The Dung Ages

• Main
• Laconic
• Quotes
• All Subpages
• Create New

"I mean, that's the thing about the past that people forget. All the shit. Animal shit. People shit. Cow shit. Horse shit. You waded through the stuff. You should spray 'em all with shit as they come through the gates." —Hob Gadling critiques a Renaissance Faire, Sandman

The convention to show the Medieval Era as a crapsack time populated by pustule-faced, cat-beating, dung-caked, mud-farming peasants. Popularized by films created by the Monty Python team. (Partially for Rule of Funny—Monty Python's Terry Jones is a historian and knows better—and partially as a reaction against the flowery King Arthur-inspired romances that had shaped popular views of the era up until then.)

Portrayal of The Dung Ages is not limited to Britain and/or the Dark Ages. It's often seen even in portrayals of cultures where it doesn't belong. Many ancient Romans, for instance, bathed every day: once soap-making arrived from Gaul, the Roman patricians who could afford it used soap with abandon, possibly to a greater extent than we do.

Something to keep in mind is that neither The Dung Ages nor Ye Goode Olde Days is "more" accurate than the other. The reality is that while hygiene was not good by modern standards, and living conditions were not what we'd call "comfortable" (what with the lack of central heating and air conditioning, flush toilets, and weekly garbage pick-up); neither did most people walk around barefoot while caked in filth, eat rotten food nor live in tumble-down huts made of sticks.

Strong aversions of The Dung Ages are examples of Ye Goode Olde Days and should be put there.

The growing Dungeon Punk subgenre blends Dung Ages squalor with Heroic Fantasy tropes and modern or near-future aesthetics. See also Medieval Morons.

Examples of The Dung Ages include:

Anime and Manga

• The setting of Berserk in general tends toward this, with only the royal courts having anything in the way of Gorgeous Period Dress.

Comic Books

• Hob Gadling in The Sandman, who is really 600 years old but looks 30, grumpily complains that a Renaissance Fair or SCA event he's dragged to doesn't have enough shit everywhere. But later he complains that the toilets are "bloody disgusting" and gets back a "we strive for realism".

Film

• Combined with Gorgeous Period Dress in Flesh and Blood.
• Ridley Scott did this with his grittier, dung-ier take on Robin Hood. Lampshaded in the scene when the children capture Robin and he mentions that he can teach them to keep clean so they won't get sick.
• Robert Bresson's 1974 film Lancelot du Lac, in many ways, instigated this trend in film. Most people do not realise that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a send up of Lancelot du Lac, but the grime and hyperviolence (as in the Black Knight scene especially) are directly related to the earlier film.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which practically everyone runs around bedraggled, shabby and covered in filth, as noted by one character's caustic observation: "He must be a king. He hasn't got shit all over him." In fact, according to backstage reports, the attention of the two Pythons who were directing (Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam) to keeping things authentic in this regard eventually began to take on slightly obsessive tones and really began to piss off the other Pythons (and the other cast and crew members, for that matter), who were having to seriously suffer for their art. This eventually made it a pretty difficult shoot at times and also perhaps provided a reminder of why this trope exists in the first place. This said, however, Gilliam at least was willing to go through what he was putting everyone else through; his two main characters are probably the filthiest main characters in the movie.
  • Terry Jones admits on the commentary track that this was exaggerated in comparison to what history research has indicated, mentioning for instance that skeletons from the time can have surprisingly good teeth due to the lack of sugar consumption.
  • The scene with the "autonomous collective" was supposed to take place on a normal-looking farm. Because they couldn't get access to a real farm on their filming budget, they changed it to a mud farm.

Peasant Woman: Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here!

• Terry Gilliam's film Jabberwocky, overall depicting the Middle Ages as a pretty damn nasty place to live. Even the king's clothes are ragged and dirty.
• The French movie Les Visiteurs
• Perfume depicts the 18th century Paris as the grossest place in the world; the book even points out that, while our 2008 Paris has at most a faint smell of car exhaust, the 18th century Paris smelled like crap, rot, sweat, rotten fish, urine, and any nasty odor you could imagine.
  • Paris was also originally built on marshland, so it was pretty boggy until the swamp was drained in the 19th century.
• Yellowbeard: Staring Graham Chapman, could be seen as an extension of the Monty Python motif.
• Mel Gibson's Braveheart.
• The England depicted in Black Death is a filthy, depressing place to live (and probably die).
• Another Python offshoot (see a pattern here?) Erik the Viking (directed by Terry Jones) is also filthy dirty.
• The village landscape in Dragonheart are several shades of brown.

