1535

In July of 1535, King Henry VIII and his court of over 700 people began a royal tour. In a four-month period, the huge court would visit 30 different royal palaces, noble manor houses, and religious institutions. This epic tour wasn’t just a PR event for the king and a treat for his loyal subjects; there was another big reason for the constant movement of the court.

The court periodically needed to escape the disgusting messes that large crowds of people, like the court, produced. Palaces had to be constantly evacuated so they could be cleaned of all the mountains of human waste. Livestock and farmland also needed time to recover after supplying food for so many people. Once the tour was over, Henry and his court of now over 1,000 people kept moving for the rest of the year, travelling between the King’s 60 residences in a vain attempt to live in hygienic surroundings.

Within days of a royal party settling in, a stink would set in from poorly discarded food, animal waste, vermin, and human waste, which was stored in underground chambers waiting for disposal. Only the King and those of very high substance had any sort of plumbing. The constant fires would cake the walls in thick soot, and the throng of so many people packed into one residence would make the chore of cleaning properly almost impossible. Henry VIII was fastidious and terrified of disease. Unusual for the time, Henry VIII waged his own battle against the filth and stench of so many, mostly properly unwashed, bodies living in the same space.

From the records, though, it seems Henry’s rules were a hapless battle. To keep servants and courtiers from urinating on the garden walls, large red Xs were painted in problem spots, but according to contemporaries, this gave the drunken courtiers something to ‘aim at’. A royal decree called for people not to dump dirty dishes in the hallways or on the King’s bed.

Henry even forbade the cooks in the royal kitchen to work "in garments of such vileness as they do now, nor lie in the nights and days in the kitchen or ground by the fireside." To combat the problem, the kitchen clerks were instructed to purchase "honest and wholesome garments" for the staff. King Henry had installed a sophisticated, for the time, lavatory system for himself; others, however, were not so lucky. Servants were asked to urinate in a large vat so it could be collected for cleaning. Sweet-smelling plants covered palace floors, and those fortunate enough to be able to afford them pressed sachets of scent to their noses.

Once the court moved on to the next royal house, the scrubbing and airing out of the palace began. The waste from the non-flushing lavatories held underground had to be disposed of, and this job fell to the King’s Gong Scourers, who were tasked with cleaning the sewers in his palaces. Henry VIII bathed often and changed his undershirts daily. He was a royal rarity, as most other monarchs of western European countries were famous for never bathing and concerning themselves with the cleanliness of the court; at least Henry tried!

Source:

History.com