Assuming i am talking about the average citizen in London. What was their hygiene like in regards to everything hygienic (teeth, bathing, shampoo, soap, cologne, etc)? Did the rich get any better hygienic treatment? What about rural vs. city dwellers, was there a difference?
Before about 1900, hygiene was pretty bad for both rich and poor, city dweller and country folk. The country folk had it a tad better, just because of less crowded conditions, but it was still pretty awful by today’s standards.
Middle Ages, bathing was unpopular, considered by some to be downright unhealthy. The wealthy had colognes and perfumes, but the poor could not afford such things. The clothes of the wealthy were often unwashable, because of their fragile materials, or because of their decoration. (They changed the linen they wore below.) The poor usually only had one garment, which, as you can imagine, was infrequently washed.
There were no toilets, or sewers as we know them. Sewage was simply thrown into the street, or into the river Thames. The stench would have been nearly indescribable to a newcomer, but remember, one’s nose becomes “used” to odors, so it’s doubtful they noticed it as much as we would, if we were suddenly dropped into a city street.
The rural dweller had it a little better, but not much. Animal waste and human waste were often just stacked into piles in the yard. They had less crowded conditions, though, so it would have been slightly more healthy.
It wasn’t until around 1900 that the move towards hygiene as a prevention for disease became widespread.
i remember watching ‘1900 house’ where a family tried to live as a wealthy london family in 1900 would. They had toothpaste, but i think it was made of baking soda. I can’t remember what the shampoo and/or soap was made of though. Either way, they were living as a rich family, a poor family would’ve lived a much different life im sure.
…but you never see this addressed in any time travel movie involving this period.
That might have been true of London, I don’t know, but it wasn’t true of most of the west during the Middle Ages. It was one of the duties of the noble host to provide a bath for his guests, and most cities had bathhouses. Bathing didn’t really get seen as unhealthy until the Black Death, because bathing was seen as a possible cause for the plague (and also because the little ice age made wood for heating really expensive) Bathing wasn’t common in the middle ages, but it wasn’t looked at as a bad thing.
In terms of sewers, Paris had gotten (admittedly, not very sanitary) sewer ditches by major roads in 1200, and a covered sewer (beneath the Rue Montmartre. It drained into the Seine) by 1370.
Didn’t the Roman’s invent sewers? and toilets and baths and stuff?
Perhaps I was unclear. The “average” person probably wouldn’t have been able to bathe very often (even if he’d wanted to) for a variety of reasons. Where bathouses existed, a poorer person had to be able to take time away from work, get transportation if it were not within walking distance and pay whatever admission was charged. All of this effort might seem silly for something that wasn’t necessary.
Secondly, some of the clergy discouraged bathing (especially that of the communal kind.) It showed a distressing amount of concern with the body, and was immodest. Some physicians decreed that it was unhealthy, because while the body was wet, it was most at risk of being attacke by dangerous “humors”.
Now, as to what the “average” person believed, I cannot say. They most likely couldn’t read, and so wouldn’t have been influenced by advice manuals, but would have been highly influenced by the opinions of the local preacher, who may or may not have taken the extremist view.
Romans had communal toilets with running water and communal baths as well but they were hardly the inventors of such things. Baths aren’t an invention, for one, and the flushing toilet was in use by the ruling class of Minoan civilization centuries (millennia?) before Caesar was even a gleam in his father’s eye.
I don’t know who invented the sewers but I have a hard time imagining it was the Romans. My bet would be the Chinese or Babylonians.
Lobelia Overhill, the first plumbing was in 3000BC at Crete. While the roman aquaducts are impressive and as far as I can tell the first grand scale plumbing scheme, they weren’t built until 312 BC.
Ok, so here’s something quasi-related that I have always wondered about. Sex.
More specifically, how did they stand it? I can barely keep it up if I get suspicious my wife might have bad breath (Obviously, Mr.Food is not a big fan of eye openers, primarily owing to morning breath.) While she is a great person for adpting to this, I can not imagine what sex in the middle ages must have been like.
From what I am reading, I am guessing appears these people didn’t wipe much either. I know I must seem squemish, but seriously, was there something they did to hide the massive amount of BO that must exploded outward with their respective disrobment?
AFIAC, it’s a miracle the human race propogated its way through that mess.
Anyway, just something I have always been [morbidly] curious about. Thanks for any insight!
It was probably a turn-on. Body odor seems to be a sexual stimulus for most species- even for modern humans. True some of us prefer the allure of sweet perfumes, but still there are those of us who prefer STANK!
I seem to recall that personal hygene in Muslim-held Spain during the Middle Ages was quite a bit better than in the rest of Europe.
But it is in some historical movies.
