by Lucy Worsley
Thomas Deloney’s Elizabethan novels kicked off the literary genre of the whodunit, in which beds would play a prominent part. In one of his books, a traveller named Thomas Cole arrives at the Crane Inn (a kind of sixteenth-century Bates Motel). He falls into a strange melancholy state, depressed by the screech owls and ravens which ‘cried piteously … hard by his window’. ‘What an ill favoured cry do yonder carrion birds make!’ he said, as ‘he laid him down on his bed, from whence he never rose again’.
He was killed in his sleep by the inn’s evil keeper, who’d fashioned a trapdoor beneath the bed. When the pins holding the trap were removed in the middle of the night, unfortunate guests would whistle straight down into an enormous cauldron in the kitchen below, there to be ‘scalded and drowned’. In this particular case, the murderer was discovered, for the innkeeper had overlooked one detail: he told everybody that his guest had never arrived, but Cole’s horse wandered off from the inn, was recognised, and gave the game away.
The privacy of the bedroom also makes it a favoured place for suicide. John Evelyn recounts how the ‘extraordinary [sic] melancholy’ Lord Clifford, formerly Lord Treasurer, had been found strangled ‘with his cravat upon the bed-tester’. Clifford’s servant, however, had looked in ‘through the keyhole, and seeing his master hanging, brake in before he was quite dead, and taking him down, vomiting a good deal of blood’. He was just in time to hear Lord Clifford’s last words, which were ‘there is a God, a just God above’.
It’s therefore not surprising that bedchambers are also the most haunted rooms of a house. James Boswell, that bundle of bravado and insecurity, was not immune to frights in the night. Sharing a room with his friend Lord Mountstuart, they lay one night talking about superstitions: ‘I was afraid that ghosts might be able to return to earth, and for a time wished to get into bed with my Lord. But I lay quiet.’
In the previous century, though, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes treated the question with his usual rationality. His brilliant work aroused jealousy, and his enemies spread false reports:
One was that he was afraid to lie alone at night in his Chamber; I have often heard him say that he was not afraid of Sprights, but afraid of being knockt on the head for five or ten pounds, which rogues might think he had in his chamber.
Most people, though, were with Boswell rather than Hobbes. Going to bed in an age when witches, ghosts and robbers were all equally real in the mind required a good deal of resolution. Preparing to survive the trials of the night was a much more arduous task than it is today, when you merely set the alarm and switch off the light. The precautions one could take ranged from a pragmatic attention to household security, to prayers and rituals designed to scare off even the most awful evil spirits. First you had to get into the right frame of mind: ‘Discompose yourselves as little as may be before Bedtime,’ was the sensible advice of Humphrey Brooke in 1665, ‘the Master of the Family prudently animating and encouraging his Wife, Children and Servants against Fear and Disorder.’ It was wise to pray for protection each night against ‘sudden Death, Fears and Affrightments, Casualties by Fire, Water or Tempestous Weather’, and obviously, ‘Disturbance by Thieves’. There was also symbolic protection to be gained by placing a pig’s heart over the hearth, or putting a shoe among rafters in the roof, or carving the protective letter ‘M’ (for Virgin Mary) by the window or chimney through which a witch could conceivably enter. You might also put rosemary leaves under your bed in order to ‘be delivered of all evil dreams’.
One could also take the practical step of locking all the doors; a Georgian house at night was described as ‘barricaded’, ‘bolted’ and ‘barred’, both ‘backside and foreside, top and bottom’. ‘I always go round every night to see that all is fast,’ explained the London laundress Anne Towers, concerned that thieves would try to steal her customers’ linen overnight. Rural robbers might try to steal a family’s pig, and its male members would blunder outside with their sticks or cudgels in a literal attempt to ‘save their bacon’. Burglar alarms are an older invention than you might think. In The Footman’s Directory (1827), the retiring footman is encouraged to lock up carefully, and ‘if the shutters and doors be secured by an alarm-bell, be sure to put the wire of the alarm-bell to them, so that they cannot be opened without its going off’.
Today, night fears are more about intruders and serial killers than ghosts, but they still persist. Many people think that the 3 a.m. existential angst is a modern phenomenon. Like most human problems, though, people have suffered from it for centuries.
PART TWO
An Intimate History of the Bathroom
Separate rooms for washing were not standard in people’s homes until at least the middle of the twentieth century. In this section we nevertheless cover the activities of washing, defecating and grooming, which today take place in that most private of places, the bathroom. Bathrooms are now usually the only rooms in a house with a lock on their doors, yet the activities that take place within did not always require privacy.
Nor did people’s bodies inevitably grow cleaner as the years marched on. It’s surprising to discover that the many enthusiastic users of medieval communal baths probably smelled better than their Tudor descendants, who thought that bathing was dangerous. The Georgian period saw an enthusiasm for baths and washing return after an absence of more than two ‘dirty’ centuries. But many people had to make do with a bowl of water in the bedroom well into the twentieth century.
It seems horrible today to imagine life without hot water, but our notion of what it really means to be clean has changed dramatically. Developing ideas about cleanliness and social habits have dominated the history of the bathroom. Technological improvements in the art of plumbing have merely followed, rather than led, change.
