Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction

Introduction

Before this book ever became real enough to stare at me in the form of a blinking cursor, it was an idea I’d had based on dozens of conversations with friends and strangers alike. Having been a medievalist for quite a few years now, I’ve noticed that whenever people are drawn into a piece of historical fiction – or a great story from history, itself – we naturally tend to ask ourselves the same questions about the time period in which it takes place. These questions are all based around the human element: what was it like to be there and to experience that moment in time?

While we may learn about dates and kings and wars in history classes, it seems that too often we miss out on those little details that made up ordinary life. And yet those are the details that bring history into full colour, the details that connect us as human beings through time, and the details that stick with us long after we’ve closed a book or turned off a screen.

This book looks at medieval Europe in terms of those little itches of human curiosity that may not be scratched by a conventional look at history. Not everything that you might expect from a regular book about the Middle Ages is in here, but many things that you may not have thought to wonder about are. You’ll find that much of what we explore pulls the Middle Ages back from the extremes for which it is known: extreme violence, extreme filth, extreme prejudice. Barbara Tuchman famously called the fourteenth century ‘a distant mirror’, but I’ve found that the mirror is not as distant as it may seem.

For our purposes, we’ll be looking at medieval Europe from around 500

CE

to around 1500

CE

. This roughly corresponds to the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Protestantism. Naturally, no one at the time thought of these markers as distinctions of a historical era called ‘the medieval period’, but they’re helpful markers, nonetheless. As Roman influence began to fall away, new power structures arose in the shape of what has been called (and argued and debated) feudalism, while at the other end of the period, Protestantism meant a break with the power of the Catholic church, and a different kind of independence for European kingdoms.

A lot can happen in a thousand years, and a lot did happen. Empires rose and fell, technology leapt forward, and half the population was wiped out in the course of a single year. We won’t be able to cover it all in such a short book (or even a thousand short books), so there will be quite a lot of necessary generalising. My hope is that this book will whet your appetite enough that you’ll read on and investigate whatever tickles your fancy, from Vikings to Venetians.

While our focus will be on medieval Europe, it’s important to remember that this was just one small part of a wide world, and that there was a whole lot of fascinating stuff going on at the same time elsewhere. Europe was connected to a vast network of travel and trade that stretched from Greenland down the Nile and east to China. Goods, stories, and people made their way across thousands of miles slowly, with millions of tiny, human interactions along the way, making the medieval world culturally much richer and more diverse than people once believed. I ask you to imagine medieval Europe not as a place where everyone looked, dressed, and behaved the same way (they didn’t), but as a place where peoples and cultures mixed and collided. I also invite you to read further, both geographically and historically, and learn more about what other amazing and wonderful things were going on around the world at this time.

So, what was life like in medieval Europe? It’s often been described as ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ (à la Thomas Hobbes), as ‘the age of faith’, and a time in which people would rather die than take a bath. As we’ll see, there are some grains of truth to these notions, although they’ve tended to be magnified through our need to believe we’ve come a long way in the time since. In reality, medieval people had much the same dreams, desires, and expectations that we do, and they reveal themselves to us through their daily habits, advice, and leisure pursuits.

History is fundamentally the story of human beings making their way through the world as best they can with curiosity, frustration, humour, and courage. It’s my belief that getting to know the people of the past changes our thinking about human beings in general, and fosters understanding and compassion across boundaries. Beyond that, learning about a world that is so strange and yet so familiar is just an unbelievable amount of fun.

Chapter One

A Dirty Little Secret

One of the most common myths about the Middle Ages is that no one cared about getting clean. It’s just one of those ‘facts’ that seems to get passed on without question, an accepted part of what we know about this era. Much is made of the filth of the period, but to be squeamish about medieval hygiene is to come from a place of enormous privilege. Not only do we know about bacteria and viruses today, but many of us have the resources to keep clean; namely, access to filtered water, heating systems, and cleaning products. Many people on Earth today don’t have access to these things, and so they keep clean and healthy the best they can. The same was true for the majority of people in the Middle Ages.

Did medieval people take baths?

The answer to this is a resounding yes – and no. As the Romans slowly receded from most of Europe, they left behind the bathhouses they so enjoyed, many of them ornate and cleverly constructed to make use of natural hot springs. Both bathhouses and steam baths continued to be well-used features of towns and cities all over Europe throughout the medieval period, although perhaps not as often as we might prefer.

Bathhouses could be in the Roman style of pools in which everyone soaked together, or they could be rooms in which there were many bathtubs big enough to fit a few people at a time. Most medieval bathtubs, in both public bathhouses and private homes, generally looked like the bottom half of a wooden barrel and were made by coopers. Because it’s an unpleasant feeling to get a splinter while sitting down naked, bathers would often have a linen sheet draped into the bathtub as a layer between themselves and the wood. They’d also make a linen tent above the bathtub to keep things steamy and cosy. For additional luxury, water could be sprinkled with flower petals to make the bather smell nice. Patrons had to pay a small fee to use the bathhouses, much as people today do when they visit a spa.

Evidently, people enjoyed their baths: there were dozens of bathhouses in Paris alone in the thirteenth century, and London even had a Bathestereslane. Bathhouses were used by both men and women, and although Christians often bathed in mixed company, occasionally they had separate times and bathhouses, as did Muslims and Jews. Concerned writers specifically warned against sharing a bath with those of other religious beliefs, as the casual social setting and lack of religious attire might lead to a dangerous mixing of beliefs.

