Hygiene practices from another era, far from being clean

We Used to Toss Trash in Castle Moats?! Yikes!

Castles might seem all grand and majestic, but their moats often hid a pretty gross secret. Instead of nice, clean water, they were sometimes filled with sewage and straight-up garbage – human waste and everything else you can imagine. Basically, they doubled as giant, open-air toilets.

Back before indoor plumbing was a thing, servants would just chuck everything into the moat: leftover grub, what was in the chamber pots… it’s hard to imagine anything less royal than the stench of a ditch full of that kind of stuff.