...Not far from the Castle of Leiden, a rounded stone structure erected in the eleventh century, van Oosten locks up her bike and heads into a stately brick building that holds the city’s archives. In a hushed room, surrounded by scholars cloistered in study carrels, she lays out a series of pamphlets on a table, each of them centuries old, yellowed and brittle at the edges. They bear such names as “Inspection of the Ordinances on the Subject of Privies” and “Rules and Orders on Privy-Cleaners and Nightworkers.” By examining documents such as these and amassing a large database of excavated cesspits—104 from Leiden alone—van Oosten has been able to reconstruct the intricacies of waste management in vivid detail.
In the archives for an almshouse in Leiden called Sint Agnietenhof, she discovered 34 written permits, each of which describes the cleaning out of a private cesspit by a team of nightmen. The 400-year-old paper trail reveals a fastidious process, each step of which was administered with precision. On September 20, 1603, she reads, in the backyard of a small house on the Rapenburg Canal in the center of the city, a nightman named Baernt Robberechtsz removed 95 tubs of waste from the cesspit of an aging widow by the name of Sara de Haen. According to city regulations, Robberechtsz and his team would have guided their barge into the city after 10 p.m., so as not to offend the sensibilities of the citizenry. Upon mooring at the bank of a canal, the nightmen proceeded to the backyard of Sara de Haen’s home. The “hole-man” climbed down into the privy and scooped out waste—known as “night soil”—which two men on the surface transferred to a wooden tub or barrel. The “tub-men” then undertook the task of carrying the vessel and its sloshing contents back to the barge. Robberechtsz and his crew followed a path through the streets and alleys so exact that their salary was calculated according to how many steps they took. Finally, the crew entered the barge by way of a gangplank and by the light of an oil lantern in order to prevent any spillage in the river. And they did so quietly—if the nightmen were loud, drunk, or sloppy with the night soil, they could be prosecuted. Records show that unscrupulous nightmen in Leiden were punished on at least two occasions. Upon completing the job, before they could be paid, their supervisor checked the cesspit to make sure it had been properly emptied. Even centuries later, it is clear that such punctilious lawmaking and record keeping were not the work of a society ignorant of decency, cleanliness, and order.
As it turns out, archives all over Europe hold documents that reveal long-ignored systems of public health and hygiene. In cities throughout the Netherlands, going back as far as the thirteenth century, so-called mud officials patrolled the streets, doling out fines to citizens who disposed of their waste inappropriately. Other cities benefited from the services of “waste citizens,” who were enlisted to clean specific places in the city in exchange for citizenship. The Belgian city of Antwerp employed men who monitored the city’s freshwater supply, while a brigade of “dung carriers” (moosmeiers) in Bruges removed waste from cesspits to beyond the boundaries of the city. London was voided of its waste each night by so-called gong farmers.
The city of Ghent—one of the larger urban centers of the late medieval period, with a population of 40,000 by the seventeenth century—employed an especially versatile sanitary official known as the “King of Dirt.” As decreed by the city, the King of Dirt, along with a group of underlings known as the “King’s Children,” would patrol the city, punishing citizens for unsanitary behavior....