15 – The Fall of Bathing …
GLOUCESTER: O, let me kiss that hand!
LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608)
Notice that King Lear doesn’t wash his hand; he merely ‘wipes’ it. This is deeply significant in the history of personal hygiene. The actor playing the first King Lear probably washed himself far less frequently and thoroughly than his medieval predecessors.
The word ‘medieval’ is often – and wrongly – used to mean something primitive, dirty and uncomfortable. This is really unfair to the people of the Middle Ages, where art, beauty, comfort and cleanliness were widely available (at least for those at the top of society). Washing their bodies was an important part of life for prosperous people, and from medieval towns there are numerous records of communal bathing after the Roman model.
More commonly than taking a bath, though, medieval people washed their hands and faces in a basin (the very same word for the much more sophisticated, plumbed-in bowl that you’ll find in your bathroom today). In art, you often see the baby Jesus being sponged down in such a dish. The head of the household usually had his own personal basin, and one of his servants would have had the job of pouring water into it from a special jug: we know about this because people often left valued basins and jugs to each other in their wills.
It was particularly important to wash your hands just before mealtimes, and the attention you paid to this was a marker of status. Once Cardinal Wolsey dared to dip his fingers in water that had just been used by the king; his presumption in doing so was considered to be outrageously arrogant. This was the kind of minor, intimate but telling detail that led to his downfall.
A medieval bathhouse. Its patrons enjoy baths, saunas, drinking and social interaction
But medieval people also immersed their whole bodies in bathwater relatively frequently. A bath was not just for getting clean; it could also be a hugely significant element of ritual purification as well. The ceremony of baptism involved water, priests would wash carefully before taking Mass, and bathing was an important part of the ritual of conferring knighthood. In Britain, this was especially important to the Order of the Garter’s
younger sibling, the Order of the Bath. Just before Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509, twenty-six would-be companions of the order had a ritual bath at the Tower of London – denoting ‘future purity of the mind’ – before keeping an all-night vigil in the castle’s medieval chapel.
A knightly bath sounds rather pleasant. The knight’s servant was supposed to hang sheets, flowers and herbs around the wooden tub, and to place in it sponges upon which the knight would sit. The servant then took a basin full of hot, fresh herbal potion in one hand, and used the other to scrub his master’s body with a soft sponge. The lucky knight was then to be rinsed with rose water, taken out and stood upon his ‘foot sheet’, wiped dry with a clean cloth, dressed in his socks and slippers and nightgown, and sent to bed.
If the knight required a ‘medicinable’ bath (perhaps after jousting), it might have contained hollyhock, mallow, fennel, camomile and ‘small-ache’ (wild water parsley). In his royal palaces, the king had even better baths: as early as 1351 he had ‘two large bronze taps … to bring hot and cold water in’. Henry VIII’s bath at Hampton Court could be found in a room in the Bayne Tower (from bain, French for ‘bath’). It was filled from a tap fed by a lead pipe bringing water from a spring more than three miles away. Henry’s engineers performed the amazing feat of passing this pipe beneath the very bed of the River Thames, all this effort being necessary to create, through gravity, the pressure of water to spurt up the height of the two floors to the royal bathroom. The bath itself was made of wood, round like a barrel cut in half and lined with a linen sheet to stop the king from getting splinters in his bottom.
The king may have had his own private bathtub and bathing room, but a great many of his subjects made regular visits to public bathhouses, or ‘stews’. The Crusaders had returned home from the East with reports of the enjoyable Turkish ‘hammams’ they’d visited, and in 1162 there were eighteen bathhouses recorded in the London district of Southwark alone. They were perhaps called by their colloquial name of ‘stews’ from the ‘stoves’ which heated the water, but alternatively it’s worth noting that fish were bred and kept in ponds likewise called ‘stews’. Medieval Londoners loved water as much as fish.
London’s numerous communal bathhouses were concentrated in Southwark, on the south bank of the river, a district devoted to pleasure and packed with playhouses, bear-baiting pits and gardens. When the water was hot and the steam ready at any particular establishment, boys would run through the streets shouting out the news and drumming up custom. (They were ordered to refrain from doing so before dawn because it woke everybody up.)
The bathhouses were used by large numbers of men and women all together. Bathing was a social experience, just like the sauna is in Nordic culture today. People in the Middle Ages – professional hermits excepted – were used to being in a group, and rarely spent time on their own.
While many bathhouses were respectable institutions offering a useful service to the public, some of them shaded over into houses of ill repute, just as many twenty-four-hour massage parlours do today. A prudish monk who visited a communal bathhouse in the 1390s was less than impressed: he found that ‘in the baths they sit naked, with other naked people, and I shall keep quiet about what happens in the dark’. In medieval songs and stories, taking a bath was often an erotic affair. The dynamic and heroic Sir Lancelot is often offered baths or massages by the various damsels he rescues from distress. Just like his twentieth-century equivalent, James Bond, a beautiful and flirtatious girl inevitably appears whenever he’s swimming or bathing.