Literature

• Played with in George Macdonald Fraser's novel The Pyrates. The opening pages describe an idealized picture of England during The Cavalier Years with buxom wenches and lots of Gorgeous Period Dress, but then refer to scholars' conclusion that the actual standard of living and cleanliness of the time made it closer to The Dung Ages. Fraser then dismisses these conclusions in a tongue-in-cheek way as Political Correctness Gone Mad and announces that he would prefer to write about 17th century England as it should have been.
• The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell rips the King Arthur mythos from the medieval version of Gorgeous Period Dress setting into this one.
• Invoked in the Animorphs book Elfangor's Secret, which makes a big point about how bad the hygiene of the general populace was in medieval times. The animorphs find the time travelling villain by looking for someone clean.
  • Not just bad hygiene, bad health as well. They actually specifically call attention to the fact that even the really important kingy people have giant sores in their faces from smallpox and what have you. When they say "clean" they actually specifically mean "doesn't have a face full of holes".
• Averted in Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series. Good hygiene doesn't show up in the medieval town of Okoitz until the titular time-traveling engineer's reforms start taking effect.
• A Song of Ice and Fire goes for the duality of Gorgeous Period Dress and The Dung Ages. A lot of the action involves the nobles, but it's made clear that the "smallfolk" are having a pretty shitty time of it, usually paying the price for disputes between lords. The moral aspects of the era are called up, as well—thirteen is seen as a perfectly valid age for marriage, the most popular system of justice is trial by combat, castration's still a legal punishment... Westeros is just not a nice place.
• The Witcher, in all its postmodernist glory. Here it goes even to the higher classes, at least in the North, where even kings would need a rather emphatic encouraging to bathe. Sorcerers, on the other hand, are no less clean than the modern people.
  • Which is completely intentional. On the other hand, in his brilliantly acerbic critical essay The Pirog, Sapkowski lampshaded the tendency of hiding behind the postmodernism by telling a story how after another author defended his decision to put a batiste panties on on of his characters as "postmodernist", the said author dressed his own character into a mail made of scales of a giant catfish—which doesn't have scales at all. As Sapkowski noted, "creating a mail of something that doesn't exist requires ether exceptionally strong magic, or exceptionally strong postmodernism".
• Completely averted in the novel of Timeline, by Michael Crichton. After a hard day's work, sure, the people are dirty—but then they go home and bathe. At least within the fortress walls, but that's where as many people as possible live, for the protection.
  • And the introduction pulls no punches in criticizing the foundations of this stereotype.
• Averted to some extent in the Aubrey-Maturin series. Conditions ashore can often be pretty messy, but much is made throughout the course of the books about the Royal Navy's positive fetish for cleanliness on board ship (and the reasons why such an obsession was, in fact, very sensible indeed), and Jack Aubrey's home, Ashgrove Cottage, is kept shipshape by retired sailors.
  • O'Brien has a great deal of fun playing with the expectations of a bachelor house in the books, to the point of doing a literary Gilligan Cut. Scene 1 -- rural English gentlewomen speculating how messy Aubrey's house must be (since he has no proper maid or servants). Scene 2 -- a description of how the sailors acting as servants clean the house just like they do the ship—up before dawn, disassemble the entire house, mop, scrub, dry, put the house back together, THEN wake the Captain up. Spend most of the day polishing metal. And paint the whole thing at least once a week.
• Sometimes averted, sometimes upheld in Eric Flint's 1632 series. The "downtime" Germans of the 17th century are notable in their day and age as having some of the cleanest cities and towns in Europe, but some other places - Edinburgh, for one - are every bit as filthy as stereotype would have it. Indeed, Julie Sims Mackay's infant daughter contracts a severe infection while passing through Edinburgh from which she almost dies.
• Invoked by Ellie, word for word, in Avalon High. While others may have romantic notions of the Middle Ages, this daughter of Medieval scholars has absolutely zero desire to be one of them.
• In Evolution a hunter-gatherer arriving in a Proto-Indo-European city (about 6000 BC) is understandably appalled by the hygienic conditions following the rapid population growth.
• Deliberately avoided in the Codex Alera novels, where everyone bathes regularly if they can, including public baths. Of course, this is a setting where everyone has access to at least some degree of Elemental Powers, so hot, fresh water is commonplace thanks to fire and water furies. The injured and wounded are actually the cleanest, as the healing abilities of watercrafting usually require the patient to be submerged in a tub. Bathing for cleanliness is a bit harder to acquire for the Legions when they're in the field, to the point where the camp followers can make a decent income off of providing hot baths for legionnaires. The hero, Tavi, has to regularly take baths while in the Legions because he pissed off his immediate superior (a logistics officer) by investigating his corruption and got handed an assignment to precisely measure the depth, length, and width of the latrine trenches to make sure "they were up to standard."
• In the Gotrek and Felix book, Skaven Slayer, Felix once went to a tailor to get some fancy clothes and then he had a hard time figuring out how to get to some guy's mansion without getting his clothes gross. He got there presentable by having a carriage take him there. (I forgot details such as if someone provided it to him, or if he saw a setting equivalent of taxi and thought 'oh that works!')

