Medieval people bathed regularly | Hacker News Reader

Medieval people bathed regularly

going-medieval.com

298 pointsfanf2193 comments

"Regularly", but not as frequently as we do now, and to whatever extent this was true, it certainly didn't extend to conquistadors in the early modern period because American Indians all considered white people intolerably dirty by their standards.

The Internet seems to have amplified a certain contrarian tendency that goes too far. While it's true that the people of medieval Europe were not just a bunch of ignorant, filthy peasants, they were still more ignorant and probably more dirty than you and I are at the moment. While the early middle ages in western Europe were not "dark ages" completely bereft of human accomplishment, they were by many measures crappier than either the heyday of the Roman empire or the early modern era that would follow (or indeed even the late Middle Ages).

> not as frequently as we do now

Evidence? (I'm legitimately curious; the OP seems well researched.)

The OP has references but not concrete references or scientific evidence. It's narrative or fairly tenuous relations (soap makers became a guild at some point, etc).

its narrative

"its narrative" - what does that even mean?

I've always found the chart of Rome's population [1] very thought-provoking. That's unimaginable collapse of cities, trade, arts...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/bVjPVPK.png

What a rebound. What happened to revive this city?

In 1870 It was annexed to the rest of Italy, the Pope lost his temporal power and it was made into the capital of the newly unified state. That meant moving all the administration and building a lot of new areas. That is on top of industrialization and a more general population boom.

The point is more how small it was just before that: a population of around 50k and much of the Roman ruins in the center used as a pasture.

Industrialization.

Keep in mind that a graph of Constantinople would probably show a symmetrical climb around the same time

You’re certainly misrepresenting something here.

The population of the world doesn’t follow this chart which simply implies Rome became irrelevant in history and people moved elsewhere.

I think that was their point

Their point was more akin to “all cities have been abandoned as civilisation ceased to exist”.

If that was the case we would observe a definite decline in population numbers across the world.

We don’t see that which either implies that the existence of civilisation wasn’t the prerequisite for our survival or that civilisation went elsewhere.

I am betting on the second one. By the time Rome become irrelevant we observe the raise of Paris and London.

Or the population dispersed into rural areas and returned to lives of subsistence farming.

Sure, but where? There wasn’t an equivalent of old Rome anywhere west of Constantinople.

The sudden downfall in the chart looked so strange, I thought they must have conflated the city of Rome with the Roman Empire. But no, people actually left the city proper in droves, as resources became unavailable and the city fell into overall disrepair:

"The decline of the city's population was caused by the loss of grain shipments from North Africa, from 440 onward, and the unwillingness of the senatorial class to maintain donations to support a population that was too large for the resources available. Even so, strenuous efforts were made to maintain the monumental centre, the palatine, and the largest baths, which continued to function until the Gothic siege of 537. The large baths of Constantine on the Quirinale were even repaired in 443; and the extent of the damage exaggerated and dramatized (according to "Rome, An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present", Rabun Taylor, Katherine W. Rinne and Spiro Kostof, 2016 pp. 160–179). However, the city gave an appearance overall of shabbiness and decay because of the large abandoned areas due to population decline. Population declined to 500,000 by 452 and 100,000 by 500 AD (perhaps larger, though no certain figure can be known). After the Gothic siege of 537, population dropped to 30,000, but had risen to 90,000 by the papacy of Gregory the Great."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Monarchy,_republic,_empir...

When Charlemagne went to Rome for his coronation, only maybe 20000 inhabitants remained. To reach the Pope's dwellings, you had to ride for miles across the immense ruins of a former million-people city, a sight that stroke deeply the Franks.

They managed to abolish slavery, which is quite an achievement improving life significantly for a large part of the population.

The Medieval Ages ended in the 15th century[1], and slavery didn't really start to end until the 19th century [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism

I'm pretty sure they're referring to the end of Roman slavery. Slavery was the foundation of the Roman economy, which wasn't true of Europe's economy again until the colonial period.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe

Sure, but the end of Roman slavery was just the collapse of the economy. No one bought slaves any more so slaves became serfs - no longer sellable people but people tied to the land and coerced to work. That's hardly a sign of marvelous progress.

While still being a horrible situation serfs had significantly more freedoms than Roman slaves. Serfs were able to hold possessions, work for themselves, and did not have an owner that had complete freedom over them including killing them.

I'm unfortunately ignorant on history of serfdom in Western Europe, but serfs in Russia were effectively owned by landowners. Killings, corporal punishment, family separation were routine practices.

Roman slaves could own property including other slaves. They could be doctors, architects, teachers & other occupations that would be considered middle class today.

I would be really interested to read about the transition of slaves to serfs after the fall of Rome. Is this your own hypothesis or something that has been written about?

I think it was meant very much in the figurative way. In continental Europe, Roman society never really stopped, it just changed a lot. Even Goths and Lombards would try to "become Romans" as much as replace them, happily adopting titles and structures (with varying levels of success).

