1. Stews are shown with multiple tubs to a room. The people are naked except for headress and jewelry, they sit in the tubs and the tubs are full of water. They are eating and there are servants moving about with trays of food and jugs of drink. I dont see luffas or soap in evidence.

2. Personal home bath are shown with a naked person sitting in an empty tub. There are servants/helpers moving about with buckets of water, people have luffas and or a bar of soap (hard to tell unless I see the original). Some of the bathers are shown with dirt marks all over them. Water was poured over the person as necessary.

3. Moslem Hammans in Turkey, which I visited and quite enjoyed. They dispense with the tubs and go for large tiled rooms. You are provided with a seat and a sink with no drain. Your servant fills the sink with warm water and wets you down with a copper bowl and then proceeds to soap you and luffa the skin off your body as if you personally insulted him. You are provided a towel to tie around your waist and they stop at the towel. He rinses you and leaves you to wash under the towel. Once clean, you are then allowed to go in to enjoy the hot tubs and heated slabs to lay on.

4. 19thc officer bath seen in the forts here in Canada. They are all sheet metal, about a small bucket in size, enough for your feet, and they have a very wide splash rim around them making the diameter about five feet. Included in the design is a seat, a handle underneath to move it and a long groove in the splash rim to help pour out the waste water. Interpreters state it was stored under the bed or on the wall and set up infront of the fire for the daily bath. Heated water was poured over the officer by his servant.

5. So to sum up, getting yourself clean was a cross between a shower and a bath. I say this as you sat in a tub (empty) and had water poured (not rain effect like modern shower heads) over you to wet you down so that you could soap yourself. Then you had more water poured over you to rinse yourself off with. This could be repeated until you were happy or out of water. I believe the empty tub was to catch the waste water, rather than make a mess on the floor. There is one tub pictured with a tent like canopy for either privacy (I doubt this) or to prevent chilling breezes in winter. I think this bust the going comments of big families all washing in the same dirty water, with the lord going first and the baby last, to be thrown out with the bath water.

6. So this summer, try this theory of mine. See how it works. If you are shy you could wear a bathing suit, or like they still do in Eastern Hammans, a thin towel tied around the waist, which is expected to get very wet, but also you can reach up under it to soap yourself. This may take a number of buckets, but once you have a large pot heated, the trick would be mixing the hot with the cold to get the right temperature in the pouring pitcher or bucket. If everyone hauls their own water, it should be relatively easy. What we have been using in the past is a propane fired shower that sucks water out of a bucket and heats it prior to spraying you like a modern shower head. We found that a large bucket of water is sufficient, but two buckets is a luxurious amount of water. Of course the pump must continually run or the unit burns out (prior to turning off) so we place the nozzle back into the bucket while soaping. We stand or crouch on a felt mat on the ground in a tent.

Discussion?

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I spend 12 day in Museum last fall (Like Living History farms, only without the "Living History" for most of the year...). We worked, slept and cooked there without anything modern. It was a great experience. I washed my face in the morning and felt quite clean for about 3-4 days. after that we decided to wash
The guys tried the little creek, but smelled fishy and muddy afterwards -and it was octobre so it was very cold and they could only suffer it with quite a bit of schnaps...

My friend and I washed in the kitchen: we had a tub for washing dishes to stand in, while the other poured water out of a pitcher.
With a sponge and a bit of selfmade soap washing was quite effectiv, it was nice and warm in the kitchen, didn't make a mess and didn't use up much hot water (we had put one one small kettle over the rest of our fire we used for cooking dinner -by the time wie finished eating it was hot enough to mix with cold water).
I could imagine this might have been a way you "bathed" back then. It's sort of what you see on pictures and it isn't that big of a deal to organise.

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You wouldn't be drawing your own bath, your country cousins child might be lugging that water, to help contribute some funds to a dowery. We have dishwashers, they had scullery maids or all-round servants. I'm not addressing lords or gentry either, but carpenters, masons, dyers, tylers, and the like, in their own households.

Barbara Hainawault addresses the topic in her book "growing up in Medieval London".

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An excellent book, esp section on apprentices, linked to this by virtue of the fact they were not servants (despite often being treated as such), ie the water bearers would be real servants.

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Another picture shows a filled tub, this time in an Italian, not well-known version of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, dating about 1390, in ink, on which a naked lady stands in the tub, clearly full of water, with two naked maidservants (or friends) one of whom tries to step in as well, the other holding the lady in the bath. On the background a pole on which they hung their clothes. (Liege MS 1041). This last scene also seems domestic.

All right, they are Italian, but they still might give reasonable evidence to how things were done in Europe.

[ 11-09-2006: Message edited by: Sir Lawrence d'Hastings ]

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