All this talk of bathing reminded me of the great Bathtub hoax. For years, it was quoted in popular articles about the history of the bathtub in the US. Millard Fillmore was credited for the first bathtub in the White House, for example, and there were supposed attempts to ban it in many cities.
It all started from an article by H.L. Mencken that was intended to be a joke, but it took on a life of its own, to Mencken’s dismay.
So you’re saying that this isn’t a new idea …
from xkcd: Citogenesis
They do. But of course are also very dirty while the put up with it. Look at photos of soldiers after they have spent a long time in harsh physical conditions without access to hot piped water, they are dirty (despite having access to cleaning supplies that would be crazy sci-fi fantasy to a medieval peasant), if you want an approximation of how clean a medieval peasant was that’s a good start….
Also of course, as with almost all primary sources, he was not talking about poor peasants, either Norse or Anglo Saxon. Almost no one who was writing things down in that era was talking about them (except on the occasions the turn up on the rich folk’s footsteps en masse with pitchforks)
Speaking of US Presidents and bathtubs there is always the urban legend that President Taft was so fat he got stuck in the White House bathtub and needed help to get out.
There’s also the story that at the baseball field at Yale, there is still a double wide seat that was built for Taft.
Ref Wiki Taft was 5’11" and topped out at ~340 lbs while serving as President. After he was no longer president he got down to ~240 before he died some 17 years after leaving office.
I expect President Taft dressed in modern clothing would not look at all unusual waddling through a modern Wal*Mart.
Agreed
Though he’d probably need to trim that mustache just a tad.
You still occasionally see a real walrus 'stache in the wild even now.
But as you say, if dressed in crocs, elastic-waisted cargo pants, & a T-shirt with words on it, his 'stache would be the only distinctive thing about him.
Though if course that would make him very obese by 19th/early-20th century standards.
Not sure I buy it, because soldiers in that situation are by definition living in insecure, precarious, temporary conditions. They’ve got a lot of shit to deal with for extended periods of time, and it makes sense that washing may be deprioritized.
Peasants in a secure dwelling situation, with permanent shelter and established life routines, are much more likely to have a regular washing regimen than soldiers enduring the hardships of a military campaign in extreme conditions.
Now, if you were trying to make that point about medieval tramps and beggars and slum-dwellers and the like, I’d agree with you. Those people did indeed tend to be chronically filthy, precisely because they had insecure living situations, sporadic access to water, little shelter or privacy, no changes of clothing, etc. Washing gets deprioritized, just like for those struggling soldiers.
But the average settled sedentary agriculturalist (“sedentary” in this case meaning “fixed abode, non-nomadic” rather than “avoiding physical exertion”) of medieval times—the sort of person we refer to when we speak of “traditional peasant costume” and “peasant food” and “peasant dwelling”, etc.—is not in that situation when it comes to having customs and resources that support regular washing.
This silly argument about the cleanliness of medieval European peasants could be put to rest just by examining the hygiene of literally millions of people alive today living in pre-modern conditions.
Agreed. Been there done that on week-long wilderness backpack trips. With her much longer hair, Mrs. Cretin needed more water than I did but still well under five gallons.
There was no such people as “the Vikings”.
1066 was not the last invasion - not even the last successful invasion - of England/Great Britain.
I don’t think anybody’s claiming there was? It’s not an ethnonym, it’s a label for a certain type of military/expeditionary force, like “the legionaries” or “Starfleet”.
“The Vikings” is a standard descriptor for “seafaring raiders/explorers from medieval Norse cultures who ‘went viking’ for conquest or tribute from other peoples”.
Most of us Dopers would know that, but the average person with not much historical interest, only having heard of “Vikings” from popular culture? Many of them will have the misconception that there was a unified people of seafaring and raiding warriors from Scandinavia. Probably wearing horned helmets.
Dik Browne lied to all of us.
The first sentence of the Wikipedia page says:
I wouldn’t try to persuade anyone that Wikipedia is a final historical authority, or that “Vikings” is a demonym in the strict sense, but “the Vikings” is an entirely legitimate and broadly accepted term for a certain group of people in history.
It’s used as ethnonym quite widely. E.g. wikipedia leads with “Vikings were a seafaring people originally from Scandinavia” which would be fine if had left out the “a”. See also this from History Extra (which is a fairly well respected mainstream popular history magazine) which at the least fuzzes the line between Viking-as-occupation and Viking-as-ethnicity:
For 80 years England was divided between the land controlled by the kings of Wessex in the south and south-west and a Viking-controlled area in the Midlands and the north. Viking kings ruled this region until the last of them, Erik Bloodaxe, was expelled and killed in 954 and the kings of Wessex became rulers of a united England.
…
Vikings remained in control of large parts of Scotland (especially Orkney), an area around Dublin and Normandy in France (where in 911 King Charles the Simple had granted land to a Norwegian chieftain, Rollo, the ancestor of William the Conqueror). They also controlled a large part of modern Ukraine and Russia, where Swedish Vikings had penetrated in the ninth century and established states based around Novgorod and Kiev.
I think by the time you’re using the word Viking to describe people living in settled kingdoms for a couple of generations or more you’ve gone beyond “a certain kind of expeditionary force”.