Turnbull National Wildlife Reservation.

[JOhnGw]

The Roman baths at Bath have been restored to working order in the last few years but naked use is not countenanced.

[nuduke]

I watched a documentary about the Norman Invasion of England in 1066 a couple or 3 weeks ago.  Apparently, Duke William of Normandy had to billet 14,000 men and 3,000 horses at a French port waiting for the weather to calm down so they could sail to England.  The presenter drew our attention to the business of feeding this multitude with a diet of 70% bread and dealing with their waste.  Apparently the huge volume of dung was carted off in 5000 carts per day and disposed of in a manner not specified.  The job was to keep the pile of crap down at the camps to avoid spread of disease.  Interesting facts number 543 - just thought I'd share my little learning given the tenor of the discussion previously!


John

[jbeegoode]

14,000 men divided by 5000 carts, that is nearly one cart per three men! This appears to be a load of sh.... That is  lots of bread, but dudes!!!!

500 carts, one per 30 men perhaps....still... oh but I didn't include the horses, did I!... Finger stuck on the "0" key perhaps, a little type writer oil for the sticky key?
Jbee

[Peter S]

A few years ago that same presenter did a documentary on London in the horse-drawn era, and showed us a pile of horse dung illustrating a day's sweepings from the streets. It was BIIIIG!!!

[eyesup]

pjcomp, that reminds me of "City Lights". A Charlie Chaplin movie. He is a street sweeper in New York and is trying to stay caught up with the droppings from all the horse traffic.

He finally get a handle on it and turns around only to see a circus parade passing through an intersection that includes a large number of elephants. He is standing with his back to the camera with hands on his hips and you can imagine what is going through is mind. "I can't BELIEVE this! 

Funny stuff!

Duane

[nuduke]

Jbee,
You forget the horses, oxen and cows.  There were several '000 of these too.
The fact that this fact was retrieved from the TV where I assume they only mention it for effect, imbues it with necessary televisual narrative hubris and rounding up for effect.  To report that 'a modestly normal amount of dung was removed occasionally by a few carting contractors' is hardly riveting factual TV!  But they did mention that there were records of the event because of the huge cost to Duke William of Normandy generating the need for detailed accounts...  so it may be true.
John

[Greenbare Woods]

I found this on Wikipedia:

The exact numbers and composition of William's force are unknown.[32] A contemporary document claims that William had 726 ships, but this may be an inflated figure.[33] Figures given by contemporary writers are highly exaggerated, varying from 14,000 to 150,000 men.[34] Modern historians have offered a range of estimates for the size of William's forces: 7000–8000 men, 1000–2000 of them cavalry;[35] 10,000–12,000 men;[34] 10,000 men, 3000 of them cavalry;[36] or 7500 men.[32] The army would have consisted of a mix of cavalry, infantry, and archers or crossbowmen, with about equal numbers of cavalry and archers and the foot soldiers equal in number to the other two types combined.[37

I looked up the army of William in Wikipedia.     Numbers are questionable, and the asserted 5,000 dung carts for 3,000 horses and 14,000 men is ridiculous.   They may have had 500 carts total for food, supplies, and cleanup.  That would require 500 head of oxen which would produce more dung, and require more feed.

What was it Napoleon said, "An army moves on its stomach."   And if they don't want to all die of diseases they need to watch the cleanup in their camp.

[eyesup]

Moving a medieval army around and through populated country was a major headache. Most towns didn't want them anywhere around. Armies tended to take what they wanted even before they began the invasion.

There were also hordes of support; cooks, farriers, carpentry men, medical (of dubious skills) and even some, where the nobility was involved, included wives and courtesans. It was literally a moving town.

Maybe the report was including all the extraneous attendants.

Duane

[jbeegoode]

The medieval armies into the Crusades took family. These also fit in as cooks, etc. So the number of soldiers may be less than the total population, BUT, it still seems off to me, 500 max I say. I'm sure war horses were put into double duty, just like the soldiers.
Jbee

[Peter S]

Common soldiers were undoubtedly given double duty, but the horse soldiers of William's time were the elite, the knights, the chosen ones, and their horses reflected that. In the normal run of things a war horse would not be put anywhere near a set of shafts, least of all a dung cart. Much later, when the armour got heavier, the war horses were bred bigger and stronger, but they would still have been kept for battle; their descendants have proven to be the latter day cart horses, the Shires and Percherons.

