Medieval Laundry

 As I have discussed earlier, when talking about medieval soap, medieval people wanted to be clean.  The wanted their persons, their clothes, and their surroundings to be clean.  This was of course very difficult without washing machines, hot showers, vacuum cleaners, and all the soaps and cleaning agents you can now find at the store, but they tried.

 

Washing clothes without modern technology was especially a challenge, in no little part because there was not much cotton (to say nothing of polyester, nylon, or permapress), and the most typical fabrics, wool, linen, and (for the wealthy) silk, were all fabrics that today we feel need "special handling."

Wool shrinks when wet, and therefore it would have to be "fulled," beaten and pulled and stretched to get back into the right size.  Fulling was a specialty occupation, shop keepers who would sell fabric and also wash wool and get it back into shape.  Fulling hammers were one of the things which a mill would run.  Obviously one did not get a wool outfit cleaned every time it was worn.

Linen doesn't shrink nearly as much, but it does wrinkle.  It could be ironed (with flat irons, of the sort now used as door-stoppers), but the biggest challenge was keeping it pure white.  Without modern chlorine bleach, it mostly had to be bleached by being laid out in the sun.  Fair maidens in the stories were described as wearing garments of pure white.

Silk is a lot stronger than it looks.  It also holds dye colors well and, unlike wool, is not munched by clothes moths.  It also does not smell sweaty as fast as most fabrics. With no dry cleaners, those who could afford silk gave it the old rub-a-dub.  (The silk saris worn by women of all social stations in India today are not regularly sent to the dry cleaners either.)

So where did washing take place?  One possibility was going down to the river with your dirty clothes, some lye soap, and starting to scrub.  This was sometimes still the case in parts of the US into the twentieth century and even occasionally in southern Europe as late as the 1960s.  Alternately, many towns had wash houses, a well or fountain surrounded by an open-air structure where one could come, wash clothes without getting rained on, spread them out to start drying, and chat with one's neighbors.  Some of these wash houses were in use until quite recently.

So medieval people are often portrayed (in movies for example) as dirty, and by our standards they probably were.  But they did their best not to be.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on clothing and hygiene in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available in paperback or as an ebook from Amazon and other on-line booksellers.