Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

There’s a missing bold tag somewhere in that post…

Sarah, I have been searching for AGES for historical information on leg hair removal! The covers don’t bother me so much - because heck, they didn’t have purple eye-shadow back then either, but bring it on on the covers - but why do we never have a scene with the hero running his hands through her hairy calves? WHY? WHY???

Some of these can be done you know - Elizabeth Chadwick and Sharon Penman both write historical novels that have a fair amount of decidedly authentic detail, including the public washing thing and dealing with facilities, and other odours, and still manage to create decent romances.

Rats, how’d my post get chopped off like that?

One of my favourite icky bits is the hanging of clothes in the garderobe to deter moths. *shudder*

Heh, the lack of mention of hair gets me too!  We often hear about how hairy the hero is, but never the heroine.  No one was hairless then, though, as shaving legs/underarms only became popular in the 20th century, so obviously our medieval hero wouldn’t care if his lady had furry legs.

Most things with regard to smell and hygiene I ignore.  We don’t hear them much in contemporaries because such things are normal to us.  This would be normal to medieval people too.

I love this post!

And then there was the siege of Chateau-Gaillard in 1204 where some guys noticed they could get into the latrine drain, so they climbed up through the pee and crap to storm the castle. Yeah, the smell and sight of them would make me surrender. Excellent post, Kris!

Thanks, Kris, for taking us through a day in the life of Medieval Times (not as glamorous as the dinner theater).  My husband and I are Anglofiles, so he indulges me in yearly trips to the UK.  I prefer the crumbing castles to the restored manor houses because their eeriness gives me a better perspective on Medieval Life.  Readers and writers should check out the websites for National Trust, English Heritage, National Trust for Scotland, Historic Scotland, and CADW (Wales) for more info on Medieval sites. 

Thanks, Sarah, for inviting Kris to blog on your site.

The hero in The Key by Lynsay Sands only bath twice a year, in January and July.
The heroine complained about his B.O whenever the hero tries to seduce her but
never mentioned about his breath. I kept thinking that if he doesn’t care to take a
bath or wipe himself, he wouldn’t bother with cleaning his teeth. So, wouldn’t kissing
the hero be yucky as well?

Great info, Kris, and very comical. And they say romance writing is such a
glamorous job! If only they knew! Nice to see you here.

Thing with the BO issues was if everyone had the same general level of stink they became inured to it. So even with the less frequent bathing, lack of deodorant, etc. it wouldn’t have been that big a deal between people of the times.

Also worth noting that the places where public bathing was still in existence became hang-outs for prostitutes, and general lewdness, because there were lots of naked people about. The Church decided this was Very Sinful and turned the notion of bathing into a Bad Thing among the faithful.

I’ve also seen references to body hair removal. Apparently the Saracens practiced it, and they thought the Europeans who came to the holy land on crusade were barbarians because they were so hairy (among other things—they were also less educated). It would be possible for a knight to come back from crusade having developed a taste for a less hairy female, but would said female want to submit to that sort of thing? Because they didn’t stop with the legs.

I have pointed this out at various times on various forums, and here I go again.  :-)

All of us unconsciously filter out sounds, sights and smells that form a constant background to our lives.  Our eyes, ears and noses give us the information, but our brains decide how to interpret it. 
How many of us who live in cities today are constantly aware of the vile stench of vehicle exhaust fumes?  One might notice it fleetingly when just returned from a holiday somewhere with noticeably pure air, but otherwise, it simply does not register on the 21stC city-dweller, because it is ‘background’.  Same with the noise of motor traffic.
The same would have been true of the more organic (and less harmful) odours of previous generations.  The personal smells of humans and other animals and of waste and ordure of various kinds would just not have been noticeable.
Anyone who has spent time in countries and cultures that still have elements in common with earlier generations in Europe and North America (e.g. the widespread use of horses, donkeys and cattle for transport), can testify that at first they notice that life smells different,  but after a few weeks, they cease to notice.  The brain starts to class the smells as ‘background’, and omits them.
As an historian, I like to see accurate and well-researched detail in historical novels, but in imagining the context of a medieval (or, come to that, an 18th/19th century) way of life, it is perfectly reasonable to omit any general reference to organic odours, for the good reason that the inhabitants of that time and place would not have been consciously aware of them.

One of Kris’s points that I should like to challenge is this one:  the alleged use of spices and seasonings to disguise the taste of tainted meat.  This is often stated, but I believe it to be completely untrue.  The social classes that would have had to eat poor-quality food certainly could not afford imported spices, which were very, very expensive status symbols.  The social classes that could afford them were in a position to ensure that their basic foodstuffs were fresh.

“Then again, there were no processed foods, no pesticides/herbicides/antibiotics/etc being ingested by plant or beast, so I suspect the odors were much less . . . well, odoriferous. “

I’m sorry, but this is pseudoscientific quackery and total nonsense verging on a malicious, dangerous lie.

Processed foods do not automatically make you smell worse, and neither do additives. The pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics in food are in such tiny, minuscule amounts that they have no effect on body odors. If anything, the preservatives in food make life less smelly because they stop food from rotting before it’s eaten. They also make it less likely that people will get sick and die from eating preserved foods, something often forgotten by the pampered who take sanitation for granted.

And processing does not instantly turn food into artificial, unnatural frankenfood any more than cooking it does. (In fact, cooking is a form of processing.) This is a dirty lie spread by corporations who sell overpriced “natural” food and quack medicines to the gullible. Processing in and of itself is value-neutral; processing cheese, for instance, just makes it smoother and easier to melt. It’s when processing uses too much fat or starch that the food becomes less safe to eat in large amounts, but only because it contains more calories than the base food would otherwise have contained.

And washing wasn’t just considered wrong because of the connection of prostitutes with bathhouses; it was also considered dangerous, and rightly so. Swallow a mouthful of that wonderful cleansing bathwater and expect to be very sick in a week from cholera, typhoid, or dysentery.

I suppose my pet peeve is when people think that modern innovations like food processing, preservation, and immunizations are somehow dangerous because they’ve been led to believe that the good old days were safer and healthier than they were.

Thank you AgTigress!

I was just going to mention that…. After Maggie Ostrand’s head-desking use of “history” for her humor column at HuffPo last week, I was wondering what was going on in the Zeitgeist this month.

Here’s a great source on myths in medieval cooking:
http://medievalcookery.blogspot.com/2007/10/medieval-food-myths.html

Not a romance, per se, but the film The Lion in Winter (the Peter O’Toole/Katherine Hepburn one; I haven’t seen the more recent version) includes a lot of these details.  Henry breaks ice to get to his wash water in the morning, and there are dogs everywhere, and it really shows that in the medieval period, even kingship was pretty grubby by our modern standards.

Plus it’s a fan-freaking-fabulous movie.  Brilliant script, and amazing performances all around.

Check out “Knight Errant” by R. Garcia y Robertson.  A War of the Roses trilogy featuring a Hollywood producer who is very very new to witchcraft and ends up back in time and hooking up with an eighteen year old Edward Plantagenet.  And what with Robertson being a history prof somewhere out in the Pacific North West, it’s filled with lots of excellent details.  Fleas for example.  And teeth and the food.  Totally appalling.  Good stuff.

Reviews are mixed.  Romance is not the main thrust (sorry) of this tale, adventure is and so is all the serious political unrest of 15th century England, but I really liked it.  Robertson really did his homework about Wicca, natural magic and their historical/religious antecedents as well as England.  All that stuff really pops off the page.

The heroine has an engaging go-with-the-flow attitude, which makes the reader treat the yuck she experiences like the worst car crash you’ve ever seen—you just can’t look away.

Great post!

I should also quote Eleanor’s speech in The Lion in Winter, about the great beauty of Rosamund: “Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That’s a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction. “

One of my favorite scenes in a Roberta Gellis medieval is when the heroine is using a fine-toothed comb to delouse her husband.  Authentic and loving.

I agree with everyone else who mentioned the BO issue (“Bring on da funk!”), and it’s one of the things that bothers me the most in historicals—when the author makes a point of how clean and shiny the heroine is.  Your nose filters those scents that are “normal” to your environment.  If not, our senses would overload and we wouldn’t be able to spot the alarming scents we need to spot, like gangrenous flesh or the smell of a wild animal.  Just as some of us are more sensitized to the smell of animal manure than someone who lives on a farm or ranch, medieval types would have had to be truly rank—or ill—for someone to notice the smell.

i love medieval romances, but i haven’t read many of them because i can’t seem to find them :(  i’ve got For My Lady’s Heart open in front of me now, yet again (privy! garderobe!), and while i can’t smell anything, the sights and sounds are vivid and that’s what matters to me.  i’m really not interested in hygiene practices.  in fact, i find them jarring, especially in the novels i’ve read where the hero and heroine bathe in every chapter.  there’s no reason to go there unless they’ve had some adventure that involves mud or excrement.  i can enjoy a novel where there’s no mention of bathing just as much as one that insists the heroine smells like jasmine the hero smells like sandalwood if the story is good, if it’s intriguing and the characters are engaging.

I am tired of two-child families.  Not that they didn’t exist, just that probably more of them started as six- or seven-child families.  And childbirth!  With the dying!

Thank you, AgTigress. I was going to jump in to challenge the meat/spices mention, but you got there first.

I think the worst ‘facts’ list I have seen is “Life in the 1500s”. It’s such a joke that I still can’t believe some believed the list. I feel sorry for Medieval historians sometimes. :D Let me find the list as I think some here would like to read it. 

Found it. Someone’s kind enough to debunk each on the list, too. Yay!  Life in the 1500s.

Hi Kris,

Great post, and lots of fun!  Along the lines of missing body parts are health issues, in general.  Heroes and heroines rarely are scarred from the pox, or suffer the ailments that would have dogged them on a regular basis.  The one that really springs to mind for me is the good, old-fashioned bladder infection.  Now, we know how much those manly heroes like to claim their heroines from, er, behind.  Often in fairly unsanitary conditons.  Can you imagine how many bladder infections those poor women must have had?  Yikes!  I only hope they knew about cranberry juice.

As for the odors in general, I’m going to have to be a bit indelicate.  I know that when I eat meat (and I notice it with my husband), my body odor is stronger the next day.  The same thing happens when I take antibiotics.  My perspiration smells different.  The skin is the largest organ in our body, and it helps to process out what goes in.  So it makes sense to me that people in different time periods probably smelled differently than they do now - washing aside.  That’s neither good nor bad, just different.

You know, I read historical romance for the emotion, the love story, the adventure, the triumph of good over evil, of the ability of courage and determination to overcome the challenges that separate the hero and heroine.  I want the history to be accurate and evoke the period, but I’m not reading it as historical fiction.  I’m not interested in smells or missing body parts, unless they serve the story or setting.

Re the “tainted meat” medieval urban legend:  there were extremely strict laws against selling spoiled meat or other foods, and very nasty punishments meted (hah!) out to those who broke them.

One book I can think of that mentions the lice and fleas is a YA titled Catherine Called Birdy (forget the author’s name.)

And second the shout-out to Sharon Kay Penman, who writes very detailed, meticulously researched medieval historicals.  I really wouldn’t consider her a romance author; though she does include the occasional love scene, you won’t find any HEAs in her books.  She writes about the lives of actual historical figures, most of whom came to unpleasant ends.

Thank you AgTigress. That bothered me too. Also, there were times and places when everything was going well and meat was more generally available so that even the peasants got their sausages. It didn’t balance out the hungry times, but there were good moments at the table.

The point about the cold is a good one. Indeed, before the advent of central heating, everyone was cold in the winter. The rich may have been less cold than the poor, but they weren’t warm. Anyone who has ever lived through a winter power outage and tried to heat the house (or even just a room) with a fire in the fireplace knows whereof I speak.

I visited an old castle in Ireland a few years back and got a detailed “life in the castle” lecture from the tour guide.

Ick.

One thing they certainly don’t mention in romance novels is how short-lived these people were. Half the children died before the age of five and an adult who lived to the ripe old age of 40 probably counted himself lucky.

Not something I want to think about after the happily-ever-after.

Anony Miss~
  You know, I DID have a section about hairy legs.  Then I pulled it, as I was trying to cut space.  But you’re right!  Smooth silky skin might be something a romance hero notices, but I’m not too sure it’s an accurate.

  Then again, an author-friend Kim Killion was reminding me that women have been getting wax jobs for thousands of years, so there’s the flip side, too.  Not sure they were doing their legs tho.  :-)

FD~
I don’t think I know about clothes in the garderobe to deter…moths. Tell me more!

Re processed foods: I generally see the term used to refer to a food object that has been refined a great deal, not necessarily any food that has been modified from its natural state, such as a cooked veggie. Following that, if “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan is anything to go by, usually the reason something edible lasts a really long time is that the parts of it that are “alive” and therefore nutritious have been taken out, which leaves the edible thing not so nutritious or useful. Grocery-store bread, highly processed, has had the living part of the wheat stripped from it, which is why those horrid unprocessed-food-advocating liars warn against it so much: all of the nutritional value has then been artificially added back in, apparently inefficiently.

Whether that makes us smellier or not I don’t know.

I have one nitpick, as a paleoclimatologist—the Little Ice Age didn’t start until the 1600s. Before that, in the period we’d commonly call the Middle Ages, was the Medieval Warming Period, from 800 to 1300. That’s why they were able to grow grapes in England and the Vikings colonized Greenland—it was a lot easier to farm at higher latitudes then!

