Urine collected from the home for the Woollen Trade

 

18th century men scouring wool with paddles

A little known fact is that men's urine was collected from people's homes in the 17th to the 19^th century for use in the processing of raw wool, and there is still evidence of this outside houses today locally in Yorkshire.

Urine, or as it was known locally as “Lant” was collected by men going house to house and collecting from outside through a spout, and many of these spouts still exist to this day. The following picture shows one outside a house in Denholme near Bradford for use in the local mill of Fosters, where many Bancroft men, women, boys and girls worked.

A lant spout outside a Denholme house

For centuries in the woollen and worsted areas of the West Riding of Yorkshire, lant was a valuable commodity and was used for scouring and washing raw wool prior to spinning.

Fermented urine was known as lant and was retained not only for household use, but also collected to be used for commercial purposes. Many houses during the 17th and 18th centuries had special lant stones located on an outside wall. Internally they consisted of a recess into which urine could be poured from chamber pots and from where it passed through a spout in the wall and was collected on the outside in tubs. Surviving examples of lant stones can be found locally at properties in Haworth, Stanbury, Utley, Denholme and Sutton-in-Craven.

Wool for scouring was put into a large tub, or trough, containing a mixture of water and lant and vigorously agitated, to remove dirt and grease, by men using long paddles. A large internal stone trough found in a farm in Newsholme, near Keighley, was probably used for this purpose. During the early 19th century, a mechanised process was developed. The wool was drawn along a wooden trough by paddles before being passed through rollers that squeezed the liquid out. The wool was fed into the rollers by hand with the inevitable consequence that operators lost fingers and even limbs. In 1812 at a mill in Scotland, “a man working some rollers of a new scouring machine had one of his hands drawn under a roller...with the loss of one finger”. Eventually a fully mechanised process for scouring was developed, but it does not appear to have been in common use in Yorkshire until the 1830s.

Lant was also used as a mordant, or fixative, for dyeing wool and cloth. In the 1770s Bridgehouse Mill at Haworth was an indigo mill. Here lant, which was said to be particularly beneficial for dyeing indigo, would have been used for dyeing finished cloth, perhaps shalloon, a fine worsted used for lining coats. During the first half of the 19th century, small dyeworks were established in Keighley attracting specialist dyers to the town..

William Partridge in his Practical Treatise on Dyeing, published in 1823, wrote that the urine of beer drinkers was the most sought after and this may well be so as a row of lant stones still survive in the yard at the rear of the Friendly Inn at Stanbury, for use by anyone leaving the Inn.

A  lant spout outside a local farm house

I am grateful to the Keighley news for some of the information in this article