Live Action TV

• Blackadder. The first series, anyway.
  • The second series as well, the couple decide to buy Blackadder's house specifically because it doesn't have an indoor toilet.
• Maid Marian and Her Merry Men
• The BBC's Robin Hood (2006) includes some elements of The Dung Ages.
• The 1997 English mini-series of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe went for this kind of period accuracy in clothing, beards, and decor. On a small TV set, this left all the male characters looking drab, hairy, and nearly identical, while the scenes were so under-lit the parts of it this editor saw might just as well have been shot in a cave.
• HBO's Rome has The Dung Ages for the plebs, and Gorgeous Period Dress for the patricians. Which is pretty close to the way it would really have been.
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys had Herc's greedy friend Salmoneous invest in a dung-fertilizer business run by brothers who had become way too desensitized to the substance.
• Tony Robinson's Worst Jobs in History confirmed this to be quite literal Truth in Television. A key component of the daub in wattle and daub construction was manure.
• Subverted in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "The Magic Sword", where Joel holds a Renaissance fair on the Satellite of Love, and Servo shows up as an indentured serf, making observations of the "real" Dark Ages, taking the fun out of Joel's fair.
• The Dark Ages, a 1990s Britcom by Rob Grant, starring Phil Jupitus.
• Featured in one of the regular sketches in French And Saunders.

Tabletop Games

• Since it's such a Crapsack World already, Warhammer Fantasy Battle's Old World loves to include elements of The Dung Ages. A typical Bretonnian army has both the stereotypical Arthurian knights and the gross, almost-worthless filth-covered peasants they've conscripted.
• Often glossed over in the Fighting Fantasy world, but Blacksand!, the second volume of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy series, details just how filthy and stinking the streets of Port Blacksand are. In some parts of the city, there's so much mud and horse crap on the streets, that it can be waist deep for a Dwarf.

Video Games

• Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, both being heavily influenced by Berserk are this. It's most obvious in the Vally of Defilement and Blighttown respectively. These areas are nasty, disgusting, plague ridden towns built over swamps.

Web Comics

• Appears in The Order of the Stick once, with some mud-farming peasants.

Web Original

• Debunked in Cracked.com's "6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes" and "5 Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe About the Dark Ages".

Western Animation

• One of the Pinky and The Brain plots is to gain money via Robin Hood methods, and get indoor plumbing to England, which would inspire the people to make them kings. While everything else works, the plan falls flat because the English didn't want to be bathed, believing hot water and soap to be a lethal combination.
• In the short lived cartoon Mad Jack the Pirate, Jack and Snuck visited a very poor village who worshiped an animal and rubbed its droppings on their clothing.
• Averted humorously on Family Guy in an early episode showing the Griffins attending a medieval festival featuring Eternal Sexual Freedom, plenty of good food, and a chorus of monks grunting Gary Glitter's "Rock 'N' Roll Part One." (Peter even sarcastically remarks that the characters at the festival act so hoity-toity that they remind him of the TV show Frasier.) This from the same series that regularly portrays The Fifties unflatteringly, with iron-toothed racial segregation (even in the North!) and people so grotesquely gluttonous that they literally eat cigarettes.