A big hindrance to seeing continuity is that popular knowledge of "romanness" is so focused on the late republican/early imperial era and there is surely not much visibly continuity between early medieval and a snapshot of the Roman state outdated by several hundred years.

Serfdom is just a mortgage by anyther name. Unless you own your house you are a serf too.

The start of European colonialism marks the end of the Middle Ages. Abolitionism was about abolition in the Americas, not Europe where it was largely replaced by serfdom in the Middle Ages. Slavery continues to exist in some forms today.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

Also following the end of slavery the British Empire used “Coolies” from India and Asia in various transportation and labour roles which were basically a transitionary role between slavery and free paid workers. So job-wise was somewhat similar to slavery, in practice, but largely voluntary at the source and paid in some form to their families or community rather than ‘stolen’ by slave traders. While also less constrained from leaving back to their home countries, which was still difficult and they were not compensated nearly enough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolie

References?

The hey day of African chattel slavery followed medieval period, a project of horrific proportions carried out by the society that followed medieval Europe.

As I recall Slavery was legal in medieval Europe but not as widely practiced as serfdom at the time but both were forms of coerced labor (serfs were "slaves of the land" - couldn't leave and had to provide labor or goods). I mean sure, the particular institution of chattel slavery was dying out but this more a matter of "we need something simpler" than any impulse to improvement or any actual improvement.

Slavery was not abolished in the middle ages though. It did become less important relative to serfdom, and in many places in Europe it became illegal to sell Christians as slaves, which meant it was mostly Muslim slaves (and vice-versa in the Muslim states). Since slavery was never abolished it could grow in importance again in the age of colonialism.

Slavery was abolished in France in 1315 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_X_of_France#Readmittance... (it's a little short but there are much more details on the french wikipedia)

American Indians had never seen medieval Europeans as the Europeans that started going to America had been coming from Renaissance Europe.

I have read that for some reason during Renaissance Europeans started preferring natural body smell and bathing less.

Any reference for this? I'd be honestly interested.

Edit: This Wikipedia section seems like a mishmash of contradictory claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene#Hygiene_in_medieval_Eu...

The linked article has a section addressing this. It says that in later periods some doctors recommended not bathing.

Medieval Europe is several hundred years, a load of different societies at any given time, social strata within these societies. And even then, are sources reliable? If a lot of writers in a time period write that people don't bath enough, is that a sign that everyone is concerned about hygiene, or a sign that people aren't concerned about hygiene?

Indeed, all that is made more challenging given that "ordinary life" was often not considered a subject that should be written about any detail. I recall a description of medieval literature often involving "the acts of kings" written as just as a sequence of events.

I think in many societies, there often wasn't much effort put into "telling people what they already knew" and instead writing involved records of big events or accounting entries.

Some indirect evidence comes from historical perfume recipes. They really liked strong stuff back in the day.

King Lear: "Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination: there's money for thee"

Now, Civet here is a by-product of anal glands of a civet cat (not really a cat) and it smells pretty much like you'd imagine: extremely fecal, pungent and long lasting.

Modern perfumes still use this ingredient sometimes in minuscule amounts, but one ounce of civet is a lot for a modern nose. it would stink up the entire king's palace for days or even weeks.

Off-time but not off-topic, an exceptionally good story is narrated in Perfume by Patrick Süskind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Süskind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume_(novel)

What many people forget today is that we are now (with the obvious exception of smog/pollution and related) mostly living in odourless environments whilst the air in a city, at least until the 18th or 19th century was full of very strong smells.

Only think of:

1) open gutters/sewers

2) "side effects" of ubiquitous animal traction

3) small shops/industries (using fires, chemicals, etc., one example for all tanneries) were often side by side with homes

> American Indians had never seen medieval Europeans as the Europeans that started going to America had been coming from Renaissance Europe.

That’s what I was referring to as “the early modern period”.

While people claim they bath 3 times a day but I've not found this to be true in practise.

I've had girlfriends who bathed 3 times a week or sometimes once a week.

Now that's ofc my personal data and it's not from some third world country but Germany where I lived in Europe and I also found this to be true in China.

This article provides no evidence of frequency.

It says daily

With no evidence.

> American Indians all considered white people intolerably dirty by their standards.

So American Indians were around during medieval times and bathed regularly. Post title upheld!

The conquistadors and colonists were generally adventurers from impoverished regions of their home countries, engaged in extremely arduous military and quasi-military expeditions thousands of miles from home, so using them as a counter-example is a little odd; like using American soldiers stationed in a forward operating post in Afghanistan to judge the culture of hygiene in America.

I agree that the Internet has "amplified a certain contrarian tendency that goes too far", but I think that tendency is more evident in top-rated Hacker News comments than in the work of professional historians like the author of the article.

