So what did they do in the Time Before Dry Cleaning?

Factual Questions
41

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by OpalCat *
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…

[QUOTE]
Actually, I think this is more common than people think, it’s just that there’s a huge social cost to admitting it sometimes. I know a lot of folks who don’t bathe every day, and some of them might be following your pattern. If someone ain’t smelly I don’t question their shower frequency.

On the flip side, I’ve known a couple people who reeked even bathing more than once a day. Really, this is highly variable between individuals.

42

My husband falls into that latter category. He is a pretty smelly guy… he builds up an impressive wall of B.O. within hours of a shower if he doesn’t pile on the deoderant. It’s kinda sad :frowning:

43

Opal, my hubby, too. If the weather out is hot and humid, he can develop a stink from standing in the bathroom too long, drying off after a shower!!

I’m a once-a-day girl, myself, but not because it’s what society says; it’s what I need. Sometimes, I have to shower ar bedtime as well as when I get up, if I’ve worked particularly hard that day. I understand your theory about not stripping your skin of oils, and it sounds reasonable, but I’d have to venture that there’s some chance that you wouldn’t be any worse off if you bathed or showered daily (except, of course, in the sense that you have wasted your time/resources). To me, if a person looks reasonably clean (or at least the dirt is fresh. . .you can always tell “old dirt”, y’know?), and doesn’t stink, I would never question how often they bathe. It doesn’t matter. Consider me not grossed out.

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**

I don’t think the nobility were really concerned about rabbits. I can’t recall ever reading of someone hanged for rabbit poaching. The nobility were concerned that if the starving poor ate all of the deer, there’s be none for when they felt like sport hunting.

Of course, if you were caught with a bow and arrow in the forrest, it appears that they would assume the worst. There were some hanged for poaching deer having not even caught one.

(Sport hunting for the wealthy often involved a platform on which the “hunter” stood and waited until the servants had driven all of the deer into a clearing right in front of them. The noble would shoot them down at his leisure. King Henry VII enjoyed the chase, though, and hunted from horseback.)

Well, King Henry was pissed about it when he heard. He ordered the Board of Green Cloth to make the Prince’s meals more simple and suitable to his age. He was concerned that the Prince would be tempted by baby greed into eating too many delicacies and making himself sick.

I’m sure the servants, who had been dining lavishly on the leftovers, were terribly dissapointed, but Henry ordered that “simple” (which is somewhat of a relative term) meals be presented to the Prince in his chamber instead of feating in the Great Hall. This didn’t mean that the servants went hungry, it just meant no more roasted peacock.

I’ll have to check my books this evening on the subject of sugar. For some reason, I’m thinking that sugar was being imported at this time, but was astronomically expensive.

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It was.

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Here are some woodcuts, I believe they’re all 15th century…the first of a man bathing and eating.

http://www.godecookery.com/afeast/dining/din023.html

The second, of a man and woman, probably lovers, bathing together while a musician plays.

http://www.godecookery.com/afeast/dining/din022.html

and the third of a public bath

http://www.godecookery.com/afeast/dining/din018.html

Here’s a chapter, in PDF format, from Paul Newman’s textbook “Daily Life in the Middle Ages”, discussing medieval hygene and sanitation.

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/textbooks/newman/Images/Chapter4.pdf

It points out in part:

The first site you gave seems to be from an undergraduate paper, and the second, from a newspaper article?

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While I know the sites I gave aren’t scholarly ones, they agreed, for the most part with the books I have read about life during the Middle Ages. If any health manuals of the day recommended bathing (for other that the occasional medicinal dip), this is the first I have ever heard of it. I’m not saying that the author is incorrect, only that I wish he had given a cite for that statement.

While bathig was not unknown, I doubt highly if the common man much availed himself of it. Unless he lived in a city with a public bath (and even then, a lot of public baths were thinly-disguised brothels) bathing probably would have been much too laborious. He would have had to have the disposable income for which to pay the entry fee, and the spare time, two commodities which were very rare for a peasant.

The illiterate peasant wouldn’t have known even if an advice manual did suggest bathing. Chances are, he never came within shouting distance of a book of any kind.

I’ve heard it suggested, that some woodcuts of bathers were the pornograpy of the day-- bathing was the excuse to depict the subject in the nude.

48

Point one: the OP was about cleaning clothing before the advent of dry cleaning, not about bathing.

Point Two: Listen to Lissa, Expert in Human Stink, on both accounts.

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I’ll see if I can find any manuals for you recommending it. And I’m not saying you’re wrong…bathing probably was infrequent among the peasantry in Medieval Europe. However, if it was, it was probably more for practical reasons than ideological ones…it wasn’t because people thought that bathing was immoral or caused disease…but more because it’s hard to draw a bath when you can’t just turn a dial and have hot water shoot out of pipes…the person would have to lug the water to his tub, heat the water, without getting it too hot, and bathe before the water had a chance to cool. It’s a pain.

