouse 2019 to 2021 i lived there and luckily i had a toilet in my trailer that had to be emptied after every use. Third world indeed. Lol.
There's an account of this in my episode 1 of Weird Blues Tales about 1 Horn the mama goat. Thanks for all you do.
Yikes. I think you've put me off goat farming for life :-)
The smell of an outhouse is definitely something that sticks with you. We used to use one every summer at the racetrack dad drove at (quarter mile car racing) as a hobby. They finally replaced the outhouse for real toilets in the late 90s. Even though it's been over 25 years, I can still smell it.
Old train stations used creosote to stop the bad smells
We only had flush toilets by the swimming pool and barn at Girl Scout Camp. Everywhere else was latrines.
See, this is why I never joined the Girl Scouts :-)
Actually, the same thing happened in the US. A thunderstorm hit during recess at a grade school. The girls ran into a latrine or outhouse, and the floor collapsed. Same result. It happened in the later 1800s, I believe.
Enjoyed this video more than I should 🤭 "The hand of God in what had happened" cracked me up 🤣
Erfurt is a nice city to visit - nowadays.
By the way: your pronunciation is really good! Take it from a German.
Ah, thank you so much. I always stress out about saying words in other languages, so I'm delighted that I did well with the German words and names in this video. Glad to hear Erfurt is not overshadowed by this gruesome story. :-)
Happy to help with translations from early German and French if ever needed by the way. I enjoy such stuff 🤓
I considered asking for help on my community tab with this one actually as I had a terrible time with the medieval German, but I didn't want to give away what my video topic was.
I have to say after listening to I don't know how many of your videos that I like this little playful side of you. It's quite nice.
Thank you very much. I can't always be like that depending on the subject matter, but it's more fun for me too to be able to be light hearted.
What a title!!! 😂 Looking forward to this (currently at the beginning)
Yes, it's quite a story. Try not to throw up! :-)
Where I grew up, there were still a great many who didn’t have indoor plumbing of any kind. Some had a nice water pump in the yard, others had to haul water from a nearby creek.
All had what was called an outhouse. My aunt and uncle had made two holes in theirs. One smaller one for children and one larger one for teens and adults. The larger hole had the addition of a comfy toilet seat screwed into place above the hole. Outhouses were not pleasant that’s for sure. Most had a large bucket of lime with a scoop in it sitting in the corner. After you made a stink you’d put a scoop of lime down the hole. It did help control that pungent odor but it did not make it disappear. Some folks didn’t bother with the lime and you could smell the little building from quite a distance. All folks had their outhouses at least fifty feet from their house and usually dug a new hole every year or two to relocate the pit, ( using the dirt from the new hole to finish filling in the old poo pit), and then just relocating the little house atop the new hole. They were scary to have to go out and use in the night. They were freezing cold in the winter and in the summer, besides being hot and miserable, you also had to deal with flies and Yellowjackets (that for some reason liked it down in the hole).
I was very luck ,( and knew it), that we had indoor plumbing and electricity, which a lot of folks still didn’t have, although most did have both electricity and indoor plumbing by the time I was in high school.
In case you’re curious I grew up in the mountains of Montana , USA. 🙂
Oh ya, and you sometimes got slivers from the wood seats and it was scary when I was younger and they didn’t have a small hole for little bums, ( it was hard to balance on the front edge of the hole when I was used to a real toilet at my house).
Very glad to hear you managed not to fall down the hole! Not so glad to read about the possibility of splinters in the bottom. Ouch! Nevertheless, you will be glad to know you haven't put me off Montana. I've seen it on TV etc, think it looks beautiful and would still love to visit some day :-) I don't know what yellowjackets are though. I Googled it, but all I got was some TV show.
@@HistoryCalling Montana is absolutely beautiful! I’m partial to the western side of the state where the mountains and trees and an abundance of lakes big and small abound, as well as super friendly folk. 😃(since that’s my stomping grounds). Yellow jackets are a very ornery type of bee. Not as mean as a hornet but right close.
This film is the PITS.
Haha!!! :-)
I can remember my German grandmother being horrified at the idea of indoor plumbing, granted she didn’t know how it could possibly work. And she was someone who was an extremely clean person.
I can also remember when rest areas only had outhouses. We’ve come a long way-many things to be grateful for
What a shit way to go.
