To stink or not to stink?
Hello dear reader! I cannot believe that it is 2023 already. Where has the time gone? I had intended on posting this before Christmas, but life does like to get in the way.
There was something I intentionally missed out in my last blog post because I wanted to discuss it separately. I’ve already explained how public the bedchamber was, well, it’s about to get a lot more public. You see, if you and your (platonic) bed mates were wealthy enough to share a nice, comfy bed, you would also sleep naked*. Why? For personal hygiene reasons of course!
What? You don’t believe me? Well read on.
The Three Wise Men on their way to see Christ, all undressed (Public Domain).
Despite not knowing about germs, medieval people did understand that there was some link between filth and disease. But filth was not just the daily dirt you picked up. It was also everything that came out of you – sweat, spit, breath, hair, nails, and the more obvious excrements. Breath is included because medieval people also believed in an invisible airborn ‘filth’. Known as ‘miasma’, it was thought to only travel through bad smells. We all know humans are smelly creatures, so need I say more on that matter?
Finally, like our modern selves, Medieval people considered it polite to maintain a good level of hygiene when being so close to others. Etiquette guides like Les Countenance de Table listed numerous hygienic practices including: -
Washing hands prior to and after meals.
Not returning food that you’ve touched to communal dishes.
Not touching your nose or ears.
Swallowing any food in your mouth before drinking from a shared cup.
And we know these behaviours were not limited to the rich thanks, sadly, to death records - a young boy of 10 drowned in a horse trough while attempting to wash his hands and dish after his meal.
Keeping clean took several forms from the primitive, to the social, to the luxurious. Like your sleeping arrangements, it all depended on your coin and your status.
Bathing could be a simple wipe down with a bowl of water and a wet rag or dunking yourself in a nearby source of water. Or if you were in a town or city, you could visit a bath house. They were extremely popular with rich and poor alike and were the equivalent of your local pub! Totally naked* and with no segregation for the genders, you and your neighbours would clean yourselves while hearing all the gossip, eating a meal, drinking some of the best alcohol, or listening to some music. It all depended on what you could afford. And yes, that includes other ‘services’. It’s no wonder they were nicknamed “the stews” and that eventually stews became a slang word for brothels.
Bathing in style; note the food, expensive soap and herbs (Rosalie Gilbert, 2022)
Those with money could afford their own bathtubs and the staff to handle the work involved. Like beds, they were a status symbol. Take that, Sir Hugh de Willoughby! And if you really want to impress him, have your Lady Wife bathe him while he eats, drinks, and listens to your musicians. Both stews and private tubs would be surrounded by cloth hangings. I suspect this was more to do with keeping draughts at bay than modesty! Tables made from boards would be laid over the top. If you want to know more, then please check out Rosalie Gilbert’s website. It is her excellent recreation of a medieval lady’s bathtub you see pictured in this blog.
Contrary to popular belief, bathing was not seen as dangerous to your health (that came later). Indeed, many physicians would prescribe baths with certain herbs and oils. They mostly warned against an overabundance of bathing, as with everything else, and there was some disagreements as to whether hair should be washed.
Soap too was known and used. From the cheapest, roughest ‘black’ lye soap to the most expensive olive oil ‘castile’ soap. As were oils, powders, combs, tweezers, men’s razors, ear scoops, breath fresheners, and tooth ‘brushing’! The latter done with cloths, brushes and hazel twigs. Again, the quality of the items varied depending on wealth and status.
And now, I promise to explain why sleeping naked was considered hygienic.
It starts with clothes. You see, wool is a great hardy fabric, making it perfect for clothing. Only pure wool, as it would have been back then, is hard to wash. It grows heavy and can easily become misshapen. Also, it can be itchy and the dye can fade when repeatedly washed. But anything that sat next to a medieval person’s skin needed to be washed regularly to remove the ‘filthy’ body secretions, dirt, and miasma build-up. Therefore, medieval underwear was generally not for supporting or covering up body parts but worn as a barrier between the wool (or other, more expensive fabrics) outer garments. Unsurprisingly, they were mostly made from fabrics, such as linen, that could withstand regular washing and were cheaper to replace. Linen also has the boon of becoming softer and more absorbent the more it’s washed.
Nowadays, historians agree that poorer members of medieval society had more clothing than first thought. You would have had to have been extremely impoverished to not own at least one change of linen undergarments. So even if you slept in your woollen outer garments for warmth, you would still regularly strip to wash your body and change the linen underneath.
Of course, the richer you were, the more undergarments you would own. And you would willingly change them to stave off disease. Now bring in the bed, remember how I said in the last post, that it was a matter of wealthy pride to be able to regularly change the linen bedsheets? If you could not, then by all means sleep in your undergarments to make the bed linens last until washday. But if you could, why would you put on a clean linen undergarment just before bed if you were climbing into clean linen that could do the same task and would be whisked away the next morning?
Yes, it seems counterproductive in a miserly sort of way until you remember that it takes less linen to make an undergarment than it does to cover a bed. So in reality, it was another extravagant way of showing you cared for your family and guest’s health! And while I cannot confirm this, I suspect it was considered a great snub for a guest to still insist on sleeping dressed in their undergarments.
So there we have it, medieval hygiene practices were far more complicated than modern media leads to believe. They valued hygiene as much as we do. Furthermore, they weren’t as body shy as us modern folk. Nakedness* was accepted as a given thing in the right circumstances. And want to know why I’ve been putting an asterix after the word? Well, you’ll have to read my next post on medieval clothing.
With special thanks to Rosalie Gilbert
Sources
Did people in the Middle Ages take baths? Medievalist.net Online
Medieval Hygiene, Mark Cartwright, 2018, Online
Medieval hygiene: Did people have bad teeth in medieval times? Modern History TV, 2019, Online
Mistress, Maids and Men: Baronial Life in the Thirteenth Century, Margaret Wade Labarge, 2003
Soap and washing: Did they have soap in medieval times? Modern History TV, 2019, Online
The (not so) stinky Middle Ages: why medieval people were cleaner than we think, BBC History, 2020, Online
The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women by Rosalie Gilbert, 2020.