Real Life

• The perception then was bathing was sinful. In Roman Empire times, bathing was a social activity when people would go to public bathhouses and gymnasiums not just to keep clean, but also to relax, socialize with peers, and engage in prostitution. These places were seen as places of decadences (opponents claiming they were essentially swinger clubs or brothels in all but name), together with the gladiatorial games. Hence, Queen Isabella and some saints got the "holy" credit for not bathing.
  • People in the middle ages weren't necessarily worse for the wear for missing out on the public baths. As the vast majority of Roman baths were un-chlorinated bodies of rarely-changed, standing water frequented by large groups of people with questionable hygiene, the cleanliness they offered was only skin deep. Especially since sick people were encouraged to visit them.
• After the fall of the Roman Empire, bringing in the so-called Dark Ages, Rome might as well have been known as Malaria City.
  • There were plenty of disease outbreaks during the era of the Roman Empire. They didn't call July, August, September, and October "sickly" for nothing. Residents were told to go somewhere else, if at all possible, those months. 30,000 Roman residents died every year. Bathhouses and aqueducts didn't protect against malaria: it is estimated that over half of all Roman children became infected during summers when the Roman Empire was at the height of its power.
• Even better, up until the late 1400s and early 1500s, there were still a few public baths in operation in major European cities and the collective memory of the people drove them to still practice the Roman custom of bathing, infrequently as they could afford to, and supposedly not knowing why would they do it in the first place. It can be said The Dung Ages come immediately after the end of the Middle Ages proper.
  • Quote: The conversion of forest into arable land had reduced the supply of wood, however, and the bath houses began to shut down because of the expense of heating the water. They tried using coal, but decided that burning coal gave off unhealthy fumes and abandoned the use of the stuff. By the mid-fourteenth century, only the rich could afford to bathe during the cold Winter months, and most of the population was dirty most of the time.
  • In Russia, where the forests were so abundant that even now there are moose on the prowl in the downtown Moscow sometimes, the concept of weekly bathing pretty much never died. It was one of the reasons why the Black Death outbreaks were relatively weak there. Well, that and the general lack of enormous concentrations of people in the filthy cities — Russian cities always were more spread out.
• Queen Isabella II of Spain bathes only twice in her entire life. This is the queen we're talking about here. That's saying something.
  • The reason why is often cited for the same reason mothers still warn their children not to get wet in the rain. The guy who gets cold and wet is more likely to get sick. Showers involve getting cold and wet. So logically, those who don't shower don't get sick.
  • The pale yellow color called "Isabelline" is said (falsely) to derive from another version of the story about Queen Isabella, see The Other Wiki's entry for details.
  • Louis XIV of France is another famous ruler who is said to not have bathed more than a few times in his life (most of the occasions when he did get clean from head to toe was when he was about to enjoy a new mistress for the first time). The contrast with the Gorgeous Period Dress of the time is all the more glaring.
  • The Polish Plait, a sort of welding of the hair (due to excessive dirt) in a pigtail, which according to name was common among Polish peasants, affected even King Christian IV of Denmark. It would be horrible even to imagine how the lower classes looked in comparison to their King...
  • Mariners of later parts of the Age Of Sail (when water was at a premium on board all ships) would help this process along with some tar.
  • It should be noted that the queen would be bathing far less than anyone else. That is why she bragged about it, because she was an exception that proves the rule. Commoners who worked had to bathe far more often to clean off dirt, sweat, and other things that made them smell. She was showing off that she was rich and powerful enough that people did everything for her; she didn't work up a sweat, so she didn't need to bathe. Moreover, she had oodles of servants who could give her sponge baths whenever she wished. Bathing in a tub like a villager, or a pond like a peasant, meant doing the work of scrubbing yourself.
• Following horses to clean up after them is relatively recent. Before then, wherever they wanted to go, they went. Even if the horse died right in the street, it was left there to rot. It was only moved if it was blocking traffic. But the horses went quickly even if the street cleaners didn't do anything. They would get grabbed up by butchers.
  • Herbert Wells once wrote a pretty apocalyptic article where he pictured London covered to the roofs in the horse dung—due to rapidly increasing traffic.
• Up until the 19th century, the water from the Thames was used both for drinking and sewage. This is why there are portraits of kids drinking beer, it was much safer than water.
