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bathing, daily life, Franks, medieval, Middle Ages, The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, The Cross and the Dragon
When I decided to write a novel based on one of the Roland legends, I knew very little about the Middle Ages, but I was certain of one thing: medieval people didn’t bathe. I recall being told by teachers that the folk thought it was unhealthy. As an author, all I needed to decide was whether the characters would notice how bad they smelled.
So imagine my surprise to find a section about bathing in Pierre Riche’s Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne. Carolingian princes took baths and changed their clothes once a week. OK, so that’s not as often as Americans who can’t live without their daily showers, but it’s a lot more frequent than what I was led to believe.
Commoners would have bathed less often than aristocrats because of the time and labor it took to fill a tub, but they would have bathed as often as they could.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons
So how did the misconception of medieval filthiness come into being? We can blame the plague for that, or rather belief about how the plague was spread in the 15th century—bad air that entered the body through the pores. Medical treatises of the time advised against frequent bathing, among other things, in order to keep the pores closed.
Go back to the Carolingians of the eighth and ninth centuries, and you’ll find a different attitude. Baths were a requirement for palaces, and bathhouses contained hot and cold pools. The bathhouse at the Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle in French) was spring fed and could accommodate up to 100 bathers.
Abbeys also had baths for the residents, guests, and the sick. Yes, you read that last part right, the sick, who were allowed baths on a mostly regular basis. So much for bathing being bad for health. Frequent hair-washing in the winter was to be avoided, but that’s not exactly a surprise when you consider how cold it was indoors.
Some medieval people didn’t bathe, but the reason had nothing to do with health. Abstaining from the bath was a form of penance, just like giving up wine or meat or something else you enjoy.
Between baths, people of all classes would wash using basins of cold water. Just like most of us, medieval people wanted to be clean.
Sources
Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, Pierre Riche, translated by Jo Ann McNamara
Daily Life in Medieval Times, Frances and Joseph Gies
This post was originally published on Jan. 23, 2013, on Unusual Historicals.
Kim Rendfeld 
It depends on where you were at the middle ages. Central Europe didn’t have public baths, but the Byzantine Empire did. Constantinople had aqueducts, plumbing and plenty of public baths just like Rome. Public baths called hammam were popular in medieval Muslim world also: “Medieval authors mention hammams alongside mosques, madrasas (schools), and gardens in their descriptions of beautiful and prosperous cities. Hilāl al-Sābi’ (969–1056), for example, estimated that Baghdad at its height had 60,000 bathhouses.”
There are various reasons people have listed for the lack of bathhouses in Europe. One of them I’ve read was the prostitutes infesting the public baths around Thames in England and the pious people avoiding them to protect their reputation. The other one was the scholars of Paris university decided the plague enters the body from pores and the more dirt you have on you, the more difficult to catch the plague. Church dogma was another reason, seeing excessive bathing is a bad thing. Yet another reason was the migration to the East after the fall of Rome and no one with the knowledge to maintain the plumbing and infrastructure remaining. Public bath culture spread pretty much everywhere the Romans had conquered, and remained popular with the water engineering knowledge being intact, unlike Europe.
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South of the Thames: you are referring to the Southwark stews. Public bathhouse but some, not all, were also brothels.
bathing was often mixed and, judging by contemporary illustrations, several couples would bath together and even have their meals whilst in the hot tubs.
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Reblogged this on jeanetteford51 and commented:
Very interesting write. An aspect of history re-thought!
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