Regarding the use of spices in medieval cookery: others have already pointed out that it wasn’t about concealing rancid food, but I recommend checking out the book Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants for a look at the use of seasonings as status symbols, among other things. (It’s a very good read.)

In the 1500-1700s, Edinburgh was one of the most densely populated cities in the world.  Because of the city wall, they built up (6-7 stories) with very narrow pedestrian walkways (closes).  And of course, no sewers or plumbing or other sanitation.  So what did they do?  Toss the slop out the window with a cry of “Guardie Loo!” into the closes, where it would hopefully wash down to the Nor Loch (now Princes Street Gardens).

And of course, when the plague came through, they boarded or bricked up entryways where the infected were located until the plague passed.

Re: B.O. 
  You all are totally right, that people become sensitized to whatever surrounds them.  When I’m with horses, I’m not smelling the manure.  I don’t think there’s a hero in a romance who would think his heroine smells bad.  :-)  And thus, as you say, AgTigress, we don’t include it.

  As far as pesticides/etc, I definitely didn’t want to imply processed foods are ‘frankenfood,’ so much as whatever we ingest will come back out through our bodies, one way or another, for good or ill.  When I eat garlic, I can smell it.  When my hubby does too.  :-)  And highly processed food, with its artificial additives and hard-to-digest ingredients and antibiotic use in animals, will affect odor.  Especially when it’s makes up a predominance of a diet.  Just like meat.  Just like garlic.  In and of itself, that statement isn’t a value judgment.  But I definitely hope no one was taking my article as medical advice!  :-)

@earthgirl—Although the minima were in 1650, 1770, and 1850, temperatures did a sudden downturn in the early 1300s, and it could be argued that the Little Ice Age began then, or even with the advance of pack ice in the mid-13th c. In fact, Brian Fagan includes that time in the period in his book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850.  A sample timeline (laid out on Wikipedia) is

1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
1650 for the first climatic minimum

That early, generally cooler weather is clearly what Kris Kennedy was referring to in terms of the chill in the air and the problem of famine and so on. Combined with the arrival of the Plague a few years later, it made the high middle ages a truly horrific time for both rich and poor.

Suzie~
  On a heroine noticing the hero’s B.O. but not bad breath…
  I feel the same way!  I just stay away from the whole issue of toothbrushing /dental hygiene.  It’s not that contemporaries of the characters would have a problem with it, but readers will. (I will.  LOL)

Theresa~
  Ohhh, I totally forgot to put in about emptying chamberpots onto the streets!!  Thanks for mentioning it.

Maili, that link is full of win! Thanks for sharing.

I remember hearing that those big collars that Elizabeth 1 made so popular, were to catch lice. Anyone know anything about that?

Also, whenever I read an historical or medieval, or any non contemp, I always wonder what women did when they had their period? And cramps? The only book I remember that even mentioned cramps was a Loretta Chase (I forget which one). The heronie and hero are in Egypt on a boat and she has cramps for 2 days and the hero eventually goes in to comfort her.

only28: hah! I WISH my period came only 28 days, instead of 20.

Fabulous! Great list and hilarious to boot!

Re: spices and meat . . .
  Shoulda been clearer.  Yes, you ladies are right, meat was a luxury, as were many spices (I left out a little piece about how costly spices like pepper were), and therefore the people eating meat were also the ones who had the resources to purchase more than the diy-grow-it-in-your-backyard-croft spices. 

  I meant to indicate (and see I did a poor job with it) that spices could be used to cover up the taste of a food that had gone past its prime time. (It wasn’t always done, nor was it the main point of seasoning.)  But being such an important resource, if the meat had turned a bit, they didn’t chuck it directly into the . . . moat.  it was too valuable.  Seasoning helps in such cases.  I wasn’t clear.  Sorry.

First, CONGRATS ON THE BOOK!

And second the shout-out to Sharon Kay Penman, who writes very detailed, meticulously researched medieval historicals.  I really wouldn’t consider her a romance author; though she does include the occasional love scene, you won’t find any HEAs in her books.  She writes about the lives of actual historical figures, most of whom came to unpleasant ends.

You do see HEAs in her books, but always for minor characters who you find out in the Author’s Note are ones she made up. *sigh* I was really bummed the first time this happened (after being elated that someone got a happy ending).

I remember hearing that those big collars that Elizabeth 1 made so popular, were to catch lice. Anyone know anything about that?

I’ve certainly never seen or heard this before. I’d want to see some serious documentation before I bought in . . .

And washing wasn’t just considered wrong because of the connection of prostitutes with bathhouses; it was also considered dangerous, and rightly so. Swallow a mouthful of that wonderful cleansing bathwater and expect to be very sick in a week from cholera, typhoid, or dysentery.

Not sure about England, but public bathhouses were very common in the German Duchies. Not only did people go there to get clean, but it was where they socialized (very much like the Romans) and where they were treated by barber surgeons.

I’ve always thought the connection to prostitutes was more of a 17th century development . . . at least that’s where I really start to see it (post Cromwell).

Randi~
  As far as menstrual cramping . . .herbs and other ingredients (barks, flowers, etc),  can be pretty potent stuff, so without having researched this, I’m guessing they took their equivalent of Motrin as needed.  :-)

Kalen~
  Thanks for the congrats!  :-)

  About the public bathing . . . I certainly haven’t studied medieval bathing/hygiene, but while I agree, that there were dangers, people have been doing it throughout various civilizations and over many eras, so there is certainly precedence for it.  Even with the dangers.  And some of it was a sweat, wasn’t it?  (Again, haven’t research this—just thinking out loud . . . )

@Randi and Kris—yes, but what did they do for periods? Did they stick moss in their underpants?

@Lisa—Thanks for clearing me up.

I remember hearing that those big collars that Elizabeth 1 made so popular, were to catch lice. Anyone know anything about that?

I did some research on ruffs while I was looking into Shakespeare’s London.  The big starched ruffs started as just the edge of your undershirt showing at your neck.  Over time they got longer, more elaborate, more starched, etc. etc. until they were these huge purgatorial pie-frill things you could hardly eat over.  I never heard anything about lice, though!

Kalen: I can’t remember where I heard/read that. It was probably over a decade ago. But this is what Wiki has:

They served as changeable pieces of cloth that could themselves be laundered while keeping the wearer’s doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline.

It’s not a lot, and it’s Wiki, but…

earthgirl: exactly! AND, most bloomers or their ilk (like a combination), had the seam open at the crotch, so…how does that work when you have your period?

@Randi and Kris—yes, but what did they do for periods? Did they stick moss in their underpants?

Ok, I’ll step up to this one since I have done a ton of research and I get asked this question every time I give a workshop on the history of underclothes: THERE IS ZERO DOCUMENTATION ABOUT WHAT WOMEN DID BEFORE THE VICTORIAN ERA.

Zero.

As in Nada.

None.

Whenever the topic gets brought up there is a ton of speculation, ranging from “nothing, they bled on their shifts” to “rags” to “Pessiaries” but the plain, simple truth is that there is not one shred of documentation before the 1850s.*

As it’s never been germane to any story I’ve written, I just leave it behind the veil (along with the toothbrushes). 

*If you have something, I’d LOVE to see it.

I personally would be quite happy if I never had to read another description of any character’s smell in a romance novel. Do I need to know that the hero smells like leather and “male”? Do I care if the heroine smells of lavender? Not really. Certainly I don’t go around describing people’s smells in real life. Oh lord, and Julie Garwood’s medievals always mentioned somebody (usually the hero, I believe) smelling like the sun. WTF?

Different strokes, I guess. I’m trying to think of an instance when the smell description really added something to the story…I did enjoy the description in Not Quite a Husband of the heroine’s soap smell, only because it was so different from the usual, but in general I find any mention of smell or hygiene pulls me out of the story because I start to wonder what life was really like Back Then.

Great post, though! I’ll definitely look for The Conqueror—I love medievals and wish there were more of them these days.

Medieval gentry actually did not go around stinking to high heaven and throughout a great deal of the period were actually very concerned about personal hygiene.

One has only to read medieval manuscripts like The Babees Book or some of the many medieval herbals available today to know that.

Kalen: I can’t remember where I heard/read that. It was probably over a decade ago. But this is what Wiki has:

They served as changeable pieces of cloth that could themselves be laundered while keeping the wearer’s doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline.

It’s not a lot, and it’s Wiki, but…

This is what all shirt collars and ruffs did.

Earthgirl~
  Again, not something I’ve studied in any great depth (or any depth at all) but I think they used, essentially, tampons.  A small rag rolled up and inserted, with a thread tied around the end, to assist in removal.  I assume they didn’t use a rag like we might a pad, as there wasn’t ‘underwear’ as we know it. 

  And perhaps, thus, the phrase, ‘on the rag’?

earthgirl: exactly! AND, most bloomers or their ilk (like a combination), had the seam open at the crotch, so…how does that work when you have your period?

Both of these garments are Victorian, and we know that they used sanitary belts and washable rags/pads. Underpants for women in England dates to the early 1800s (before that they’re all going commando).

I’ve seen images of German women wearing underpants, but all of the images are allegorical and are making a point about the woman “wearing the pants in the family”, so they can’t be taken as proof that German women were actually wearing underpants as men did.

I’ve always liked how people assume that the swords and stuff were so dang heavy.

Really, I’ve seen numbers as high as forty pounds.

As much as my internet researches can tell me, the heaviest double-handers still around today are, like, 12 pounds (not an exact figure). For a weapon that’s big because it’s ceremonial and meant to be impressive.

The business items were smaller and lighter.

I mean, really, like eight pounds. Even lighter for something that’d allow you to, I don’t know, carry a shield or the flailing maiden of your choice over your shoulder as you fought off the Green Priests of the Mad Snake God.

And don’t get me started on the armor.

A suit of plate mail isn’t significantly heavier (and may not be at all heavier; my memory’s going on me) than what some of the soldiers in Iraq are carrying on their back. And, furthermore, it’s spread all over the body. Sure, your range of motion is a bit restricted, but after a while it apparently wasn’t hard to move in.

Next Episode: Why Armor Won’t Stop An Arrow.

And Kalen again has the dirt on the research, which is awesome.  :-)

I didn’t know there wasn’t any research on periods/ underclothes prior to the Victorian era, but I assume they did something for their periods.  Rags make the most sense to me, but as Kalen says, if it doesn’t serve a story point, why put in something that isn’t researched? (Or at least has been suggested and theorized about by 1-2 credible sources).

That being said, I know, in my heart of hearts, women did not go around bleeding on themselves for 3-7 days a month.  Holy cow.  Aside from any other considerations, there would have been riots.  Men would have run screaming down the streets, jumped into the nearest sea, and drowned en masse.

Whenever the topic gets brought up there is a ton of speculation, ranging from “nothing, they bled on their shifts” to “rags” to “Pessiaries” but the plain, simple truth is that there is not one shred of documentation before the 1850s.*

And I will now contradict myself (sort of). While looking for a date for “on the rag” (which I pretty much knew had to be Victorian or later; and it is 1939 ‘JUSTINIAN’ Americana Sexualis 34 She’s got the rag on) I found this in the OED:

1606 R. FIELD Of Church I. xviii. 35 The Prophet Esay pronounceth, that all our righteousnesse is like the polluted and filthy ragges of a menstruous woman.

So there we have a 17th century comment on how women dealt with menstruation! Yea!!! I love finding new info to add to workshop.

OMG, Kris, you rock!

Especially over the whole “bathing” thing. The practice of the roman style communal baths and bathing in general only became thought of as harmful when one version of the plague hit. I think the one in the mid 14th century. And even after that, it wasn’t uncommon for a priveleged (aka rich and titled) person to travel with his personal bath in tow.

JennyME~
  LOL on not wanting any more descriptions of character smells!  :-) 
  Such descriptions have become invisible to me now in books.  I don’t read them; I skim.  I didn’t even realize it until you said this.

We need to go back to the furry legs. All this waxing is exhausting.

This reminds me of a secondary character in Sarah Bird’s The Boyfriend Club [terrible title, good book] who was a medieval romance writer attending a Luvboree in Texas.

Earthgirl,

I’m not a paleoclimatologist, just an interested layperson, but I’ve seen quite a few scientific sources that state that the Little Ice Age began as early as 1250, and usually the time frame is given as from 1300-1850.  The first obvious sign, the Great Famine, occurred in 1315.  It’s true that the coldest periods didn’t start till the 16th century, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Little Ice Age didn’t start until 1600.

And don’t get me started on the armor.

A suit of plate mail isn’t significantly heavier (and may not be at all heavier; my memory’s going on me) than what some of the soldiers in Iraq are carrying on their back. And, furthermore, it’s spread all over the body. Sure, your range of motion is a bit restricted, but after a while it apparently wasn’t hard to move in.

Next Episode: Why Armor Won’t Stop An Arrow.

Having worn a suit of plate, I can tell you it’s damn heavy, and don’t forget that there’s chainmail under large parts of it (which is really heavy!) as well as padded arming doublets and clothing. It’s certainly much heavier than cameos, a chemsuit, and body armor. And yes, you do get used to moving in it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still heavy (and jousting armor was even worse).

