Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History of Sh*t: Aztec Poo Goblins to Viking Turds

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Of all the taboo topics covered on Betwixt the Sheets, this one might make you wince the most.But it cannot be denied that poo and our management of it through history has massively shaped human civilisation.What are the evolutionary reasons why we're so repulsed? What would happen if you came across the Aztec poo goblin? And what does the future hold for us and our poo?Joining us today is the marvellous Suzie Edge, author of History Stinks!: Poo Through The Ages to tell us more.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith and the senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my loveliest of lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with the podcast, but before we can get going with it, I have to make sure that you're all safe and bundled up and snugly and not scared or nervous about what's coming your way, so here is the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults,

to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Actually, this particular episode might be one that you just don't want to listen to today. It's not that it's particularly scandalous or particularly sexy, but I'm talking about the history of poo. So if you are sat having your dinner, if you're trying to tuck into a lasagna and this podcast is in your ear, you might just want to turn it off, save it for later, have a listen to something else. But if you are going to plow ahead with this particular episode, before you do, perhaps you could just click that subscribe and follow.

follow-along button wherever it is that you're getting this podcast. It does actually help us a lot. It would be a really, really big favour. Thank you so much, lovely. He's right on with the show. Keep your voices down betwixt us shh. We're out after midnight in the 14th century Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. Whilst I love a night out in what is modern-day Mexico city, locals in this area are very wary of, checking notes, a poo goblin. And who wouldn't be? That sounds absolutely terrifying. I don't know about you, but I did not have poo goblin on my 2024 bingo card, and yet here it is. Back to the 14th century, though, and you want to be careful. Legend has it that if you're caught squatting over a bucket and answering the call of nature in the middle of the night, this poo goblin

will catch you, and the results are unpleasant to say the least. And even if you don't subscribe to the Aztec somewhat complex mythology, my question is, would you even risk crossing paths with an ancient poo goblin. Get back inside, I say. Just hold it to the morning. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. Of all the stigmas I've covered on this podcast, perhaps this is the one that will have you wintzing the most.

But let's get this out the way first. Everybody does it. Everybody does it. From lofty royals to lowly peasants. And yes, even you and I, dear listener, it's one of the things that we all have in common. So it's strange that we're so ick about the whole thing. We all poop. Or at least I hope we do.

If you don't, that's a medical emergency. And given that this is one of the great human levels, is one of the things we've all got in common. You have to ask, how has it shaped our daily lives throughout history? Because it has in more profound ways than you might think it has. What did Henry the 8th's appointed groom of the stool have to say about his lord and master's habits? And what is the biggest poo ever to have been found in history? Because there is one.

There is, and we're going to talk about it today. Joining me today is the utterly marvellous friend of the show, Susie Edge, author of History Stinks Pooh Throughout the Ages, which is published on the 11th. April. She is absolutely incredible. But let's get our air fresheners at the ready, Betwixters. We're going in. Hello and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets. It's only Susie Edge. How are you doing? You're sniggering already. I don't have it. I like it that I have that effect on people. You just had an argument with a man with a chainsaw. Yeah, well, it was once I did

argument really because he had ear protection on and I probably looked quite funny shouting the obscenities that I was screaming at him over the fence, but he seems to have gone. So whatever I did work. I'm so pleased that you're here. I think the lesson is, don't shout at people with chainsaws is a rule of thumb in life. Yes, unless you can run a lot faster than then. We are here to talk about your new book. History stinks, poo through the ages.

That is a masterpiece, Susie. What made you want to tell this history? This is a children's book. So it starts at 8 plus, although I have been told by a lot of people, I've bought this for my granddaughter, but she might not get it for a while yet. So it's the same thing, really, as the books that I wrote for adults. I keep on wanting to say adult books, but that sounds slightly dodgy, doesn't it? So the books that I wrote for adults, it's the same sort of thing that my interest in the human body and what the human body can do and how we treat it is, to me, a gateway into... history and different parts of history and different characters in history. And so that's what I've done with this one as well for kids. I've told lots of silly poo jokes, but then there's stories of characters

that they will recognise and cities from around the world that they'll recognise. And so yeah, it's a great way, isn't it, to get the kids into history by telling them a poo joke or two? I'm going to give it to my nephews, Will and Jack, because they are at optimum poo age where they think everything, like they're six and nine. You can just go up to them and say poo and they're just in hysterics. Why do kids think it's so funny? I mean, I did when I was a kid, but what is it? Why do kids think that poo is so hilarious?

