Yesterday afternoon I was involved in a conversation about furs and the maintenance thereof and someone brought up the expense of summer storage. This led me to ask a dumb question that nobody had an answer to.
People have been wrapping themselves in furs to keep warm since the dawn of time, but refrigeration is a 20th century phenomenon. What did people do to prevent furs from deteriorating durning the warmer months before the advent of refrigerated storage?
I would say the quick answer is “They didn’t”. Your 19th-century fur coat just wouldn’t have lasted as long, if you stored it in the closet.
But with that said, keeping things cool is not a 20th-century phenomenon. Our ancestors had various methods of maintaining coolness, ranging from the cellar to the ice-house filled with ice from the previous winter’s frozen lakes/ponds. If Great-Grandma wanted to keep her furs pristine, and if she had the room, she could have stored them in the ice-house.
She might also have stored them in a cedar chest, with or without naphthalene based mothballs.
In medieval castles, there was the * garderobe * which, depending on which source you read, was either the privy, or a room to keep valuable clothes. I’ve heard, but am having trouble verifying, that it was actually both, in that the, um, fumes from the privy were considered useful in keeping moths and harmful insects away from the clothes.
If true, this would speak volumes for the olfactory impact of the medieval fur-wearer.
They must not have been all that worried about flies.