Most plate would stop an arrow (and why you wore chainmail in the spots you couldn’t cover with plate). In fact, it would stop a bullet (that’s why many suits have a dent in the breastplate, that’s the proof that it had been tested). This is not to say that arrows didn’t get though, but they shouldn’t have (and in most cases they didn’t).

@ Kalen

Re: Bathhouses in Medieval German Duchies

I don’t know if this is right, but off the top of my head- strangely this was discussed in history lessons in school, when I was a teenager in Germany- bathhouses were closed down eventually, beginning in the 16th century with the advent of syphillis. Since public baths were often used for prostitution and maids that worked in bathhouses had a reputation in accordance, as far as I remember, they earned a reputation for spreading ‘The French pox’, and closing them down was a way of trying to keep the disease from spreading. At least I remember my history teacher telling us that, and I vaguely remember reading somewhere about it too, but hands down, have no idea where to start looking for my source.

*returns back to lurkdom* :-)

Kalen~
Realized my response to you about public bathing didn’t come through as clearly as it sounded in my head.  My post implied, via a few misplaced commas, you’d made a point about the dangers of public bathing, when in fact the opposite was true.  I was was agreeing with (& expanding on) your point that there was public bathing in various cultures, despite any risks. (Ah, the joys of non-nonverbals and speedy cut-&-pastes)

  And yes, public bath houses were closed down for public health reasons at times.  And they always opened back up again. Interesting.

Scrin~
  On armor . . .
  You make a good point.  Like Kalen said, I think it was pretty heavy, but then, these men trained with it, and wore it a lot, so to them it wouldn’t seems as heavy as to us.  They carry it better, and I’m guessing not notice it as much (which doesn’t mean not at all).  Armor did become heavier, to the point of ridiculousness, later on, when used for tournaments and other ‘show’ events.  But you make an excellent point: armor worn for battle had to be light enough to be useful.  Knights had to be able to move and ride and fight in that armor.  It couldn’t so heavy it was cumbersome or unwieldy.

  And…it was HOT.  People could die of heat stroke and dehydration as a result of wearing armor, especially in the heat.  And that’s usually when they’d be fighting: the ever-popular summer battle season.

Chris~
  LOL—oh yes, let’s go back to furry legs!  :-)

On believing that bathing was dangerous…
“Swallow a mouthful of that wonderful cleansing bathwater and expect to be very sick in a week from cholera, typhoid, or dysentery.”

Actually, the bathwater would be just the same sort of water that was used in cooking, brewing, or to water the wine, so you were exposed to the germs in the water quite regularly. But the belief that bathing was dangerous comes in in the late 1500s and flowers in the 1600 and 1700s, when you have rich people wiping with clean dry linen cloths and changing shirts but not washing, believing that dry rubbing was as cleansing but much safer.

(Cholera, by the way, came to Europe from India, in the 1800s.)

On the other hand, human-produced gas (burping and farting) was a major problem if the health manuals, manners manuals, and cookbooks can be believed!

And it’s conversations like these that make me love this site and all of you Bitches. :D

@growly cub: Yeah, the Little Ice Age isn’t my area of focus. I’d just heard enough about it and the Medieval Warm Period to think Kris’s timing was off, but I was schooled by Wikipedia above.

  On the other hand, human-produced gas (burping and farting) was a major problem if the health manuals, manners manuals, and cookbooks can be believed!

What do you mean WAS a problem!?!? STILL IS!!

At my house it sure is.  And provides almost-endless entertainment for my preschooler son and husband.

Great post! Farting heroes are a bit too much like real life ,leave them out!!

Overall though life back then doesn’t sound much different than living in rural Kentucky in the 1960s .
Outhouse perched over a creek. Didn’t stink but I don’t remember if anyone lived down hill? Enameled tin pee pot under the beds.
Saturday night baths in a metal tub on the porch where the cleanest person went first. (gotta smell good to gotomeetin)
Daily washing of course but in winter, yes you had to break ice to get to the water. The soap would burn a layer off our skin.
There was one laundry day and it took ALL day.
Standard medication was castor oil,  not leeches.
If we didn’t grow it, we didn’t eat it. I think we were what the hippies wanted to be.
Coca cola , not beer, was like THE BEST TREAT EVER!
God I’m old.

I just finished Loretta Chase’s The Last Hellion and there’s a scene where the heroine browbeats the hero into being leeched.

I love this list!  There is one thing that always gets me in just about every romance I read.  Picture it, hero and heroine touching stuff- babies, lakes, farm equipment, guns, horses- and then suddenly, her magic hoo hoo takes over and they are suddenly having sex.  He’s sticking fingers in her, she’s rubbing his stick of love and then putting it in her, and no one ever seems to wash their hands.  It really upsets me!  They did a study and found that’s really gross.

Sad to say, common folk get short shrift in medieval romances, which all seem to twirl around the upper classes and royalty.  I’m sick to death of knights. 

Two terrific nonfiction studies of the mid-medieval period (specifically, the fourteenth century) are Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and John Kelly’s The Great Mortality, which focuses on the Black Plague.  The latter in particular offers glimpses into daily life, and it’s eminently readable.

Kalen, yeah I know those terms are Victorian (and I learned about the combination from the latest Sherry Thomas); I just couldn’t recall what they were called prior to that time period, and figured everyone would know what I was talking about. Which, basically, everyone did. ;)

[ arrows wouldn’t pierce plate armor…]

weeeelllll, not quite right.  The English longbow was actually pretty good at punching holes in plate when it was weilded by a pro.

From: A Short History of the Longbow by C. Anton -

Such was the power of the Longbow, that contemporary accounts claim that at short range, an arrow fired from it could penetrate 4 inches of seasoned oak. The armored knight, considered at one time to be the leviathan of the battlefield, could now be felled at ranges up to 200 yards by a single arrow. One account recalls a knight being pinned to his horse by an arrow that passed through both armored thighs, with the horse and saddle between!

Modern tests have verified that this was indeed possible. A 700-800 grain arrow can pierce 9 cm of oak at close range, and 2.5 cm at 200 yards. No armor up to plate was proof against an arrow at less than 200 yards, and even plate could be penetrated at less than 100 yards.

Earthgirl,

Not sure I’d trust Wikipedia, but I think there are plenty of scientific texts out there on this topic.  The Fagan was already mentioned.

Have you read William H. Calvin?  If I remember right he had a bit about the Little Ice Age in ‘A Brain for All Seasons’.  His comments on the Atlantic conveyor belt and the current slowing of it scare the dickens out of me and that was in 2002.  I haven’t dared to look into what’s going on right now.

FYI for everybody, ‘A Brain for All Seasons’ is looking at human evolution and abrupt climate change (aka the major ice ages) and I highly recommend it.  It’s very readable and utterly fascinating.

It’s been so long ago that the details are hazy, but I remember reading Grace Ingram’s RED ADAM’S LADY and being enchanted with the footnotes about historical details, the one that stuck with me was that certain establishments (tanneries? soapmakers?—I said the details were hazy) had receptacles at the door for urine deposits, since urine was used in whatever they were doing.

I am endlessly fascinated at the education to be found here.

Where do you think the saying “three dog night” came from? If it was a bitter cold night and no covers would help, you dragged your dogs onto the bed with you. Thus, it was cold enough to have three dogs sleeping with you = Three Dog Night.  :)  (or one, or four, but three is the common phrase)

Egads, we of the Eternal Bitchery KNOW our medieval stuff!

Roberta Gellis (one of nine names in my personal pantheon of writing mages) wrote THE ROPE DANCER some years back because there was so little medieval-set romance among the lower classes. A fascinating book, though all of hers are wonderful.

Ladies in the 14th century were aware of halitosis. According to the herbals, they often chewed various herbs to sweeten the breath. One tooth-cleaning agent (assume they used a finger or a rag) was sage mixed with rock salt. I wouldn’t want to try it, give me the stuff in a tube anytime.

The spoiled-meat-and-spices theory has already been well debunked, but I submit also the following: if you could afford meat, it came to your table fairly fresh from the hoof. There was no way to slaughter goat, pig or steer and keep it fresh for next week. Therefore if you were having a feast, you sent out your hunters and commandeered your provisions fresh. The spicing was more a matter of taste than preservation, although salting was heavily used. The spicing may have resulted from a desire to disguise the taste of salted meats, not spoiled ones. And as far as fish, google “stockfish” and see how they dealt with salt herring and cod during Lent.

In my medieval time-travel romance (out next spring, thanks for asking), I had my time-traveler heroine remark on some of these nastinesses, but only once. One can afterward assume she became 1) inured to the various smells, although she does notice the pleasant absence of cigarette fumes and jet fuel); 2) accustomed to the sanitary facilities; and 3) inventive at concocting 14th century approximations for 21st century conveniences. I trust it works.

Brava, Kris, for crafting a book I now want to read. And just WHY is his sword turned that way on the cover? I fear for his neck.

K.Z.

I’ve only read a few medievals where both main characters were non-nobles and they were by Roberta Gellis, so you know they were high quality all the way around.  I enjoyed them, but they are not the ones I tend to re-read.  I might just have to break out Roselynde and Alinor again. :)

I just think besides minstrels and traveling folk the lives of the peasantry and/or serfs were so circumscribed that there isn’t a whole lot of room for interesting stories.  Get up, work the fields, eat, have sex, repeat, die.  And quite honestly, if somebody wrote a story about an exceptional serf my anachronism meter would probably go off the scale.

You know, I DID have a section about hairy legs.  Then I pulled it, as I was trying to cut space.  But you’re right!  Smooth silky skin might be something a romance hero notices, but I’m not too sure it’s an accurate.

Hairy legs can be smooth and silky. Stubbly, short hair on legs won’t feel either smooth and silky, but if someone never shaves their legs, the skin and hair do feel smooth and silky. I suppose it might depend a bit on the texture of the individual’s hair (some cats and dogs, for example, have rougher coats than others), but still, I see no reason why one couldn’t describe hairy legs as smooth and silky.

Deb Kinnard~
  btw, when is your time-travel medieval romance due ou— oh, wait, next spring?  Cool.  I’ll be all over it.  :-)  Title? 

  LOL on his sword.  Yes, it is interesting choice the Art Dept made, isn’t it?  And a bit dangerous.  Promise, there’s not one scene in the story where he holds his sword like that. (snort)

Modern tests have verified that this was indeed possible. A 700-800 grain arrow can pierce 9 cm of oak at close range, and 2.5 cm at 200 yards. No armor up to plate was proof against an arrow at less than 200 yards, and even plate could be penetrated at less than 100 yards.

I’m going to guess that it depends on the era and the armor. My experience is mostly with 16th century plate, and if it withstood a bullet fired from fairly close range, it would have withstood an arrow as well. The main danger was an arrow finding an unarmored spot on the man (or busting through a link in his mail).

Can I pass along a few thoughts about bathing and human smells?

You got yer three sources of human smells ... the body, the clothing and the latrines.

When you are walking into an LDC village in the heat, the ‘smell of humanity’ you notice at the outskirts is the gentle rotting of human excrement in latrine pits.  For good evolutionary reasons, humans are programmed to particularly notice the smell of human scat. 

But villages in the Third World today know how to deal with human wastes.  There’s no reason to believe 1500s folks wouldn’t know how to use and maintain latrines and wouldn’t be sensitive to a badly kept outhouse.

ISTM, in 1550, outside the cities, you’d get
—the stink of urine in odd corners.  (Not unknown today.) 
—In the summer, in a village or castle, you’d get a strong whiff in particular spots when the wind blew wrong. 
—Using the outhouse, you’d hold your breath. 

But ‘odeur d’outhouse’  would not be a constant companion at the dinner table any more than it is today in African villages without public sewerage.

The whole ‘washing the human body’ thing . . .

A sizable portion of the human race —a third?—does not have water in a tap inside a whole room devoted to bathing.  They do not tote twenty buckets inside to fill up a tub and then haul it out to empty it.
They wash, perfectly well, from a clay pot dipped out of the river or a jerrycan filled at the pump.  They don’t smell. 
Full body immersion is only tangentially related to cleanliness. 

Clothing, though,  is the real kicker.  And here, in 1550, I think we got a class thingum.

Linen undergarments would be intrinsically expensive.  They’d take time and effort to wash.  Folks who couldn’t afford to change into a clean shift or a clean shirt every day or so would smell like stale sweat until they did.

OTOH, rich folks could afford all that washing and changing of linens.  They would smell of lavender and clean linen and a body that had been sluiced down that morning from a basin of scented water.  Why would they stink?

The fine silks and velvets they wore on top were protected from body dirt by those linen undergarments.  They’d be sponged down and hung to air out.  It seems to me they’d smell to roughly the same extent your good cashmere cardigans do when you’ve worn them a lot.   

One indication that folks in 1550 did not routinely smell bad is that the distinct minority of people who avoided bathing for religious reasons are remarkable in contemporary terms in that they did smell.

LOL on his sword.  Yes, it is interesting choice the Art Dept made, isn’t it?  And a bit dangerous.  Promise, there’s not one scene in the story where he holds his sword like that. (snort)

At least he’s not wearing jeans and a button down shirt like poor Kathrynn Dennis’s hero.  :(

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, by Katherine Ashenburg is a pretty readable and entertaining survey of European attitudes on bathing in medieval times (also covers some Greek & Roman precedents, and the invention of showers, and all kinds of British weirdness on cold baths).

