Sometimes there is documentation. Since clothes were so valuable, they were often listed in a woman’s dowry agreement and in wills.
For the poor, it becomes more difficult. Some plantation records list that clothing or enough cloth to make an outfit was given to the slaves at Christmas. Sometimes clothes are mentioned in passing by trial transcripts or lawsuits.
Letters and diaries are also a good source. I remember reading a letter that’s in our museum archives which talks about a boat which capsized. The writer goes on at length about losing his best shirt-- the only one he owned besides the one on his back.
Well yes … as I stated on the next line … “As I say, just a WAG.”
A little bit of selective quoting there, eh? I’ve never claimed to be anything other than the historical ignoramus I undoubtedly am - heck, I dropped History as a subject at school at the earliest opportunity.
Probate records often contain inventories of estates file in court by the executors. Clothing, especially articles of lesser value, were sometimes lumped together, though. I’m looking at an inventory of a woman who died in Bristol County, Massachusetts, in 1842. She had six linen sheets valued at $6.00, six cotton sheets valued at $3.00, 12 pillow cases at 10 cents each. The deceased’s wearing apparel was valued at $25.
The Scots and Indians weren’t the only ones to utilize this technique of making clothes last. When clothes became stained, they were sometimes “turned,” which means the garment was taken apart, and then sewn back together inside-out. This worked best on plain fabrics, or ones in which the colors were woven into the fabric (like gingham) rather than printed fabrics.
Sometimes, people saved extra fabric left over from garment-making because they could switch out torn or stained panels. We also have a few examples in my museum’s collection of people cutting out stains and patching in a new piece of cloth. (With infrequent washing, you didn’t need to worry as much about fading, so the new piece could blend right in.)
** pseudotriton ruber ruber, ** one problem with documentation of underclothing is that at certain times, underclothes were literally “unmentionables,” not discussed or written about openly. Often, they were just loosely grouped under “linen.” Women might discuss in letters buying cloth for petticoats, but it’s rare during certain times to see a direct mention of pantalettes or men’s underdrawers.
Petticoats, chemises and pantalettes were usually made out of a sturdy white cotton, which is easily washable. From what I’ve read, they were often boiled, or scrubbed with lye to keep them white. Women who lived in isolated areas often laid whites in the sun to bleach, but city women often didn’t have that option, because it was shameful for others to see your underwear.
Women’s underclothing at the time was almost always white, with the exception of red petticoats. (Red does not show embarassing menstrual stains as badly as pure white.) One of the letters in our collection is unusually blunt in mentioning this. The letter is written to a woman who is planning to travel west in a wagon train. The writer urges her to get a few more red petticoats, “for decency’s sake,” i.e so others wouldn’t see the stains when she washed her petticoats.
In the past, washing could be a very complicated process. The traditional way to wash a kimono was to take it apart, wash the pieces, stretch it to back to the proper shape while drying, then sew it back together.
I don’t really believe that people were dirty and everyone stank before the latter part of the twentieth century when daily showering became culturally obligatory. Actually, I think that aspect of modern culture is as much influenced by the potential for financial gain as for the natural stinkiness of humans.
What did they do in the time before deodorant and antiperspirant? What did they do in the time before mouthwash? Was everyone walking around with embarrassing body odors and halitosis? (Though, of course, in the last few years we’ve learned that mouthwash can fight potentially fatal gum disease as well as bad breath…)
In the past, people probably noticed these smells less than we would now. Most people would have probably had a slightly noticable smell, but it wouldn’t have been as extreme as the smell you notice on the few adults who don’t use deodorant today. You’d be more used to the smell. Also, I think most people would have been able to do something to lessen the smell, and I don’t mean by using perfumes or spices. Simply rinsing one’s underarms daily would have been sufficient to reduce body odor from the pestilential extremes we normally ascribe to pre-modern humans.
Basically, I think people have always been able to reduce the smells they noticed, and probably didn’t notice ‘body odor’ as much as we would now.
Those that could afford it wore perfumes, but, believe it or not, most people stank abominably. A certain preacher I’ve read of, who, ironically enough, was one of the leaders of the *household * hygiene movement, bragged quite openly that he had never taken a bath in his life.
