Gong farmers were only allowed to work at night and the waste they collected had to be taken outside the city or town boundaries.

Gong farmers were only allowed to work at night, hence they were sometimes known as nightmen.

This practice was also called gong farmer in England but carried many health risks for those involved with transporting the excreta and fecal sludge.

A gong farmer was the term used in Tudor England for a person employed to remove human excrement from privies and cesspits.

Gong farmers usually employed a couple of young boys to lift the full buckets of ordure out of the pit and to work in confined spaces.

Some of the more repulsive or dangerous jobs included fuller, chimney sweep, executioner, leech collector, Plague burier, rat-catcher, leather tanner, gong farmer, and sin-eater.

It was the job of the gong farmers to dig them out and remove the excrement, for which in the late 15th century they charged two shillings per ton of waste removed.

Despite being well-rewarded, the gong farmer's job was considered by historians on The Worst Jobs in History television series to be one of the worst of the Tudor period.

When human concentrations became more dense, waste collectors, called nightmen or gong farmers were hired to collect the night soil from pail closets, performing their duties only at night (hence the name).

One London gong farmer who poured effluent down a drain was put in one of his own pipes, which was filled up to his neck with filth before being publicly displayed in Golden Lane with a sign detailing his crime.

Those employed at Hampton Court during the time of Queen Elizabeth I, for instance, were paid sixpence a day, a good living for the period, but the working life of a gong farmer was "spent up to his knees, waist, even neck in human ordure".

Gong farmer (also gongfermor, gongfermour, gong-fayer, gong-fower or gong scourer) was a term that entered use in Tudor England to describe someone who dug out and removed human excrement from privies and cesspits; the word "gong" was used for both a privy and its contents.

As sanitation engineering came to be practised beginning in the mid-19th century and human waste was conveyed from the home in pipes, the gong farmer was replaced by the municipal trash collector as there remained growing amounts of household refuse, including fly ash from coal, which was burnt for home heating.