I'm sorry. I'll see myself out.
I nearly said that myself, but ended up downgrading the language a bit to keep YT happier :-)
@@HistoryCalling haha yes, it's a shame you must appease the all mighty algorithm at the cost of low hanging humour. Hehe
In Canada in the 20th century (very recently) houses and cottages in the countryside and summer homes on lakes usually had outhouses which were a toilet with a hole dug underneath. I’ve used them many times. I’m sure they are still used in some places. However many summer cottages are now modern and have indoor plumbing
This is the content I need!! "Shartenfreude"🤣🤣🤣💩💩💩
I'm off to Google that now.
Edit: Er, I got Sharten joy from Google translate???
Das war ja so komisch! 🤭
'That was so strange' - is that the correct translation?
@@HistoryCalling That was so funny!! (Translated) 😉
@@HistoryCalling "Schadenfreude" is a word that means "deriving amusement from someone elses msfortunes .. I just changed the beginning of it to "shart" ie a plume of diarrhoea propelled rapidly by intestinal gas... (it was a joke)
Myt mother is an historian. One of her favourite medieval joke is this: Two brothers fell into a cess pit. Side by side they were interred.
First here ❤❤ i often wonder how women in medival times managed their periods .
Put it this way, I'm glad I'm living in the 21st century!
That's a link to a video a German historian lady, history of subject and trying to make / use them . Like a reenactment thing.
COUNTRY WOMEN USED MOSS. TOWN WOMEN USED RAGS.
That upper room must have been quite fragrant even before the collapse😮
I literally just heard about this event 2 weeks ago and now you made a video about it! Absolutely love it!
Would you ever been interested in a video about the 1315 great famine?
I'd never heard of it until recently actually, but one of my friends mentioned it to me and I decided to do a video on it.
hello Hc! just coming in from vacation so i’m a bit late but happy to have this to unpack all my goodies to🙌🏻
Welcome back. Hope you had a good trip. :-)
Gross warning.
I work in hospice care. Unfortunately I can think of something worse, having an infection decomposing you from the inside out. I had a gentleman who had the unfortunate experience of developing an infection in his intestines from inflammation and it partially blocking his bowels. The inflammation got bad enough to rupture them into his abdominal area. He was already on hospice care and was not well enough for surgery. Having your insides turn to festering goo has got to be towards top of the list. He passed away a few days later.
That poor man...
When I was at boarding school in the 60s, we had an emergency latrine set out side. I have experienced the horrors of using a latrine pit toilet. The heat and foul stink is a memory that has lasted me a lifetime.
And the headmasters cat fell in one year.
Regards from South Africa
What a giggle. I knew what was going to happen by 4:00!
My wife writes stories set in the 13th to 18th centuries so we made studies about latrines of the period especially garderobes. You featured a good example at 2:34. Many garderobes had poo pits but others emptied into the moat or rover over which the castle had been built . Pele towers such as used by border reivers on the Anglo-Scottish border had internal garderobes for security.
We've read of garderobes being used as means of accessing the castle so this was a good strategy, if of somewhat dubious health benefit.
Yes, I was chuffed to find that photo as I don't have any myself that show a hanging latrine like that. What an awful way to enter a Castle. I think I'd rather just let them keep it! :-)
You’re so peppy and sassy in this video! You sound well! Love that!
Thank you. It seemed like the type of topic that needed that approach to deflect from the smelly horror of it all.
@@HistoryCalling I cannot imagine the terror and utter confusion they experienced.
I think that there probably were a large number of individuals present. Otherwise, I don't think the floor would have collapsed. This is especially the case, as the building appears to have only been forty years old at the time of collapse.
As a child growing up, we had no functional plumbing, but a gravity fed water source, We had no toilet, but we did have a two seater outhouse with a big old Sears catalog in it.that catalog served for two purposes, I think you might know what I mean by that. The outhouse was located next to the cornfield about 200 feet away from the house. We had to move the outhouse periodically from time to time and our shower was in the basement up against the base of the chimney. It was gravity fed by a water tank up above,the temperature of the water tank was what the temperature of the water that you took a shower with. Oh,the good ole days.🤪
When I was very young, about 50 years ago, we had a latrine in a small shed behind our house. It was awful and sometimes rat-tailed maggots crawled up from the pit ending up on the floor and the wooden plank. To combat these maggots, creolin was poured into the latrine. My grandmother in another town had also a latrine in the garden and they still used newspapers. Later, this was replaced by toilet paper that came in two colors, pink and grey. That toilet paper was almost as bad as the newspapers, it was very coarse and felt like sanding paper...