One thing I remembered reading about this whole washing thing, and maybe someone can chime in…

I read somewhere that Romans (and maybe Greeks?) didn’t use water for cleansing. That they, instead, oiled themselves up and then… oh what’s the word?...took like a flat edged object and…holy hell I’m screwing this up…squeegeed..OK NOT the right term, but hopefully you’ll get the visual…themselves.

Does that make sense, at all? LOL.

Joanna Bourne~
And in re: to clothing and odors…the natural fibers used in the medieval era would have helped to reduce body odors as well.

Randi…

“I read somewhere that Romans (and maybe Greeks?) didn’t use water for cleansing. That they, instead, oiled themselves up and then… oh what’s the word?...took like a flat edged object and…holy hell I’m screwing this up…squeegeed..OK NOT the right term, but hopefully you’ll get the visual…themselves.”

Scraped is the term you want; the instrument was a strigil. The Romans did bathe in water along with this process; they didn’t use soap, though. In fact, the Romans were among the most enthusiastic bathers in history. :)

SCRAPED!!! ROFLMAO. Right. Clearly, I am losing my mind.

Thanks for confirming, Jenne.

Well, I don’t know about people not smelling in medieval times or otherwise.  I live one county over from one of the poorest in the nation where conditions range from outdoor plumbing and no flowing water to fully functional bathrooms, and some of the folks one encounters in the grocery store can be smelled from pretty far away and it’s not their clothing alone that smells, it’s their persons.  In a society in which the idea that bathing and washing is pernicious is prevalent I’d imagine that this situation would be exacerbated quite significantly when you see smell issues in our current society that puts tremendous emphasis on hygiene and daily showers.

RE: Smells

Personally, I know that when I smell my boy, I recognize the scent as distinctly HIM.  I often try to define it in words in my head, but I can never get the description right - however, it would be a blend of various scents.  To me, his smell is one of the things I strongly identify with him.  So I can see the importance.

It does bother me in medievals when she smells clean - unless she’d recently bathed, of course.  I much prefer moments where she smells like hay, or food, or something that connects to her everyday life - if she had just been gardening, I might expect her to smell like freshly tilled earth.. or something. :P

RE: Hair

I try to ignore it, but every so often I get that niggling thought that they DIDN’T shave or wax then.  Instead of talking about her smooth legs, how about her smooth shoulders?  Shoulders are sexier anyway. ;)

A few comments:

1 - Use of spices.  I have to thoroughly disagree with Deb Kinnard.  Unless there was a great feast, a beast was rarely slaughtered and consumed in its entirety.  The “leftovers” which were the provisions for the castle inhabitants, needed to be preserved.  Some meats were salted, some were pickled, and others were left to age.  The term “gamey” - that funky, three-day-old gymsock smell we all know and loathe - was coined about meat (usually game birds, boar and venison) that was left to hang and age, i.e., to soften up and basically ROT.  This was a common practice well into the late 19th century, before the invention of refrigeration.  In fact, this is still done today - albeit under better conditions.  Top tier steak houses serve dry aged beef - 21 to 45 days, and the longer its aged, the more expensive it is.

2 - Bathing.  This one’s all over the map.  In rural England in the late Middle Ages (1200 - 1450 CE), peasants bathed twice a year, in June and December.  They were actually sewn into their clothes.  This is backed up by castle records - the lord provided two sets of clothing for his tenants and dependants - one in June and one in December.  Nobles didn’t bath frequently either, and knights rarely.  However, many knights would shave their heads - not because of lice, but to keep from pulling it out when removing chain mail. 

One accounting I read, years ago when working on a Master’s degree in Medieval and Early Modern Social History, was of knights who were permanently stained with rust marks from their armor.  No stainless back then!  Steel and iron rusted, and chainmail particularly in the warm months.  Although there were layers of wool padding between the skin and the mail, body sweat would wick through the wool into the mail.  Rust would become embedded into the wool and eventually begin to soak into the skin. 

Armor is actually my biggest pet peeve about most medieval romances.  Until the late 14th century, knights didn’t wear full suits of plate armor, which is featured in so many badly researched books - the stuff is all from the late Medieval and Early Renaissance era.  Plate armor was made popular in response to the advancements in long range weapons - first the crossbow (arbelast and ballista) and then the English longbow.

I think we all can agree that life in the Middle Ages was, to quote Thomas Hobbes, was nasty, brutish and short.  It was, compared to today, smelly, gross and disgusting, hygiene was as non-existent as privacy.  But who wants to read a romance about two smelly, hairy people with bad teeth who have to sleep in a cold, stinking room with their servants and livestock?

Not to mention, there was NO CHOCOLATE in the Middle Ages. 

(Spam word - “Efforts 32”  The heroine died at the ripe old age of 32, despite the best efforts of the local barber).

Lita

One accounting I read, years ago when working on a Master’s degree in Medieval and Early Modern Social History, was of knights who were permanently stained with rust marks from their armor.

There was a book in the last couple of years that talked about the physical toll that the Knight’s Templar’s lifestyle and clothing took on their bodies and how they would have been easy to spot, even in “disguise” by the knights who were hunting them down . . . I wish I could remember the name of the book. It’s not my era, so I sort of let it drift away. It was fascinating though.

Modern tests have verified that this was indeed possible. A 700-800 grain arrow can pierce 9 cm of oak at close range, and 2.5 cm at 200 yards. No armor up to plate was proof against an arrow at less than 200 yards, and even plate could be penetrated at less than 100 yards.

From Wikipedia (with footnotes for verification):

In a modern test, a direct hit from a steel bodkin point penetrated Damascus chain armour.[19] (Bodkin points have been described as “armour-piercing”, but the latest research is that they were not made of hardened steel and were not designed for this purpose.)[20]

Even very heavy draw longbows have trouble penetrating well made, tough steel plate armour, which was used increasingly after 1350. Armour of the Medieval eras was not proof against arrows until the specialized armour of the Italian city state mercenary companies.[21] Archery was ineffective against plate armour in the Battle of Neville’s Cross (1346), the siege of Bergerac (1345), and the Battle of Poitiers (1356); such armour became available to European knights of fairly modest means by the late 1300s, though never to all soldiers in any army. Strickland and Hardy suggest that “even at a range of 240 yards heavy war arrows shot from bows of poundages in the mid- to upper range possessed by the Mary Rose bows would have been capable of killing or severely wounding men equipped with armour of wrought iron. Higher-quality armour of steel would have given considerably greater protection, which accords well with the experience of Oxford’s men against the elite French vanguard at Poitiers in 1356, and des Ursin’s statement that the French knights of the first ranks at Agincourt, which included some of the most important (and thus best-equipped) nobles, remained comparatively unhurt by the English arrows.”[22]

19 Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, by Saxton Pope.
20 Royal Armouries: 6. Armour-piercing arrowheads
21 “Medieval Military Surgery”, Medieval History Magazine, Vol 1 issue 4, December 2003
22 Strickland M, Hardy R. The Great Warbow. Sutton Publishing 2005. Pages 272-278

This tallies with what I’ve always understood about the effectiveness of the longbow and its gradual decline in effectiveness and use.

On Lita’s comment about the spices and ‘rotting meat’—this is the information given in William Edward Mead’s _The English Medieval Feast_, originally published in 1931—including the ‘gameyness’ thing. Later research and more information in inventories and household rules have come up with a more complex idea, involving the distribution of different cuts of meat to different servants and inhabitants and the size of the catering; there’s also a certain amount of information out there about preservation techniques in the middle ages and before 1900. Check out books by Peter Brears and Ken Albala on this subject. Most scholarly texts no longer support the rotted meat theory.

Also, the fact that lords only gave their servants (of all classes) one or two suits of clothing a year doesn’t prove that they only bathed once a year—you seem to be assuming that each outfit only lasted the 6 months and then was discarded. Which seems… unlikely. (17th century noblewomen were sometimes sewn into their clothes for the evening as well as pinned into them; and today’s fashion models are also sometimes basted into their outfits for a shoot. Again, not proof that the clothing was never taken off.)

Books to check out on cleanliness include Douglas Biow’s The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy… there’s also, somewhere, an article about how bathing humor features in German medieval romances.

Re: Hair removal

I will happily sign the petition for letting leg hair grow (true story: from the ages 11-14 I wore leggings under my school uniform skirt every single day because I didn’t want to shave - and this was in Houston 95-degrees-and-99%-humidity, Texas. Woo! And don’t get me started on the Epilady.

Re: Historical (snigger) periods

What about biblical allusions? Oh yes, when Rachel steals her father’s idols, she hides them under her cushion, and she doesn’t rise because all assume she’s sitting on her menstrual cushion. Something like that (oh, some previous bible teacher of mine is undoubtedly weeping at how wrong I’m getting this). I dimly remember us asking in class about what women did then, and we were told they kinda sat on a sheep.

Pause.

Maybe they meant a sheepskin?

Here’s a problem re the stuffed rag idea: if virginity was such a hot commodity, wouldn’t women stay away from a tampon-like set up; assuming that it would break the hyman (even though it doesn’t) and render the woman as a useless commodity?

God. I soooo want to know! aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhh!

Ok, I’ll step up to this one since I have done a ton of research and I get asked this question every time I give a workshop on the history of underclothes: THERE IS ZERO DOCUMENTATION ABOUT WHAT WOMEN DID BEFORE THE VICTORIAN ERA.

Zero.

As in Nada.

None.

Whenever the topic gets brought up there is a ton of speculation, ranging from “nothing, they bled on their shifts” to “rags” to “Pessiaries” but the plain, simple truth is that there is not one shred of documentation before the 1850s.*

As it’s never been germane to any story I’ve written, I just leave it behind the veil (along with the toothbrushes). 

*If you have something, I’d LOVE to see it.

Some years ago I read a great YA novel called Journey To Matacumbe (sic?) by Robert Lewis Taylor, set in the years following the American Civil War.  At one point in the story a female character gets her period and can’t do anything about it, since everyone is camping out in the wild, on the run from the KKK.  One of the men in the party hands her a plug of chewing tobacco, and she stalks off into the woods and does something mysterious with it (since the narrator is an adolescent boy, he’s clueless about what’s going on, and we don’t get anything like a detailed description.)  I’ve often wondered what she did with that chewing tobacco—did she use it as a tampon?  Or did eating it somehow dry up her menses?  And what was the author’s source for this?

Anony Miss~
  ROFLOL. Bible School Teachers Gone Wild: telling little kids women used to SIT ON SHEEP to deal with menstrual flow.  Bahahahahahaha.

Also, the fact that lords only gave their servants (of all classes) one or two suits of clothing a year doesn’t prove that they only bathed once a year—you seem to be assuming that each outfit only lasted the 6 months and then was discarded . . . Books to check out on cleanliness include Douglas Biow’s The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy… there’s also, somewhere, an article about how bathing humor features in German medieval romances.

I agree that the “two suits of clothing a year” doesn’t support or prove that people only bathed twice a year (esp as this was somewhat standard well up into the 19th century).

It is interesting to see the differences between countries and cultures (and because of these differences we can’t construe anything about one people based on the habits of another). I’m really not that familiar with the bathing habits of Medieval/Renaissance Englishmen. I know that the Germans and the Italians bathed frequently though.

Some years ago I read a great YA novel called Journey To Matacumbe (sic?) by Robert Lewis Taylor, set in the years following the American Civil War.  At one point in the story a female character gets her period and can’t do anything about it, since everyone is camping out in the wild, on the run from the KKK.  One of the men in the party hands her a plug of chewing tobacco, and she stalks off into the woods and does something mysterious with it . . . I’ve often wondered what she did with that chewing tobacco—did she use it as a tampon?  Or did eating it somehow dry up her menses?  And what was the author’s source for this?

I’d guess that using it as a tampon is about all she could have done (I’ve read Victorian sources that claim women who lived in coastal towns used seaweed much the same way) and I have no idea what the author’s source might be.

What about biblical allusions?

As I’m not fluent in Herbrew or Aramaic I have no real idea what “biblical allusion” actually says.

The point about the cold is a good one. Indeed, before the advent of central heating, everyone was cold in the winter. The rich may have been less cold than the poor, but they weren’t warm. Anyone who has ever lived through a winter power outage and tried to heat the house (or even just a room) with a fire in the fireplace knows whereof I speak.

Have to take issue with this, sorry.  I live in a seventeenth-century farmhouse and we heat almost exclusively with wood in the winter (Connecticut, not the coldest place ever, but we’ve had some bloody frigid winters in recent years.)  Lemme tell ya, you get a decent, properly built fire going in the main fireplace or wood stove, and it will drive you RIGHT THE HELL OUT.  My signifigant other and his son routinely wander around the house in their underwear.  Granted, we’re probably a lot better insulated than most medieval castles or wattle-and-daub hovels, but we certainly don’t freeze unless somebody is careless and allows the fire to go out.

Apropos Roman baths, oiling and use of strigils:  of course soap is itself an oil-based substance, traditionally based on tallow.  And yes, the Roman bathing ritual involved exercise, sweating in a steam room, oiling, scraping and water—  finishing off with a cold plunge bath to close the pores.  By the way, there are one or two Roman references to tooth-cleaning powder.