The myths we tell about history always tend to be so self-serving and belittling of the people who came before us. I'm not sure I want to know what people will think about us 500 years from now

"they only took social media detoxes once a month, by the 2020s older people that were already addicted to the novelty of social media only did detoxes once every six months and this was considered a privilege for the most mental health conscious people with a modern social support system"

As a kid I loved "Motel of the Mysteries," reimagining the discovery of our culture today as if it was Howard Carter opening King Tut's tomb.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/i...

I think that a system of popular thought (epistemology?) is invariably antagonistic to all other systems. Adherents of one typically seek to discredit the others. There is always a body of popular stories explaining why all to other systems are bad.

Ants defending the ideological hive. You see it in science, religion and politics.

Charles Fort addresses this phenomenon in his "The Book Of The Damned".

Classical Mediterranean practices specified that, when two people made a contract with each other, each would swear to the gods he honored to abide by the terms of the contract.

Judaism, and its followers Christianity and Islam, innovated a different approach, the idea that someone who doesn't follow your god can't be trusted to adhere to an agreement. This made them antagonistic to other cultures, which worked out great for Christianity and Islam (the memes themselves, not the people carrying them).

Religious practices farther east, in India[1], China, and the central Asian steppes, were generally not exclusive in the same way. You were free to mix and match practices and avowed beliefs from several formal systems, and they didn't factionalize in the same way.

On the other hand, Chinese Confucianism, considered as a system of how society is organized (as opposed to a system of thought) was quite hostile to other modes of organization.

My take is that governments don't coexist easily, but philosophies do.

[1] Islam excepted.

I’m reminded of a quote I can’t find again and I’m paraphrasing and butchering- every generation sees the previous one as primitive troglodytes and the future one as effete dandies.

"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." - George Orwell

Perhaps?

Even Socrates was complaining about the next generation:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Not a real quote from Socrates: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

Apocryphal, see wikiquote.

What I find fascinating Is how people view the future as some sort of progressive utopia. But if you look at history actually that’s not true. The Roman Empire was more supportive of woman’s rights than 18th century America. It’s entirely plausible we could experience a regression of social norms, and that could last hundreds of thousands of years. History isn’t linear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

It's also fascinating how people view the moment they are living in as the most important of all time.

It's incredibly hard to argue against even with the tools of history on your side. We are psychological pre disposed at any point in time to consider that the present moment relative to that time is the utmost most important and urgent and also to view the past and future as less important. It's non stop urgency of the moment.

Imagine a historian in the future writing about the decade we are living in now and just writing a line "nothing much to note". We would feel insulted and hurt just considering this.

> most important of all time

More realistically: The most important time yet.

And this is kind of reasonable, since progress mostly seems to accelerate.

People intuitively discount the future, since it's hard to imagine what will come. But I haven't seen many people actively discount the future.

I think they do discount the future in comparison to today. Yes not actively but it's all an intuitive response to whatever they view as important.

You’re being too charitable. At many times and places, women’s rights have been realized more effectively than in _present day_ America.

Folks who talk about any sort of arc to history have to be thinking of a fundamentally statistical reality. The lived experience of any specific human or tribe is going to be far too nuanced for that picture.

21st century people were idiots. They treated cancer with poison.

We treat every disease with poison. The disease is alive, and we want to kill it. That's all poison is.

For reference, "antibiotic" means "contrary to life".

We also treat cancer with surgery, the only problem being that, like the poison, it doesn't really work.

Maybe 25th century people, instead of resorting to poisoning it, will find a way to assimilate disease and add its biological distinctiveness to our own.

But cancer is not a living organism and rather parts of the living organism gone wrong.

And cutting the bad parts out, can indeed work, but maybe future generations find a way to help the body stop going wrong, so you don't need those radical methods anymore.

> But cancer is not a living organism and rather parts of the living organism gone wrong.

This is much like saying that criminals are not living organisms, just parts of a society that have gone wrong.

Cancers are living organisms, similar to, but quite distinct from, the animal they developed from.

I meant, cancer is not a living organism, in a way, that a living organism can reproduce. Cancer can only grow, until the body is destroyed, but not beyond. . So seems a bit similar to a parasite, but not the same.

A parasite is its own organism, has its own purpose. Even though it is against the purpose of the host. Cancer has no purpose. It is a "bug" in the organism that can be fatal.

Why would using the best means/technology available to us at the time make us "idiots"?

Were primitive hunters "idiots" for using crude (only by modern standards of course) sharpened sticks/stones instead of rifles?

What's interesting is we don't look back on all people evenly, nor do we esteem people less who lived farther back in time. For example, we tend to esteem the Greeks and Romans more than the Medieval Europeans. The author has a chip on his shoulder because we don't regard all eras equally.

"How could they have 7 billion people? Did they all live in the desert?"

"Yes, there was food growing there in the desert, too. Right out of the ground, as far as your eye could see."

"And they just threw it all away?!"

We had a garden and we paved it.

