Good Queen Bess's bathing habits

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There's a statement I keep running into, in the context of the history of hygiene and allied subjects, that Queen Elizabeth I was a paragon of cleanliness in her own time because she took a bath once a month "whether she needed it or not".

Sometimes the interval is given as "once a year" or "once every three months" or "twice a year" (sure proof that we're dealing with a word-of-mouth legend here), but the last six words are always the same, so it is always implied that this is a quotation of some kind. But I have never seen any reference saying where the quotation comes from.

Can anybody tell me the origin (and original form) of this quotation, so I can tell whether it has any historical validity or not? I have always suspected it of being pure nonsense, but I could be wrong....

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The "whether she needed it or not" tag is used frequently about jokes on bathing--current commoners as well as the House of Tudors.

I think the expression may originally have referred to fanatic housekeepers, but I can't be sure. Furthermore, in the days of unpaved roads, incontinent horses, coal heat and tallow candles most cleaning was needed on a daily basis.

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But my point is that people believe this story about Queen Elizabeth amd assert it in all seriousness. I agree that it's absurd - apart from anything else, anyone who wore clothes as expensive as hers (her dresses cost the equivalent of a Daimler or a Rolls-Royce) couldn't afford to have them rotting after a couple of wearing from contact with a filthy body!

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syntinen wrote:

But my point is that people believe this story about Queen Elizabeth amd assert it in all seriousness. I agree that it's absurd - apart from anything else, anyone who wore clothes as expensive as hers (her dresses cost the equivalent of a Daimler or a Rolls-Royce) couldn't afford to have them rotting after a couple of wearing from contact with a filthy body!

Well, I suppose not many drove a Daimler or Roll in 16th century :wink:

However, bathing habits really were different 500 years back, and some amateur sites say as quoted above - like here

Quote:

As for bathing, most Englishmen think baths are unhealthy. Queen Elizabeth I is considered strange for bathing as much as four times a year.

However, she had many different interests throuout her life like fresh flowers, fire works, the theater, vanilla (she put it on everything), pearls, silk stockings, archery, fantastical cloth, vigorous dancing, bathing, and the colors black, white, gold, ginger. Unlike others of her time, she hated unwashed bodies and bad smells. (Uppity Women of Medieval Times, Vicki Leon ,Conari Press, 1997 as quoted here .)

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thanks Walter. That illustrates very well what I mean, how such statements get repeated everywhere, so they grow to have the status of something that "everybody knows", "a known fact" with no proof or backup at all.

But I have e-mailed the owner of the site you mentioned, and maybe she'll be able to provide some proof of the statement (and maybe she won't). Thanks for your help.

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Among the ancients, the Romans were real fond of bathin', with the Greeks not far behind. The practice was quite popular among the Meditteranean cultures right along as well. It seems, however, apart from direct Roman influence, to have had not much of a followin' in the British Isles or on most of The Continent ... not too surprisin', really, when you consider the climate and the architecture; even the finest castles were dank and drafty places for most of the year. There was a good reason fragrances - perfumes, incense, aromatic oils, and the like - were real big sellers in those days.

An interestin', slightly related aside - the practice of printin', generally credited to Guttenberg, didn't really take off for about a century or so followin' it invention. Along about then, a method for producin' linen came about that was so efficient and inexpensive that it was more expedient to dispose of soiled or damaged linen apparel than to launder or repair it. The rags were an endless and economical raw material source for the one thing printin' needed to really catch on; cheap paper.

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timberlandko wrote:

It seems, however, apart from direct Roman influence, to have had not much of a followin' in the British Isles or on most of The Continent ... not too surprisin', really, when you consider the climate and the architecture; even the finest castles were dank and drafty places for most of the year. There was a good reason fragrances - perfumes, incense, aromatic oils, and the like - were real big sellers in those days.

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One of the modern myths about medieval times is that no one took baths. This is not true. Baths were normally taken in wooden tubs. Often times some privacy was provided by a canopy or tent. In warmer weather the tub was placed in the garden of the castle, and in cold weather near a fire inside the castle. When travelling, the tub often accompanied the lord, together with the bathman.

