Medieval soap

"Wash your hands!"  We've been told this since we were little kids, and in a time of pandemic it's especially important.  We assume (rightly) that soap is a crucial ingredient of the process.  Did medieval people have soap?  Yes indeed, though not our kind of soap, in handy wrapped bars or even decorative shapes, smelling delicately of verbena or sandlewood.

The ancient world had not been big on soap, although they knew about it.  Athletes had cleaned up after exercise by smearing themselves with oil and sand, then scraping off the sand with little scrapers, taking the sweat with it.  You can buy "olive oil soap" today, but it's not the same.

Soap is made from mixing rendered fat or oil with a "base" (a base as opposed to an acid, think back to high school chemistry).  Medieval people cooked down (rendered) the fat from meat, which we often throw away, and mixed it with lye made from mixing water with wood ash.  This made a powerful soap, good for dissolving dirt and killing bacteria (although they didn't know about bacteria, they recognized that cleanliness was healthier).  Soap usually didn't come in bars but was soft, more like liquid soap (but no handy pump-top dispensers), and had no delicate fragrance.  Lard-based soap could become more or less solid, though oil-based soap stayed more or less liquid.  This was the normal soap in Europe and the US until the mid-nineteenth century.

(One may note that lard, made from pig fat, is often still recommended for pie crusts, and you can buy it at the grocery store.  But I digress.)

This pre-modern soap would not be described as "gentle on your hands."  Farm families could and did make their own.  In medieval cities, however, soap-making could be a skilled profession, even sometimes a guild, with the different soap-makers promoting soap that came in balls rather than as a thick liquid (making it more convenient), even scented with minced lavender leaves or the like.

Between the difficulty of heating up enough hot water for a bath and not wanting to scrub too much lye-based soap on your delicate parts, medieval people did not bathe as often as the modern model.  They valued cleanliness, but some things are just not easy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on health 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.

Medieval Health and Hygiene

We have no idea how lucky we are in the twenty-first century to have antibiotics.  Antibiotics were developed for the first time in World War II and have been highly successful in curing bacterial diseases and infections, the things that can kill you if not treated.  Unfortunately, overuse of antibiotics has led to bacteria who are resistant to most of them, so it's possible that the antibiotic era may not even last a century.

In the Middle Ages, without modern medicine, the normal way to treat disease was to keep the sick person warm and clean, feed them chicken soup, and sprinkle them with saint dust.  With luck, their own immune system would kick in and fight off the disease.  This obviously worked better against some diseases than others; it did not work at all against the Black Death at the end of the Middle Ages.

Starting in the twelfth century, the well-to-do felt it a pious duty to endow hospitals, buildings where large rooms would be lined with beds, where the deserving poor would be cared for by nuns (in England, nurses are still addressed as Sister).  Pictured above is the hospital of Beaune in Burgundy, built in the fourteenth century.  The beds along the walls, now with red blankets, had curtains in front for privacy and a hall running behind, hidden again by curtains, where the nurses would come and go.  It is now a museum, but it continued to be the town's municipal hospital until the middle of the twentieth century.

The doctors primarily had a very theoretical idea of medicine, derived from Aristotle, though barber-surgeons had a more practical knowledge of human bodies and could set bones and cut off gangrened limbs (without anesthetics, of course).  It is probably not surprising that most people were worn out in their fifties (see my post on life expectancy).

Still, the Middle Ages did better at medicine than the Renaissance and early modern period, when it was decided that dangerous diseases needed powerful medicines.  Mercury became a popular cure.  It never worked, of course, "proving" how dangerous the disease was.

Medieval people believed in a bath every week, not because they liked being dirty, but because if one has to heat a whole tub of water over a fire, it takes a lot of water and a lot of fuel that were too valuable to waste.  We now take turning the tap for a hot shower for granted, but the weekly bath was the norm in the US well into the twentieth century.

Aristocrats bathed more frequently, even daily if they had access to hot springs, and cleanliness was a mark of elegance.  Everyone did try their best to keep their teeth clean with twigs and their fingernails free of dirt.  (See my post on medieval teeth.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.