[nuduke]

How nice that the stats of medieval military dung deposition and disposal have captured our collective interest!  I have an apology to make.  My memory of the stats given in the programme BBC 1066: A Year to Conquer England - Series 1: Episode 2 was at fault.  I rewatched the appropriate moments from around 28-32 mins into the programme:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08hyhm7/1066-a-year-to-conquer-england-series-1-episode-2


Like many BBC documentaries, based on good research and offering a summarised narrative of the accepted academic canon associated with the subject, the stats given in this version of history were:
No of ships (debated) ranges from 777 to over 1000
Army size estimated at 14,000 plus non combatant staff and camp followers
Bread being the staple (70% of daily intake) there were some 14 Tonnes of flour used per day for 6000 loaves each feeding 5 people
The cavalry had around 3,000 horses
The time interval discussed was not daily, I am sorry I got that wrong.  Over the 2-3 week encampment awaiting fair weather to cross the channel, Williams army produced an estimated 2500 tonnes of animal and 450 tonnes of human waste and this was shipped out in 5000 carts in total not daily as I incorrectly opined
This makes it between 250 and 350 carts/day with a cart  load being, by simple arithmetic, 600kg (1320lb).


Gentlemen, you were right that the cartage estimate I reported was well in excess for the time interval (day) given.  I was adrift by a factor of 15-20.
Please accept my humble and unalloyed obeisance, and revel mightily in your astute observations of that cardinal error.


....even though not one of you made any attempt actually to estimate how much was in a cart or what was the output of a man or horse to support your opinions!   
Sorry, had to get a retaliatory dig in there, couldn't resist after all that apologising! 


John

[jbeegoode]

Still, conservatively, that's like 75 lbs. per beast per day and a kilo per person using rough math. Over three thousand animals, divided by 2500 tons = say, 1500 per over average 20 days. Me thinks less, much less.

600 kilos per cart is 1320 lbs. each. That would be quite a pull for my truck, let alone two horse power, even British horse power.

Anyway, I'm getting a kick out of this, as I'm a pretty much retired swordsman/player from The Society for Creative Anachronisms, that could spend hours on the trivial reality of historical eras to bring a sense of recreation. Finding that I can't watch the show from link because I'm not in the UK is a terrific tease for me.
Jbee   

[Greenbare Woods]

Army size estimated at 14,000 plus non combatant staff and camp followers
Bread being the staple (70% of daily intake) there were some 14 Tonnes of flour used per day for 6000 loaves each feeding 5 people

OK. I'm picking on BBC again. 

14 tons of flower is about 28,000 pounds but they probably use British tons which are more.  According to the Cambridge Dictionary "a unit of weight equal to 2,240 pounds or 1016 kilograms"

Doing some math that's 14,224 kilos of flour which makes 6000 loaves weighing 2.37 kilos each.  Loaves here are sold by pounds, not by kilos so I don't know how many kilos is in a loaf, but that comes to just over 5 pounds per loaf.   Pretty big loafs.  I've never seen a loaf that big.

However if each loaf was supposed to feed 5 people for a day, and most of the people are fighting men keeping in condition, 1 pounds of bread per day each is about 1,200 calories per person per day.   That's 70% of about 1,740 calories.   Pretty lean rations for fighting men, and it would have to be shared with several thousand non-fighting persons whom BBC says were also there.

As Napoleon said, "An army moves on its stomach."

I suspect that BBC just took some numbers they found and used it without doing the math or understanding what their numbers meant in real terms.

[Peter S]

Journalists and TV types frequently fail to do the math and check if the numbers add up, though it's one of the first things they're told to do in training (well, I was, and I remembered to do it; perhaps today's crop can't remember). But to take up Bob's point about loaf size - the past is a foreign country, they do things differently. I think you'll find that large loaves were indeed par for the course, especially for mass catering.

[eyesup]

Bread is a carbohydrate and is quick energy. Meats and dairy are proteins and a longer term energy and pack more bang for the buck. I don't get feeding an army on bread. No wonder they needed so much flour. Less energy per ounce with bread than or more per ounce with protein.

Obviously they didn't understand dietary science they way we do.

Duane