In some castles the bathrooms were built in. At Leeds Castle, in 1291, there was a chamber 23ft by 17ft, lined with stone, which could contain 4ft of water taken from the lake that surrounded the castle. There was a ledge for accessories, a recess for the bath, and a changing room located right above the bathroom. Some castle bathrooms had piped-in hot and cold water. Some lords even had bath mats to protect their feet from the cold.

A lavabo, slop basin, or laver was a stone basin built into the wall. It was used as a wash basin and sink for washing the hands before and after meals. Often, a refillable tank with copper or bronze taps sat above the basin. Some lavabos were highly decorative and had spouts in the form of animal heads. Some examples of castles with lavabos are Goodrich and Conisbrough Castles in England.

source

Same re Germany: there are a couple of pics proving such - I'll try, if I find them online.

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timberlandko wrote:

An interestin', slightly related aside - the practice of printin', generally credited to Guttenberg, didn't really take off for about a century or so followin' it invention. Along about then, a method for producin' linen came about that was so efficient and inexpensive that it was more expedient to dispose of soiled or damaged linen apparel than to launder or repair it. The rags were an endless and economical raw material source for the one thing printin' needed to really catch on; cheap paper.

Before woodblock printing was common - as well as
Gutenberg´s invention made printing much easier.

By the thirteenth century there were established paper mills in Spain and Italy, and in France by about 1340, Germany by 1390, in Britain not before the 15th century.
It was Gutenberg's invention which transformed the need for paper, and by the later fifteenth century it had become so infinitely cheaper than parchment that it was used for all but the most luxurious books.

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Oh, its not that folks didn;' bathe then, Arthur - they did. It just wasn't a daily thing. Actually, one of the semi-official "Persons in waiting" for higher nobility was the Master or Mistress of The Bath. And there's no denyin'the antiquity of the sayin' "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"; bathin' was a big deal, and bath day was a family affair; Dad got his first, then mom, then the kids, so, by the time the baby was done,the bathwater was pretty murky. Daily bathing didn't really become a fixture untill the urbanization of the latter part of the indudtrial revolution ... and even then, the practice took a while to trickle down the socio-economic ladder.

And it was indeed linen-based rag paper that became cheap. In the 8th Century, the Chinese method of papermakin' was brought by the Arabs into Spain, and the French soon grabbed the idea. Still, paper suitabl for writin' - or printin' - on required a costly, slow labor-intensive process. The fine papers of the French and Spanish mills were costly luxuries. The 14th Century printin' press drove the demand for paper, with supply-and-demand havin' the natural effect; the price went up and folks looked for cheaper ways to produce it. by the 15th century, the availability of vast quantities of linen rag material, and the mechanical advances of emergin' technologies camr together to bring about good, cheap paper - and books - for the common man.

The mass-production loom, the printin' press, and the paper mill all are bound up in that inextricably, each dependin' on the other, and together chief foundation of what became the industrial revolution. Which brought abpout daily bathin', so its all Gutenberg's doin' that we're more hygienic than were our forebears Laughing

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Quote:

And there's no denyin'the antiquity of the sayin' "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"; bathin' was a big deal, and bath day was a family affair; Dad got his first, then mom, then the kids, so, by the time the baby was done,the bathwater was pretty murky.

This is actually not a folk saying but a literary one: its origin is a tract by a German theologian in the Reformation!

I suspect, timberlandko, that you have come across part of an internet spoof called "Life in the 1500s", which is filling the world with misinformation about word and phrase origins. Try this site http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa042202a.htm which debunks it at length.

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syntinen wrote:

This is actually not a folk saying but a literary one: its origin is a tract by a German theologian in the Reformation!

First found in Thomas Murner's »Narrenbeschwörung«.

http://www.stadtbibliothek.ulm.de/images/murner.jpg

http://www.akademie-rs.de/pics/991103_daemon.gif

(However, since Murner used it quite frequently, it is thought that it might not have a creation by him but that it truely was a folk saying.)

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Not at all syntinen - the sayin' was a jest even in pre-Shakespearean times, when it appears to have originated. None the less. untill comparatively recently, bathin' was a much bigger and far less common deal than it is today. Incidentally, the shower didn't really take off untill the housin' boom followin' WWII - a shower head for the bathtub was a real sellin' point.

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timberlandko wrote:

Not at all syntinen - the sayin' was a jest even in pre-Shakespearean times, when it appears to have originated.