I don't think they're alone. I think we all do. We just hide it better. We just maybe pretend that we don't. Am I wrong? Do you what you reckon? No, no, you're probably, poo jokes and fart jokes are universally funny, aren't they? They are.

It's one of those things. There's not much in life that is a great universal level of something that absolutely everybody does. Like, even as a sex historian, I'm not sure that you can say everybody experiences sex, because some people don't experience desire, but we all shit. I've managed to say that a few times in the book that we've had to deal with this everywhere, forever. And it has shaped, you know, it's shaped our cities and how we built them and how we've built our homes and how we've lived forever is dealing with the waste that we leave behind. It's so true. It's like once you've got past the funny bit because we're talking about poo, it has actually been a huge driving force in civilisation of waste management and what we do with this stuff.

The first thing that I did when I started to research was to go back and see what ancient civilizations, what we found, what we found under the ground, what archaeologists have dug up. And quite often they're describing systems within cities and how they dealt with excrement and how they got rid of it. And so it goes back a very long time that it's there. It's how we've, as I say, how we've built our cities and up to more recently as well. So, you know, the city of London has changed dramatically when they started having huge poo problems in the 19th century. You don't often think about, but you're absolutely right about how central this particular issue is to just all of human. mankind. And I think that's sort of one of the, well, you can talk about it's better than I can,

but one of the really central things about poo and shit and excrement, the disgust factor. And that's universal as well, isn't it? It is. I like to say what to kids especially about the stinkiness of the horrible job of taking it away. Somebody's got to come and take it away if you don't have sewer systems. And when I was writing that particular bit in the book, I had a break. I went through to the kitchen, I put the kettle on. I was standing. there watching as a truck reversed up our drive to empty some temporary toilets that were right next door to us because somebody was building a new house, they've got these temporary loos. And somebody has to come and take it all away. And I thought to myself, he probably doesn't get

paid an awful lot. But historically, the gong farmers, as they were called, would come and take away the poo and they'd take it out to the fields to use as fertilizer or what have you. There came a time when they were paid quite well because it was such a repulsive job. Nobody would want to do that. And there are biological evil. evolutionary reasons why we find it so revolting, isn't there? Yeah, I mean, you don't want to get near it. You really need to bury it or flush it away or just, I suppose, quite topical, actually, isn't it?

When I say flush it away, we don't want to flush it out into our water systems either, really, because it's potentially full of all sorts of dangerous things. And so, yes, that's deliberate, isn't it? You want to stay away from things that smell bad and taste bad. Did I just say that? But it's also, and we forget this, useful, especially in the ancient world. Shit was put to good use.

Yeah, I think we've lost our way a little bit in that. I think that we take clean water, we put it in our systems, and then we use that to flush away the potentially useful stuff that could go on our fields and help grow things. And we've lost our way a little bit because, you know, in the past, people would take it and put it on the fields and use it as fertilizer. And we just do that with cows and horses now, don't we? but I absolutely adored the South American story,

the Aztecs and their Panoos, they're Panoos? No, they're poo canoos, is what I'm trying to say. Oh dear, poo canoes. Technotland, the city that is now Mexico, was built on a huge lake, and there were bridges over the waterways, and underneath they would have canoes, and people would sit on top of the bridges,

and they would do their shit, and it would plop down and land in the canoe. And when the canoe was full, somebody would take it away and put it on the fields. And they had these beautiful gardens there as well. And that's what they would do with it. So I think the poo canoe might be my favourite toilet of all those that I found. Wow. That's incredible, isn't it? I don't think that's due for a revival though. I'm all right if we don't go back to that one. And you write quite a lot about the Aztecs and their use of poo.

