Once again, intrepid Castle team member Daniel has been on the trail of another of our Castle Characters. Some of the characters we’ve looked at so far have been pretty high up the social ‘heap’, so to speak. But not this poor chap - after all, if you’re going to have a heap, someone has to be on the bottom of it, and in terms of Castle jobs this character definitely ranks near the, er, bottom. Anyway, speaking of heaps and bottoms, let’s get on with Daniel’s investigation into the exciting life of the Gong Farmer…

Fair warning: don’t read this if you’re about eat.

Medieval Plumbing (or lack thereof)

Being born in the modern day, it’s fair to say we take a lot of our everyday lives for granted. When it comes to the toilet, we don’t need to think too hard about where our waste goes. Just flush and it’s gone. But given that the flushing toilet wasn’t invented until 1596 and underground sewers didn’t come into existence until the mid-19th century, people of the times past had to devise other ways to dispose of their leavings.

Latrines would vary depending on your status. For a wealthy person, they would use a garderobe. Today, this word is the French for ‘wardrobe’, but in medieval times, it was used to describe a small cupboard or room in a castle. Simple in construction, these were fitted with a wooden bench covering a hole, connected to a long chute. These would ideally be built over a flowing body of water like a river. In London, such privies emptied out into the Thames. In the case of Newcastle Castle, we have evidence of two areas for toilets. All the garderobe chutes in the Keep are connected to a room at the base of the castle, likely a cesspit. At the Black Gate, they empty into the dry moat surrounding the gatehouse, which was also used for general waste disposal. You can only imagine the smell!

For the average person, living in a village or town, they would make use of a communal outhouse, or a ‘house of easement’. If you weren’t lucky enough to have a home built near the river, it was either this or construct your own privy. These wooden huts, fitted with the same wooden bench and hole, would be built over a deep cesspit at the bottom. They were made to be less than watertight, allowing liquids to drain away and leave only the… solid waste. Properly built, it could be as long as a year before they had to be cleaned.

However, they still needed to be cleared out, otherwise they presented a serious health problem. They could overflow into the street or start seeping into the water supply of underground wells. In some cases, neighbouring privies could rot through the walls of other houses and leak into them. Thus, we see the task that had to be undertaken by the gong farmer and it was far from pleasant.

Job Description

The name itself is derived from the old English word ‘gan’ or ‘to go’. This in itself was used as a slang word for the toilet and its contents. They were also known as ‘night men’, because of their working hours. Naturally, nobody wants to have carts of human waste (or ‘night soil’ as it was called) being pulled around during the day, so their work would start around 9pm and finish at 5am. The periods required to empty the pits varied, but it was usually done once a year. During her reign, Elizabeth I found the smell so bad at Hampton Court when the garderobes were being emptied, that she would stay in the home of one of her courtiers until it was finished.

The job would usually be done by about three or four men. One went down into the pit to begin shovelling the load into the buckets. Another would pull the buckets out by a rope, while one or two others would carry them to the cart. These would then either be disposed in a larger cesspit outside of the city or be sold to local farmers as manure for their fields. If it was attached to a castle, it could be used for fertilising their own fields. The farmer would also have to clear out the chutes which emptied into the pits. He would beat his drum to announce the ‘hour of no shyting’, climb up and unclog any blockages, either by waste build-up or from corpses. The latter would be from invaders trying to climb up to attack (if they were brave or desperate enough). Curiously, an additional duty of castle gong farmers was to kill these attackers if they tried.

Though it was a disgusting job, it was essential and one which was quite well paid. Accounts of the late 15th century saw gong farmers paid two shillings per ton of waste removed, equivalent to about £66 in today’s money. Accounts for the church of St Mary Woolnoth in 1577 list paying a gong farmer ‘foure poundes of candells’. These would likely have been made from beeswax and used for church services, which were more long lasting and more expensive than most other candles. Supposedly, a gong farmer to Elizabeth I was partly paid in brandy.

On-the-Job Risks

Despite the good pay and regular hours, gong farming was far from the most sought after of work. Naturally, gong farmers didn’t have the best social standing. Being forced to work late into the night and regularly coated in human excrement likely won’t endear you to many people. Especially if they were encountered while working, most couldn’t stand to be in their company. They were even required to keep their homes in specified areas, away from the general populace.

Being down in the cesspit would have been thoroughly unpleasant. The primary concern in their construction was the storage and eventual disposal of waste, not fitting them for a human being down there for an extended period of time. As such, ventilation would be extremely poor, provided only by the opening of the pit which the smell would rise towards. The chances of death by asphyxiation would be quite high. In the Tudor period, when tobacco came to England, some gong farmers took up smoking in a bid to combat the smell.

Perhaps the biggest risk would be presented if the latrine was in poor upkeep. The floor separating the user from the cesspit below was made from wooden planks. If the waste started to pile too high, the floor could begin to rot. This presented a danger not only for the gong farmers, but the people who used them. A well-known, unfortunate account concerns Richard the Raker in 1326, a gong farmer himself. When going to use a privy, the floor had become so rotten that it broke under his weight. He fell into the pit below and drowned in his own excrement.

The worst part? He wasn’t even working. It was his day off and it was his own privy.

It’s difficult to imagine that anybody was sad to see this profession go. As the 19th century rolled on, gong farmers were slowly made redundant by the introduction of better sanitation and waste disposal methods. However, we at the castle still employ our own gong farmer! If you see him about, feel free to say hello. If you can stand the smell.