Life in the 1500's

material girl wrote:
Of course they did - but other people's smells, not their own. People worried a lot about bad smells because they thought that diseases were spread by them. So doctors in times of epidemics carried posies of scented flowers and herbs to protect themselves, and English judges at the assizes were provided with posies to protect them from the stink of the miserable verminous prisoners being brought up from the jail for their trials. And that danger was real; louse-borne diseases like typhus throve in jails, and often infected people in court. The worst case on record in Britain was the Black Assize of Oxford in 1577, at which the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, a sergeant-at-law, five justices of the peace, two sheriffs, one knight, and most of the jury were killed by typhus caught from the prisoners.

But people didn't carry posies to protect themselves from their own smell; it they thought they smelled bad they did the logical thing and washed, just as you or I would.

- Incidentally, the custom of providing the assize judge with a posy for his protection continued in England into the 20th century. For all I know it still does.

I have always been amused at European bathing customs (pacem, our members across the pond, when i use that term, i mean the residents of North and South America as well). After Petr Alexeevitch created St. Petersburg, the Hanoverian Elector sent a minister accredited to the Tsar. He wrote volumes home, and in particular described in detail the "barbaric" custom the Russians had of bathing on a weekly basis. Very amusing reading.

What exactly did he find barbaric about it? Simply the fact of regular bathing? Or the use of steam baths, something that Germans had never been accustomed to? Or indeed the communal nudity, which might well shock a 17th-century German?

It's axiomatic that every culture thinks its own washing habits civilised and finds any different habits barbaric. Bear in mind that the entire Muslim world thinks it utterly barbaric to wash by swilling around in a bowl, basin or bath full of water; in Islam proper washing is done only in running water. Europeans who take a bath seven times a week consider that they bathe every day; but to a literally-minded Muslim they have not washed at all.

Supposedly, the great incensor at the cathedral at Campostello was designed to disguise the odors of the pilgrims.

Life in the 1500's
The funny thing is my English teacher read of this story to the class.
She thought it was true! :wink: