The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [28]
The most momentous change in personal cleanliness during the Middle Ages was the return of the public bath. In most of western Europe, the institution had been defunct or seriously diminished since the fifth century or so. It reappeared thanks to the Crusaders, who arrived home from their failed campaigns in the East with the news of a delightful custom—the hamam, or Turkish bath. Ironically, Christianity, which was at least partly responsible for the demise of the Roman baths, was now, incidentally, responsible for their revival, in this modified, Eastern incarnation. Probably as early as the eleventh century, Europeans added the bath to the list of luxuries—including damask, glass mirrors, silk and cotton—that they discovered in the Arab world.
Rudimentary teeth-cleaning included, in medieval Wales, the use of green hazel twigs and woollen cloths.
THE KING TAKES A TURKISH BATH
“Abu Sir came to him and rubbed his body with the bag-gloves, peeling from his skin dirt-rolls like lamp-wick, and showing them to the King, who rejoiced therein … after which thorough washing, Abu Sir mingled rose-water with the water of the tank, and the King went down therein. When he came forth, his body was refreshed, and he felt a lightness and liveliness such as he had never known in his life.”
—A Thousand and One Nights
The first medieval bathhouses, which were stripped-down adaptations of the hamam, combined a steam bath and, usually in a separate room, round wooden bathtubs, bound with iron, that might seat six. Although the Turkish bath did not usually include sitting in tubs, the European version—perhaps inspired by memories of Roman baths—did. The hamam in Turkey never became a daily habit as it had been with the Romans; it was frequented once a week or every two weeks. It doesn’t seem likely that medieval Europeans used the bathhouse more often than that. In some cases, Roman baths were rehabilitated and, where baths were positioned at hot springs, as at Baden in Switzerland, large outdoor pools were built, holding scores of people. Occasionally bathhouse owners and bakers joined forces, with the bakers making use of the surplus heat from the bath furnaces. As bathhouses became better established, rooms for private baths and rooms with beds for resting after the bath were added.
Such extras were not within everyone’s means, but the medieval bathhouses were democratic institutions where all classes would meet. Much as modern bosses may tip their employees with a massage or day at the spa as Christmas presents, medieval employers rewarded servants and workers with a session at the bathhouse. In Germany, Badegeld, or bath money, was a regular part of a salary, and bathhouse taxes provided free baths for the poor. Within a century or so of its reintroduction, the bath had changed from an exotic novelty into an expected part of town and city life.
Once the baths reappeared, they spread rapidly. Fourteenth-century London had at least eighteen bathhouses; in Florence three or more streets were lined with baths. In 1292, with a population of 70,000 people, Paris had twenty-six bathhouses, and the owners formed their own guild. Public baths enjoyed a particular popularity in Germany, where communal washing in at least one form had enjoyed some popularity even before the days of the returning Crusaders. The so-called Russian or vapour bath had entered Germany from the north, and as early as 973, Ibrahim ben Yacub, a diplomat and geographer who visited Saxony and Bohemia, described the saunas he saw there.
Writing in the 1920s, Marcel Poète, the historian of Paris, noted of its medieval inhabitants, “The Parisians of that time had at least one point of superiority to those of to-day: they bathed much more.”
The acceptance of mixed bathing waxed and waned through much of Europe during the Middle Ages, rather like the Romans’ on-again, off-again flirtation with the practice, and completely unlike the strict segregation of the hamam. When public opinion dictated, separate days, times