Bathing was believed to leave the body vulnerable to disease. It wasn’t so much that the dirt was a protective layer, but that people thought getting wet was dangerous.
Taking a hot water bath would have been laborious, to say the least. Not only would water have to be fetched from a creek, pump or well, it would have to be heated up over a fire, then lugged to the tub. Soap, unless home-made was expensive, and many city-dwellers did not own animals from which to render the fats for soap. They would have to have purchased it. When buying enough food for your family takes up most of your income, most people would see soap as a luxury, especially if it were just used for such a vain purpose as removing body odor.
Even had a person bathed, their world was indescribably filthy, and they quickly would have become smelly again. Sanitation was virtually unknown in the past. Human and animal feces, urine, blood from butchering, rotten food, and God-knows-what-else caked the streets. Domestic animals lived inside the house with the family. Just imagine the stench you would pick up on your shoes and clothing hems just from walking down the street.
Dental hygiene was virtually non-existant. No peasant ever owned a toothbrush, no for that matter, did any nobleman. The wealthy rubbed their teeth with “tooth cloths” to remove surface scum, and sometimes chewed cloves or gargled with perfumes in order to try to reduce bad breath. Elizabeth I ate candies and cakes in the mistaken belief that it would “sweeten” her breath. It didn’t, and her breath was apparently remarked upon by her couritiers.
It was rare for any adult, rich or poor, to keep all of their teeth. They literally rotted out of their mouths. The peasants, whose budgets didn’t allow for perfumes or spices, would have had indescribable halitosis. Ettiquette manuals of the day advise people to avid breathing on their fellow dinner guests in order to avoid offending them with foul odors.
**
This is true to a certain extent. Astronauts returning to earth often report being sickened by the stench of civilization. They’ve breathed only purified air, and thus they’ve lost the “nose-numb” which protects us from sensory overload. Smokers often don’t catch the scent of cigarettes on themselves, but others notice it very distinctly. You can get “used” to a smell, but it’s still there.
**
The stinky man riding on the bus next to you has most likely bathed at least once in his life, if not in the last week. A man three centruies ago may never even have washed anything besides his hands and face. You may be more used to the smell, but trust me, you’d notcie it.
Wealthy people used to carry something called a “pomender,” which was basically a perfume tube, around with them. Upon approaching the un-perfumed masses in the street, they would hold it to the nose to block out the odor. They must have noticed it if they were trying to block it, right?
They saw no reason to try to wash away body odor. Everyone stank. It was no big deal. Why open yourself to risk of fever by washing? It was a silly waste of time, and showed a distressing amount of concern for the body.
We spend so much time ridding our bodies of natural odors because our culture insists upon it. We’re ashamed if we think we stink. But people who have never been taught that shame wouldn’t feel the same as we do. There is no inate human instinct to render ourselves odor-free.
Even the modern families who joined the PBS experiment *Frontier House * quickly abandoned bathing as being too much effort after a hard day’s toil. I remember that in one episode, the family laughed about how smelly they must be, but said they were just too exhausted to care. I imagine the peasants of old must have thought along very similar lines.
“It’s sweat, by God, which keeps a man clean.” (I remember seeing this quote in one of my books, but for the life of me, can’t remember which one.)
I love LISSA…this is one of the most informative threads I’ve ever read. It makes a ton of books more realistic to me…and some movies too.
The United States population didn’t start bathing regularly until late in the 19th Century…and then…only because of the ‘Cleanliness = Godliness’ campaign. Damn, Lissa…you rock! Thanks for the info.
Someone mentioned that people in the past didn’t have means to dry their laundry in the winter. I don’t have a dryer and haven’t had one for years. My wife is from China and never had a dryer and just considered it an unnecessary expense. In the winter, we just hang our clothes indoors. If anything, they dry faster because the air is dryer in winter.
My wife grew up in very-rural China where even today living conditions are similar to 19th century America. Farmers do have electricity, but usually no plumbing. Work is done with beast-drawn plows. I spent a month there and I didn’t notice anyone stinking. I can’t say how much they bathe today, but my wife says that when she was growing up the standard was once per week.
