Hollywood Lied to You

Medieval movies with gleaming castles and clean-shaven knights are pure fantasy. Real towns reeked of sewage thrown from windows. Most people rarely traveled more than a day's walk from where they were born, and castles were dark, damp, and rat-infested.

Streets often doubled as open sewers. People dumped waste and emptied chamber pots into the streets — so often that medieval towns passed ordinances and fines trying to stop it. (The famous cry "gardyloo!" — from the French gardez l'eau, "watch out for the water" — actually comes from later centuries: it's first recorded in Edinburgh in 1662, not the Middle Ages.) Pigs roamed freely through towns eating garbage, serving as the medieval waste disposal system.