How Did People Go to the Bathroom in Medieval Times?

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Updated: November 14, 2026

In a castle in the 1200s, the bathroom was a little stone closet built into the wall, a wooden seat with a hole in it, and a long drop to the ground below. No flush, no pipes, and no privacy as we would know it. The answer starts in the castle, moves out of an upstairs window with a shout of warning, and ends down in a pit with the men who cleaned it.

The castle garderobe

The medieval castle toilet was called a garderobe: a tiny room built into the thickness of an outside wall, with a stone or wooden seat pierced by a hole. Below the hole ran a vertical shaft down the outside face of the building. You sat, gravity did the work, and the waste dropped into a moat, a pit, or a stream below. These rooms appear in stone castles from the 12th century onward, and you can still see them today. At Peveril Castle in Derbyshire, a garderobe juts out from the keep. At Goodrich Castle, a whole tower held a communal garderobe, with three chambers and several seats.

The name is the strange part. Garderobe comes from the French words for keeping clothes, and it is the ancestor of our word wardrobe. The toilet room was also a clothes store, because people believed the sharp smell of ammonia rising from the waste would keep moths and fleas out of expensive cloth. The lord's fine robes hung beside the toilet seat. Privacy was a flexible idea: a small room of its own, often with a cloth over the doorway, counted as private, and many garderobes were shared, with a servant waiting just outside the curtain with a towel.

Chamber pots and the nightmen

The garderobe belonged to the rich. Most people in the 1200s never saw the inside of a castle, and their bathroom was a pot. The chamber pot sat by the bed, made of ceramic, metal, or wood. At night you used it, and in the morning someone carried it out. The polite destination was the cesspit or the midden heap outside. The impolite destination was the street, out of an upstairs window. That did happen. Cities kept passing laws against it: London forbade dumping waste into the waterways in 1357, and town courts fined people whose upstairs slops landed on the shop goods below. In Edinburgh, the warning shout before a pot came out of the window was "gardyloo," from the French "garde a l'eau," which means watch out for the water. If you heard it, you moved.

Under the town lay the cesspit, a hole in the ground where waste collected. A lined cesspit was expensive to build, about twice the yearly wages of an unskilled laborer. That somebody had the worst job in the medieval town. In later centuries they were called gong farmers, from "gong," an old word for a privy. In the 1200s they were simply rakers, and the law made them work only at night, after nine in the evening and before five in the morning. They carried buckets up on ropes and loaded the waste, called night soil, onto carts bound for outside the town walls. The work paid well for dirty work: in the late 1400s a gong farmer could charge two shillings for every ton removed, and some earned three times the wage of an unskilled laborer. The night soil went onto the fields as fertilizer, and the cycle started again.

The night the floor gave way

On the 26th of July, 1184, in the German city of Erfurt, King Henry the Sixth called a court day, a Hoftag, to settle a quarrel between Conrad, Archbishop of Mainz, and Louis the Third, Landgrave of Thuringia. Around sixty nobles crowded into an upper room of a church building to hear the case. The floor was old, and its wooden beams were rotten. Under the weight of the crowd, it gave way. The nobles fell through the floor below, and then through the floor beneath that, straight into the cesspit under the building. About sixty men died, crushed by falling timber, drowned in the pit, or overcome by the fumes.

Then there is the castle that fell through its own toilet. In 1204, during a long siege of Chateau Gaillard in Normandy, the story goes that a French soldier found the mouth of an old latrine chute on the south side of the middle courtyard. Above it stood a chapel. He climbed the shaft, stood on a companion's shoulders, and pulled himself through a window. Others followed on a rope. The garrison panicked, the chapel caught fire, and the French opened the gates from inside. This is a legend, but the builders learned the lesson. After that, garderobe chutes got their iron grates, their narrow turns, and their right angles. The bathroom stopped being a back door.

So, how did people go to the bathroom in the 1200s? In a castle, in a little stone closet in the wall. In a town, in a pot by the bed, emptied into a pit. And somewhere underneath it all, a crew of night workers kept the whole system moving, one bucket at a time.