More generally, it’s overly broad to say “People didn’t bathe in the past”…you’re covering a lot of territory there, both historical, geographical, and cultural. Somebody in London in 900 would probably have different attitudes about hygiene than somebody in Rome in 1100, who would have different attitudes than somebody in Constantanople in 1300, or Damascus in 1500. It’s an overgeneralization.

50

Yeah it’s the waste of time, water, soap, etc that is the reason I don’t do it.

I want to add that I always shower/bathe before any…uh…romantic encounter.

51

People with extremely dry skin or eczema actually should NOT bathe daily, particularly in winter.

Oh, sure, clean off the surface dirt, and sweat from manual labor or hard exercise, but folks in those categories can actually be harmed by too frequent bathing.

This is particularly troublesome in children with eczema. It usually happens this way:

Kid gets a rash.

Mother (or father), concerned child has or will get an infection, bathes child more frequently than usual

Rash gets worse.

Parent bathes child even more to eliminate the blight.

Rash gets worse

Parent drags child - now very rashy, with raw, bleeding, oozing skin - to doctor. Kid might even have a genuine skin infection at this point. Parent wrings hands, explains dedication to cleanlines, weeps at spread of this hideous, disfiguring plague on offspring.

Doctor says: kid has eczema. Stop using soap, use this very very mild cleanser. Use this cream to sooth. Put kid in long sleeves, pants, bandages, and trim nails very very short to cut down on scratching. Don’t bathe the kid so much

I speak from experience on this. I’ve had to cut back to once-a-week during a couple of very serious outbreaks. So, not only do you have this hideous skin problem - peeling, cracking, bleeding, oozing, itching that drives you mad and keeps you up at night, not to mention the joys of hopping into the bathroom in the morning to pry the stuck-to-you bedsheet off your scabby hide - people treat you like your a leper, they won’t sit next to you on the bus or train, when you deal with service folks they sometimes look at you and gasp at your raw face and hands, look at you funny if you’re wearing long sleeves all summer, AND, if they find out you’re NOT bathing at least 14 times a day they start lecturing you on how you’re filthy and it’s all your fault you have this disease (it’s not a disease, and it’s not contagious) because you aren’t clean enough. Well, NO, in part it can get really bad because you are too clean.

Fortunately, there’s much better treatment for eczema than there used to be. And, you know, I really, really like a luxurious hot, steaming bath but my skin won’t let me do a good soak very often. >sigh<

While non-bathing people can get eczema and other nasty skin conditions, where the rate of bathing goes up past a certain point some skin problems like eczema actually incease. Really, what is necessary is a happy medium based upon the needs of the person in question.

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Actually in the 17Century only linen and light fabrics were washed in water . Expensive silks and brocades were brushed clean or treated with a damp rag to remove stains… later on when Marie Antoinette introduced a fad to wear cotton materials like her famous “Robe de Gaulle” which was what the colonist in the Caribbean posesiones wore were washed in water…fermented Urine which turned to ammonia was used to bleach the clothes.

53

Not quite right. The outer garments you spot clean by whacking off dried mud and dust, then spot clean the greasy spots by rubbing with oat or wheat bran, then brushing it off. Inner clothing, the small clothes are the ones that get washed more frequently as they were plain less fitted garments. Those tended to be linen or wool or linsey-woolsey [half and half linen and wool] and stood up to being whacked in water.

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It’s been seventeen years since Broomstick wrote those things, so she may be down at the stream washing her clothes now. :wink:

55

Ugh. This is ruining any time travel fantasies I had about going to old Europe.

56

What stuff, of course they did. They dried fabrics indoors in front of the fire. I do the same in winter. Washing large things like sheets (these were heavy linen sheets that lasted for decades, not the thin cotton ones we use now), of course you’d do those in the spring when you could spread them on the grass.

57

I watched a documentary about Louis XIV and Versailles a few weeks ago. One thing that they kept coming back to is, by our modern standards, how filthy and stinky everything was – clothes, furniture, rooms, and people.

58

People have very odd uninformed ideas about life outside of their little modernity bubble.

I haven’t dry cleaned anything at all in many years. I hand wash wool and silk, it is really quite simple. I have a lot of wool sweaters, since I prefer natural fibers – wool sweaters are warmer and more hard-wearing, age more gracefully and are far more mendable, than fossil fuel fabric ones. Takes about ten minutes of labor to wash one heavy wool sweater. I use dish detergent, not some special soap like Woollite.

  1. Submerge sweater in cold soapy water. Leave to soak for five to ten minutes.
  2. Rinse thoroughly. This is what takes the time. Especially if your sweater is very dirty, as mine invariably are. Wool hides dirt well, and I live on a farm.
  3. Squeeze out the water (don’t wring), roll in a big towel, dry flat, out of the sun, preferably on a rack or screen.

Ta da.

Of course this would be folly with a lined tailored jacket. But I don’t have any of those. You can wash lined tailored pants this way though, since they have no padding and few seams.

59

I do not buy anything that has a “dry clean only” label. That said, I’ve been given dry-clean only stuff as gifts. I wear the item until it is dirty, then I put it in the wash with all my other laundry. About 60% of the time it works fine.

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There were clean centuries, as well as dirty ones.