Queen Elizabeth may have had her bath once a week, ‘whether I needeth it or no’, but people in medieval times might have thought she was odd.

Not because, she bathed, but because she didn’t bathe enough…

Yes! It’s time for Medieval Mythbusters!

Hey! My eyes are up here sport!

A yearly bath? Nope.

Charlemagne, for example, used to bathe each morning in a large pool or river, where he would meet with his ministers, who were also invited to bathe.

Bathing was part of a ritual before certain ceremonies, such as knighthood, and in the romances of chivalry we see that the laws of hospitality required offering guests a bath before they dined.

Bathing was, pardon the pun, an every day affair – and with soap as well!

Most people in the period stayed clean by washing daily using a basin of hot water. Soap first began to be used widely in the Middle Ages (the Romans and Greeks did not use soap) and soap makers had their own guilds in most larger Medieval towns and cities. Heating the water for a full bath was a time consuming process, so baths at home were less common, but even the lower strata of society enjoyed a hip bath when they could get one.

If you didn’t have a bath at home, you could go to one of the communal baths – a habit that lingered from the time of the Romans – and that was a system that worked very satisfactory until the Black Death. Bummer.

The prominence of the public bathhouse went into rapid decline in the sixteenth-century. Several suggestions have been made to as why – were more puritanical religious people able to impose their moral values on the community, or were the diseases that struck Europe since the Black Death convincing people from to avoid them. The disease of syphilis, which broke out in Europe the late fifteenth-century, would have also motivated people to stop their sexual promiscuity, thus reducing the other reasons for having a bathhouse.

The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public bathhouse. “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths,” he remarked. “Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.”

So, life in Medieval times was filthy? That’s a dirty lie!

We call:

It’s a bust

Meet the characters of
Warrior’s Surrender
and WIN!

Visit my post on this page – http://box5218.temp.domains/~lizabga3/index.php/meet-the-characters-of-warriors-surrender-and-win/
And share my Warrior’s Surrender e-cards – or any of my Medieval-themed blog posts and you go in the running to win a certified organic Botanical perfume, Brave – the perfect scent for a heroine like Alfreya of Tyrswick.
Don’t forget to tag me, so I can track your entries! :D