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Today I’ll review ‘Life in Medieval Europe, fact and fiction’ by Danièle Cybulskie.
When I read this in the introduction, I knew I was going to enjoy reading this book because I care so much more about the daily life of our common ancestors than about whatever the fancy pansy lot were doing;
“While we may learn about dates and kings and wars in history classes, it seems that too often we miss out on those little details that made up ordinary life. And yet those are the details that bring history into full colour, the details that connect us as human beings through time, and the details that stick with us long after we’ve closed a book or turned off a screen. This book looks at medieval Europe in terms of those little itches of human curiosity that may not be scratched by a conventional look at history. While we may learn about dates and kings and wars in history classes, it seems that too often we miss out on those little details that made up ordinary life. And yet those are the details that bring history into full colour, the details that connect us as human beings through time, and the details that stick with us long after we’ve closed a book or turned off a screen.
This book looks at medieval Europe in terms of those little itches of human curiosity that may not be scratched by a conventional look at history.”
Cybulski begins with one of the most stubborn myths about the middle ages and one of my favourite subjects; Hygiene:
“Did medieval people take baths?
The answer to this is a resounding yes – and no. As the Romans slowly receded from most of Europe, they left behind the bathhouses they so enjoyed, many of them ornate and cleverly constructed to make use of natural hot springs. Both bathhouses and steam baths continued to be well used features of towns and cities all over Europe throughout the medieval period, although perhaps not as often as we might prefer.”
“Because it’s an unpleasant feeling to get a splinter while sitting down naked, bathers would often have a linen sheet draped into the bathtub as a layer between themselves and the wood.”
Although this makes sense and was something I’ve believed for a very long time, I’m now doubting it, I think it may have just been for comfort.
It sounds like it makes sense, but I’ve seen wooden tubs made by professional coopers and they’re amazingly well made, very smooth.
I think that the chance of a splinter would have been extremely small but to be sure I think I need to do some experiments.
So if you’re a cooper who makes massive medieval style tubs I can bathe in, send me one for free, for science!
The following I found extra interesting, I already knew this but the way Cybulskie described it made me think about how in the 1930s in the Netherlands people were worried about the radio allowing people to listen to the opinions of those with different religions or political ideas;
“Evidently, people enjoyed their baths: there were dozens of bathhouses in Paris alone in the thirteenth century, and London even had a Bathestereslane. Bathhouses were used by both men and women, and although Christians often bathed in mixed company, occasionally they had separate times and bathhouses, as did Muslims and Jews. Concerned writers specifically warned against sharing a bath with those of other religious beliefs, as the casual social setting and lack of religious attire might lead to a dangerous mixing of beliefs.”
Another subject I think differently about now than I once did is the bad reputation of bathhouses.
It seems that both normal bathhouses and brothels with bathing services were called stews and this may have helped things get extra complicated.
But books like ‘Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries’ by Janna Coomans (2021), ‘Het middeleeuwse openbare badhuis’ by Fabiola van Dam (2020) and ‘Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities’ by Carole Rawcliffe (2013) have made a good point suggesting that most bathhouses were not the naughty fun palaces of perviness that they were long accused of being:
“But bathhouses weren’t just for getting clean: they were also convenient places to get dirty. Given that people routinely got naked together there, it seems inevitable that bathhouses would also become a place for sexual rendezvous, and this is exactly what happened. While some establishments offered food for the bathers, others also provided beds – and prostitutes. Eventually, they gained a very bad reputation, indeed, and the common English word for bathhouse – ‘stew’ – became synonymous with brothel.”
I think that a lot of villages, even very small ones, did have bathhouses but nothing like the ones in cities.
More like a sweat shed next to the baker, using the heat of the baker’s oven to fuel a sort of sauna where the locals would sweat and then scrub themselves clean and pour water over themselves.
I’ve even heard a historians suggest that this is how public bathhouses started, even before Roman times.
But the lots of people drowning is very true, it happened quite a lot.
People who can’t swim risking their lives to clean themselves, does that sound like folks who were a mucky bunch and who didn’t care about being dirty?