In literature, it’s sometimes not clear whether a medieval bath is being offered in hospitality or out of feminine designs upon the hero’s body. But in the thirteenth-century story of The Romance of the Rose it’s pretty explicit. The ‘Old Lady’ character warns its juvenile hero that
sooner or later you will pass through the flame that burns everyone, and you will bathe in the tub where Venus steams the ladies … I advise you to prepare yourself before you go to bathe, and that you take me for your teacher, for the young man who has no one to instruct him takes a perilous bath.
By the sixteenth century the bathhouses’ reputation had become well and truly tarnished, and they had become synonymous with brothels. In fact, Georgian brothels were often called bagnios, even though no actual bathing was happening there any more. Visits to bathhouses were sometimes cited in later medieval divorce cases: like a weekend in Brighton, a person’s spending time at the stews could be taken as evidence that he or she’d been unfaithful.
What was it like, exactly, in a medieval bathhouse? Well, numerous illustrations show rows of individual baths, or even shared communal tubs, in a large room. The heat for the water might conveniently be provided from a baker’s oven next door. Baths themselves were often draped with sheets, partly to make them more comfortable and partly so the sheets could be raised to form a tent-like steam bath. Hot stones might be provided to give extra heat, and spices – cinnamon, liquorice, cumin, mint – to scent the water. The twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen suggests various combinations of herbs suitable for water to be poured over the head, to be splashed upon rocks in the sauna, to be rubbed directly onto the body, or for a soak. In the bathhouses of thirteenth-century Paris, a steam bath cost two deniers and a slosh in the bathtub itself twice as much. It all sounds delightful: medieval illustrations even show bathers, seated in their tubs, eating meals served on boards laid across the bath.
Perhaps the most sophisticated water systems were to be found in monasteries. Monks were immensely keen on bathing too; it was just they liked to make it single-sex and do it in ascetic cold water rather than hot steam. (A monk named Aldred, chronicler of Fountains Abbey, found it helpful to sit in cold water up to his neck whenever he was plagued by ‘worldly thoughts’.) The monks of Canterbury were mysteriously exempted from the Black Death in 1348–50. What was chalked up at the time to superior praying power may well have been their hyper-efficient plumbing. The monks had five settling tanks to clear the water feeding their frater, scullery and kitchen, bakehouse, brewhouse and guest hall, as well as lavers or fountains trickling into basins for hand-washing.
But many medieval people couldn’t afford the bathhouse. And even if they could, their unwashable fur, leather or woollen clothes were seldom as clean as their skin.
The best way to keep clothes clean was to brush them. A book of advice for young men training as body servants gives these recommendations for robes: ‘brush them cleanly, with the end of a soft brush’, and never let ‘woollen cloth nor fur pass a sennight [a seven-night, a week] unbrushed & shaken’.
The medieval household manual Le Ménagier de Paris (1392) gives various recipes for getting rid of fleas, such as scattering a room with alder leaves or attempting to trap the insects on slices of bread smeared with glue. Fleas were particularly hard to remove from furs, but infested garments could be ‘closed up and shut away, as inside a chest tightly strapped, or in a bag tied up securely and squeezed’. Then the fleas should ‘quickly perish’. There was an important social distinction between being afflicted by lice as opposed to fleas. Fleas were almost unavoidable; everyone had them. But to ‘be lowsie’ was an indicator of poor personal hygiene. According to the Georgian entomologist Thomas Muffet, lice were an embarrassing disgrace. (Mr Muffet was the father of the Little Miss Muffet who finds the spider beside her in the nursery rhyme.)
Around 1500, though, something fundamental in society shifted, and the practice of bathing entered into two hundred years of decline and neglect. The bathhouses of London were finally closed down for good in 1546 by Henry VIII. This was done with a flourish and sense of occasion: the stews ‘were by Proclamation and Sound of Trumpet, supress’d, and the Houses let to People of Reputation and Honest calling’.
So began the two ‘dirty’ centuries, from about 1550 to around 1750, during which washing oneself all over was considered for the greater part to be weird, sexually arousing or dangerous. For the few people who could
afford to have them at home, baths became medicinal, rather than cleansing, in purpose.
Why did this happen? For a start, many holy wells and baths were closed down in the Reformation because worshipping the saints to whom they were dedicated had become idolatrous and illegal; their secondary purpose of keeping clean was a casualty of this. Bathing also declined because of fears that water spread illness, especially the new and frightening disease of syphilis. As cities grew, it became harder and harder to maintain a supply of clean water. People became increasingly concerned that polluted bathwater might penetrate their skin or gain access to their bodies through their orifices. Sir Francis Bacon’s instructions illustrate how the Tudors and Stuarts believed that they needed to defend their bodies against water:
First, before bathing, rub and anoint the Body with Oil, and Salves that the Bath’s moistening heat and virtue may penetrate into the Body, and not the liquor’s watery part.
A description of the nasty things that lurked in a common bathing pool makes such precautions understandable:
Mad and poison’d from the Bath I fling
With all the Scales and Dirt that around me cling:
Then looking back, I curse that Jakes obscene;
Whence I come sullied out who enter’d clean.
Hot water might even open up the pores in your skin so that the evil ‘miasma’ of the air could enter, bringing sickness with it.
