Robin Longbottom on how urine was essential to household and industrial cleaning processes

IN 1670 Hannah Woolley, a widow living in Essex, published The Compleat Maid Servant.

It was a book of household management “composed for the great benefit and advantage of all young maidens” and included in it was a section for the laundry maid. It covered advice on how to remove stains and marks from garments, particularly ink stains – "to get Spots of Ink out of Linne Cloth Before that you suffer it to be washed, lay it all night in urine, the next day rub all the spots in urine as if you were washing in water, then lay it in more urine another night and then rub it again, and so do till you find they be quite out."

Today you can go into any supermarket and buy a wide range of household cleaning agents, and they will all have one ingredient in common – ammonia. Ammonia has been used as a cleanser for removing dirt and grease since Roman times. Until the 19th century, when it was distilled commercially from vegetable and animal products, urine was the main source. When collected, stored and allowed to go stale, it ferments and produces ammonia.

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.

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.

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 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.

Lant continued to be used in the textile industry until the mid-19th century, when commercially manufactured soaps and mordants replaced it.