“People in rural areas bathed in lakes, rivers, and streams, and even the urban poor who were not able to afford a visit to the bathhouse tried to get clean where they could. We know about their bathing in part because of coroners’ records; sometimes people’s efforts to stay clean ended in tragedy, with people young and old drowning in the process.”
The following bit may be the result of people using the word bathing differently because to me bathing is having an actual bath and bathing weekly doesn’t sound rare to me at all, bathing is not washing or showering, bathing is bathing.
Most of us today don’t bathe every week, most of us don’t even have a bath tub to bathe in.
I also don’t think anyone bathed only twice a year, bathing weekly seems to be a pretty common thing;
“Though people throughout Europe were bathing wherever they could, it seems that bathing was still a relatively rare event for northern Europeans, occurring at most weekly, and at least twice a year.”
Yes, they had soap!
Europeans have had soap since pre-Roman times, hard soap may even have been invented there and it’s those little details like soap being donated to the poor but also this detail about the monks that give us a clue how big a part of life it was;
“Did they use soap? Soap was known and loved in Europe right from the beginning of the medieval period. Even those who were meant to be living an austere and strict religious life were expected to use it. As the ninth-century synods of Aachen declared, it was essential that every monk should be supplied, in addition to their clothing, with a ‘sufficient amount of soap’.”
Personally I think I prefer humans smelling like humans in stead of the wild chemical freshness of freedom, or whatever nonsense advertisements use that resulted in me nearly passing out every time I use public transport and am poisoned by the clouds caused by gallons of aftershave and deodorant.
I also think that medieval people who washed daily, regularly did their laundry, wore antibacterial sweat combatting linen and were surrounded by open fires most likely just smelled of smoke, so not that bad at all.
But yes, I love this conclusion that’s again a subtle little dig at those who came after the middle ages;
“It’s a safe bet that the aristocracy had more access to soap, and more opportunities to use it, leaving the peasantry pretty pungent by modern standards, despite their best efforts. Still, evidence suggests that soap was more common and more frequently used in Europe in the Middle Ages than in the more oft-praised periods that came before and after it. And that is nothing to sniff at.”
Cybulski going strong debunking old myths, left right and centre!
“As you can imagine, all of the human and animal traffic (and its accompanying mess) would have made dirt roads unbelievably mucky, so one of the first priorities for cities was to cobble the streets as soon as possible. City streets were levelled with rubble or gravel, and often had a gutter in the centre of the street to keep rainwater running, washing filth away. In many cities, people were responsible for keeping the street directly in front of their home clean and in good repair, sometimes on a weekly basis, reporting damaged streets or bad drainage to the city council. Hefty fines and complaints rained down on the heads of those who didn’t clean up their own messes.”
This is also such an important fact, it makes sense but sometimes someone has to tell you this before you realise it.
We modern humans have a lot of rubbish, every single day we fill our bins, litter our streets, etc.
But when you live like a medieval person (and I did, at an open air museum) you suddenly realise that you practically have almost no waste at all;
“Medieval homes had less garbage to get rid of on a weekly basis than we do now, as items were reused and repaired much more often, and there wasn’t the same amount of disposable packaging or sheer volume of things to purchase. Kitchen scraps could be fed to animals or used as compost for a backyard garden. Rags could be used for cleaning or patches, or even woven together to make rugs; eventually, they’d be used to make paper.”
Yes, yes, yes, tell them Cybulski, tell them again and louder, especially for the readers in the back;
“What about toilets?
There’s a common image of people leaning out their windows tossing the
contents of a chamber pot in the street, but tossing waste where people
might be walking was risky business, indeed. While it’s true that liquid
waste could be poured into the streets to flow down the gutter, no one
appreciated solid waste on the streets – especially human.
For many homeowners, there was little reason to toss the contents of a
chamber pot out the window, as houses and shops often had their own
latrines in the cellar or in the backyard. Many homes even had pipes leading
from a garderobe inside the house to a latrine, although they were not
flushed with water as they are today. There are complaints from London
about particularly uncivilised people whose pipes led directly into the alley
below, but these were definitely not approved of in any way. In fact, we
only know about them because of an investigation into how to stop them.”