Pre-modern methods of dealing with menstruation:  I know I have come across an archaeological record of blood-soaked rags excavated in an early-Medieval (possibly Viking) cesspit, but unfortunately I don’t have the reference (my period, excuse the pun, is Classical, not medieval, so I don’t keep detailed records of sources dealing with later eras).  Normally menstrual rags would be washed and re-used, as they were well into the 20th century, and as textiles tend not to survive well archaeologically, evidence is usually restricted to written sources, which are unlikely to go into detail on this kind of subject.

Meat and spices again.  Most meat has to be ‘hung’ for a while after slaughter to be palatable.  When absolutely freshly killed, it is impossibly tough.  Game, in particular, was often deliberately hung to within a hairsbreadth of spoiling, and the resultant pungent flavour was prized.  It is simply staggeringly unlikely that imported spices would be used to ‘disguise’ any unwanted flavour, because anyone rich enough to have the spices was also rich enough to reject bad food.  This is a matter of plain logic.  Also, Medieval cooks knew what they were doing.  Classical cooks knew what they were doing.  Preservation of meat by smoking and/or salting was a very ancient technique.

And just as a final comment:  I have used earth closets, lived in houses without electricity, let alone central heating, and have often had to wash down using quite small quantities of water because I had no access to a bath or shower.  It is not difficult to keep clean in those circumstances— it’s just a bit more effort than most of us have to expend these days.

It’s been forever since I read it, but I do recall that Jude Deveraux mentioned some medieval nastiness in “A Knight in Shining Armor.” Specifically I recall baby swaddling where they didn’t take the baby out of the clothes but just let them live in their own excrement.  Don’t know how accurate she was, but yeah, I have wondered what people did before Huggies or even plastic diaper covers and washing machines, LOL. 

As to periods, if you figure that girls were getting married young and knocked up quickly due to lack of contraception, then being either pregnant or breastfeeding on a regular basis, dying young, and also being subject to the effects of malnutrition and famine - I wonder how many periods did a woman have in her lifetime?

Hmm…this is interesting…

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2252/who-invented-tampons

OK, I’m totally cracking up here. This woman seems to think that women just went around and bled all over the place! LOL.

http://www.ask.com/bar?q=what+did+women+use+for+their+menses?&page=1&qsrc=0&ab=0&u=http://www.mum.org/pastgerm.htm

Elizabeth~
  We have a woodstove too, and we have to open our windows in the middle of winter.  You’re right, it does get toasty hot. 

  But…woodstoves are dramatically more efficient than fireplaces (although you did mention a fireplace too)  But even our modern fireplaces are better than the huge, inefficient ones they had, especially early on.  And until about the mid-12th c, they didn’t even technically have fireplaces, often just a center trough or grate, with openings in the roof above, with ‘vents’ to keep out rain, etc.

  Also burning in a fireplace, esp their huge ones, takes a lot of fuel.  Wood, peat, manure, whatever.  You’re feeding cook fires and hearth fires, and you’re burning a lot of fuel. A lot of money/work.  So, I don’t know that they spend a lot of time building a roaring fire for heat alone, once the meal was eaten.  And then, even thought it might be hot nearby, as soon as the fire burned down lower, the heat would quickly dissipate.

  And as you say, there’s the insulation issue in a castle.  Which is a huge issue. Stone walls aren’t conducive to warmth.  I do wonder about the small peasant wattle-and-daub huts tho.  Being earthen, I suspect they’d hold in heat rather well . . . Anyone know?

Re: biblical rags, I just spoke to a rabbi.

Rachel apparently claimed she couldn’t get up not because the cushion was absorbing, but because she was too weak as a result of her period to rise. Interesting.

Apparently, the Talmud mentions what women used then (this is around 200 CE) was a type of cloth that was both external and internal. We didn’t go into more detail than that, but interesting.

He did not back up my claims of sheep. :)
(sings)Ba ba black sheep, could you hold still for 4-6 days…

Everything You Must Know About Tampons (1981), Nancy Friedman says:

[T]here is evidence of tampon use throughout history in a multitude of cultures. The oldest printed medical document, papyrus ebers, refers to the use of soft papyrus tampons by Egyptian women in the fifteenth century B.C. Roman women used wool tampons. Women in ancient Japan fashioned tampons out of paper, held them in place with a bandage, and changed them 10 to 12 times a day. Traditional Hawaiian women used the furry part of a native fern called hapu’u; and grasses, mosses and other plants are still used by women in parts of Asia and Africa.

I’d want to see her book and review her documentation. Most of the early usage of supposed tampons are in fact pessiaries for delivering medication, NOT feminine hygiene products (I’ve not found any documentation for tampons before the 20th century, just folktale type stories from the Victorian era).

OK, I’m totally cracking up here. This woman seems to think that women just went around and bled all over the place! LOL.

Which would lead one to think that you’d find stained shifts in abundance, when in fact you don’t . . .

  And second the shout-out to Sharon Kay Penman, who writes very detailed, meticulously researched medieval historicals…you won’t find any HEAs in her books. 

You do see HEAs in her books, but always for minor characters

Not true!  “Here Be Dragons” has a HEA for the main couple, and that was surprisingly taken from real life.  ;)  I think that might be her only HEA, though, dealing with her real historical characters. 

Also, here’s a quick medieval tidbit (circa 1370s) that I picked up from reading Allison Weir’s “Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford” (a.k.a. about Anya Seton’s “Katherine”).  A man who publicly held a woman’s bridle (for riding) was making a very bold proclamation of ownership over that woman; the idea was that the rider being led was a captive, already having surrendered her body to the man holding her bridle.  Such a gesture, between an unmarried couple, was seen as scandalous.

Don’t forget the dying. For obvious reasons, I suppose, there’s never all that much dying of young(ish) women in romance novels. But something like 25% of women died from pregnancy or birth-related causes, and you only have to wander through an old church in England, for example, to see how many women died at 21, or 27, or 32. So, bit of a downer, or course, but there were lots of painful, messy, and un-narratively satisfying deaths.

And one more fun fact about periods: at least in the 17th and 18th centuries, most women didn’t pass menarche until around 15, and the average age for marriage was the mid-20s (that’s for England, according the the Cambridge population study something or the other). And with all the hard manual labor and varying diet, it’s pretty unlikely that most women menstruated regularly (one of the reasons it was so hard to tell if you were pregnant in the 17th and 18th centuries—you couldn’t be really sure until the quickening, more than a few months into the pregnancy). The late age to marry of most women (and men were mostly in their late 20s) is in contrast to the nobles and gentry, who were much more likely to marry young (14 year old bride, anyone?). You didn’t marry till you could afford it, which meant sometime in your twenties.

And on a totally unrelated note: there were no confessionals in the middles ages. Confessionals are a counter-reformation development. Before that, confession was supposed to be a somewhat public affair. Private confession certainly happened, but that was more like you and the priest in a room alone, and it was discouraged, since it opened the possibility of the priest soliciting sex (for ex) from the parishioner. Better was to confess in plain sight, a little out of hearing from others in the church. So no more confessionals in medievals (and no pews either, for most of the medieval period, churches were empty and you stood around for mass. Since you probably only heard sermons a few times a year, you didn’t need to sit for hours most Sundays, or whenever you went to church).

Nadia~
  Good point, about not so many menstrual cycles when you’re pregnant (and maybe nursing) a lot!  I suppose it’s our virginal heroine’s we’re so worried about.  ;-)

  And no, medieval mothers did not let their children live in their own excrement when swaddled.  I will let others who may know more speak to this, but I’d suggest they did what people do now, generally: linen or other material, & wash ‘em.  And I’d expect people to let their kids go without a lot, too.  When they’re the right age, often, that’s the best potty training method around.  :-)

Evidently there is a book out there called Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health which says that menstruation was considered unclean…so nothing could touch the blood.  Here is a recipe for a homemade tampon from that book…It must go in the “privy part”. 

Take half a drachma of triacle diatesseron, the same amounts of cockle flour and myrrh, and grind them together with bull’s gall in which savin or rue has been rotted. Then cover the mixture with cotton and thereof make a suppository as large as your little finger and put it in your privy member, but first annoint it with clean honey and oil together, sprinkle powder of scammony on it, and put it in the privy member; one can do the same with lupin root, and that is much better.

Sounds lovely.

Most of the early usage of supposed tampons are in fact pessiaries for delivering medication, NOT feminine hygiene products

Yes: including contraceptive mixtures, at least in the Roman period.  A wool tampon soaked in various mixtures of oils and acids (think salad dressing) would have been quite effective both as a physical barrier and as a spermicide.

I must reiterate that ‘rags’ were still being used for sanitary protection in many areas well into the 20th century.  My mother used cloth pads, which were washed and re-used, in her adolescence: she was born in 1915, so we are speaking of the early 1930s, when disposable sanitary towels and tampons were readily commercially available.

Meat and spices again.  Most meat has to be ‘hung’ for a while after slaughter to be palatable…..It is simply staggeringly unlikely that imported spices would be used to ‘disguise’ any unwanted flavour, because anyone rich enough to have the spices was also rich enough to reject bad food.  This is a matter of plain logic. .

You make good point AgTigress.  Of course, there’s no reason to assume the spices and herbs used to season a dish need to be exotic, tho, in order to ‘disguise’ an unwanted flavor, be it meat or other.  I’m not sure anyone has suggested only imported spices would be useful.  Common, more easily accessible, locally grown seasonings were available, effective, and used all the time in cooking.

I’m not sure I’m 100% sold on the argument that just because someone had money, and a food was a a little ‘gone,’ they’d reject it.  We’re not talking limitless wealth, and meat is a pretty valuable resource.

Great conversations!

@AgTigress: My mother was born in 1917, my father in 1907, his sister in 1905. I well remember both my mother and aunt talking about washing and reusing their rags.

Speaking to the totally unrelated note about how churches housed nothing really, and everyone stood around; though many people hated the movie, Ladyhawk (which I love!) did the best representation of the interior of churches for many centuries. Even the bishop held the bible/scroll/whateverhewasreadingfrom rather than have some type of podium to set it on.

However, many knights would shave their heads - not because of lice, but to keep from pulling it out when removing chain mail.

Whimper.

My scalp hurts ...

There is an excellent history of women’s knowledge of contraception by John M. Riddle—two volumes, one titled “Eve’s Herbs:  A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West,” and “Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance.” They are well-researched and fascinating.

Also, re: the plug of tobacco, nicotine is a nerve poison. I imagine you would get very sick (if not die) if you chewed and swallowed an entire plug of tobacco.

Cyranetta:  Dog poop was used in tanning leather. (Don’t ask why only dog, because I don’t know).  Urine was used for bleaching (when boiled it becomes a mild form of lye), for cloth fulling ( to remove the grease from the wool) and as a fixative when dying cloth.  I read somewhere that the Romans cleaned their teeth with urine. which gives a whole new perspective on those perfect white teeth the hero and heroine usually have in medievals.

@ Randi
[OK, I’m totally cracking up here. This woman seems to think that women just went around and bled all over the place! LOL]

Right.  You cut flax out in the marsh for a whole long, hot day.  You’ve beaten it out and soaked it and stripped out the fiber.  You spent a week twistng thread and weaving.  You bleached the cloth in the sun for a month.  You cut your pattern and spent another two days sewing.
Now you have your linen shift.

All that work . . .
seems to me you’d be bright enough to come up with some way not to bleed on it.

Not medieval, but I was at the National History Museum in Washington DC this May and there was a fascinating display of finds including human bones, from the rediscovered Jamestown colony area.  One of the skulls had teeth from which the enamal had been essentially scrubbed off the front teeth.  The wear appeared to have gone down almost to the pulp..  One of the ways teeth were cleaned involved rubbing the teeth with tobacco ash.  The silica in the ash would wear away the enamal.  Considering the amount of pain the owner of the skull must have inflicted on herself, she had to have a problem with OCD. 

This is a great exhibit and I urge anyone who has a chance to go see it.  There was even a mystery skeleton that was discovered in the cellar of a house built by early settlers.  They did a good job showing logically how conclusions were arrived at by the scientists who investigated the site.

Let me 3rd or 4th Roberta Gellis.  One book that I reread often is MASQUES OF GOLD— The title has nothing to do with the book other than the fact that the heroine is the widow of a recently murdered goldsmith.  The hero is a knight of a minor family—2nd or 3rd son, who has been hired by the Mayor of London to try to keep peace between various factions on the streets—early 1200’s.  There’s a murder mystery, King John,  politics, lots of history and a pretty good love story with a HEA ending. 

Unfortunately out of print.

When talking about what could kill ya in the Middle Ages though, I think we often forget that the lack of antibiotics means that someone has probably developed antibodies to a lot of bugs just to survive to adulthood. 

If you don’t mind a really, really depressing story, Connie Willis’ The Doomsday Book is a great time travel/sf story.

Common, more easily accessible, locally grown seasonings were available, effective, and used all the time in cooking.

  (my emphasis)

Absolutely.  Onions, garlic, parsley and many, many other herbs were grown and used, both in medicinal and culinary contexts, in medieval Europe.  Even saffron was grown in England. 

However, black pepper and long pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg, cloves, ginger and probably other pungent spices did not grow in Europe.  They had to be imported from India and the Middle East, a journey that ensured that they were classed as luxury items.