Because they are doing their laundry by hand, it is true that they wear their clothes more times before washing than we do here, but not as much as you would think. All in all, their personal hygiene was little different from ours here. (Well, except for oral hygiene. But since until recently their diet did not include sugar, tooth decay was rare. Discolored teeth, yes, but no cavities.) What really amazed me was that although everyone was washing by hand, no one had wringers! Believe me, if you’re washing clothes by hand a wringer makes all the difference in the world. Washing machines are appearing everywhere in China now, but I swear twenty years ago I could have made a fortune selling wringers in China.
This topic reminds of me of a passage from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The Joads had been living in a camp for migrant workers and having daily showers for the first time in their lives. One remarked something to the effect that he had been taking weekly baths all his life and never stank, but now that he was bathing daily, if he missed a day he stank. It makes me wonder whether this is due to more sensitive nostrils or whether there is a real effect on the skin from frequent bathing which makes one then require more frequent bathing. I’ll have to ask some former-infantry friends about this and their experiences with living in the field without showers for extended periods.
I’m not going to dispute what you’re wife has to say about China, but I will point out that most of us have been talking about Europe and North American Euro-people, not China. When Europe first started sending a lot of folks to China their… ah… stench was remarked upon at length by the Chinese (And the Japanese, and pretty much everyone else). Asians had different hygiene standards for most of history.
In fact, I have read only one historical account of folks who stank worse than Europeans. Once read a book where it was claimed that the Australian Aborigines where the English first set up a penal colony were so malodorous that the English refused to touch the native women, the Euopean men apparently preferring sex with each other to a native female. Supposedly, the natives where delibrately upping the stench factor (using mostly rancid fish oil) to keep biting insects away. Wow. Now that’s a stench. But I have no idea if that is true or not, having only seen the one reference.
Yes, rinsing the armpits would make a significant difference - except the pre-modern European saw no reason to do that. In fact, folks would wear the same underwear in winter for weeks on end.
As for drying clothes inside in winter - have to ask, what sort of heat do you have in your home? Unless you’re heating your home with a wood or peat fire and the combined body heat of humans and animals it’s not comparable.
Now, there are skin conditions where daily bathing only makes the situation worse, and such people are told by their dermatologists to bathe less often, even as little as once a week. This is a big cultural hurdle for these folks, and the social taboo on skpping the daily shower is so strong that it’s unlikely they’d admit to less frequent bathing. They’d also probably change clothes on daily basis as well, which would also help with hygiene and odor.
Having been camping for weeks at a time with little access to showers, I can vouch that not changing your clothes will only contibute to the odor problem. My companions and I did smell rather strongly, and sometimes we even were aware of it ourselves. However, having also smelled other folks coming in from the field, although the odor is strong and noticable, it’s never been the choking-back-nausea intensity of the city drunks I’ve had the displeasure to share a bus with. Diet will affect body odor, and so will alcohol. The largely vegetarian diet of a Medieval peasent probably mitigated the body odors somewhat, but this would be balanced by a prodigous use of alcohol (by our standards).
Let’s face it, for about 1500 years Europe really reeked.
During the Tudor era, vegetables weren’t really a big part of the diet of the poor. They mainly subsided on bread, cheese and beer. No one really grew, say, a large field of spinach. Any vegetables the poor ate would have been grown in their own gardens, and would have only been available for a brief time during the summer.
Meat was expensive, and the poor were forbidden to hunt in privately-owned forrests. Poaching could get you hanged. The poor were big consumers of “umble” which was the innards of butchered animals. (One book I’ve read on the subject claims that “umble” is where we get the expression “humble pie.” I cannot vouch for the veracity of that statement, but it’s an interesing theory, anyway.) Elizabeth I tried to encourage the poor to eat fish, even going so far as to use her position as Head of the Church of England to declare several days of the week “fish-only” days, also declaring that fish could be eaten on Fridays and during Lent.
The wealthy occasionally ate vegetables, but cooked them vigorously, because it was thought that raw vegetables were unhealthy. I remember reading of one dinner in which a “salad” was featured: boiled lettuce, topped with butter and vinegar.
The wealthy focused on meats and sauces. They also were liberal with use of sugar, because it showed off their wealth. Sugared wine, sugared meat, sugared desert treats. . . . it played havok with their teeth.
Dinners for the wealthy involved vast ammounts of food. I remember reading one description of a dinner served to the son of King Henry VIII, Prince Edward. The Prince was dining alone that evening. Seventeen dishes were served to him, including several different kinds of meat. The Prince was only three at the time. (The leftovers were eaten by the servants, so they had every reason to over-cook.)
