What Did Medieval Times Smell Like?

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The full episode is on YouTube, about ten minutes long.

Updated: November 14, 2026

Close your eyes and imagine stepping out of a time machine into a medieval town, around the year 1350. Before you see anything, before you hear the church bells or the market criers, you smell it. Wood smoke, horse dung, baking bread, rotting fish, and something underneath it all that your nose knows means trouble. Welcome to the Middle Ages, the smelliest centuries in European history. The people who lived there barely noticed.

The street

The people who dealt with the worst of it had a job title that sounds like a joke and was not. They were the gong farmers. Their work was to climb down into the cesspits behind houses and shovel out the human waste by hand, load it onto carts, and haul it out of town to sell to farmers as fertilizer. They worked only at night. It paid several times the wage of an ordinary labourer, because almost nobody else would do it.

It was dangerous in a way that is hard to believe until you hear the story of Richard the Raker. In 1326, in London, Richard fell through the rotten boards of a privy floor and drowned in the cesspit below. The detail that makes the story stick: it was his day off. He had gone to use the privy himself, the floor gave way, and that was the end of Richard the Raker, the man whose whole job was emptying cesspits.

The house and the body

Step inside a medieval house, and the first smell is smoke. Most homes had a central hearth, an open fire in the middle of the main room, with no chimney. The smoke rose through the rafters and out through a hole in the roof. In a great hall, bacon hung from the smoky roof beams, curing in the heat. After dark, the light came from tallow candles, made of rendered animal fat, which smoked and gave off a greasy, muttony smell. Beeswax burned clean, but only churches and the rich could afford it.

Now, the bodies. Medieval people smelled of themselves, because most people owned only one set of clothes, and washing them meant hauling water, heating it, and scrubbing by hand. Here is the part the stories usually get wrong. People did wash. They washed their faces and hands daily, they went to the public bathhouses most towns had, and they changed their linen underclothes, which did the real cleaning, soaking up sweat and dirt. The idea that medieval people bathed only once a year is a myth, a joke invented much later. They were doing their best with one outfit and a bucket.

The market and the trades

It was not all bad, and the market is where the smells turned good. Walk into a medieval market square on a baking day and the air was full of fresh bread from the communal ovens, roasting meat, ale from the brewhouse, and the sharp green smell of cut herbs. Markets were the best smelling places in town, and the worst, because the fishmongers were there too, and fish went off fast.

The butchers were the loudest problem in the market, and the smelliest. In London, cattle were driven alive into the city and slaughtered in the open air in the Shambles, and the blood ran into the gutter. In 1371, the king himself complained that the air of the city had been greatly corrupted by putrefied blood running in the streets. The city ordered the butchers to slaughter outside the walls. The butchers stayed put. Their customers were inside the walls, and meat would not keep across town in August.

How they coped

Medieval people fought smell with smell, and their main weapon was the herb. Floors were strewn with rosemary, lavender, mint, basil, chamomile, and roses, and the list of recommended strewing herbs ran to dozens. Walking across a fresh layer of herbs crushed them underfoot and released their scent into the room. It was air freshener, insect repellent, and floor covering all at once, and a hall could smell almost pleasant. Almost.

So the next time someone tells you the Middle Ages were just filthy and everyone stank, remember the whole picture. Yes, the streets were open sewers, and Richard the Raker drowned in a cesspit on his day off. The bread was baking, the herbs were strewn, the pomanders were swinging, and people who had never heard of a germ still worked out that sweet smells were worth paying for.