Food that was highly seasoned and spiced in a complex way was considered sophisticated and desirable, just as it had been in the Classical world.  There is no need to introduce the red herring of spoilage to account for its popularity in medieval cuisine.  People simply liked spicy dishes (and sweet ones, too).  I like hot curries just because I like hot curries, the interwoven flavours and the zing of chillies, not because I hope that the complex flavours will disguise the fact that the meat is off! 

:-)

I read somewhere that the Romans cleaned their teeth with urine.

I have not encountered this information, and I have read Pliny (the most likely source) on dental matters, so I remain to be convinced.  Of course, as others have said, urine certainly has many practical uses, the most obvious one being in the bleaching and dying of cloth.

It is perfectly possible to clean the surface of the teeth pretty efficiently using a cloth over one’s finger.  For the interstices between the teeth, of course one uses a toothpick, made of wood, feather quill or metal (there are numerous silver and bronze examples surviving from the Roman period, many of them very decorative items).  In many cultures various types of twig have been used as toothbrushes, sometimes from plants that had, or were believed to have, cleansing properties;  tooth powders or pastes are merely optional extras.  Pliny does mention a tooth-powder made of ground burnt bone and herbs, but the implication is that it is good for treating gum disease rather than everyday cleaning.

Another aside:  while many industrial activities were sited well away from settlement sites because of smoke, noise and other undesirable factors, tanneries were always notorious for their bad smell, in part due to the use of faeces in the processing.  I am thinking of the Roman period again, but this applies both before that era, in prehistory, and afterwards, right through the medieval and early modern periods, as well.

Excuse typo above - dying for dyeing!  I seem to have lost the ‘edit’ function that used to be there immediately after posting.  Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?

i am irreverently (and probably irrelevantly) reminded of that scene in the movie “idiocracy” where the protagonist is laughed to high heaven by everyone because he wants to save the dying plants using “water, like from the toilets”.

W/regards to the longbow/plate armor debate:

Medievals do tend to be overwhelmingly English/Scottish (Why is that, by the way? I would love to see some things set in Poland, which was quite cultured at the time…) so I suppose that’s where longbow information comes in. But I always thought that outside of Agincourt, a knight wasn’t really likely to run into a longbow: no other battles that I know of involved the English yeomanry in significant numbers. And even there, I remember reading, the high casualties that are traditionally attributed to the longbow may have resulted from the French knights and horses getting swamped down and even drowning in mudpits. Part of the logic for that, I think, was that shooting the French knights made much less sense than taking them for ransom, so historians thought many of the deaths must have been accidental.

Anyway, yes. I guess what I’m speculating is that if you only had one major battle in several centuries with longbows, AND if as a medieval romance hero, the longbows were probably on your side, then I guess it didn’t make much sense to design your wardrobe around its ability to resist a longbow.

Wow, very educational thread. 

But… do not read while eating dinner.   

Blergh….

@ Kris Kennedy -
As you know, clothes were expensive and fancy clothes were really expensive.  Motheaten is not just a term for shabby - moth larvae can go through woolens like butter, and will also eat velvet and furs and pretty much any kind of keratin based material. 
The ammonia from the garderobe was used as a form of deterrent for expensive clothes that were not worn daily. 

@ Kalen Hughes -
You mentioned seaweed used as sanitary protection - this is anecdotal, but my great granny came from the outer, outer Hebrides, and apparently her mother used it, and also herself although less so, since she went to follow the herring fleet and out in the wider world there was easier access to rags for use.

So fun Kris!!!!  Fabulous post :)

Re: stink.  I remember reading somewhere, sometime that families involved in using woad tended to be inbred because of the stench involved in the dying process.  People from outside the woad families wouldn’t marry in because they couldn’t take it.  I’m thinking that what I read was a reference to pre-medieval (maybe bronze age?) Europe, but I’m open to being wrong.  (Not being an historian at all, I didn’t feel the need to make note of my source.)

Elizabeth Hoyt’s “To Seduce a Sinner” mentions the heroine’s extremely painful cramps during her period (setting is mid-18th century). The hero, while a bachelor was quite the rake about town, had no idea about the length of a woman’s period, the discomfort, etc. He ends up questioning his wife about it, much to her dismay and embarrassment, and comes away with a greater respect for what women go through once a month.

BTW, this is a very enjoyable series—The Four Horsemen.

certain establishments (tanneries? soapmakers?—I said the details were hazy) had receptacles at the door for urine deposits, since urine was used in whatever they were doing.

In one of the Clan of the Cave Bear sequels (and in a couple of Native American novels I’ve read) urine was collected and used to bleach deer skin white or near-white.  So I would expect that it was tanneries who had urine collection vats at the door.

As far as personal/body odor—there are many period recipes for perfumes and “sweet waters,”  as well as formulae for sweetening the breath and cleaning the teeth, so it’s clear they were conscious of how they smelled and wished to smell better (even if they didn’t necessarily understand or have access to the most direct way to accomplish that). One good introductory source is at

http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/oil&water;.html

Re: The Hawk.

Modern day falconers do this as well, keeping the hawk or falcon inside with you is a good way to socialize (ie ‘man’) them during the training process.  It is not unusual to walk into a modern falconer’s home and see a falcon on a bow perch or block in the middle of the living room floor (this also teaches the dogs to respect the bird, get too annoying and they get footed in the face).  Modern falconers put down a layer of newspaper of course, which works great with falcons who poop straight down, but not so well with hawks who can shoot their’s six feet out horizontally.

And honestly, it’s no worse then owning a parrot, most of them aren’t potty trained either. Bird poop is very high in uric acid which makes it close to sterile, so it’s not like it’s unhealthy to have it in the house.

For another perspective on menstruation - Japanese women in the pre-modern era didn’t usually wear underwear as such, so that it was easy to lift the kimono and go to the toilet. When a woman had a period, however, she would take a long cloth and wrap it around her hips and between her legs, sometimes putting extra rags in if needed. The best colour for this cloth was red, because red is considered to relieve menstrual pain.

Hmm, so much to talk about! Gosh.

Concerning mentruation - Yes, I agree, there’s no evidence of pads! But I seem to recall in Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlocked by Janet Arnold (massive tome, and I don’t want to drag it out) there is a few references in her wardrobe accounts of a kind belt/strap, which isn’t elaborated on much, but is assummed to be holder for cloth clouts during menstruation.
Also in the medieval Herjolfsnes Greenland finds, something that looked like a sanitary belt was found on a female corpse.

Pre-1600, there’s extensive discussion in medieval textx, secular and religious, concerning menstruation but none about the actual items used for hygiene. It’s reasonable to believe that cloths of some kind were used, and would be referred to as menstrual clouts. A Muslim text, the Muthir al-Ghiram (circa 1351) mentions menstrual clouts allegedly being placed on a dung heap at a Muslim sacred site: “the Christain women were wont to throw their menstrual cloths and clouts in the place so that there was a pile of them there.”
Isaiah 64:6 was usually translated as “all our righteousness are as filthy menstrual clouts” in the Middle Ages.

Tampons? No evidence. They had medicinal ‘pessaries” to be inserted for female complaints, as seen from the text Trotula:

‘But if the womb becomes so indurated that with these aids the menses are not able to be drawn out, take gall of a bull….and let them be mixed with juice of wild celery or hyssop. And let carded wool be dipped therein, and then let it be pressed to that it is hard and rigid…and let it be inserted.
  OR let there be made another pessary in the shape of a male member, and let it be hollow, and inside there let the medecine be placed and let it be inserted.”

Now then…the idea that a medicine should be shaped like a man’s member makes me giggle, and the ingredients don’t include urine (boys urine being very prized for its purity) or any nasty stuff. So provided you don’t leave it there a long time, you are likely to avoid Toxic shock syndrome.

Baths - I think the Christians rebelling against decadent Rome did us wrong - they took bathing as sign of sinfulness and the Church continued to maintain that view. Sin! Decadence! No wonder I loves me a bath. But depending on the place and season, bathing was probably done more frequently than our notions of medieval life would believe. I’ve often run across medieval manuscripts with illuminations of bathers, and it actually looked quite convivial - food was being served, men and women in seperate tubs were talking and laughing. Looked like fun, actually.

I also ran across that sage tooth scrub! I have a nice redaction for it as well. There’s another using pepper, peppermint and salt.
For sweetening the breath confits were popular if you could afford the spices - just like modern confits, they are seeds of fennel, caraway and anise, coated with sugar.

But if any would-be medieval authors are looking for that trace of authenticity and need a good overview of hygiene and hair care/colouring, de-lousing, bathing, toothcare, scents, I’d recommend The Compleat Anachronist, Issue no. 136, 2007. Well documented, if you need go go back to original sources, and had recipes for items.

Gods forgive me for posting hugely on this already long discussion!

And forgive me again!

I read somewhere that Romans (and maybe Greeks?) didn’t use water for cleansing. That they, instead, oiled themselves up and then… oh what’s the word?...took like a flat edged object and…holy hell I’m screwing this up…squeegeed..OK NOT the right term, but hopefully you’ll get the visual…themselves

That’d be a strygil. They bathed, yes, and the strygil was kinda the pumice or loofah alternative for Roman, Greeks AND Egyptians.

Someone mentioned about having ‘dirty’ sex without washing hands, and who knew where they’d been? But hand washing evidence for meals at least is quite common - the protocol for Henry VIII’s meals can be found in “All the King’s Cooks”. Quite the procedure for towel and basin being brought round to guests.

Platina’s De Honesta Voluotatae et Valetundine (circa 1470) has a list of what to do upon getting up in the morning - wash your hands and face, blow your nose, spit, brush your hair. There’s three other sources of treatises on manners from pre-1600’s I could mention, but they are all about the same.

Maybe whole body washing wasn’t as common as in modern times, but there was hygiene of a sort. There are some lovely ewers in museums, which were used at feast.

Hairy legs! In time periods where we know there was female depilitation going on (those high foreheads! Those thin brows) there’s not much about that. There’s a scary recipe for a chemical hair removal using arsenic sulfide and quicklime in the Trotula (circa 1180-1200). Shaving was popular for women in Roman times - in medieval, there’s not much written down. Implements like medieval tweezers, earscoops and toothpicks as personal hygiene items are common enough in museum collections, so we know they at least plucked…something. And scooped. And picked.

The process for which urine was chiefly collected in Roman cities was the fulling of woollen cloth.  The ammonia in the urine dissolves natural greases, and thickens and plumps up the fabric.  As I mentioned, urine was also used in many other textile processes, not only in Classical Antiquity but up till very recent times.  Healthy, fresh, urine is not at all disgusting;  like so many other things, it becomes noxious only when stale (excuse another inadvertent pun).

Depilation:  razors were made as early as the Bronze Age;  we assume that then, as later, their principal use was for the shaving of male facial hair.

Shaving was popular for women in Roman times

Well, yes and no.  The removal of body hair, specifically pubic hair, was common during the Roman Imperial period, but it was done by plucking with tweezers rather than shaving.  Tweezers, along with ear-scoops, nail-cleaners and toothpicks, were part of the standard grooming kit of any Roman, even in remote provinces such as Britannia, and hundreds of thousands of them survive.

Ooh what a great thread.  Some of my favourite subjects, and stuff I researched when I was a teenager for my A level History.  But I’ve forgotten a lot of sources, so here goes with what I can remember (I’ve been making notes as I read through.  Yep, I have no life).  I wrote this big huge long answer, so I’m going to split it up a bit.

Sword weight is a common fallacy—yes these guys were strong but not that strong!  However I have seen cavalry swords which are huge—about seven or eight feet long—designed to be used on horseback.  There’s one hanging in the chapel at Windsor, and I asked the priest about it.  Unfortunately I can’t remember which king it belonged to.

I’ve seen a man turn a full cartwheel in a suit of armour.  You had to be able to move.  It’s not like the Batsuit.  But hot?  My god yes.  I went to a jousting exhibition a few years ago on the hottest day of the year (around 100F) and saw the knights later in the bar, armourless, dripping with sweat and downing pint after pint of water.  I think they’d have preferred beer, but it’s harder to joust when you’re drunk…

Health, infections, bladder problems etc: firstly that medieval medicine was based on the four humours and their associated temperaments (sanguine—hot and moist, choleric—hot and dry, melancholic—cold and dry and plegmatic—cold and moist).  Correcting an imbalance in these humours was the aim of medicine.  To cure a fever, which would be hot, lettuce was often prescribed, as it was cold.  I remember using that in one of the very early (and very crap) books I wrote.

And cranberries weren’t widely known in Europe at the time.  So not likely to be used for bladder infections even if they did have the right humour.

MF

Washing: it’s a little out of the period, but James I regarded washing as very unhealthy and would only dab at the tips of his fingers with a damp cloth.  He was considered to be pretty disgusting, though.  The old line about Elizabeth I bathing four times a year ‘whether she needed it or not!’ really refers to her filling up a bathtub and having a good soak.  She’d have washed pretty regularly—or perhaps had someone wash her!  It’s what we’d call a sponge bath.  Although I’ve just read that Henry VIII had plumbed-in bathrooms at Whitehall and Hampton Court.

My bible on Tudor life, Alison Sim’s The Tudor Housewife
, explains all about cleanliness, and offers the example that Henry VIII understood how cleanliness and health were positively linked: he ordered that everything that went near his precious son was scrupulously clean, washed with soap daily, the whole apartment swept every day, all clothing and toys to be very clean.  Didn’t help the poor kid much, but I don’t think hygiene was the problem.