What on earth makes you think anybody 500 years in the future will give a shit about any of us?

Hopefully not trying to work out what caused the collapse...

A person 500 years in the future is more likely to give a shit about you than a person 5 minutes from now.

Consider your comment, a throwaway one liner of no significance. Most people just read it and move on. But what if, your comment and our comments were all preserved through a series of backups and database migrations over time until eventually they were 500 years old! Imagine some future archaeologist coming across our threads and seeing what people of this day were thinking and saying to each other. Sometimes I stumble across old posts from 2001 or so and read with fascination about what the world used to be like back then. It’d be pretty meta if that future archaeologist was actually the one reading this comment right now.

Imagine if we found some text in a 500 year old book somewhere plainly asking the same question “why would people 500 years in the future give a shit about us?”

Clearly there will be people in the future that give a shit so long as the human race remains a curious species.

Future archaeologists will treat our comments as big data.

Because this is the dream time.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time...

I make the half joke, half serious caution, that people 500 years from now are going to hate our guts.

I rather think they will pity us. Primitive beings. Always stressed, always scared, or fat and degenerate in drug induced altered realities. Strangled by million rules and obligations in a corrupt system, when technology already had the capabilities to grant a decent life ... without exploiting us, or the planet.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson

Well, the fallout of our future, like micro plastic garbage on the other hand, is pretty evenly distributed ..

Or climate change in general, even though it will hit some areas harder, while others might even get better of.

Is it really true? Do we belittle those of the Enlightenment period and it's artists and thinkers scientists and composers? I think we make fairer judgements of different periods of history based on fairly objective grounds. A lot of embellishment and imaginative reconstruction of the past no doubt, but not always negative.

We consider ourselves the heirs of the enlightenment and renaissance, so we continue their tradition of looking down on the Middle Ages, and we think of it as a rational time of progress. This despite the fact that both time periods brought plenty of irrational behavior, with things like alchemy to occultism to witch hunts, and also brought fun things like slavery and racism (earlier people made differences between people of course, but not yet based on race and skin color). But we prefer to forget all that and pretend the Middle Ages was the backwards, superstitious time, despite it being the time during which the Church outright said and taught that witches and demons and magic are just nonsense.

> the Church outright said and taught that witches and demons and magic are just nonsense.

I think that was more our mythology is more holy than thine, not pure rationality.

Ok, I get that the author is trying to shake things up common-perception-wise, and really loves the f word.

"So the average person would likely wash daily at home, but once a week or so they would treat themselves to a bath at the communal bath house."

This needs support. "Average" person would go to the bath house once a week? Across all of Europe? That's a pretty extraordinary claim.

"In fact soap is a motherfucking medieval invention. .... Medieval people? Oh you better believe that they had soap."

Let's say soap actually is a medieval invention. (I see this debated, but the author seems to emphatically feel it is an important point) Doesn't that mean, pretty much by definition, that some medieval people didn't use soap? Unless they invented soap on the actual first day of the middle ages and it immediately went viral.

>Let's say soap actually is a medieval invention. (I see this debated, but the author seems to emphatically feel it is an important point) Doesn't that mean, pretty much by definition, that some medieval people didn't use soap? Unless they invented soap on the actual first day of the middle ages and it immediately went viral.

Well, the author already notes that in absence of soap earlier they used oil for scrubbing, and/or added herbs to the water for aroma.

>Unless they invented soap on the actual first day of the middle ages and it immediately went viral.

Well, whether it was unavailable for the first day or first couple of centuries of the middle ages is not really important for the general claim that medieval people had it. E.g. people in the last 4-5 centuries of the middle ages are still medieval people, still considered "non bathing" by many moderns, and half a millennium is still a good chunk of time.

Especially since the author already covered what e.g. Romans did pre-soap (or rather, in lieu of soap, as soap was available in the empire, but not preferred by Romans until towards the end).

I think the Germans and Gauls were making and using soap before the Romans showed up. And eventually Romans were using it too. Would seem to follow that medieval people would find soap to be unremarkable.

Minor nit: Soap is not a medieval invention. It has been around since ancient Egypt. One of the most classic soaps is still in production today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_soap which was the forerunner to Castile soap (I'm not sure how much the Syrian war has affected production, Aleppo was hit hard).

The Aleppo and Castile soap connection is mentioned in the article.

I don't know much about the medieval periods, but in the 16th century, people certainly didn't bath very often.

They tended to wear fresh linen everyday, which did a remarkable job of cleaning the skin of dirt and sweat, then washed their clothes regularly.

"Method" historian Ruth Goodman has described trying this herself, and claimed that it was a very effective way of keeping clean, saying that even after a few weeks, she still lacked significant body odour.

Who determined the "lack of significant body odour"? How was it measured? What's the threshold? Was there a control group? Was the experiment repeated at several times of the year?