I didn't find any souce claiming it to be English origin - all refer to Murner.

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Didn't attribute it to Shakespear, or any other person of any heritage, Walter - just remarked the sayin' pre-dated Shakespear.

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Of course, there was a real difference between the areas under Roman control and those still barbarians. The area around the Mediteranean was warm, making human contact unpleasant when bodies were unwashed. Roman aquaducts made water easy to obtain. I suspect that in the cold climates of England and Scandinavia, bathing was a more difficult matter.
I also suspect that the Scandinavian sauna -- essentially, a waterless bath -- is fairly ancient.

Many, many years ago, I read that Queen Christina was given a diplomatic gift of a bar of soap and had to be instructed in its use. Now, this is one of the statements that may either be a kind of historical myth or simply be the truth, yanked out of context. Athletes of the classical world scraped dirt and oil from their bodies with a flat device called something like a stigel and Scandinavians sweated in their saunas, then jumped into natural bodies of water and neither culture seemed to have used soap.

The public television shows that sent people back to Celtic Britain or 19th C America or England left the female participants scratching their scalps. Shampoo may be a bigger need than soap!

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Plainoldme wrote:

Quote:

Many, many years ago, I read that Queen Christina was given a diplomatic gift of a bar of soap and had to be instructed in its use. Now, this is one of the statements that may either be a kind of historical myth or simply be the truth, yanked out of context.

Or it may be a traditional slander. Stories claiming to illustrate that a given community is so ignorant of hygiene that they don't know what soap is for are widespread. In 1950s Italy a popular insult for the Neapolitans was "Mangiatori di sapone!" ("Soap eaters!"), based on a story that a crate of soap had arrived in Naples and the inhabitants, never having seen soap, had thought it was cheese and eaten it. I don't suppose for a moment that this story is true, either.

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I suspect the Neopolitans have more taste than to relish soap, unless it was very soon after the close of WWII and they were hungry.

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I e-mailed the owner of the history site that Walter recommended, asking her source for the statement that "Queen Elizabeth I was considered strange for bathing as much as four times a year". She never answered me, which suggest to me that she hasn't got any, and is just repeating a common myth.

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In his History of the English Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill made a remark which i sadly cannot quote from memory. It was to the effect however, that with the collapse of the Roman Empire, the lights went out in Europe for a millenium, and people stopped bathing for far longer.

Bathing was in fact considered unhealthy. Such historical notables as the Duke of Marlborough and George Washington discouraged too frequent bathing by their soldiers in the sincere belief that it lead to camp diseases--a problem which routinely decimated armies, although it was caused by a derth of cleanliness rather than the opposite.

Churchill himself was a devoted bather. He had a bath every morning, and his secretary would come into the bath room to take dictation in response to his correspondence, which he read while in the bath. When taken with an idea, and exercised with the response, Winston would leap from the bath and begin walking back and forth, in the nude, while continuing to dictate. Often, his valet (in the days when he could afford one) would rush to put a towell around him. As one might suspect, his secretaries were male, and needed to possess a good deal of aplomb.

Manor records strongly suggest that most people bathed once a year. The peasants on a manner would shed their garments, which were then usually burned, or sold to a rag picker, bathe, and recieve a new set of clothing which they would wear for the suceeding year.

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Setanta, can you say what manorial records you are quoting, and give chapter and verse? I have never read anything to suggest that English peasants were issued clothes by their manorial lord.

The lord's servants would have been given clothes, yes; from the Middle Ages right through the 19th century it was normal for a servant's annual wages to include a stipulated quantity of new clothing and shoes. But that certainly did not imply that the old clothes were then burned or sent for rags - they were downgraded from best to work wear. (Throw away a set of clothes after only a single year's wear? How likely is that?) Nor does that in any way imply an annual bath.

I'd love to have details of how Marlborough and George Washington discouraged bathing - in the case of Marlborough that really surprises me as in most respects of organisation he was a very modern-thinking commander for his time. He certainly had arrangements in place for getting his men's linen regularly washed, which seems like a waste of effort if the men themselves did not wash.

- and I really wouldn't take dear old Winston's hyperbole as gospel! Even at the time he was writing, I don't think any serious historian of everyday life would have accepted that statement as a reasonable summary of the case.

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Good Queen Bess's bathing habits

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