The Tudors washed their hands before each meal as they ate with their hands (a knife, and sometimes a spoon, but no forks of course).  Between courses they’d wash their hands again (of course we’re talking people rich enough to have several courses).

And a little more on hygeine:

According to Sim
, “everyone, whether rich or poor, wore a linen garment called a chemise or shirt,” and that “anyone who could possibly manage it would have a clean chemise every day.”  And yes, urine was used in cleaning, up until the seventeenth century when lime was used instead to bleach fabrics.

Since laundry was quite a trial, I sincerely dispute the idea that women bled onto their clothes at that time of the month.  A discussion on one of my author loops turned up the unfortunate evidence stated above that there’s not much reference to what was used—rags seem most likely. 

Anne Laurence in WOMEN IN ENGLAND, 1500-1760disputes the idea that women rarely menstruated, although she believes the average age of menarche was later than it is now—probably closer to 17.  Since all births were recorded, it’s easy to see that they were usually 2-3 years apart—so hardly a perpetual cycle of childbirth (although there are records of noblewomen giving birth in nearly every one of their childbearing years.  You had to beat the odds of child mortality.  Queen Anne had fourteen children, and survived them all—that’s why we had to get some German cousins in to run the country in 1714).

Finally, marriage didn’t take place as early as is believed for most women.  The average age was 27.  Nobles married younger, sometimes when they were still children, but it would have been a political alliance and the new bride and groom wouldn’t be expected to sleep together until they were of age (specifically, until she’d begun her periods).

Okay, I’ve been sitting here about an hour now, and it’s lunchtime.  Here endeth the lesson.

A bit of more ‘recent’ history with the story behind it;

My fathers parents, grandparents and great grandparents came here from Cornwall in the late 1800’s. They settled in the upper peninsula of MI. His father mined coal.

They had no running water, no indoor toilets, an old wood stove, pretty much the same living conditions they’d left behind. All their water came from the nearby creek.

They all sponge bathed. Every one of them. And his greatgrandparents were born between 1800 and 1810. My dad sponge bathed too, right up until he died at 93 (I was a late baby, he was almost 50 when I came along). The aides at the assisted facility kept trying to shove him in the shower all the time, he kept trying to tell them he’d already ‘bathed’. lol

I never thought anything of it and just always considered it another way to stay clean. Every one of his family for 5 generations at least lived to be over 90 so I can’t see it was detrimental in any way.

Ooh!  I’ve just remembered reading that men didn’t, or more to the point couldn’t, shave as closely as they do today.  The first clean shaves as we’d recognise them came in with the Regency era.

The thing is, I can’t remember where I read it—I’m pretty sure it was somewhere reputable.  And I can’t remember why they couldn’t shave closely.  You could get a pretty keen edge on a blade in any era—was it more to do with lather or softening skin to open the pores and get a closer shave?

Can anyone verify this?

When talking about what could kill ya in the Middle Ages though, I think we often forget that the lack of antibiotics means that someone has probably developed antibodies to a lot of bugs just to survive to adulthood.

Having recently finished the lovely For My Lady’s Heart by Laura Kinsale, I just wanted to mention the hero’s immunity to bubonic plague, and point out that his descendants would be immune to HIV/AIDS.  It has to do with lacking a certain type of cell that the virus “sticks” to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/highlights/011025_ccr5.shtml

Re: Armor and Weapons

Mostly, it was the English Longbow.

Seriously, those English archers were scary. Shooting arrows was a hobby for them, as was seeing who could make the bow with the heaviest draw. Pulling a hundred pounds was nothing to them. I wouldn’t even want to guess what the upper limit was.

Also, yeah, armor is heavy…but if you spend extensive time wearing it, you’ll adapt. And probably put on some pounds of muscle.

It’s sort of like the people who work their way up to smashing cinderblocks and bricks. You start off by pounding on hard objects repeatedly, which hurts because you’re actually crunching your own bones so they’ll compress and become denser when your body freaks and tries to repair itself. It’s painful and time intensive, but by the time you NEED to break a block, or pull a bow that’d make Odysseus go “DAYUM” or whatever, you’re up to the task.

And life back then was hard. Working manual labor (and what labor wasn’t, back then? Even plowing behind a horse means you have to pay attention to what you’re doing) all day, every day, will definitely toughen you up. Same goes for practicing with weapons in full armor.

Cat:  I don’t know about the ‘close shave’ question, but it is certainly true that you can get a fine sharp edge on iron and bronze, as well as steel.  I would be quite surprised if a professional barber could not achieve a really smooth, close shave on a man using the equivalent of what we now call a cut-throat razor— that is, an open blade— at any period,  even in antiquity.  However, if a man were shaving himself, it seems more than possible that he might, out of cautiousness, not try to get too close.  The need to put the skin under tension, and all the awkward angles of skin and blade, make it rather skilled process.

Safety razors, by tensioning the skin and keeping the blade at the right angle, probably made it easier for the do-it-yourself shaver.

:-)

/delurk

This is an incredibly interesting discussion! There’s such a wealth of knowledge in the Bitchery…

Re: shaving, I remember that somewhere in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth series, set in the later days of Roman Britain, one Roman hero (a legionary?) lets his beard grow when he can’t “shave” with a pumice stone, because shaving himself the British way - an open razor and cold goose grease - is a pain in the ass.

Captcha: began55. I wonder when men began shaving themselves in Western Europe? The silky-smooth shave you give yourself at home must be a fairly modern innovation…

@AgTigress on supposed Roman toothbrushing with urine: Catullus 37 and 39 both mention a Spanish man named Egnatius who does this and claims it is a common Spanish custom.  Given the derisive tone of the poem, though, it’s hard to imagine contemporary Italians cleaned their teeth with urine.  It is supposed to have made Egnatius’s smile exceptionally shiny and white, though!

In re the weight of armour ...

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=510691

I’m not knowledgeable myself, but the arguments that plate armour, at 60 or so pounds, was comparable to the full pack of modern soldiers is interesting. 

Hmmm ... seems to me a fully-dressed Victorian matron was carrying something like 40 pounds of clothing ....

But I always thought that outside of Agincourt, a knight wasn’t really likely to run into a longbow: no other battles that I know of involved the English yeomanry in significant numbers.

Actually, prior to Agincourt the French knights ran into the English longbow men at Crecy and Poitier, which is why they knew to fear them at Agincourt.  Part of the reason that the French ended up drowning in the muck during the battle was they were keeping their visors closed as a defense against the archers.

Bernard Cornwell’s new(ish) book Agincourt is a very accurate, entertaining and gritty depiction of the battle and the era.

Cass, thank you so much for the Catullus reference.  The context indicates to me that this is an example of the regrettably common Roman habit of making fun of the weird habits of funny foreigners.
:-D
Had the custom been at all widespread, I doubt if Pliny would have missed it.  I think we may assume that, if it was done at all,  it was an individual idiosyncrasy rather than a cultural norm.  It might well have bleached the teeth over time, but on the whole, I think I’d rather have less-than-dazzling teeth.

What an interesting discussion!

I just finished reading the first 3 books of Leo Frankowski’s “Conrad Stargard” time-travel series set in medieval Poland.  (The 1500’s, I think).  Lots of interesting details about medieval life including sleeping together, menses, clothing, bathing.  I don’t know how accurate they are, but the details ‘felt right’ to me.

There is also a wealth of information about medieval life in T.H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone”...one of my all-time favorite books.

Diana Gabaldon’s books, although set later in time, have an authentic ‘feel’ as well.

Betina Krahn’s “The Wife Test” has some really interesting details about medieval cooking and spices.  The other ‘Test’ books are fun and interesting.

And I definitely second the recommendation of Connie Willi’s “Doomsday Book” set during the Black Plague.

I’ll second the Gellis, Willis and Gabaldon recs and add Dunnett and Madeline Hunter to the list of those authentic in their time period.

Security word is ‘doing98’.  Not recommended, akshully.

I admit I haven’t read many medieval romances but wondered how often burnings—of heretics and witches—appears. Seems like that would be a real mood killer, the smell of burning human flesh.

Urine, especially that of pregnant women, was used to help indigo dye fast. It still is. I remember one Pennsic when the word went out “If you’re pregnant, come piss in the dye vat!”

Still on urine, it gets really pungent if several people use the same clump of weeds (or patch of asphalt). Any trip through the truck parking of a truck stop will quickly school you in this odor.

Even a single hot day with heavy perspiration leaves a person pungent. (I know several fighters who don’t bathe for the whole of Lilies War)

I don’t mind body hair, if it’s appropriate. Your ancient Egyptians shaved everything with those half-moon bronze razors. From the War of the Roses on, women shaved their heads way back. The typical 12th century Saxon haircut was a bowl that sat above the ears and the rest shaved. Body hair could be shaved, pubic hair frequently was (resulting in a need for merkins).

Just some randomness foillows:

“There’s no other way to be King, alive and fifty all at once!”

King John reigned 16 years and died at the age of 48, a old, tired man. He was the fourth son and never expected to be king.

MB~
  I haven’t heard of Leo Frankowski or his “Conrad Stargard,” time-travel set in medieval Poland.  Good reading?  I too loved Sword in the Stone when I was a kid—haven’t thought of it for years.  Think I’ll hunt it down.

Angelia~
LOL on the shout-out to pregnant women to ‘come piss in a dye vat!”  That’s actually an element in my next book.  And imo, John brought on much that stress himself.  Likely fed by threads of mental illness and excess that did not help his mood or immune system.  :-)  But his son, Henry III, an unremarkable king, ruled for over 55 years.  And John’s grandson, Edward I, a more remarkable king, ruled for 35 years.  So, John could bred ‘em, if he couldn’t join them.

Permalinking this blog for beginning future research . . .

Great conversations, all!

Hi Kris Kennedy :-)

Yes, the Frankowski books were pretty good—I enjoyed them.  They are kind of a male fantasy what with the inequal gender roles, so don’t read them for romance!  I’m only 3 books down on the 7-book series, so some romance may come in there down the road.  They are kind of like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain only modernized (of course) and set in medieval Poland.  The premise is that an engineer is plopped down unsuspectingly in that era and must industrialize and organize Poland quickly since he knows that the Mongols are set to invade in 5 years and wreak havoc and destruction.  So he must survive in a hostile environment and he brings the industrial revolution and socialism to that ancient era.  It’s really an interesting and odd concept.

I forgot to mention Gordon R. Dickson’s “Dragon Knight” series which are also (sort-of) time-travel with a fantasy rather than a sci-fi look at living in the middle ages.  Some interesting thoughts about a modern character being forced to live that life although more light-hearted and maybe not quite so scholarly in nature?

I remember a Roberta Gellis novel, whose title escapes me at this moment, where a newlywed couple got the bed to themselves for the wedding night, but knew they were going to have to share from then on, and after that they did their foolin’ around in the barn and sundry Other Locations (at least in the book. One recalls reading about Marie de Medici and how she used to entertain her lovers while her young son, the three year old who would grow up to be Louis XIII, was still in it. Well, that explains a lot about _him_). Makes the barn look better, save for the stray cow pat.

Back to the spices for a moment.

According to a paper I read in college, there’s an evolutionary reason for a cultural taste for spices.  It’s not to hide the taste of the spoiled meat; rather, it’s that the herbs and spices in question included chemicals that were rather bad for some of the bacteria that made meat a little past its expiry a bad idea.  Add spices, decrease chance of getting sick.  It also explained why we get greater strength and frequency of spices in hot and/or humid parts of the world; the meat there spoiled faster, meaning you’d need more to balance out the microbes.  Of course, this wasn’t a conscious thing, just the fact that people who liked their food hotter were less likely to be left belly-up by their meals, and over time this spread.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Erika, I don’t really understand the argument you are quoting.  It sounds as though, to make sense, the seasonings would have had to be added before cooking to avert spoilage, rather than during the process, to add flavour. 
But as has already been said, game can be acquired fresh at any time of year (and hung to whatever precise point the users required), and that the meat of domestic livestock and of fish and game was being effectively preserved by salting and smoking from very early times, probably since the Neolithic.  The mining, and presumably trading, of salt was the evident source of wealth of at least one important European Iron Age community, a fact reflected in the ‘salt’ place-names in the region (e.g. Hallein, Hallstatt).
The medicinal uses of herbs and spices were well known in antiquity, and undoubtedly well back into prehistory, when, of course, we have no documentary evidence, only the inferences drawn from material culture.  Pungent Asian spices such as pepper and ginger were first imported into the Mediterranean world to be used as medications before they began to be employed in cooking.
I am not arguing against the basic point that spices and herbs may help to counter bacterial infection (alcohol may help, too, which is a whole different story), but against the notion that our ancestors in the highly sophisticated cultures of the Classical and Medieval world were prepared to consume rotten, spoiled food in any form.  Only those who were starving would have been willing to do so, and, to repeat myself, they certainly would not have had access to spices.
One final point:  all of us develop the digestive enzymes required for the particular type of diet that is customary in our own culture.  This is one of the main reasons for tourists suffering digestive upsets when they first visit a foreign country (the other main reason is the intake of too much booze…).  In nine cases out of ten, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with the food at all, but the tourist’s gut says, ‘argh, what I do do with this lot?’ because it isn’t used to it, and can’t digest it properly.  In the 1950s, the rare British middle-class tourist who went to southern Europe on holiday would often get the runs from eating food prepared with olive oil (which at that time was never used in cooking in Britain—it was an expensive import used medicinally), yet it is an extremely healthful oil.  On the other hand, they could eat food fried in lard (rendered pig-fat) with impunity.  These days, the reverse would probably be the case.
Remember that just because a person lived a long time ago does not mean that he or she was stupid.  Our ancestors in recent periods like the Middle Ages, and in remote periods like the Bronze Age were not fools.  We know many things unknown to them, but that is not because we are any cleverer:  we simply have the advantage of a few more centuries and millennia of experience.
:-)

AgTigress,

I have to say that was a really condescending and dismissive comment.