This is a rather blanket claim. My step-dad grew up in crazy-rural Oregon. His dad refused to take a bath more than twice a year. Those long-johns with a trap door stayed on a looong time during the winters. They were still using an outhouse.

I kind of feel like there's plenty of modern examples in which regular bathing is not a priority (or even an advantage, given the lack of warm water during the winter).

So did the wife just tolerate the smell during sex? Was there no sex? Just seems so unhygienic for intimacy.

There is a running-gag in the gay community "a guy with an unwashed ass" which is used for straight guys.

Also, many women told me that they were in love with guys with bad hygiene, some of them never washing between their cheeks because "nothing goes between my ass cheeks, that's gay shit!"

Some women even going so far as saying "if sexuality was a choice, why in their right mind would anyone choose (unwashed) men?!"

So maybe this isn't that big of a problem in terms of sex and intimacy as you and I would think?

Memes aside... Sex has weird and sometimes offensive smells. This holds true for queer folks, straight folks, and even folks with good hygiene. I feel like most sexually active adults already know this.

You aren't always going to get a shower and a toothbrush just prior to bumping uglies.

Body odors are one thing. Not having showered for weeks is another.

Maybe, when everyone stinks you'd get used to it and think nothing of it?

I once spent a summer working in the equivalent of a knacker's yard. The first day or two there the smell was appalling but it got to the stage where I no longer noticed it. People away from work noticed me though!

> Sex has weird and sometimes offensive smells.

Check the condom brand/type. Sex has no smell most of the time. I found the condom to be the culprit.

> Sex has no smell most of the time.

Your bodily fluids have a smell. Maybe you can't smell them, but other people can.

There's a huge difference between washed-in-the-last-day-or-two genital odor and MONTHS of unwashed genitals!!

Straight guy here. Anyone who doesn’t wash their ass is fucking disgusting.

Many people in the modern world don't. It was a surprise/culture-shock to find that France and the USA don't have any kind of bidet on their toilets.

Yeah, I’m a Yank and I think it’s kind of gross that we don’t wash after every bowel movement. But taking that a step further and not even washing your ass while showering is just foul.

I have to wonder if body odour ramps up exponentially for the first few days of not bathing, but then fades into a less nauseating background musk after powering through the initial spike. Maybe skin flora eventually stabilize toward a less offensive culture?

There's theories out there that bacteria that oxidizes ammonia would have been pretty common. Before treated water and daily soaping.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/my-no-soap-no-sh...

Anecdotal, but I worked with a guy who didn't bathe due to religious reasons. The body odor from him did _not_ fade.

What religion would that be?

Bumism, orthodox.

The Google Image Search results for "Bumism" are pretty hilarious. https://www.google.com/search?q=Bumism&tbm=isch

I suspect at those times everyone reeked relative to today, but they just didn't have anything better to compare to.

>This is a rather blanket claim. My step-dad grew up in crazy-rural Oregon. His dad refused to take a bath more than twice a year.

Did he live there during medieval times? The post is about a specific era, and the prevalent norms, not about absolutely everybody at any era (or even absolutely everybody at the era it concerns, for that matter).

It's about statistics (what most did) not physical laws (what everybody absolutely had to follow).

Does "taking a bath" in English include showering?

I didn't take a bath for at least a year, only showers and quickly washing my armpits with soap in washhand basin

It's funny that nowadays we look at images in churches, old books, and other old buildings to deduce what medieval people did. What will people use in 200 years to deduce what we did? Will they use social media selfies? Or will those have disappeared?

This seriously worries me. Every generation thinks that what they do is disposable and not worth preserving. Source code from even just 20 years ago discarded and lost, priceless and one of a kind computer systems thrown into the sea, old movies and books completely lost. While nothing has really changed in regards to the value current generations place on current production, what has changed it seems is our ability to rediscover these lost artifacts. Newly printed books will rot away in a century or two, the memories and data we keep on company servers will be thrown away either on purpose or by accident (just look at myspace) or be otherwise inaccessible. No longer will our kids be able to find old pictures of their dad or an old diary from when we were young.

Hell, I don’t even have anymore all the code or essays I wrote in college, and I would give a lot to get those things back (not even including the 25btc I carelessly let get destroyed).

Archive is doing a great job, but as more and more content moves behind unfindable and unindexable corporate pages, it’s nowhere near good enough.

It would be really cool if such a technology exist that you could write data once on to some chip or piece of glass or whatever that you could read again and again forever. It’s really important that we try and solve these problems, if not for us, but the people that come after.

This assumes there’s no value in forgetting, but what if that’s wrong? What if forgetting is really really important for reasons we don’t know?

I mean almost everything that happened in history wasn’t recorded, and yet we’re here.

We've got a lot more than that for medieval Europe - archaeological remains of more commonplace objects, business and administrative records (oh lord the things you can learn from an inventory sheet or an invoice), etc.

Not necessarily. The vast majority of recording media we have are not nearly as robust as stone or vellum. Not much outside of archival paper will survive.

