Month: October 2019

Laughing at medieval people is fun. It’s a bit like watching a reality television show so far removed from your reality (Jersey Shore Family Vacation, anyone?) that you can’t help but feel better about your own life because, damn, look at these poor fools still gyming, tanning, and laundering! Or, in the case of medieval people, slathering a well-known toxin all over their faces in the name of beauty. (Obviously, the toxin part wasn’t well-known at the time.)
Looking at the hygiene and grooming practices of people living over half a millennium ago is a perfect distraction from your own miserable failures and existential quandaries, and everyone you’re making fun of is too far gone to care or defend themselves, so really, it’s a perfect setup. We wouldn’t try to take that away from you.

1. Sewage Management

If you were to time travel back to a major medieval city, perhaps the first thing you’d notice would be the stench. Though a disorienting succession of food and foul odors would no doubt take your attention while walking the streets of any bustling metropolis today, things were a bit funkier back in the Middle Ages.
The explanation was simple: poop. More specifically, poorly managed poop.

In 1357 a proclamation was issued forbidding anyone to throw any sort of waste into the Thames or any other waterway under the penalty of imprisonment and severe punishment at the discretion of the mayor and aldermen. This was intended to force London citizens to put their waste into the carts and dung-boats meant to carry it outside the city. However, the result was that many dumped their waste elsewhere in the city. One such place was Tower Hill, which in 1371-72 was so tainted that those living nearby were disgusted by the odor of the dung and other filth. Citizens were then forbidden to dump their wastes there, which caused a renewed dumping into the Thames. Again an attempt was made to prevent people from dumping any kind of waste into the Thames as the King noted that the channel of the river had been narrowed so much that it caused a great hindrance to shipping.

See the vicious, smelly cycle?
Another option for dumping waste was cesspits. “E. Sabine [Ernest L. Sabine, author of Latrines and Cesspools of Mediaeval London] believes that after digging up the dirt, taking away the earth, finding the lime, sand and other materials, the total cost for constructing the cesspit would have amounted to about four pounds,” wrote Taylor. This was at least twice the yearly wages of an unskilled laborer. Thus: “These cesspits, even though built for the convenience of all the tenants within a tenement, must have been seen as rather ostentatious utilities.”

2. Bathroom Etiquette

Suboptimal as medieval disposal methods were, the idea that cleanliness or privacy in the bathroom realm were of no importance is simply wrong. “You wouldn’t be pooping outside and burying it like an animal,” medievalist Danièle Cybulskie tells HealthyWay. “You’d have a place to go.”
“You were never that far from a place where you could,” she says. “In town, they would often have a public place to go to the washroom. Lazy people would probably just pee outside.” 
Basically, medieval times were just like a typical St. Patrick’s Day parade.

The private medieval bathroom of the Master Mason in the Mason's Loft. Flushes when it rains! pic.twitter.com/rbVUfmkTuw

— Ben Morris (@BenMorris_Music) March 12, 2017

Citizens of medieval London had private and public facilities available to them. There is evidence of at least 13 public latrines, though, as Sabine noted (PDF), “there must have been many more such public conveniences.” One was at London Bridge. “As early as 1358 there were already one hundred and thirty-eight shops on the bridge,” wrote Sabine. “Along with the customers frequenting the shops, businesses would have required the facilities of the privy.” The London Bridge facilities were large and possibly spread out to accommodate the shop-goers, business people, and citizens living nearby who would have used them.
Of course, in instances where there were no public or private facilities available, people would be more likely to dump their waste in less regimented ways. For example, in 1421, during an investigation of one ward’s public housing it was “reported that all the little rents…were without privies, so that all the tenants threw their ordure and other horrible liquids before their doors, to the great nuisance of holy church and of passers-by,” wrote Sabine.

3. Laundry

Unlike the fast fashion of today, where clothes are worn for a season before being discarded and sent to whatever landfill purgatory Forever 21 and its ilk go at the end of life, medieval threads were costly, whether in time or money, and expected to be worn for a long time. “Clothes were so expensive and highly regarded that even the queen’s exchequer accounts of Isabella, queen of Edward II, show that she had the worn-out hems of her gowns replaced, rather than pay for entirely new gowns,” wrote Toni Mount in The Medieval Housewife.