You are according to your own claims a classicist and not a biologist and just because you haven’t come across the information that Erika shared doesn’t mean it’s not valid.

As anybody would know who has taken any microbiology classes…

AgTigress,

I have to say that was a really condescending and dismissive comment.

I am utterly taken aback.  In what conceivable way was I condescending?  I did not mean to be, either towards Erika herself or towards the source that she was quoting.  I simply wanted to follow up on some of the ideas.
I apologise unreservedly to anyone who took offence:  I can only assure you all that none was intended.

Just dittoing AgTigress here re foods, spices, and preservation. The idea that spices were used to mask the taste of rotten meat is an old one but every bit of research I’ve ever done has indicated it’s not true. As she said, medieval people were aware of how to preserve foods through salting and smoking. There were harsh penalties for those who sold rotten meat or flour.

I can’t remember my source offhand and all my books are still sitting in a dock somewhere, but I do recall reading the “sanitary belt/tampon tied around the thigh” theory for periods. I think the book was called “Medieval Women”? They certainly wouldn’t have wandered around with blood running down their legs and soaking their clothing. Privacy was a rare commodity then, yes, but it’s difficult to imagine any woman with a brain being comfortable with this.

And yes, some castles even had rudimentary plumbing systems. Evidence has been found in London recently and in other places of plumbing going back to the eleventh or twelfth century, if memory serves. (I could swear there’s another dig I’m thinking of, but here’s evidence of plumbing in the 15th century: http://londonist.com/2008/11/medieval_knights_prove_monty_python.php) The entire household would line up to wash their hands before and after meals. Sponge baths were common. Regular baths weren’t at all unheard of; King John, mentioned above, bathed weekly. That was considered a little excessive, apparently, but it didn’t make him a freak or anything.

BTW, John might have never expected to be King, but that certainly didn’t stop him from scheming like crazy to become King once he was old enough. :) There was no love lost between himself and Richard, that was for sure.

His father’s dying words were “Shame! Shame on a conquered King!” and they were uttered when poor Henry found out John—his favorite son—had betrayed him.

It’s probably not a good idea to get me started on the Plantagenets. :)

Oh, c’mon, get started on the Plantangenets! They are my FAVORITE back stabbing murderous plotting royal family! And I do mean that in a good way - reprehensible but oh so interesting. There’s a reason I prefer European history to my own Canadian - it’s like some kind of sinful Black Forest cake with rum added and maybe other dangerous ingredients, as compared to relatively blan-mange pudding. Not that there aren’t interesting bits in Canadian history, but we ain’t experienced and old enough in our recorded history to compare!

Mind, one of my fav women of the middle ages was Eleanor d’Aquitaine so I am a bit biased.

Well-behaved women never make history!

AgTigress:  I believe the accusations of condescension were because you assumed I was assuming our medieval forebears to have been stupid.  Which I was trying not to do, more focusing on the fact that they just plain didn’t have the preservative capabilities we do.  (I got into an interesting discussion about that just a few days ago, when I was reminded that yogurt is itself an answer to the tendency of dairy products to spoil; since I’ve always been told to put the yogurt back in the refrigerator if I can’t finish, it never occurred to me that it might not be completely necessary.)

I’m mostly arguing from the spice-as-preservation model—and I will point out that I was specifically arguing against this spices hiding the taste of spoiled meat thing that keeps popping up—but extending it beyond salt.  I think my phrasing was off the first time through, and it had been a year since I read the article, so let me try this again: 

I’m going to risk overgeneralizing here, as I’m not much of a cook, but I’ve noticed that for a lot of the Indian recipes I’ve worked with or seen people use, you don’t, in fact, add the spices afterward, but marinate it into the meat.  I can’t think of a single meat recipe I’ve used in which the seasoning was after the fact, actually; at the very least, it gets baked or broiled in.  Spice marinated into meat kills off bacteria, spoilage is lessened if not outright avoided; according to the article, which I would link if I weren’t pretty sure it’s not available without a biology journal subscription, the amount of spice generally used for recipes in a given area tends to correspond to the amount needed for peak antimicrobial efficiency.  Taste for spice, and ability to deal with the spice in question digestively, works its way into the genotype for this reason.  Then later, when people come up with ways to preserve the food that don’t involve stuffing it full of salt or curry mix or what have you, the taste for the spices is still there, so even if they don’t do the marination thing (and even if they do, since otherwise you get the well-seasoned outside, the really well-seasoned outer fat, and then the bland center, and what’s the fun in a bland center?) they still want a little of the seasoning.  Better?

It’s possible that your assumption of my assumption of stupidity is based on the fact that an evolutionary approach is being taken.  Which I wasn’t intending, or anywhere near it—consider that, as you pointed out, people’s digestive systems have to adapt to the substances being pushed down them first.  That’s where the evolutionary context comes in; that and bypassing the acquired taste phase.  After all, people can not-like medicine and still take it, but people have to be able to tolerate cooking substances if they’re going to go into everyday use, right? One of the things that class pounded into me was the fact that a lot of the things we take for granted and ascribe to our intelligence have evolutionary bases; I remember hearing that at some point in that class someone did a paper on the evolution of music likes and dislikes.

Erika:  I obviously wrote the final paragrap pf my post in a cack-handed way.  It was not intended to be a rebuke to you, but rather, a reminder of what should be a well-known fact, but, alas, isn’t.  I have met so many intelligent, well-read, well-educated people who do subconsciously think that we are intrinsically cleverer than our ancestors, rather than merely being better informed.

Anyway, thank you so much for not taking offence, and I apologise again for my ill-chosen words.  I think possibly my different dialect, as well as lack of thoughtful editing on my part, may have been partly to blame.

I appreciate your fuller explanation very much, and I think we are actually on the same side.  Yes, spices and seasonings are indeed typically used before and during cooking, when they react and blend with each other and the raw food, rather than being added on serving.  Marinades are, however, the first phase of such preparation, rather than an element of the storage system of the slaughtered carcase before it is jointed and sent to the kitchen.  If the meat is already tainted before it reaches the kitchen, it is naturally too late to reverse that process.

The whole subject is a complex and intriguing one, and there is probably still a lot of research to be done on it. 
:)

I have been loving this discussion very much. Lots of great info and more research ideas for me :)

I’m curious though. Is it just me, or does anyone else here every wonder things when they’re researching or discussing things like this, who was the first one to figure out salting preserved meat? Some plants are safe to cook with and others aren’t? Who was the first person to discover waste management? ;)

I don’t mean “It goes back to the time of…” What I mean is, I have to wonder who it was sitting around that suddenly had that ‘light bulb’ moment. What they thought. How they discovered it. What made them ‘research’ it to begin with.

I know, shut up…

Theo, I am a bit nervous about saying anything now, lest I be accused again of arrogance and discourtesy, but the point you make is one of the ever-fascinating puzzles of history. 
So many of the things we take for granted were first worked out in prehistory, so we can never know who made the first breakthrough and how.  The other thing is that many, many bright ideas have occurred repeatedly, to different individuals and human communities at different times and in different places.  Methods and techniques are often forgotten, and then rediscovered perhaps centuries later, sometimes by means of studying the surviving material culture of an earlier era.
Questions like food choices are, to a great extent, a matter of custom, and of trial and error.

@AgTigress,

I didn’t see any arrogance or discourtesy from anyone here. So don’t worry about posting to me :-)

I know there’s that old saying, everything old is new again. Every old idea becomes new with the next generation. It just fascinates me sometimes, trying to imagine what that person looked like, what they thought when all of a sudden, they put the wheel on something, you know? ;-)

I obviously have more time on my hands that I need…

It just fascinates me sometimes, trying to imagine what that person looked like, what they thought when all of a sudden, they put the wheel on something, you know? ;-)

This is what good historical fiction is for, Theo!  To bring to life one possible answer to that kind of question!  And when it is done well, it opens the mind of the reader as well as the writer.
:-D

It’s a little out of period, but for what it’s worth, re; menstruation:  John Lynn’s new book Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe  (Cambridge University Press 2008) has a chapter about women who disguised themselves as men to become soldiers.  (Yes, I know, the perfect romance trope…for real.)  He speculates that women disguised as male soldiers might have used some form of tampon.

More interesting really is the rest of Lynn’s book, which talks about why Renaissance armies had such relatively huge numbers of women (and also children) accompanying them.  Before the rise of state armies, regularly paid by means of taxes, soldiers survived basically by pillaging (their allies as well as their enemies).  As best as I understand Lynn’s thesis, he argues that a soldier needed a woman to come along as a sort of personal quartermaster, to carry the stuff pillaged, and to deal with luggage and trading for those items that couldn’t just be grabbed, as well as the traditional female occupations of cooking and laundry.  Frequently sex went along with these other duties, and in Germany there was even a term for a “may-marriage” - a sort of temporary contract between a man and a woman to act as a team for the duration of a military campaign.  The potential for abuse sounds pretty appalling here…but also the potential for an interesting romance novel.  Has anyone written one already?  Does anyone want to?

Oooh, Rebecca have I got a recommendation for you!!!

“Firethorn” by Sarah Micklem.  There’s a sequel coming out this year as well.  It’s fantasy, btw, but SO worth reading.  The main character IS a camp follower.  It’s in a medieval time period.

FWIW, I came across this today on my RWA chapter loop. I think it’s okay to post, they didn’t say not to.

Georges Duby, in an article in A History of Private Life, suggests:

“...Among the dominant classs at least, cleanliness was much prized. In
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Cluniac monasteries and houses of
the lay nobility continued to set aside space for baths…No formal dinner
(that is, no dinner given in the great hall with a large crowd of guests)
could begin until ewers had been passed around to the guest for their
preprandial abulutions. Water flowed abundantly in the literature of
amusement—over the body of the knight-errant, who was always rubbed down,
combed, and groomed by his host’s daughters whenever he stopped for the
night, and over the nude bodies of fairies in fountains and steam-baths. A
hot bath was an obligatory prelude to the amorous games described in the
fabliaux. Washing one’s own body and the bodies of others seems to have been
a function specifically ascribed to women, mistresses of water both at home
and in the wilderness.

The website below is about bathing, and has a bibliography at the end.

http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/ herbs/baths. html

You’ll need to remove the spaces from that link or it won’t work. Thought I did, but it didn’t copy well.

Sorry.

For some reason, the thought of everybody crowded together for warmth is really neat to me. Not in an orgy way, but in a UST way. I’m thinking of a lord and lady who cuddle up in bed at night but can’t DO anything so they come up with creative times/places to get intimate, or a situation where the lady is married to a lord she doesn’t particularly care about and in winter she and the knight she’s in love with lay together in the bed with her husband + other knights + servants etc. and think about each other and maybe a the knight’s hand makes its way toward the lady’s hand in the middle of the night and they touch as their bed neighbors snore on unawares.

Angel—Who says they can’t do anything?  The notion that you need to be alone to get it on is (at least in part) an artifact of our notion of privacy.  I know at least that in cultures where everybody sleeps in the same room, people often go right ahead, and possibly that was even true if everybody was in the same bed.

It is not, however, probably the kind of langorous or wild-monkey sex marathons featured in novels.  More a quiet affair where you try not to disturb anybody else’s rest.

Hi, all,

I have to weigh in on one of my hobbyhorses, a common misinterpretation of life expectancy figures. When one hears that life expectancy was 40 years or some such figure, people conclude that perhaps 25 or 30 was middle-aged and 35 or 40 was old. The problem with this view is that the life expectancy figures are skewed because of the high rate of infant mortality. However, if one made it out of the toddler years, one had a chance of living a life not that much shorter than ours (though still prey to things like childbirth, illness, infection, accidents, warfare, and so on).

It was certainly unusual to live to ages such as 90 or 100, but it wasn’t a great wonder for people to live to 60, 70, or even 80. Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, died at age 82. Her husband Henry II was 56; her children were 53, 47, 3, 28, 33, 42, 28, 52, 34, and 49 when they died. To take another royal, William the Conqueror died at age 60, but had a daughter who lived to 70 and a son who lived to 80.

Even in antiquity, we can find things not so different: Socrates was 70 when he was put to death; Virgil died at 51, Cicero at 63, and Herodotus at 59.

Even if one can argue that royalty and famous philosophers/teachers/etc. were better nourished than most, there’s no reason to suppose that they routinely lived much longer than those less famous—it’s just easier to find the life dates than for Roger the farmer or Joseph the wool merchant. But one way to examine this is to look at genealogies for less famous people and see how long they really lived.

*hopping off soapbox for now*

Thanks!
Elizabeth