Another crappy job — The Gong farmer of the Middle Ages and Tudor England,During the Middle Ag

Another crappy job — The Gong farmer of the Middle Ages and Tudor England,During the Middle Ages it was not uncommon for people to urinate or defecate in a chamber pot and just throw it into the streets, or perhaps just forgo the pot and go straight onto the street.  Eventually rains would wash the waste away into a local river, and all is well.  Then came the plague and a whole host of other terrible diseases.  While people of the time had no concept of germ theory, they began to understand that filth bred disease.In Tudor England many cities installed public privies for people to do their business, that way they weren’t doing it in the streets.  Many citizens also built their own private privies.  However in the Tudor Age running water and sewage systems had been neglected since ancient Roman times.  The waste could not just be flushed away.  Instead  privies had a large cesspit where the waste collected.  It was only a matter of time when the cesspit was filled, usually around one of two years.  When that happened it was time to call the gong farmer.Gong was a slang term for human excrement.  So you can probably guess what the gong farmer’s job was.  When a cesspit was filled to the max it was the job of the gong farmer to shovel out the contents, transport the gong from the city, and dump the gong at an appropriate dumping site.  Typically gong farmers were only permitted by law to work from 9 pm to 5 am, so that the sights and smells of cartloads of human excrement would not be noticed by the public.  As a result gong farmers were often called “night men” and the waste they collected referred to as “night soil”.The job of a gong farmer was obviously not very glamorous.  Working at night waist deep in human poo obviously is not a career path idolized by the masses.  It was also a very dangerous job, as gong farmers often dug into pockets of deadly poisonous gas and of course risked disease.  In 1325 a medieval gong farmer named Richard the Raker was emptying his own personal cesspit when he accidentally fell in, drowning to death in his own gong.  Gong farming did have one upside in that they were well rewarded, earning around a sixpence a day, a weeks wages for the average laborer.  Gong farming continued well into the 18th century.  By the 19th and 20th century the advent of water closets brought an end to the gong farmer, although the job is still common in third world countries today.  Septic pumping services has also replaced the need to hand shovel human gong as well. -- source link

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