medieval hygiene question

[aceplace57]

Antiques roadshow featured a urinal that was designed for use in a dining hall.

No joke. People got up peed and sat back down. I suspect that got a bit smelly.

[Swallowed_My_Cellphone]

@t-bonham@scc.net

Even in the western frontier towns, a laundry was a common business. (Often started by Chinese immigrants who originally came over to work on laying railroad tracks.) Obviously, while on a cattle drive at the end of the season, cowboys didn’t have cleaning facilities. But when they arrived at the railhead, there were laundries available to them.

Also, just for economic reasons, never washing their jeans wouldn’t make sense. Clothes last much longer when washed on occasion. And jeans were a fairly sizable investment for a cowboy; they would have wanted to make them last.

There may be a nugget of truth though. When I think of the multi-day backwoods camping or paddling trips I’ve been on, it not like we have room to carry several outfits. I pretty much lived in a single pair of pants for a week (convertable, so I could zip off the legs and turn the pants into shorts). They’d only get “washed” if I was wading through a creek or something. I’d smell like a bear by the time I was ready to come out of the woods.

I can’t imagine a guy on a multi-day cattle drive being able to wash his jeans until he got home. So yeah, “we didn’t wash them on the range” probably wasn’t that far off from the truth, even though it’s not at all the same as “never washed them, ever”.

[Measure_for_Measure]

More views on soap:

@Some commercial website

Originally, soap was used to clean hides and fleeces, not bodies. Even with Roman baths, some question remains about how much soap was actually used on bodies compared to the use of olive oil and perfumes. With the fall of Rome, however, so went the popularity of bathing, which by then was viewed as an immodest practice at best. Soap use in medieval Europe remained only in Spain and Italy.

Soap eventually found its way to France, where it underwent significant improvement, and from there to England.

The website also dates the widespread use of soap to the mid 1800s. http://www.thestraddlecreeksoapshop.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=71:a-historical-timeline-of-soap&catid=45:soap-school&Itemid=73

Recall that the germ theory of disease is of recent vintage. Cleanliness only became proximate to Godliness in the 1800s. Before that, Christians tended to associate dirtiness with humility and devout penury. Admittedly Muslims and Buddhists had a different opinion.