I had expected to find out that it had been a methane explosion rather than a building collapse.
I wonder if the humidity from the pit had rotted the beams.
I just love your pronunciation of the word “Count” - I’ve listened three times now and find it more enjoyable than the original story!
I'm the proud owner of an outhouse (over a pit) on an old ranch in Wyoming. We still use it. It was built by the Civilian Conervation Corps during the depression.
This sounds very interesting can’t wait to find out about it!! Thanks for the video!❤
Hope you like it and don't throw up from the gruesomeness of it all :-)
@@HistoryCalling thank you!
I moved into a huge old mansion four years ago that hadn't been lived in for years. There was oft times a bad smell but the owners told me it was when it rained a lot but over time it got way worse. One day when having a plumber do some work we discovered that the house, as grand as it was, was not connected to the waste system and in fact all the 'poo' was just dropping under the house for years. I ended up giving notice as the owner didn't see the problem. I could have had the house legally declared uninhabitable but I chose to just go. My brother in law had a similar experience when he bought an old house and discovered that the cellar under his house was used as a waste pit and was half full of waste ! He had to spend a fortune having it taken out and then they discovered that under the cellar was another cellar, he had them both condemned.
Mental note: never buy an old house (though I couldn't afford a mansion, big nor small, smelly or otherwise :-) )!
I got locked in a port-a-potty in the 90s with my cousin and sister. It felt like it lasted for an hour but it was probably five or 10 minutes. It was before they were redesigned in the US and was about the size of a phone booth. We were all quite young and small, which is why my cousin took me in with her to help my sister. The door stuck. No one else was in the park and I had always been a bit afraid of port-a-potties anyway. We kept trying the door and somehow it came unstuck and didn’t tip over, though it was a close thing. I never entered one of those ones again.
I like looking for and finding your watermarks on the pictures, nice touch🎉
Many summer houses have seperated latrines in Scandinavia. Works really well, clean with just a handfull of saw dust.
My Grand Dad in Jacksonville,Alabama had a Outhouse when we rolled up from Virginia in 1975. I was maybe 5 and I telling you that fly infested hole at the bottom was stuff that still gives me nightmares.
composting toilets seem to have come from those, but are a much nicer experience. They are often used in Finland and I have never been to one that smelled bad or was not well kept. Interesting video.
This does reminds me of a story in my family relating to the second world war in County Durham, my uncle Arthur went out to the toilet which was in the back yard, exactly timed for a German bomb getting dropped close by, why’ll uncle Arthur was well into his Business, the bomb totally destroyed the toilet building leaving uncle with his trousers round his ankles with not a mark on him but totally open for all the world to see, I imagine he wouldn’t have to do any straining that day, left like a statue on a pedestal. Arthur suffered no ill effects apart from temporarily deafness, the Methodist minister said it was a miracle and they should put up a statue in the center of the village of Arthur sitting on his toilet, you could just imagine the war memorial with the statue of Arthur on the toilet next to it
Now who can deny that history can and often is humorous? This was not so gruesome as it was hilarious. Thanks & keep up the good work!
Glad you liked it. I don't often go this medieval (or leave the British Isles) for my videos, but this was certainly worth it.
New sub. I appreciate your efforts for accuracy.
Well, I knew I could count on you for the nitty gritty facts. lol. I have often wondered about the John's in some castles that I've seen. True, they were years improved form their older days but they all left me with the thought that some missing people were not really lost but had an unfortunate mishap when doing their nightly duty. This could account for many of History's Mysteries... missing Brides, lost treasures and hopefully Not , the lost Princes.
I can think of stupid ways to die ... but I'm not sure they could be more horrible.
I think there is the making of a mystery series. On the Way to the Toilet...
Oh gross. I certainly hope no one disappeared down the latrine chute! :-0
The ad was perfect for this one. Listening to this all of the sudden I hear “trying to clean out stuck poop….?”
You have very quickly become my favorite creator, so thank you!
I had a question, was there social consequences to being a mistress to the king during the medieval/ renaissance era? What happens to a woman who had children out of wedlock with the monarch? What becomes of her social status?