4. Medicine

For most people, the term “medieval medicine” doesn’t evoke many good images. Pre-germ-theory medical practices didn’t always miss the mark, though. “People were doing stuff like cautery. They were doing stuff like suturing. They knew you had to keep a wound clean. They knew you had to keep it dry,” says Cybulskie. “You didn’t necessarily need to know about the actual bacteria to know that if there’s dirt in it, it will fester and you will die. This was a time where people were on the battlefield a lot. Or day-to-day injuries, they could go bad really fast, because you didn’t have antibiotics.”
https://twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/568545325637632000
That doesn’t mean that they didn’t accidentally tap into antibiotic properties. “They used a few things that are really, I think, fascinating. One was honey. Honey is antibacterial; this has been shown today. So they would put honey on wounds and use it to clean them out. And it’s sticky, so it keeps stuff together,” says Cybulskie. “Also, they used to pack wounds with moss because moss is absorbent. They didn’t realize that some forms of moss will grow penicillin. So that worked.”
Some of the recipes include ingredients you still might see floating around the internet today as possible homeopathic remedies, such as this one using betony and vervain, recounted in The Medieval Housewife:

For the migraine—take half a dishful of barley, one handful each of betony, vervain and other herbs good for the head and when they be well boiled together, take them up and wrap them in a cloth and lay them to the sick head and it shall be whole.

So, they got a surprising amount right, or nearly right, given the theoretical framework they were working with. Still, they got some things very, very wrong. For example, this deeply unsettling “cure:”

To cure gout. Boil a red-haired dog alive in oil until it falls apart. Then add worms, hog’s marrow and herbs. Apply the mixture to the affected parts. Or take a frog when neither sun nor moon is shining. Cut off its hind legs and wrap them in deer skin. Apply the right to the right and the left to the left foot of the gouty person and without doubt he will be healed.

Clearly, dogs and other pets were viewed a bit differently in the Middle Ages than they are by many today.
If you consider the profound trauma of the Plague, which wiped out millions of people throughout the Middle Ages, it’s hard to blame people of the time for their more superstitious tendencies. That the smell of death was literally in the air was just another reason to employ the nosegay (meaning nose ornament), a small bunch of flowers that could be held up to the nose when passing through a particularly smelly area of town—or to offer some olfactory or emotional comfort in the face of death.
“People did carry a nosegay to keep the smell off—to keep from smelling the bodies and stuff—but they also would put herbs in there that they thought would protect them,” says Cybulskie. “They were desperate to do anything that would save them.” This included “using plants in trying to keep the miasma—the vapors—away.”

5. Makeup 

Given that a person living in the Middle Ages must have been hyper tuned in to the fragileness of their own existence, it’s a wonder that any of them mustered the effort to care at all about the vainer pursuits of life, like optimizing physical appearance. Then again, you can never underestimate the drive to reproduce—and as anyone who’s ever hooked up after a funeral can attest, the threat of death sometimes heightens that drive. Carpe diem and all that.
“People did not like being gross, and they didn’t like being smelly,” says Cybulskie. “Part of that reason was because it’s unattractive….You know, there are books of manners that say, like, ‘You want to make sure you have nice-smelling breath,’ for example. Which is not something we would imagine they worried about because we figure they are used to being stinky—but they did. And they had recipes for deodorant as well. They had recipes for toothpaste, for shampoo, for makeup.”

Take two ounces of the very best white lead, let them be ground; afterward let them be sifted through a cloth, and that which remains in the cloth, let it be thrown out. Let it be mixed in with rainwater and let it cook until the consumption of the water, which can be recognized when we will see it almost completely dried out. Then let it be cooled. And when it is dried out and cooled, let rose water be added, and again boil it until it becomes hard and thick, so that from it very small pills can be formed. And when you wish to be anointed, take one pill and liquefy it in the hand with water and then rub it well on the face, so that the face will be dried. Then let it be washed with pure water, and this [whitened look] will last for eight days. 

If rubbing lead all over your face seems like a bad idea, that’s because it is. Depending on the frequency with which this kind of toxic makeup was used, side effects might have included swelling and inflammation of the eyes, tooth enamel erosion, retexturing and blackening of the skin, and, eventually, death. That’s a pretty high price for beauty.

6. Bathing

One of the main reasons medieval citizens wanted to stay clean was the miasma theory. “They didn’t like being smelly because they were afraid that was going to make them sick,” says Cybulskie. “And they were right! But it was because of the germs that were floating around.”
Unfortunately, not wanting to stink isn’t the same as not stinking. Though people in the Middle Ages desired cleanliness, it wasn’t always possible by the standards of today, given the practical hurdles. “If you went to the bathhouse, you were going to be sharing bathwater with other people. If you had a private bath, that meant heating up gallons and gallons of water and hauling it to a bathtub, and then getting rid of it later,” says Cybulskie. “Given the chance, would they have had a bath every day? Probably. But it was just not possible.”