From Bogs, Baths and Basins

[bunnyjadwiga]

This is from the beginning of the first chapter, on the privy and its names:

Recent excavations at Yorvik, the Viking settlement at York, uncovere a 1,000-year-old 'toilet' seat. It consists of a simple wooden board-- forming a bench -- with a round hole cut out. The seat would have once covered a void where human excrement would have piled up. Instantaneous removal of the waste, by gravity or running water, was rather the exception. This basic facility continued in use, little changed, into the twentieth century... They would be instantly recognizable to a tenth century Norse settler-- or anyone for that matter-- living in Britain at the time. This simple arrangemet, nevertheless varied enormously in detail and went by many names...

Names Evesleigh records include jericho (Parson Woodforde, 18th c), necessary, closet, privy, privy-midden, bog ...

The association of the words 'toilet' and 'lavatory' with a device for the removal of human waste is modern and appears to date from the early twentieth century. Formerly toilet meant the act of washing and dressing or it referred to a dressing table with a mirror. Toilet-ware denoted the utensils which went with it -- sets of ewers or jugs and washbasins and the lavatory was properly the washbasin.
A further confusion is the use of some names to describe both the actual device, with its wooden seat and the room or space where it was located. Sometimes a distinction was made by adding the word 'house,' as in 'bog house' and 'necesasry house.' Many were separate from teh dwelling though n larger houses it was common for them to be incorporated within the main building. Medieval castles were often provided with garderobes in upper floors which conveyed the waste by stone chutes built in the thickness of the walls to the surrounding moat or ditch. At Conway Castle in North Wales, built betwen 1283 and 1293, some of the privies consist of corbelled projections overhanging the rock below. A south wing added to Little Moreton Hall, near Congleton in Cheshire, between 1570 and 1580 includes a garderobe tower containing two first floor* closets which emptied through holes in the bottom of the cess chamber into the moat. Similar projecting turrets connecting with first floor* chambers were frequently built into the walls of substantial farmhouses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries..

First floor, in this context, actually is a British usage meaning the first floor above the entrance, or ground floor-- what Americans call the second floor.
The citations for the specific places point to guidebooks of those historic spots.