Anyway, I would say that actually, a large part of garbage was disposed of, not just let lying in the streets, because it was useful in some way. For instance even human excrements have been used for a long time as manure. And you’re average middle-age guy wouldn’t let this valuable by-product going away, except if it was really inconvenient to gather it.
I always read that bathing dissapeared mostly due to the pressure of the church , which wasn’t enthralled by the concept of bath-houses, which were often also brothels. But indeed, until a fairly late epoch, bathing was a common practice during the middle-ages.
Later, during the classical era, bathing has been considered a health risk (your “humors” would go away, or something similar) . King Louis XIV took, I believe, a couple baths in his life, on medical advice and under medical supervision.
IMO, your two first point aren’t compelling. working people had quite a lot of free time, due to both the numerous holydays and to the huge number of regulations about trades and crafts, including how much and when workers could work (not after nightfall, for instance, in most cases). Transportation wasn’t probably a huge issue, since towns weren’t very large, so a bath house would certainly have been within walking distance of everywhere. Only the money part was probably a serious hindrance.
I shouldn’t have posted before reading the whole thread, as usual, since you had already mentionned what I pointed out in my previous post.
The popular image of people prior to modern times being smelly and filthy all the time is almost certainly a complete myth. People have always been concerned about cleanliness, even during the Middle Ages, and have taken whatever steps they could to stay clean, as well as trim hair and beards and whatnot.
It was certianly less hygenic 100, 500, or 1000 years ago than it is today just by virtue of people back then having less technology and wealth. They didn’t have antibacterial soaps and hot running water didn’t exist for the most part. By the late Middle Ages, wood to burn to heat water was becoming more expensive as Europe deforested. Nonetheless, they did bathe; even poor folk could wash themselves down in a tub or, failing that, a lake or stream. Imagine it as being on a never-ending camping trip; I’m sure everyone reading this has gone camping at one point or another. I don’t know about you, but I can keep reasonably non-filthy when I’m out camping, even without access to running water or a bathtub.
There was certainly some degree of ignorance around the importance of washing your hands a lot and stuff like that. Of course, I suspect a lot of people don’t wash their hands enough NOW.
Concerns about bathing didn’t arise until the Renaissance, and were (for the most part) a result not of modesty or stupidity but about contaminated water supplies. People still found ways to keep neat and clean.
I suspect that bathing went in and out of fashion, although it’s hard for me to imagine it. My reading on this is pop culture, not historical or archaeological – but the Ken Follett novel “Pillars of the Earth” shows bathing among the general populace rare (although his main characters do bathe). In Larry Gonick’s “Cartoon History of the Universe” he claims that ancient Indian cities (among the oldest in the world) had excellent sewer facilities and “the largest bathtub in the world” (a huge communal bathing area). Gonick does a lot of research (although I find myself sometimes diasagreeing with his interpretations), and Indian history is pretty poorly covered, if not outright ignored, in most of the US.
From what I’ve read, Romans had pretty impressive sanitary facilities – public baths, several aqueducts, public toilets, etc. They “brushed” their teeth, I’ve read, using cloths and applications of salt and the like. But they still used animal transportation and I’ll bet not everyone had access to good sewers. Those raised stones you see in the streets of Pompeii were to allow you to cross the street when rainwater backed up into the streets and turned them into rivers. So I’ll bet ancient Roman and Roman cities were still an assault on the senses.
Not really true, because the point about this stereotype about medieval London is that it was only the case when the system they did have wasn’t working. It was actually illegal to throw sewage into the street or the River Thames. They knew fine well that it wasn’t a good idea. What they had instead were cesspits and the City employed teams of workmen to empty them, in theory on a regular basis. The waste was reused as fertiliser. Not the most hygienic of methods, but not a complete absence of waste disposal services either. In most areas people usually threw raw waste into the streets only when the cesspits overflowed.
Medieval London also had a dozen or so public toilets.
Why on earth would we assume that merely because people didn’t bathe, they also didn’t wash? Thanks to modern plumbing and affordable fuel, we view the two as one and the same. But anyone whose grandmother would talk about taking a “spit bath” knows that a person can keep pretty clean with just a bit of water, a bit of soap, and a rag.
Not entirely true…but the standards of hygene are viewed differently post 1900 and germ theory. Go to http://www.florilegium.org/ and select ‘personal care’ and brouse to your hearts content. There are a fair number of references in period documents about bath house regulations, and other sanitary issues that can be found in a number of places. Barbara Tuchman’s ‘Distant Mirror:the Calamitous 14th Century’ covers one small time period in great detail - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345349571/qid=1081196682/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9371709-4027064?v=glance&s=books
and other researchers cover this in books and research papers.
;j