Medieval Hygiene

Now that we've talked about rushes on the floors in the Middle Ages and whether they were sanitary, what about attitudes to cleanliness in other parts of day-to-day living? There is an unfortunate tendency to think of our medieval forebears as dirty, which was simply not true.

For example, the Goodman of Paris, a text written in the early 1390s about managing a household (and mentioned in my post on the hourglass), offers this about hand washing:

To make Water for washing hands at table: Boil sage, then strain the water and cool until it is a little more than lukewarm. Or use chamomile, marjoram or rosemary boiled with orange peel. Bay leaves are also good.

A bowl with water was available for washing your hands and face when you awoke, before meals, when arriving home after a long day's work or a long journey (washing the "dust of the road" from you sounds like a quaint saying today, but centuries ago you arrived home likely covered in dust).

Besides the Goodman, another popular text in Western Europe was the Tacuinum sanitatis ("Maintenance of Health"), a Latin work translated from an 11th century Arabic medical treatise. Numerous versions were produced in the 14th and 15th centuries. It discussed the virtues of bathing with Water of A Pleasurable Warmth:

Nature: Warm and humid in the second degree.
Optimum: The kind that opens the pores with moderate heat or with a fever.
Usefulness: For bodies with open pores; furthermore, it lowers the temperature.

There are also many depictions of people in bathing tubs, such as the one above. Of course, not everyone could afford a tub, or to heat water. Lower classes took advantage of streams and ponds or lakes. No one wanted a build-up of grime on their hands or bodies.

Our old friend Hildegard of Bingen offered a recipe for washing:

...one whose face has hard and rough skin, made harsh from the wind, should cook barley in water and, having strained that water through a cloth, should bathe his face gently with the moderately warm water. The skin will become soft and smooth, and will have a beautiful color.

This is a face conditioner; did they have a face cleanser? Grime could be more easily removed if you had soap. Did they have soap? Let's figure that out tomorrow.

The Hourglass

Detail, Allegory of Good Government
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338

The hourglass has become a symbol of medieval technology, one of our first attempts to quantify and measure time. We know it existed in the 14th century, from a 1338 fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1290 - 1348) in which the allegorical figure of Temperance holds one (Temperance, after all, is about taking a "measured" response to something, rather than uncontrolled actions). In 1345, an English merchant's receipts show that he paid for "twelve glass horologes" in Flanders, establishing that they were probably already prevalent and in demand.

Sailors found the sand-filled hourglass a definite improvement over its predecessor, the clepsydra* (the water clock), which was affected too much by the swaying of the ocean. When Magellan (c.1480 - 1521) circumnavigated the globe, his fleet had 18 hourglasses per ship, with a page dedicated to turning each one to keep accurate time.

They were also preferable in the early Middle Ages to clocks, because they did not rely on complicated and delicate machinery that needed frequent maintenance.

Where and when was the hourglass invented? A story that it was invented in the 800s by a monk at Chartres named Liutprand has no evidence to support it. The clue to the origin may be in the construction. The earliest hourglasses used marble dust for the sand. Also, the hourglass required expertise in glass-blowing. The likeliest location for these two features of the hourglass to be brought together is Italy, particularly Venice, where glass-blowing was a highly developed art and marble was readily available.

By the end of the 14th century, hourglasses were so common that the Goodman of Paris, writing a guidebook for his young wife in the 1390s, included a recipe for preparing the sand/dust for an hourglass:

Take the grease which comes from the sawdust of marble when those great tombs of black marble be sawn, then boil it well in wine like a piece of meat and skim it, and then set it out to dry in the sun; and boil, skim and dry nine times; and thus it will be good.

Not only must the hourglass have become common, but its construction was clearly something that could be contributed to by a regular household.

*clepsydra is from the Greek and means "water thief"; they could be very elaborate, but were naturally susceptible to humidity and temperature.