THANK YOU SO MUCH @bargunner for the very generous donation and kind comment. To answer your question, it depended on how the King treated her. Henry VIII and Charles II made sure their mistresses were either well married off (if they weren't married already) or financially secure for instance. From what we can tell though, Edward IV doesn't seem to have been terribly interested in his exs, given how little we ever hear of them.
Thank you!
Love your work.
You're welcome. Glad you enjoyed this little deviation away from my regular content :-)
@@HistoryCalling As a historian, I rather enjoy exploring the lesser known incidents, nations, peoples, etc that get passed over for the big flashy ones like Henry VIII and his children (though I never get tired of reading or hearing about such things).
HC, I think you've discovered a gold mine of content for many videos going forward. The full (and epic) title of your secondary source (8:25) reads "Historical Chronicle or Description of the Most Remarkable Stories Occurring from the Beginning of the World until the Year 1619, whereby the Most Important Events; the Origins, Rise and Fall of the Great Monarchies, Kingdoms, Electorates and Other Principalities, Free Polities, Countries and Cities; the Biographies of All Emperors, Popes, Kings, Electors and other Princes, Famous Cardinals, Bishops, Heroes, Scholars and Artists; as well as Wars, Battles, Sieges, Victories, Conquests, Defeats, Peace Treaties, Alliances, Coronations, Triumphal Entries, Celebrations, Riots, Betrayals, Murders, Executions, Conflagrations, Floods, Storms, Shipwrecks, Earthquakes, Times of Plenty and Penury, Deaths, Funeral Processions, Castra Doloris, Natural Wonders, and other strange events, from the Beginning of the World, in Europe and Other Parts of the Earth, Ordered according to the Four Monarchies, with a (?) Timeline, in Eight Parts".
Yeah, the author didn't exactly understand how to optimise his title, did he? It's just a bit on the long side :-)
I have actually used an outhouse or latrine before when I was a kid. It was at the boyscout camp that I was camping at with my girl scout troop. It was so bad that it is memorable to this day even though it was well more than two decades ago. It was very unpleasant to say the least. It made me rather pee myself than use it.
I’m glad history can make me laugh, however callously, when future prospects can’t. 😂❤
Oh yeah, there's always something funny somewhere in the past (and there's always something funny coming in the future too) :-)
Thanks so much for creating and sharing this informative video. Great job. Keep it up.
Gads - you don't say....
I've known latrine as an out house and my family had one at our camp house which didn't have electricity. Before we had that it was essentially a poop bucket you'd take with you onto the camp site.
At least a bucket probably only has one 'deposit' in it at a time though and it presumably came from yourself and was then cleaned out for the next use? That's what I'm hoping for for your sake at least.
Here in the U.S, West centeral states we had outhouses (latrine). When I was young back in the 1970s I remember a park in Nebarska that had a public outhouse
I just hope it was emptied regularly. :-0
Swiss here, two points:
a) Compost toilets are a modern form of latrine and if properly handled they are actually cleaner and less smelly than portapotties. (They use wood shavings to be thrown between the huan waste)...
b) Rathe is highly likely an old german writing of Rat => council, if it has the add on "zu" this is highly likely not a place name but means "as he was sitting in the council/having a council", though it could possibly also hint towards the "Rathaus" the town hall.
Allthough I doubt that townhalls had a cesspit directly below their council halls, this is probably some other building which has been choosen due to the ammount of involved people etc and thus might have been overloaded.
Thank you :-) I've read other people saying something similar about how modern compost toilets are built and that they don't smell.
Yes I agree. back in the 1930s until we had flush. we had a bucket of sandy soil and when we had used the pit Lavatory we through in a shovel full to cover. one day someone had done there business and done a poop so big about 12 inches it stuck out of the bucket. My Uncle said the man who did that must have Jacked him up in the air spinning him around and lifted his boots off the ground I never heard so many grown ups in fits of laughter as that day.
collapsing floors still happen, especially with older structures. There was a very tragic wedding reception in Italy, where the floor collapsed, but in a way that funneled the people into the remains of a very old well that had been under the newer (yet still old) addition where the reception was happening. The bride and groom survived but many of the family members died and my memory may be wrong but the casualties were around 50? Even one is too many, as it was people being crushed by more people into a well with old everything in it.