I thought that was absolutely fascinating. Who was the poo goblin? So this goblin, this nighttime ghostly spirit thing, I want to come up with a better word than that, would roam around at night. The Spanish later called it Lorana when they came along. But it was there long before they arrived. It would roam around the ground at night. So if anybody went out of their house in the night to go and do their business and they caught sight of this thing, then the terrible news was that they might die. So nobody would leave their houses at night. They would all do it all in a bucket and take it out. out when the sun came up so that Lorana couldn't get them. Yeah, that sounds absolutely terrifying. Because I was thinking about this when I knew that I was going to come and talk to you, is that we've lost the art of communal pooing as well, which would have been very common in the ancient world. Like if you go to the ruins of Pompeii or Greece,

is that the latrines would just open, soos basically, wasn't it, that you were sort of squatting above. Yeah, I don't think that's a bad thing that we've lost the art of communal pooing. It might be a bonding experience. I can imagine the Romans doing deals and coming up with great things while sitting there together on their communal toilets. But yeah, they had the huge communal areas where they would have stone toilets all around the walls on three sides, I suppose. You'd walk in and find these benches, is the word I'm looking for, that had holes in them. And there's no barriers between them.

There's no cubicles. There's no door with a lock. They would just go and sit down and choose a hole, preferably one that had been warmed up by a slave, earlier. Or maybe not. I think I'd prefer a cold one actually. I would prefer a cold one actually. There's something weird when you sit down on a toilet seat and it's warm. Yeah, it's disturbing, isn't it? But yeah, they'd sit there and have a blather while they were doing their business. When you're pooing, it is quite a vulnerable, intimate moment for you, for everybody. So I can totally understand why there would be scary poo goblins that people would fear that would attack you at that very

moment when you're at your most vulnerable. But also, as you're saying that when you have people around you in that vulnerable position, that can be quite beneficial in a weird businessy power kind of a way, certainly with royalty, wasn't it? Like the person who would wipe the royal bottom was quite an influential person. Yeah, the groom of the stool, as they were known, was a position. We think about Henry the 8th, I think, mostly when we think about that. I'm not sure what I'm not sure why there's such a strong connection there. But the other royals had a groom of the stool who was there who would look after their personal toilet,

who would check to see that everything was okay when it was all deposited in the bucket and would potentially wipe their bum as well if needed. It was very intimate and they were very close to the monarch. And so they would have the monarch's ear. And so it was a coveted position. It was one that was paid well. And yeah, people would fight over becoming the person

who could wipe the king's bum. These are the things that we often don't think about in history. And I think that the history of shit and the book that you've done is amazing because so much social history is guided by this. For example, if you're going out for the day, you probably don't even consciously think about toilets. You just assume that they're going to be publicly available conveniences. But if there weren't, that actually does limit where you can go and what you can do.

So I'm fascinated by throughout history, what would people do? and they needed the toilet and they weren't at home. I think the answer to that probably is a bit like the animals is to find a quiet corner behind a bush. Yes. Hopefully there's some sphagnum moss or something nearby that you can do a bit of a wipe with.

If you were rich, you might have, what were they called? Like a literal chamber pot that somebody would come up to you with and you would kind of squat over it. It's bonkers, isn't it, to think that you would just be in a room somewhere and you could just kind of almost click your fingers and a toilet would appear. On a slightly different tangent, you just reminded me that when we bought our little cottage in the Highlands, it was full of chamber pots. And I just imagined them in the night. It's so cold. Why would they go outside? Why would they leave their bedroom and venture off towards any sort of bathroom or anything? If you've got a pot there, why not? We're so pampered when it comes to toilets and just, you know, we'd assume that there will be somewhere for you to go to the toilet. It's very difficult to imagine a world where, nope, that's not.

the case. And the other thing is difficult to imagine is that poo was once used for making buildings. That's interesting. Yes, I think this cottage is one of them. It's so old. Wattle and Daube type houses. Wattel and Dau.

