Slaughterhouse

An older term for an open-air slaughterhouse is a "shambles"; there are streets named "The Shambles" in some English towns (e.g. Worcester, York) which got their name from having been the site on which butchers killed and dressed animals for consumption. In those days there were no sanitary facilites or hygiene laws as known today, and guts, offal and blood were chucked into a runnel down the middle of the street or open space where the butchering was carried out. Picking one's way through the resulting mess must have been unpleasant - but then, all forms of household waste were commonly thrown in the street anyway, so perhaps it was less disgusting to the poeple of that age than it would be to us. You can easily see why we refer to any scene of total disorganisation and mess as "a shambles" The word is probably derived from Saxon.

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