6 Reasons the Past Was a Smelly Era

I firmly believe the past reeked—both figuratively and literally. Indeed, it was a foul-smelling time. Our ancestors endured a constant barrage of unbearable stenches, akin to spending a lifetime in the restrooms of New York City’s Penn Station. Here are six reasons to be grateful that you and your nose exist in the modern age.

1. Body odor was everywhere.

At Shakespeare’s Globe, the term 'Penny Stinkards' was used to describe those who purchased the cheapest tickets. Even the devout weren’t spared: St. Thomas Aquinas endorsed the use of incense “to mask the unpleasant odors from the crowds gathered in the building,” as translated by historian Jacob M. Baum. (Other translations are more direct, quoting Aquinas as saying the congregation’s body odor “could induce disgust.”)

Even nobles and royalty weren’t spared from foul odors. Queen Elizabeth I reportedly claimed she bathed “once a month, whether necessary or not.” Her father, King Henry VIII, was even more notorious for his stench. In his later years, the corpulent king had an open, festering leg wound so pungent it could be detected three rooms away. The injury—exacerbated by overly tight garters—was worsened by his physicians, who believed the sore required drainage to heal. They kept it open with string and inserted gold pellets to maintain infection (and the accompanying stink).

Louis XIII of France once famously stated, “I take after my father. I smell of armpits.”

2. Foul breath was equally widespread.

French monarchs were no strangers to bad breath. Louis XIV, for instance, was notorious for his halitosis, a fact his mistress lamented without success. As noted by Texas A&M assistant professor Jane Cotter, dental care back then was limited to toothpicks or brandy-soaked sponges. However, the Sun King’s oral problems were far more severe: A botched tooth extraction left his palate punctured, and, as Colin Jones recounts in Cabinet magazine, “he spent the rest of his life unable to eat soup without it spraying through his nose.”

It wasn’t until the 1920s that Listerine ads turned halitosis from a minor annoyance into a socially unacceptable condition demanding immediate attention, as Laura Clark explains in Smithsonian.

3. Garbage littered the streets.

With garbage collection being a low priority, urban areas were plagued by foul smells. In her book Taming Manhattan, Catherine McNeur describes how “rotten food like corn cobs, watermelon rinds, oyster shells, and fish heads mingled with dead animals such as cats, dogs, rats, and pigs, alongside mountains of manure,” all common sights on 19th-century New York streets.

Similarly, some homes treated their floors as trash bins. Describing a 16th-century British household, the scholar Erasmus noted that “floors were clay, covered with layers of marsh rushes that sometimes remained for decades, festering with spittle, vomit, urine from humans and dogs, beer dregs, fish scraps, and other unspeakable filth.”

4. Feces was everywhere.

While we briefly touched on manure earlier, excrement warrants its own spotlight. In 1835, New York City housed around 10,000 horses, producing a staggering 400,000 pounds of dung daily. As McNeur notes, this waste was piled along the streets like snow after a blizzard.

And that’s just from animals. Human waste was an ever-present, foul reality. Thousands of night soil men were tasked with hauling waste from cesspits to massive dumps on city outskirts—one near London bore the ironically cheerful name Mount Pleasant. Sometimes, they opted for a quicker solution: dumping it straight into the river.

During the scorching summer of 1858, London faced an overwhelming crisis as the Thames became clogged with human waste, emitting an unbearable stench. This event became known as The Great Stink of London. Parliament attempted to mask the odor by soaking curtains in chloride of lime, but it failed. Government offices were forced to close. Ironically, the rise of flush toilets exacerbated the issue, as they generated excessive raw sewage that overflowed into the river. Londoners were especially alarmed because doctors of the era believed foul air spread diseases.

5. Death added its own unique stench to life in earlier times.

The smell of death—both human and animal—was pervasive. Butchers slaughtered and gutted animals in the streets, prompting King Edward III to observe in the 14th century that “The city’s air is heavily polluted and tainted” due to “the slaughter of large animals … their putrid blood flowing through the streets and entrails dumped into the Thames.” He attempted to outlaw butchering in central London, but his decree was frequently disregarded.

Human remains also contributed to the foul odors for centuries. For instance, the ancient Romans burned thousands of bodies just outside the city walls. In the mid-1800s, a British church stored a shocking 12,000 corpses in its basement, as detailed in Catharine Arnold’s book Necropolis. The stench from the decaying bodies often caused worshippers to faint. The discovery of the bodies sparked a major scandal.

Even in death, Henry VIII’s odor persisted: His bloated body reportedly caused his coffin to crack open, releasing fluids. This was not unique to him. When William the Conqueror was being interred, as recorded by the monk Orderic Vitalis, his "swollen bowels burst, emitting an intolerable stench that overwhelmed everyone present."

6. Technology also contributed to the stench of the past.

Before the Industrial Revolution, wool production was a particularly unpleasant process. The wool was cleaned through a method called “fulling,” which often involved beating it with clubs in vats of stale urine. The ammonia salts in the urine helped bleach the wool.

The early Industrial Revolution introduced its own array of foul odors. The 1837 book London As It Is depicts factories “spewing out … thick clouds of black, choking smoke, filling nearby streets with suffocating fumes ... Some believed the smoke was beneficial, masking other offensive smells, but this idea was far from accurate.”

While the modern world still has its share of unpleasant odors (both figuratively and literally), it’s a fragrant utopia compared to the malodorous realities of the past.