''"Who is that?"
"He must be a king."
"How'd you know?"
"He hasn't got shit all over him."
The convention to show the early Middle Age Britain as a time populated by pustule-faced, cat-beating, dung-caked, mud-farming peasants. Popularized by films created by the
Monty Python team.
Portrayal of
The Dung Ages is not limited to Britain and/or the Dark Ages. It's often seen even in portrayals of cultures where it doesn't belong. Many ancient Romans, for instance, bathed every day: once soapmaking arrived from Gaul, they also used soap with abandon, possibly to a greater extent than we do.
Something to keep in mind is that neither
The Dung Ages nor
Ye Goode Olde Days is "more" accurate than the other. The reality is that while hygiene was not good by modern standards, and living conditions were not what we'd call "comfortable", what with the lack of central heating and air conditioning, flush toilets, and weekly garbage pick-up; neither did most people walk around barefoot, caked in filth, eating rotten food and living in tumble-down huts made of sticks.
Strong aversions of
The Dung Ages are examples of
Ye Goode Olde Days and should be put there.
See also
Medieval Morons.
Examples:
- Black Adder. The first series, anyway.
- Maid Marian And Her Merry Men
- The BBC's Robin Hood (2006) includes some elements of The Dung Ages.
- The newer movie version of Pride and Prejudice puts the Bennet girls into historically inaccurate drab clothing and plops them down into a working farm, something completely at odds with both Austen's description of the Bennet home and the normal life of an English Regency country gentleman. The 1995 television version is far more accurate on both counts: in 1812 England, only the most eccentric country gentleman would have farm animals within sight (or, more particularly, smell) of his residence.
- Combined with Gorgeous Period Dress in Flesh and Blood.
- The 1997 English mini-series of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe went for this kind of period accuracy in clothing, beards, and decor. On a small TV set, this left all the male characters looking drab, hairy, and nearly identical, while the scenes were so under-lit the parts of it this editor saw might just as well have been shot in a cave.
- Monty Python And The Holy Grail, in which practically everyone runs around bedraggled, shabby and covered in filth, as noted by one character's caustic observation: "He must be a king. He hasn't got shit all over him." In fact, according to backstage reports, the attention of the two Pythons who were directing (Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam) to keeping things authentic in this regard eventually began to take on slightly obsessive tones and really began to piss off the other Pythons (and the other cast and crew members, for that matter), who were having to seriously suffer for their art. This eventually made it a pretty difficult shoot at times and also perhaps provided a reminder of why this trope exists in the first place. This said, however, Gilliam at least was willing to go through what he was putting everyone else through; his two main characters are probably the filthiest main characters in the movie.
- Terry Gilliam's film Jabberwocky,overall depicting the Middle Ages as a pretty damn nasty place to live.
- Played with in George MacDonald Fraser's novel The Pyrates. The opening pages describe an idealized picture of England during The Cavalier Years with buxom wenches and lots of Gorgeous Period Dress, but then refer to scholars' conclusion that the actual standard of living and cleanliness of the time made it closer to The Dung Ages. Fraser then dismisses these conclusions in a tongue-in-cheek way as Political Correctness Gone Mad and announces that he would prefer to write about 17th century England as it should have been.
- Since it's such a Crapsack World already, Warhammer's Old World loves to include elements of The Dung Ages. A typical Bretonnian army has both the stereotypical Arthurian knights and the gross, almost-worthless filth-covered peasants they've conscripted.
- HBO's Rome has The Dung Ages for the plebs, and Gorgeous Period Dress for the patricians. Which is pretty close to the way it would really have been.
- Perfume depicts the 18th century Paris as the grossest place in the world; the book even points out that, while our 2008 Paris has at most a faint smell of car exhaust, the 18th century Paris smelled like crap, rot, sweat, rotten fish, urine, and any nasty odor you could imagine. In fact, this is what ends up driving Jean-Baptiste Grenouille out of the town and into the mountain, where there was no nasty odor at all.
- Appears in Order Of The Stick once, with some mud-farming peasants
.
- Graham Chapman's Yellowbeard. A reasonable extension of the fine Python tradition.
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys had Herc's greedy friend Salmoneous invest in a dung-fertilizer business run by brothers who had become way too desensitized to the substance.
- Mel Gibson's Braveheart.
- Hob Gadling in The Sandman, who is 600 years old, complains that a Renaissance Fair or SCA event he's dragged to doesn't have enough shit everywhere.
- The setting of Berserk in general tends toward this, with only the royal courts having anything in the way of Gorgeous Period Dress.
- The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell rips the King Arthur mythos from the Gorgeous Period Dress setting into this one.
- One of the Pinky And The Brain plots is to gain money via Robin Hood methods, and get indoor plumbing to England, which would inspire the people to make them kings. While everything else works, the plan falls flat because the English didn't want to be bathed, believing hot water and soap to be a lethal combination.
- Tony Robinson's Worst Jobs in History confirmed this to be quite literal Truth In Television. A key component of the daub in wattle and daub construction was manure.
- Invoked in the Animorphs book Elfangor's Secret, which makes a big point about how bad the hygiene of the general populace was in medieval times. The animorphs find the time travelling villain by looking for someone clean.
- Averted in Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series. Good hygiene doesn't show up in the medieval town of Okoitz until the titular time-traveling engineer's reforms start taking effect.
