The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [27]
Medieval people apparently liked being told how to conduct themselves, whether they were religious women, as in the Ancren Wisse, or young people hoping for success in love, as in The Romance of the Rose. Manuals proliferated on genteel behaviour, the care of babies, health and education for boys, written by authorities who ranged from senior servants to the great humanist Erasmus. Naturally, etiquette books order handwashing before as well as after meals, but the practice also appears, with a frequency that borders on obsession, in poetry. Poets found it hard to describe a banquet or even a meal without affirming that everyone washed their hands. In The Romance of Flammenca, a thirteenth-century Provençal novel in verse, Flammenca’s husband gives a feast for three thousand knights and ladies. At the start of the meal, the poet writes, “When they had washed, they sat down.” At the end of the meal, he duly notes, “When they had eaten, once again / They washed themselves.” At points, the repeated attention to handwashing sounds like a Continental hygiene campaign, but more than that, it was a formulaic reiteration of the characters’ refinement. After the hands, the cleanest part of the body was the face, including the mouth. Etiquette books recommended washing the face upon rising, and rinsing out the mouth with water.
In theory, infants were kept fairly clean during this period: medieval baby-care manuals recommend bathing them in warm water at least once and sometimes three times a day. Clearly, they were bathed more than adults or older children because they were not yet chamber-pot-trained, but also because it was much easier to draw, heat and transport the water for a baby’s bath than for an adult’s. (A gallon of water weighs eight pounds, and the average medieval tub for an adult held at least ten gallons, which meant that eighty pounds of water had to be procured, heated and disposed of after an adult’s bath.) In reality, the infants of peasants and the urban poor, who were also unlikely to be reading manuals about their children’s care, were probably not bathed so frequently, nor were their swaddling clothes changed often.
The medieval world was immeasurably less deodorized than ours. In general, people were accustomed to that, but the rankest odours did not pass unnoticed. So spiritual a character as St. Thomas Aquinas approved of incense in church because it masked the prevailing body odour, which, he admitted, “can provoke disgust.” At least in the upper levels of secular society, ideas about courtly love and gentility were drawing attention to a personal attractiveness that was based on cleanliness. Poor grooming was commented upon, especially among the gentry. A contemporary wrote of Brun, the brother of the tenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great, “When he took a bath, he hardly ever used any soap or preparations to make his skin shiny, which is even more surprising, since he was familiar with such cleansing methods and royal comforts since early childhood.”
In Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century collection of stories, The Decameron, the characters are highly conscious of the odour of their bodies and their breath. The latter was cause for keen concern, and in one of the tales, a deceitful woman named Lydia first convinces two serving boys that, because they “stank at the mouth,” they must serve with their heads held as far backward as possible. She then persuades her husband that the cause for their strange posture was his halitosis. The point stressed in The Romance of the Rose and The Decameron, as well as other romances and manuals of the time—that intimacy is often more pleasant when the beloved is clean and sweet—may seem obvious to us, as it would have been to the Romans. But for medieval readers it was a new idea, slowly percolating down through the social classes.
PRIVY MATTERS
In 1518, John Colet, the head of St. Paul’s School, London, furnished only urinals for the boys who went to his prestigious school. “For other causes,” he wrote,