Roches, you might not believe everyone stank before the latter part of the twentieth century, but it’s true. Lissa seems by far to be the expert here in this regard. It doesn’t take a whole lot of deep digging into history to discover how seldom people washed either their bodies or themselves. A peek into the history of advertising will show you how America’s have been educated about the evils of BO and ring around the collar. We’ve now moving toward the opposite extreme.
As an historical reenactor of the colonial period, I pass on a lot of information about life in the past. While members of my group bath frequently and use deoderants, most of us let our clothing stay somewhat frayed and soiled. I tell people how men had to have two opposing front teeth to bite off the tops of their gunpowder cartridges in order to join the militia.
Many of the better known historical sites such as Colonial Williamsburg and Plimoth Plantation give a rather sanitized portrayal of everyday life, because the public doesn’t accept tattered clothing or peeling paint. And certainly no one today wants to experience the true stink of the past.
What time period are you talking about? I know that in parts of Europe during the 10th-12th centuries, bathing was seen as, while a luxury, a pleasurable one. The nobility bathed fairly often (although not by modern standards) and a number of cities had bathhouses.
In fact, I’ve heard some people argue that bathing was pretty popular throughout most of the middle ages, and that it wasn’t until the Rennaisance that it was frowned upon.
Not to gross anyone out, but I typically bathe once a week, and have gone longer on many occasions. Depending on the time of year, my hair may or may not be getting a little limp by the end of that–and usually running a brush through it makes it look mostly normal again. I also don’t usually use deoderant.
And I don’t tend to smell bad. If/when I smell something, I go take a shower or a bath… but it rarely happens. And it isn’t just that I am used to my own smell. My husband says he has never smelled a body odor on me, and on those occassions when I do have one, I notice right away.
My theory is that since I am not always stripping my skin it had adapted to not producing as much oil and stuff. I also keep my house pretty cool (72-74 or so) and don’t do many sweaty things. If I get sweaty or dirty I bathe right away.
So now that you are all totally grossed out by me…
I meant “vegetarian” only in the sense that there wasn’t a lot of meat in their diet. And it wasn’t, like today, for ethical reasons or to pursue better nutrition, it was because they couldn’t obtain meat as often as they’d like.
Also, the Medieval definition of “non-meat” was different than ours - if I recall, fetal rabbit wasn’t considered meat, among other things, nor were fish, although modern vegans would disagree. Certainly, the peasent diet would be an ovo-lacto version of vegetarianism most days. They did eat legumes - hence the old nursey rhyme “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold/Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old”. Wild berries, nuts, and mushrooms also made an appearance in their diets, although as you point out fresh foods were highly seaonsal in those days. Things like apples, pears, and plums might also be available. But you’re right - they mostly lived on bread, cheese and beer. Mostly bread and beer.
Turnips, carrots, and oinions would keep for an extended period, and cabbage could be pickled. But yes, vegetables were not a big feature of anyone’s diet. And certainly not if they could help it.
Nonetheless, people took the risk. Was the ban on just the bigger game like deer, boar, and rabbit? I’m wondering how many songbirds and squirrels went missing… certainly a lot of deer and rabbit disappeared, particularly during crop failures.
At least in England, there were a number of recipricol duties between peasent and lord, where the lord was obligated to feed peasents when they performed certain labors, and meat was often included in such “feasts” (typically around planting and harvest). The peasent diet wasn’t entirely meatless, meat was just infrequently in their diet.
Considering how many people were toothless by 30, you have to wonder if the state of dentistry contributed any to boiling fiberous foods to death, as well as a tendency to mince and mash meats.
It wasn’t just sugar - more probably, honey - doing in their teeth, it was a total lack of dental hygiene. Nobody brushed. Nobody flossed. Nobody gargled with Listerine. They did have toothpicks, and it’s already been mentioned that the fastidious wiped the worst of the scum off with cloths.
Sugar as we know it either wasn’t available, or extremely rare and expensive. Most sweetening was done with either honey or fruit juices.
Well, there you go - cooking for the prince wasn’t cooking for just the prince, it was for his whole entourage.
Thanks for the info.