If you want to read more about medieval hygiene check out this article:
I love how this still surprises a lot of people;
“True medieval feasts would not have included giant turkey legs, however, as turkeys come from the Americas, which had not been ‘discovered’ yet (aside from a couple of abandoned Viking settlements). Incidentally, the same is true of tomatoes, potatoes, sweet corn, and chocolate.”
Another classic myth I still regularly have to deal with;
“Wasn’t the food all bland?
While it’s true that eating the same food in different combinations based on what you have available can become tiresome, that doesn’t mean that the food was bland. Peasants had most of the spices that are still regularly featured in modern spice racks available to them, such as the old favourites parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, as well as basil, oregano, garlic, and chives. Their inclusion in the thousands of modern recipes online goes to show that the possibilities for interesting dishes are endless using these flavours alone.
People with wealth could also buy spices from far afield, mixing them in combinations which may seem strange today, but are no less delicious for their unfamiliarity. Pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cumin, and cloves were common ingredients in recipe books, although their inclusion in books (expensive commodities, themselves) underlines their use in wealthier households, not peasant homes.”
Yes! Another debunk, medieval people drank water, they didn’t drink beer/ale because all the water was polluted;
“The common idea that no one actually drank water, however, is a myth. Everywhere in medieval Europe, people sank wells to provide themselves with the water they needed for drinking, cooking, washing, and watering gardens. Cities provided central fountains and wells for their citizens, sometimes drawing water from sources outside of the city limits via lead pipes. In castles, especially, establishing a well was one of the first orders of business, as in times of siege the people trapped inside the castle’s protective walls would die within days without a water source. Beyond wells and cisterns, people from the smallest homes to the largest castles channelled rainwater from their roofs into barrels.”
If you want to read more about the drinking beer in stead of water myth check out this article:
This too is still a surprise to many, yes medieval people rarely married when they were still kids and their marriages were also rarely arranged, both men & women worked, got an education (which could be school but also learning a trade, serving in a household) and waited for the right time to get married;
“Most common people didn’t get married until they were in their late teens or early twenties since, by then, they had finished their apprenticeships or their contracts as household servants and had saved up enough money to establish their own households.”
If you want to read more about marriage during the middle ages check out this article:
I regularly have to still debunk these old myths, so it’s wonderful to see it dealt with in this book as well;
“Believe it or not, most ‘medieval’ torture devices are actually clever Victorian fakes meant to convince people of the barbarism of the Middle Ages. The iron maiden, the pear of anguish, and the infamous chastity belt are not medieval and were never used. Even the scold’s bridle is Early Modern. When medieval people wanted to torture someone, they didn’t need elaborate means to do it.”
The book is well written, has short chapters and quickly gets to the point.
It isn’t a thick book with lots of pages, it’s not difficult to read, so it’s very suitable for people who perhaps aren’t used to reading lots of history books, which makes it also perfect for younger readers as well.
It deals with a lot of myths but is also just a good description of what life was like, here are some of the subjects dealt with in the book:
Did medieval people take baths?
Did they ever wash their hands?
Did they use soap?
What about their teeth?
Did they wash their clothes?
Were the cities filthy?
What about toilets?
What did people eat?
Wasn’t the food all bland?
What did people drink?
Were they constantly drunk?
Was everyone up for a night of drunken excitement?
What was a feast like?
Did they really eat with their hands?
Did people have any table manners?
Did medieval people date?
Weren’t all of the marriages arranged?
What about their sex lives?
What about LGBTQIA+ people?
People were using contraceptives?
What was childhood like?
Did everyone die young?
When a serf got married, did the lord get to sleep with the bride?
If people didn’t confess to their crimes, were they tortured?
What about knights?
Could they even move under all that armour?
Weren’t monasteries also schools?
Did everyone believe?
Wasn’t the church always burning people for heresy?
What was life like for the Jews?
What about Muslims?
What about the crusades?
Did they have doctors like we do today?
What about people with disabilities?
What was the Black Death?
Did medieval people wear underwear?
In short, I recommend this book, I enjoyed reading it.
If you enjoyed reading my review, check out this list of other reviews I’ve written:
