What is a dunghill?
This favorite Pulter image seems at first straightforward. A dunghill is a pile of shit or as the OED puts it, “a heap or hillock of dung or refuse.” But if shit happens, as the saying goes, dunghills do not. They have to be carefully constructed, ripened, and maintained, and were, in the course of the seventeenth century, revalued as part of a larger reconsideration of waste as resource. The dunghill can be seen as an achievement and a source of wealth and fertility.
"Salt Petre, State Security and Vexation in Early Modern England"
Charcoal and sulphur, the minority ingredients of gunpowder, were easily and cheaply found, but saltpetre proved scarce and expensive. Known to contemporaries as “the soul,” “the foundation” or “the mother” of gunpowder, it was either imported from distant lands or extracted at high cost from soil rich in dung and urine. Lacking understanding of the nitrification associated with bacterial action on decaying organic matter, government advisers wondered whether saltpetre was a substance to be mined or grown. This was a serious question, hinged on the different technologies, customs and prerogatives pertaining to agriculture and minerals. Derived from the “adored muck” of “dung-coloured earth,” saltpetre had mysterious properties, thought the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, that “may well deserve our serious enquiries.” (74-75)
Certain Ways for the Ordering of Soldiers in Battle Array
There is an artificial or made saltpetre that is as powerful as the natural. But the most excellent of all other is made of the dung of beasts, converted into earth, in stables or in dunghills, of long time not used. And above all other, of the same that comes of hogs, the most and best is gotten. Whatsoever dung it be of, it is requisite that by continuance of time it be well resolved into earth, and the humidity thereof dried. Yea, and it is needful that the same earth be as it were dusty. (sig. F4r)
The abundance of hay yearly drawn out of these enclosures, will so enlarge the poor man’s muck-hill (his Philosopher’s stone) that all his labors in casting out this, and loading in his harvest would be turned to gold, and the fruits of tillage thereby increased in no small measure.
“The Reverend Richard Baxter’s Last Treatise”
[In London, t]hey have all the dung of the city, cow dung, horse dung, and cold ashes for the carriage; and when their horse teams bring hay or other vendibles [saleable goods] to London to be sold, it is small trouble to carry back a load of dung, which they do at ten or twelve miles distance at least. And there they make a great dung hill, of one row of the superficies of the green earth, and another row of weeds, and another of lime, and so again and again, till it be near two yards high; and this they leave many months to rot, and then carry it to their ground. And they come near 20 miles for wagon loads of old rotten rags, which some make great gain by selling, hiring abundance of poor people to rake them out of dunghills. And though they give a great price for them, it so much furthers their grass and corn as fully recompenses their cost and labor. And, above all, London is a market which will take up all that they bring, so that nothing vendible need to stick on their hands; and, by garden stuffs and by peas and beans and turnips, they can make more gain of their grounds, than poor country tenants can do of ten times the same quantity. (184)