While that's true, the vast majority of things we record are not worth keeping for long time frames. There's still a lot of stuff that gets printed on metals, stones, archival media, etc. Not to mention we have modern archival methods that didn't exist back then. Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth, we'll still be passing vastly more information on to future generations than previous generations ever did.

I assume there are other archives like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_arc...

Designed to withstand 70s nuclear war scenarios, among other things. Stores about 1 billion 35 mm images at the moment.

> Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth

Many archives are not replicated, at least not including all important pieces. Also note that what's worth keeping vs what's unimportant might change over time. Bach and Vivaldi only became famous after their death. I don't say that everything should be preserved forever, just that it's kept in mind.

Right now, Spotify and Apple Music and Google Play are holding on to recordings, in hundreds of replicas, of garage bands who've only been heard by 1000 people in their whole history. If one of those services goes out of businesses, there are others.

Archivists like the Library of Congress use in-house solutions comparable to S3 Glacier or Google Archival Storage, where use of longer-lived media and copying to new media is cheap enough to preserve fantastic amounts of information.

A caveat - though the risk of losing art due to loss or destruction of physical media is lower than ever, we still have to contend with intentional destruction of copies by the creator, for business or security reasons.

r/datahorders would like to have a word with you. Also the internet archive, the Google art/book projects, Wikipedia, etc.

Those business and administrative records were kept on paper which lives for a long time. Now they are transitioning to computers and while it's easy to store all business transactions of a business on an usb-stick, that usb-stick, and basically any digital storage medium we have now, deteriorates over time and will become unreadable in a matter of decades.

There is research on digital storage mediums that have archival capabilities. I hope that they will become cheap enough to get into widespread use. Note though that claims for archival capabilities and actually having archival capabilities are different things. We might wake up one day, realizing that the technology we used to store data for the long term actually deteriorated more quickly than we thought, with tons of stuff lost. The only way to combat that is to use multiple different technologies.

I don’t really see the point in some fancy archival medium when so much data now is already stored in cloud-based servers with redundancy and constant hardware maintenance on a global scale.

I think there would have to be an apocalyptic event to cause knowledge about significant events, people, and ideas to be lost.

Paper and archeological history is absolutely riddled with holes, which doesn’t speak well of its durability.

It's not always clear what data will be significant in the future, and we don't want the memory of the present to be inordinately selected by those who can afford server upkeep.

“He who controls the past, controls the future"

I suspect that our inventory of digital media will survive as long as people do. It would take a complete technological collapse to expunge all the random TV shows and internal discussions floating around the infospher, and even under the worst ecological scenarios, technological collapse everywhere is unlikely. Future scholars will be able to just spool up our mass entertainment as we do. They might even read this comment.

Some kind of computerized historical analysis might read your comment, but it's hard to imagine how it would be practical for future historians to read more than a tiny sample of the enormous flood of ephemeral writing we're producing today, such as message board comments. They'll have both the challenge and the advantage of being able to see into many types of conversations that were once unrecorded.

Well, sure. I'm not saying that anyone will read this thread. That's unlikely. But I believe that this thread will at least be available somewhere in some archive pretty much for the remainder of human history.

Don't be so confident. MySpace lost basically all the original music uploaded to that site, much of which only existed there. I've personally seen one off masters of tons of video and audio content destroyed to make room for new stuff or because the media can't easily be played anymore. Much of our digital archives are only maintained with constant and fragile upkeep.

Another case in point:

I used to make electronic music. Back in the 90s, I made a track and uploaded it to mp3.com, back when that was a place for people to share music. It got relatively popular, for what "popular" meant at that. I got messages from people saying they liked it, there were lots of downloads.

As far as I can tell, that song no longer exists anywhere on the Internet.

Yep. I’ve got a bunch of mix cds that are just gone and a lot of pictures that were hosted on personal websites that never got captured by internet archive.

Now I want to listen to it. Why not put it somewhere on the Internet? Maybe it will bring some joy to a few more people. Worst case scenario it will get ignored (it will get one listen from me though).

> Why not put it somewhere on the Internet?

I don't think I have a copy any more. If I do, it's likely in a format for an old MOD tracker that I may not be able to open any more.

Probably on some cdrw. A tape even.

Sure. I expect we'll lose things here and there, as we have already. But major works are safe, and there's more than enough for any future civilization to establish definitively how we lived.

The quantity doesn’t matter as much as the medium. I suspect digital mediums are one of the most fragile and least likely to survive.

Freeway overpasses?

"The Mayans and Egyptians built pyramids. The Chinese built the Great Wall and armies of clay soldiers. The Khmer built temples in the jungle. Americans build highways. It’s our state religion."

https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state-religion/

I often think that maybe in a 1000 years or so, archeologists will find evidence that almost every household had a copy of Harry Potter or something similar and will conclude that this was a widespread religion at the time.

