Does it means these poor people that happen to be our ancestors had a faint body odor surrounding them? Can we stop with this crasiness? We are animals, animals have "body odor", and it have been considered a good thing for a long time.
Every time I hear about personal hygiene I remember this American girl who was learning Chinese with me in a university in south China. She was there on the behalf a sort of NGO and her goal was to "teach Chinese personal hygiene". She was talking about "spreading the use of perfume and deodorant" and such things.
So now we have no more colonization, but we still have missionaries, and hygiene missionaries. And they still do harm.
(Because yes, abuse of perfumes and deodorant IS harmful in many respects)
So, to come back OT, it is ok to wonder if middle-age peasants had more free time, and if their life was pleasant (I guess it was not), but please let our own crasiness out of the discussion.
We are the anti body age, anti-body hair, anti-body odor, shaved-porn-age (which is anti-sex), etc. We have our crasiness too. It is very optimistic to believe we are less crasy than the Middle-Age. And God knows Middle-Age was crasy...