I've heard this so often growing up, and I'm fairly certain that I was even taught it in school. But was there ever really any point in midieval history where the streets were just filled with feces and urine because of peasants emptying their buckets out the window? It just seems unfathomable to me that any society no matter how uncivilized would do something like that in the open where they walk. They still have a sense of smell. I looked into it on my own and I had a surprising amount of difficulty finding any reference to this phenomenon, both anything proving it, and anything disputing it. Can someone who knows more about that time help me out?
Yes, there are a number of town and city ordinances we know of that prohibit throwing human waste from windows, and laws like that normally don't just spring up.
I'm linking to a similar post from a few years ago below, but I mostly wanted to point out that the reason for throwing it out the window would have been a lesser of two evils. Streets at night would have been unsafe, and given the belief at the time that sickness due to human waste was caused by odor/vapors, it was better to get it out of the house than to leave it inside. Craig Taylors "The disposal of human waste" compares ancient Rome and medieval London pretty well.
similar post from the past: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yneer/the_history_of_toiletry/
Here are a few previous comments
/u/Flubb on medieval London why did medieval people put up with so much filth in their city streets? IF they didn't have the resources for modern plumbing, couldn't they at least hire armies of people to cart away waste?
/u/Dashukta on medieval England People used to throw their shit in the street in big cities in Middle Ages?
/u/tekeella on New York Was it ever a real practice to indiscriminately dump ones bed chamber out the window onto the street below?
While limited sewer systems have been present in some civilizations going all the way back to the Indus river valley, not all cities had this luxury. Installing an underground sewer was a major public works project that many cities didn't have the leeway for, so they made do with overground sewers (i.e. the gutter).
It should also be noted that even discounting the human waste many streets would still have been filthy from the traffic of horses and other animals. If the street was already covered in shit, no harm adding a little more, right?
For a long time many cities were extremely unsanitary and had more people dying in them than being born, relying on a constant influx of new arrivals. It wasn't until the 16th century in Europe that the urban population grew high enough that street gutters began to be unable to cope with the waste, leading to the creation of cesspools. Modern sewer systems wouldn't be built in Europe until the mid 19th-century.
Will Durant in his book The Age Of Faith, mentions that this was very common, though the person tossing the chamber pot was expected to shout a warning. The waste would flow down a central gutter in the middle of the street. (A lot of rain might be a blessing in such a town, I presume).
In that book, or one of his other volumes, he mentioned that the muddy filth of such streets is what set the fashion for sturdy, tall footwear such as jack-boots. Such boots offered some protection.