Modern books like Harry Potter come with front or back matter that makes it clear that they are works of fiction, not a religious text.

Current historians distinguish between religious texts and fiction for entertainment. Why should this distinction be lost in the future?

I understand that in the archaeological community, they have a tendency to label things they can't figure out as being of religious significance. An example I recall is some kind of olive press, I think; it was labelled a religious tool until someone familiar with old-school manual olive presses commented how much it looked like an olive press.

Where this is going is that current archaeologists mistake household items for religious tools, so perhaps future archaeologists will as well.

As an aside, how do we know that current historians are not already doing the same? That they're not already labeling ancient fairy tales, told as amusing stories by people who knew they were just stories, as religious texts?

That last paragraph is exactly what I was thinking. Did people in ancient Greece actually believe the stories from the Odyssey or Iliad? Or was it meant to entertain? Or have a look at Genesis. Is this something that the original sources believed to happen or was it an entertaining story in the beginning and retold until people started to believe in it? I'm not sure there always is a clear distinction between fiction and religion.

Yes they believed the stories from the Odyssey and Iliad and considered them historical events. Actually they have been considered historical until modern times. (And many still consider them historical to some extent.)

So why should future historians not make the same mistake?

Well if there is written material (like the Harry Potter books) then it is considered history, not archeology. And the historians would be able to read the book and consider if it was treated as fiction or a religious text at the time, especially by comparing to other fiction books and religious texts which would also be available.

While not every historical culture had a clear distinction between the two, our culture have a concept of a "novel" which is distinct from both history and theology. A historian looking at books from our time would be able to understand that.

Amazon order history. Per person.

They should probably put the title as Medieval Europeans, the misconception that Medieval "people"/Europeans don't bathe isn't a global notion because Medieval people from other places bathed such as the Japanese.

Most definitions of "medieval" or "middle ages" seem to reference Europe. It's considered the time between the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance / Age of Discovery.

Agree. I have never heard Medieval used in, say, Indian history where different timescales are used to denote historical periods - e.g. Vedic period, Ancient, Sultanate and Mughal periods, British raj etc.

Medieval is usually used as a name for a period of Europe's (and periphery) history, not a global time period.

E.g. while one might write about "Medieval China", the actual periods of history of China is better described in terms of dynasties (Han, Ming, etc.) -- and of course it doesn't come with the same connotations the term "medieval", "dark ages" comes from in Europe, nor there is a subsequent "renaissance" or "age of reason", etc with the same connotations as Europe (there is a period often referenced as renaissance, but it's about a new "golden age", prosperity etc.)

I asked a related question on reddit but no answer yet.

How did taverns handle hygiene of dishes. Especially since it was a crossing of wild varieties of people.

Soap and water? Soap was known to civilization by ~2000 BCE, long before the middle ages.

did they had enameled ceramics back then ?

soap cannot clean porous things I suppose

I've no special knowledge of such things, but for one I doubt there were many dishes to speak of. Mugs were often used for alcoholic drinks, which I'm sure helped a bit. I imagine utensils were quite rare. Perhaps just a plank of wood would be used, or a hammered flat bit of iron.

Two answers:

- Hygeine? That was invented by Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century. :)

- In circumstances that allowed it, bread was often used as a plate (“trenchers.”) Would be nicely hygienic if the bread used in this way wasn’t traditionally then given as alms.

They ate off trenchers, hard pieces of bread which you could also eat. No dishes to worry about (and ceramic glazes plus metal utensils are tough to come by anyway).

Warm water and sand can clean pretty good, too.

Bacteria and microbes ?

Not known back then ..

Oh and I forgot ashes. They clean and can indeed also sterialize a bit. But yes, I did not say, I would want to eat in a mediaval tavern ..

Edit: and vinegar

good point, acid and salt could be used I suppose

I guess it's worth looking into the topic

beer and ale would solve that

From what I've heard, scrubbing does more for killing bacteria on hands than just washing with soap, specifically doctors are advised to scrub their hands rigorously. Soap and detergents don't seem to be strong disinfectants.

Perhaps a bit more balanced (both in language use as content-wise) treatment of the same topic can be found at the Ancient History Encyclopedia:

https://www.ancient.eu/Medieval_Hygiene/

And why does this matter?

My roomie was a staunch defender of medieval times, when allegedly things were oh so much better. He left me a bit of creatine monohydrate in a closet, he absorbed the stuff by the kilograms. I was thinking with some scorn "they used to grind this from the bones of peasants before, didn't they?".

I feel pity of the people that was before us, grateful for some of their legacy, and very bitter for other parts of it, and I'm extraordinarily, rabid jealous of how much better the coming generations will most likely have it.

It matters because most people believe the opposite, because it's a misconception. A lot of people also think that it was believed the world was flat for centuries, but it was known to be spherical or spheroid since greek times.

In fact public baths in Europe were closed in a futile attempt to curb contagion during the Great Plague, during the 14th century. From there on, bathing was frown upon as being dangerous and even unhealthy.