Put up some sticks and throw some shit at it. It must be quite insulating. They must have found over the years that this was wrapped in the straw or whatever. It's probably good insulating qualities after it stopped stinking, of course. It must have stunk. Do you know if they were using human excrement or animal excrement for that, the old wattle and daub?

I suspect it would have been, it would have been animal, isn't it? Because they do produce. I mean, cattle can really produce a fair bit of it, can they? And why not put it to use? There's a whole study of historical poo though, not just like in like a social history, but actually studying fossilised poos that turn up from time to time, right? I think this is one of my favourite stories that came up in the book. gutologist, isn't it? There's this wonderful guy called Dr. Jones, Dr. Bone Jones, who was responsible

for looking at the biggest human fossilized poo that we've ever found. And that was found in the city of York, or Yorvik, as it was for the Vikings when they were excavating in, I think it was the 1970s. They came across this enormous poo. It was 20 centimetres long. Holy shit. Yes, it was wrong. Wow. And five centimetres wide. The biggest example of fossilized human poo ever found. And what was great about it was, apart from its size, was the fact that it was there on its own. Because most of the time, people would be poeing into a communal pit and it was all mixed in together. But this was found on its own and sitting there. Dr. Jones said it was the most exciting piece of excrement I've ever seen, which is wonderful.

See, that's what I love about this, is that it is incredibly silly, but that is actually such an important piece of history, which is nuts, but it is. What do they call them? Is it coprolites? Yeah, coprolites is the rather polite historical term for them. But we can actually learn an awful lot from studying them, apart from just the hefty size of this thing. What kind of things can you learn from studying coprolites? We learned from this particular coprolite that the proud Viking who laid it what he would eat. So I'm assuming it was a he. I just, yeah. I was just about saying maybe. Maybe. You know, it came back saying that there were traces of grains and meat in there, which is probably quite obvious really. But also, there were thousands of little eggs,

little parasite eggs. So we knew that this particular Viking was infested with whipworms and more worms, which are terrifying creatures really, that a female witworm can lay between two and 10,000 eggs a day. When they hatch, they come out as little worms and they grow to considerable lengths up to two metres inside the gut. And they sit there and they eat everything that the Viking was eating. So they may well have been in a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort. They've been known to find their way out of orifices at times. So you could be sitting there having lunch with dad and suddenly this worm appears out of his nose. Oh, no.

So we know that our Viking was probably suffering, but we know that our Viking had these as well. Now, Susie, you're a medical doctor as well as a historian. Is that size of a poo normal for human beings? Well, I mean, I've never seen one that big. In all my time inspecting people's poop. No, it's very large. What's a real shame about this giant poo

was that a few years ago a group of kids had gone to see it because it's on display. I didn't mention that, but you can go and see it at the Yorvik Viking Centre. It's on display and some kids were there with a teacher and someone picked it up and dropped it. And it broke into three pieces and had to be put back together, glued back together.

I'm not sure what they used to glue it back together, but it's back in one piece-ish, but it'll never be the same again. Checking on the back of the glue packet, suitable for all surfaces. That's the one. That'll do. I'll be back with Susie after this short break.

So I need to ask, you know, how does it survive? Like, I mean, apart from just the size of this thing, surely poo is degrades, it's biodegradable. That's one of its few positive qualities. Yes, I mean, it was originally organic material, but the process of fossilisation means that organic material is replaced by minerals. It's a mineralisation process. And so actually what you're looking at there is not the original organic material.