  • This is true for most of history, actually; water is rarely entirely safe to drink, regardless of man-made contaminants. The reason has little to do with the alcohol content (which could be as low as 1% for "small beer") and everything to do with the very first step in making beer: boiling the water.
  • Fermentation also made anything that was growing in the wort that shouldn't be there easy to detect, by smell during the process and by taste afterwards. Both the boiling and the smell and taste were very important in places where the ground water was stagnant and undrinkable on its own, such as a large portion of France (the original place where it was said you didn't want to drink the water).
  • In some less developed third world countries, even today it's still safer to drink beer than the local water.
  • In most of the heavily-populated parts of the Marshall Islands, there is very little clean drinking water, so they mostly drink beer and soft drinks imported cheaply from the United States. The result of drinking so much sugary soda? The worst diabetes epidemic of any country on earth.
• Averted by the Vikings, surprisingly. There are several accounts remarking with disgust how they washed their hands, hair, and faces daily, washed before meals, and changed their clothes and bathed at least every Saturday (the nordic word for Saturday was "laugardagr", which literally means "bathing/cleaning day"). Explains why they were popular with the Englishwomen.
  • On the flip side, to Muslim observers, who are required to wash their hands and faces five times a day for religious reasons (can't pray if your face and hands aren't washed) they were still too filthy and disgusting.
  • An old legend about the Crusades tells the story of a wounded soldier, first tended by a cleaner, wiser Islamic doctor whose work is undone by a filthy Frank physician: he simply amputated the injured limb, obviously leading to infection and death.
• Similarly averted by the Slavs, who were living in much the same condition as Norsemen, had a pretty similar culture, and frequently intermingled. Every weekend was a bath day, and the house didn't count as such if it hadn't an adjacent bath built up close.
  • In the North, where the winters were brutal and forests abundant, they even had heated outhouses, built up to the back wall of the house, where the stove was installed, and heated by its warmth. The outhouse was connected to the main building by the special gallery that kept the filth ans smells away and was also used for storage.
• When the automobile was invented, it was thought by many that this would reduce pollution, because the city streets would no longer be filled with horse dung (and the occasional dead horse). It can be argued that the Dung Ages in New York City lasted until the 20th century.
  • Arguably it did reduce pollution, as the environmental impact of providing for horses in modern-day New York City would be great.
  • The Italians performed an inquiry in 2006 to get an answer to the question: "Did the pollution in cities increase or decrease during the last 30 years?" (That is, 1976 to 2006.) The result, rather surprising for the modern Greens, was: it decreased. Modern cars have catalytic converters, modern power plants burn clean natural gas instead of heavy fuel oils, modern locomotives are mostly electric and fewer are Diesels, modern homes have better insulation and require less heat during winter, modern power appliances use less electricity (modern green fridges are ages away from ammonia fridges only one generation old). A man aged 50 could have seen the world getting cleaner in his own lifetime.
• Refugee camps in any era are usually reminiscent of this trope, as hygiene is the last thing that desperate, weary people fleeing starvation and violence are going to worry about. No shortage of displaced people in medieval times.
• A family that lived for several years on a replica Iron Age farm said that the modern convenience they missed most was welly boots. Every winter was a losing battle against mud. Hence the tradition of Spring Cleaning.
• An interesting subversion in ancient Rome - there is the story of a nobleman who was very proud of his gleaming smile (by virtue of cleaning them with the acidic properties of urine). A rival nobleman called him out on it, saying "You brag about having the whitest teeth, but this only means that you drink the most piss."
• Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762) had once been approached (at the London Opera nevertheless) by a fellow nobleman, who ironically told her she had dirty hands. Her answer: "You should see my feet." This counts more as a Lampshade Hanging, even as the 18th century had been renowned as the age of curly wigs and outstanding dresses covering utmost filth and lice: in those times, the only way to see a society lady`s bare feet was to be her lover and in bed with her, so she was taunting him for being unworthy of this.
• In the Philippines, Spanish friar historians frequently cracked down on the "unholy" practice of bathing in rivers by the natives, mainly because men and women bathed together though they still covered themselves up. Note that up until the late 19th century, the Philippine culture as it was run by the Spanish was described by some observers as medieval.