For instance in the late 1500, Henri IV from France was writing letters to his prime minister Sully to pray him not to bathe so often (uncommonly for the time, Sully used to have a weekly bath) because it would destroy his health and be a huge loss to France to lose such a valuable man.

Did you ever see the movie, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"?

An excellent portrayal of medieval baths in that.

What an interesting and well-researched article. Also, the tone is hilarious, as appropriate. Bravo!

I feel the opposite about the tone. Sure, I have also heard that medieval people didn't bathe, and if I asked about it I would have repeated it as the best information I had. Not sure how that warrants being insulted by the author who is upset that not everyone else in the world is a medievalist like they are.

"The Romans – whomst I don’t see a bunch of basics going around accusing of being filthy – did not, in fact have soap, in contrast."

"Basics"?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Basic

If I was still a teenager, using "basic" in this way would probably sound good, now it sounds incredibly stupid. I've officially become my father.

Romans did have soap but they mostly used it to clean clothes not themselves.

The article title is correct but whoever wrote this uniformed garbage needs to go back to grade school.

The Romans also used human pee to clean clothes.

Old pee is basically ammonia.

The article was about bathing, not washing clothes.

>Romans did have soap but they mostly used it to clean clothes not themselves.

Which is the same as not having bathing soap...

"Basics" I can live with, but I have a real problem with "whomst."

Underlying many of these comment conversations: don't you dare challenge my belief that contemporary western society is superior because of [global capitalism, technology, "advanced" knowledge, etc.].

Narratives of progress are very loud on HN.

Meanwhile, a lot of people you know personally don't really bath all that often. They stay clean. But not by showering every day. And it really is none of your business. No you cannot necessarily detect them with your nose.

Finally some good style of writing

Is that a joke? I found it absolutely insufferable. You're upset, I get it, now stop using the f word in every sentence.

Another telltale sign that the dark ages weren't actually that dark.

The dark ages still brought us:

Windmills

Prostheses

Plow

Just to name a few.

First of all, the medieval period comes after the dark ages. The world of the 12th century is a very different and much more prosperous one than the world of the sixth century.

Second, the dark ages were very, very hard indeed. Ward-Perkins, in "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization", demolishes the pleasant-transition-period interpretation of late antiquing that's been popular for the past few decades. Material culture collapses: trade volume crashes and Britain (being hardest hit) nearly become illiterate again.

Did it work out all right in the end? Yes, clearly. But for several centuries, the level of civilization in Europe was lower than it'd been in a thousand years. A ton of knowledge and literature was lost forever. As late as the seventeenth century, parts of Rome that in 100AD were apartment blocks and fast food joints we'd recognize as such today were still sheep pasture. It does no good to deny that something was lost.

It's a cautionary tale: complexity and interconnected civilizations are more fragile than most people think.

>First of all, the medieval period comes after the dark ages.

Untrue, medieval period and dark ages typically refer to the same time period that lasted until the 13th century.

But agreed with the rest of your post. It was not an easy time to survive. But not as barbaric and barren as previously thought.

And in much of Western Europe (Gaul, Germania etc), life was mostly the same as it had been even during the Roman Empire, generally speaking-- those areas either hadn't been ruled by Rome, or they hadn't exactly been centers of culture and technology even under Roman rule.

Sure, Europe ended up being in a backwards state of decay during the medieval period. But much of it had been during the Roman times that preceded it anyway. And yet there were still valuable advancements that were achieved.

Untrue, medieval period and dark ages typically refer to the same time period that lasted until the 13th century.

The term 'dark ages' is used by some as reference to the early medieval period specifically, which may also be classified as 'late antiquity' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity ).

So depending on who you talk to, the dark ages can be synonymous to the middle ages, be just its earlier part, or predate them...

The information here is fascinating. But the delivery... I don't even know how to describe it. Is it bro, or ?, or everything-ass-cool? At first it's fun, but then it becomes overdone. Skatergnome did this well, with a measured approach that was such that it didn't become tiresome - https://everquest.fandom.com/wiki/Skater_Gnome_Stories .

Anyway, "cool story bro".

It’s because actually determining how often average people bathed is hard, requiring evidence from many different sources across a huge time span and geographic area.

Instead, he went for the secret knowledge approach. People tend to believe things more if you’re telling them everyone else is wrong. The f bombs make everyone else seem even more stupid for not knowing this secret knowledge.

She's a PhD that literally teaches the stuff, and you're the person who couldn't even be bothered to read the mini-bio, not to mention the references at the end.

If she starts all of her lectures with "I cannot believe I need to explain these things to you basics", she might not be very good at teaching though.

How would you know how she teaches? One of her problems as a scholar is having ignorant geniuses claim all kinds of nonsense about the medeival times that are patently false. Her tone is to some extent a reflection of having to deal with those people.

Probably a myth.

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