material of the poo, but minerals that have come together in the same shape and size and the bits that are left over, obviously we can still see a little bit of the other stuff, because I mentioned we could see what he'd been eating and the more worms and wittworms and wittworms, but generally it's been replaced by minerals. So at this point, you're kind of your Viking, early medieval sewage system. What was it? I mean, because now we are very blessed that we just have flushing toilets and underground sewage systems. How does that? did they deal with waste and excrement in the medieval period? In the medieval period, not a huge amount changed in all honesty, because it's a little bit like medicine, not a huge amount

changed there because the church wouldn't let a lot of things change. But there wasn't much moving on. The rich were able to have someone else deal with their poo. If they were in big castles, they might have had the guardy robes, you know, where they had little rooms built onto the side of castles and they'd go and sit on a ledge and whatever they put out went down the wall. of the castle, basically. There's a wonderful story of the castle that was built by King John. Sorry, built by King Richard I, who'd long gone and left it to John, which was besieged by King Philip of France, who sent his men up the outside, up the poo shoot into the Gardierreau. And that's how they got into the castle. So it even then made a difference to how castles

were built, you know, how the defences were thought about, because Chateau-Gaillard, it was called was attacked. They realized that these were entrances, although they were designed as exits for the poop, they were also entrances for anybody wanting to climb in. So it made a difference even how they dealt with the poo and the excrement made a difference even to the design of castles in the medieval era. Cess pit is a word that you often hear when you're doing historical, well, anything really cess pits. But try and break it down for us. What is a cess pit? Like, and where would it have been? Would every house have had its own? sestpit? Not every house. I think some people would have taken their poo to communal syspits often.

A sestbit is just a great big hole dug into the ground that all the poo would be channeled into one way or another, either thrown in by bucket or down a chute. And when they were full, somebody would have to come and empty them and take it all away. It still happens now. I mentioned earlier that I was up in the highlands away from the big sewer systems of the cities and people come out and empty the sestpits and take away the poo. So they're not ideal in that they don't get rid of. of it forever, but they get rid of it temporarily and keep it under the ground. Quite a dangerous job. Well, apart from anything else, it was explosive. You know, this stuff gives off gases that if you were to spark something nearby, you could lose your, you could singe your eyebrows, if not worse.

Were there poo explosions? Oh, definitely, yes, and there were poo explosions recorded. You know, we talked about the communal Roman toilets earlier. It was a dangerous thing. They had to be concerned about lighting any lamps or anything when they were off emptying the cesspits. And of course, if you happen to fall into the cesspit. Well, I have a favourite cesspit story actually that involves just that. Please do tell. So the year was 1184 in the town of Erfurt in Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was Henry the 6th. He had summoned a lot of the nobles together.

There was a big land dispute and he sort to get them all together in a big room and tell them all off and tell them to sort it out. But they arrived at this old church building in the middle of Erfurt, which was already hundreds of years old at that point. and they clambered in and the floor started to creak and eventually it gave way and the wooden floor gave way and everybody crashed down onto the next floor below. But underneath that was this giant ancient cesspit and 60 people fell through the two floors into the cesspit and were killed. They were either drowned or they were killed by falling debris that came down with them or they were overcome by the fumes or pushed down by somebody else trying to get out. Yeah, 60 people

How did the king? He was okay. He was perched on something solid, so he was okay. They had to clamber up ladders to get him down again. But yeah, he lost a lot of people that day. Drowned in a cesspit of poo. What a way to go. Yeah, it's good thought, isn't it?

That must have been an enormous cesspit for people to drown in it. It must have been huge. And I guess probably why it wasn't emptied over all those years. It was, yeah, nice and full. Nice, full, stinking cesspit. Oh, that's going to stay with me. me for a while, Susie. Thank you. You're welcome. So when do we start getting, like, running sewage systems and sort of toilets that we would recognise today is that's toilet, that isn't a bucket that

I'm just flinging out the window? The first flushing toilet came during the reign of Elizabeth the first, but they didn't really catch on for a while because they were noisy and expensive. But it was a chap who was close to the queen, her godson, called John Harrington. He was a really interesting guy. He was, I was going to say, accomplished. But when I use the word accomplished, I think, of regency ladies, you know, something from James Austin. But he was accomplished. He was a poet and he could translate works and he was very clever chap. One day he translated a poem from Italian into English that was a bit racy, got into a lot of trouble for being very rude. And so the queen threw him out of court for a while. And what else do you do when

