Laudator Temporis Acti

Alan Bennett, The History Boys: A Play (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), pp. 58-59:

The monastic life only comes alive when contemplating its toilet arrangements.

Not monks stumbling down the night stairs at three in the morning to sing the first office of the day; not the sound of prayer and praise unceasing sent heavenwards from altar and cell; no, what fires the popular imagination is stuff from the reredorter plopping twenty feet into the drains.

God is dead. Shit lives.

Wanting toilet paper, or paper of any description, the monks used to wipe their bottoms on scraps of fabric ... linen, muslin, patches of tapestry even, which presumably they would rinse and rinse again before eventually discarding them. Some of these rags survive, excavated from the drains into which they were dropped five hundred years ago and more, and here now find themselves exhibited in the abbey museum.

The patron saint here, whose bones were buried at Rievaulx, was Aelred. And it is conceivable that one of these ancient arsewipes was actually used by the saint. Which at that time would have made it a relic, something at which credulous pilgrims would come to gaze.

Labels: noctes scatologicae