A 13th-Century Merchant's Notebook Spent 800 Years in a Latrine. It's Still Readable.

Archaeologists excavating a construction site in Paderborn, Germany, pulled a pocket-sized medieval notebook from the bottom of an 800-year-old latrine. The wax pages are still legible. The handwriting belongs to one person. Nobody knows how it got there.

The object is a 13th-to-14th-century construction of leather, wood and wax. The LWL, the organization overseeing the excavation, has called it among the most unusual medieval objects ever found in the region. It measures about 10 by 7.5 centimeters, roughly the size of a playing card. Reusable notebooks like this were never meant to last centuries, which is why archaeologists rarely get to study this kind of informal medieval writing.

The wooden tablets are coated in wax and enclosed in a leather binding decorated with embossed lily motifs. Medieval writers used a stylus to scratch text into the wax surface; earlier entries could be erased and the surface reused. Traces of those earlier inscriptions remain visible beneath the most recent layer of writing, and researchers hope modern imaging techniques will eventually allow them to separate and decipher the overlapping text.

The writing is in Latin, which points to an educated owner, likely a merchant from Paderborn's upper-middle class, since literacy at the time was mainly limited to the clergy and educated elites. Most surviving texts from that period were religious manuscripts or official records that people deliberately preserved. This notebook was neither. The text runs in two directions depending on how the book was held, but it appears to come from a single hand, suggesting it was used spontaneously rather than formally.

Among the other objects recovered from the same deposit: scraps of silk fabric that were possibly used as toilet paper. So it was that kind of neighborhood.

Conditions in the latrine were oxygen poor and wet, which meant the decay of organic materials was slowed. The notebook arrived at the restoration workshop in Münster packed inside a wet clod of earth; conservators noted that even after eight centuries underground, the find still had a rather unpleasant odor. How it came to rest at the bottom has no answer yet. Archival research could eventually put a name to the hand, if the latrine can be matched to a specific property in medieval records.

A merchant scratched something into wax 700 years ago, probably expecting to erase it later. He never got the chance, and now it's the most interesting thing in the room.

Read the full story at Archaeology News Online Magazine, May 16, 2026

Hot Take: Seven hundred years of formal archival practice gave historians chronicles and papal bulls. Seven hundred years in a latrine gave them something a medieval person actually wrote on a Tuesday.