you've been banished from court, but go home to your mansion in the countryside and design the first flushing toilet, which is what he went and did? And when she'd cooled down over the matter of the racy poem. She came and visited him and he demonstrated it. She thought it was great and had one installed in her palace, but she didn't use it because it was very, very noisy and she was a bit scared of it. It used an incredible amount of water for every flush, something like 34 litres. So it wasn't, yeah, it was huge, so it wasn't quite ready, but it was a start. They didn't really take on until much later. But the sewer systems and getting rid of all of the waste, certainly in the big cities, places like London, I suppose is the first place you'd think of,

didn't really come about until, but there were sewers in London. There were sewers and there were cespits and they were linked together and it wasn't a great system because the city was growing so rapidly in the 19th century. But when the Queen and Albert went for a pleasure cruise on the Thames one day and found they had to turn back because the stink was so bad, it was horrendous for them, they said something has to be done. And so upsets Basil Jets, Joseph Basiljets, who created these enormous sewer systems with pumping stations.

and really changed the city in that way. And he had the foresight to make them bigger and better than was needed at the time because he knew that the city was only going to grow. So who was Thomas Crapper? Thomas Crapper definitely takes the credit for the design of toilets, but he came along later. He did do some things.

He made a better ballcock. Again, not something that I can say and have fun with in a children's book, but we can giggle about it being called that, can we? He added a ballcock to the system above toilets, so he made them better. But the thing about Thomas Crapper was that he made a lot of toilets

and the systems all had his name written on them on a plaque. So whenever somebody went to the toilet, they would sit or stand there and they would see his name and they would associate that with him. So, yeah, they became known as the crapper. But, yeah, the word came a lot earlier than that. What was a really interesting process was the editing actually of the book because in the beginning I wrote down a list of all the different words

that were used to describe when we got people. poo and poop and crap and shit, etc. And only half of them were then appropriate to put in a book that was for eight years and plus. So it's really interesting which words were and which we know. I certainly couldn't say shit, which was a real shame because there's a story later on in the book about a chap, a U-boat captain who had an accident on his U-boat and had to come to the surface and lost his boat. His name was Captain Schlitt with an L and I wanted to make a joke that, you know,

shame it had an L in it. But I couldn't go there. I couldn't do it because it was a book for kids. So, yeah, it was interesting which words were appropriate and which weren't. And the same goes for the toilets. You know, we call them John's or what have you and couldn't really make too much of that because we don't want the kids called John getting upset about that. The wording used is interesting how some things make us shudder and others we just happily accept.

And weird how they change over time. I was reading a guy who translated the Bible from Latin into English. John Wycliffe in the 14th century. And because these words just weren't offensive there, he just puts the word turd in the Bible. When you're reading it, you're just like, wow, okay, John. And he puts bollocks in there as well when he's talking about eunuchs. Because that just wasn't offensive.

That's fine for the Bible. Just put it right in there, not a problem. It is interesting. I mean, you said turds then. I hadn't thought about that. One of the chapters in the book was called Tudor Tudor Tirds. And when it came back from the editor, suddenly it was called something else.

And I just thought, oh, okay, we don't like that one. That's fine. So you're like super well versed now in polite alternatives. That must be so difficult writing this book because you want it to be funny and you want it to be cheeky, but you have to use as polite as possible terminology. I have to behave. But suddenly those words then become funny in themselves. I think poop is just hilariously quaint.

And yet it's describing what it is. I read this book for the audio version. A couple of weeks I recorded it. By the end of it, the word poo just didn't sound right anymore coming from my lips. It just sounded so odd. So what is your favourite poo fact from this book? All the research that you've done, I mean, I know that the one about the King nearly drowning and shit, that's got to be up there. But do you have a favourite one that you haven't mentioned?

I think it was when I learned how people in war tanks, what they do. because, I mean, that would never have occurred to me to even think about it before. But having only been in a tank once, and I didn't need to go at the time, if you're in a tank, there was a New Zealand commander one day figured out that he could do his business into an empty shell casings that were left over. And then he could just deposit it out the little holes in the side of the tank and go on. And so he didn't have to leave. And I love that idea of him looking around for something to do it in.