Although it may seem strange to us, in the medieval world you could have your bath and your dinner along with it. There are many manuscript images that feature people enjoying a meal while steaming away in all their naked glory. This wasn’t considered unhygienic at the time; after all, if you weren’t clean in a bathhouse, where were you clean?

But bathhouses weren’t just for getting clean: they were also convenient places to get dirty. Given that people routinely got naked together there, it seems inevitable that bathhouses would also become a place for sexual rendezvous, and this is exactly what happened. While some establishments offered food for the bathers, others also provided beds – and prostitutes. Eventually, they gained a very bad reputation, indeed, and the common English word for bathhouse – ‘stew’ – became synonymous with brothel. In 1417, the London aldermen banned stews on the grounds that they were places of every kind of immorality. The fact that the ban specifically excluded personal baths suggests that people did have their own bathtubs, and that not everyone was using bathing as an excuse for promiscuity: some people were actually getting clean. Londoners were so unimpressed with the ban on their bathing that the aldermen were made to backtrack only eleven years later on the condition that bathhouse owners promised (and paid a bond to seal the deal) that they would run ‘honest stews’.

People in rural areas bathed in lakes, rivers, and streams, and even the urban poor who were not able to afford a visit to the bathhouse tried to get clean where they could. We know about their bathing in part because of coroners’ records; sometimes people’s efforts to stay clean ended in tragedy, with people young and old drowning in the process.

Though people throughout Europe were bathing wherever they could, it seems that bathing was still a relatively rare event for northern Europeans, occurring at most weekly, and at least twice a year. Muslims and Jews followed religious codes that required them to bathe more frequently, but for medieval Christians, the idea of being as clean as modern people are today was spiritually difficult to wrestle with, as they would have seen it as vanity or excessive pleasure; in other words, elevating the body over the spirit. In fact, some Christian writers criticised Muslims for bathing too frequently, as if this was an admission that they were dirtier than Christians.

Devout medieval Christians believed that the body was inherently sinful. After all, it couldn’t even take a bath without lust being involved. To care too much about the body was to take time and energy away from spiritual matters, and many Christian practices of devotion stemmed from the desire to mortify the flesh and deny the body its pleasure. Fasting, self-flagellation, and the wearing of hair shirts, for example, were all meant to make the body uncomfortable, and to remind the sinner of the weakness and transience of the flesh. Being dirty also meant being uncomfortable, so some faithful people found skipping baths to be praiseworthy.

Monastic rules on bathing varied. The Rule of St Benedict suggests that, ‘Use of baths should be offered to the sick as often as expedient, but less readily allowed to the healthy, and especially the young.’ As with the public bathhouses, this reluctance to allow younger monks regular baths had more to do with concerns around celibate young men being naked together than cleanliness. The ideal monastic community outlined in the ninth-century Plan of St Gall also specifies ‘separate bathhouses … for the novices, the abbot, and the monks, as well as the sick.’ Although there are evident moral concerns around bathing, the implication is that everyone in the monastery was expected to bathe.

The monks at Westminster Abbey were definitely not averse to bathing: the abbey had its very own bath attendant.

Bathhouses, brewhouses, and bakeries sometimes shared walls and resources to make better use of the heat they both needed.

England’s King John didn’t seem to mind having servants get themselves sweaty carrying buckets of heated water up and down stairs to fill his bath; apparently he even had a servant, by the name of William, who was specifically set in charge of the king’s bathtub. A few generations later, Edward III was no doubt praised by his own servants when he decided to make his bathing habit easier on everybody by installing hot and cold water taps for his own personal bathroom in Westminster Palace. When it came to bathing, being king definitely had its advantages.

As with many distasteful habits that are popularly referred to as ‘medieval’, you’re much more likely to find advice on getting ‘clean’ by wiping with linen – not bathing – beginning in the sixteenth century. It was Early Modern people who began to avoid bathhouses for fear of disease, especially syphilis and plague. Before this, if a bathhouse was closed or people were warned away, it had to do with the scandalous behaviour springing from the nakedness involved.

Did they ever wash their hands?

While all-out bathing could be inconvenient for people who had the misfortune of not being kings, medieval people did require that hands and faces remained clean, especially before eating. Books of manners insisted on it as a show of good breeding and politeness, and rules for religious communities required the washing of hands both before meals and before mass. Because monks and nuns washed their hands so frequently, they sometimes installed taps for this purpose.

If you weren’t lucky enough to have indoor taps, regular washing before meals might mean using a specially made urn for pouring out clean water: an aquamanile. Aquamaniles and wash bowls were decorative touches to add to the dining hall, as well as being practical. Washing the hands and face was important, so it was worth it to have wash bowls that left a good impression on guests. Linen towels would be provided for drying.

Did they use soap?

Soap was known and loved in Europe right from the beginning of the medieval period. Even those who were meant to be living an austere and strict religious life were expected to use it. As the ninth-century synods of Aachen declared, it was essential that every monk should be supplied, in addition to their clothing, with a ‘sufficient amount of soap’.

Most of the soap that would have been used was lye soap made from animal fat (tallow) and wood ash, and it was used for cleaning fleece, clothes, and bodies. While lye soap is great for cutting through oil and grease, it can be harsh on the skin because of its