Lant

Lant is aged, fermented urine, historically collected and set aside before use in pre-industrial cleaning and manufacturing. The word comes from the Old English hland, meaning urine. Once fermented, lant's ammonia content makes it a mild caustic agent, and household manuals describe servants collecting the contents of bedpans and letting them ferment before use. It played a significant part in wool processing and other textile work, and demand was large enough in textile producing towns that community collection efforts were organized. It was also used in agriculture, for example mixed with lime and applied when dressing wheat before sowing to discourage birds from taking the seed. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/