And then finding that he had to wait a little while because the shell casings are really hot when they've been fired. So you don't want to go putting your ass anywhere near that for a while. And so I just have this image of him just sort of trying it. Oh, that's a bit too hot. I'll wait a bit. Hold it in. And then eventually getting it out and then just depositing it through the little hole on the side of the tank. There's something quite amusing about that to me. I don't know why. No, I agree completely because you don't think about this stuff. Is that, well, how would you go to the toilet if you're in a tank? Can't just nip out, can you, in the middle of a battle? Hang on, lad. Just give me a sec.

Well, there is a story, it's probably apocrycopal, but there was a story from the army of an officer who was at the Battle of Talavera in Spain in 1809, and he desperately needed to go, had a bit of a tummy problem, as they all did at Talavera, actually. There was dysentery going about. But he couldn't hide during the battle. He couldn't run away in the opposite direction behind a bush, because he didn't want to be seen as deserting.

So instead he just marched out right in front of his soldiers who were busy in the fight, and he pulled down his trousers and he did it right there in the middle of the, the fray. And he pulled his trousers back up to a great applause from his troops. And he went back and joined them. And I love that too. That battle actually ended. There wasn't a winner, but the French did retreat at some point. So I'm wondering if that's why. Hang on a minute. We can't fight these guys. I would retreat from that. Exactly. They're completely insane. Oh, Susie, you have been so much fun to talk to, as you always are. And my final question,

to you is this is a history book that you've written and it's a fascinating and funny and wonderful insightful history but I'm wondering what are your thoughts about the future of poo because it remains a really serious issue for all of humankind waste management what do you see is the future of waste management have we got are we doing it right yet I don't think we're doing it right at all and I said that right at the beginning that I think that we've lost our way a little bit and we need to figure out, I think there are big changes that we can make, but those changes will have to look back to the past to see what we did in the past with all our poo. Obviously, there's a much larger population now, and we have a different diet as well,

and we have different problems within the poo that we make now compared to what it was a few hundred years, a thousand years ago. But I do think that environmentalists will have to start looking at how we can recycle, because we can do it. I know there was a system in Haiti perhaps where they, rather than get in fertilizers for massive amounts of money from abroad, they brought in systems to help where they could recycle and turn their own poo into fertilizer for their own fields. And I think that we're going to have to come up with something like that because I don't think it's sustainable, as I said before, to take enormous amounts of fresh water as we do without thinking into our systems.

And then we flush it all away. And of course there's huge problems at the moment in the news constantly about sewage being put back into our water systems, which isn't good. And we need to figure that out. And we make slow advances. So we've got the dual flushing toilets, you know, where we can choose whether we do the big flush or the little flush. Although I think nobody ever told us that. So for years, we've been looking at these two little buttons or toilet. Is that what that is?

Yeah. Yeah. Is that really what that is? Oh, my gosh. I didn't know that, Susie. Oh my God. Nobody's ever told us. Nobody knows. You go into a toilet. There's two buttons. Which one do you press? Well, the big one is for poo and the little one is for we and you choose which one. You get a smaller amount of water if you choose the little one. See how much I learn when I'm with you. It's not a pressing problem, faner, at the moment, for us, is it? But I think these systems in places like Australia or where there is limited water issues that are important to them. And so in these places, I think, where there are issues with water supply. and with the use of waste, they will lead the way. And we'll eventually follow when it's deemed economically viable.

We'll follow as well. Or we can start using it to make houses again, which would be an interesting move for somewhere like being cute to start offering that as a service. I have no comments. No, I'm not talking shit. Oh, Susie, you've been anything but shit. You've been an absolute delight.

And if people want to know more about you and your book, where can they find you? Most of the time I hang about on TikTok at Susie Edge. But I'm also on Instagram as well at suze.edge, and I still use X, Twitter as well. Thank you so much. You have been so much fun. I've enjoyed every second of this. It's been a delight. I'm glad my poo tickled you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Susie for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. got episodes on everything from the history of drag to Viking sex all marching your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.