The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (47 page)

For most people, personal cleanliness is less a health-related issue
than a social one. William Bullein states that ‘plain people in the country, [such] as carters, threshers, ditchers, colliers and ploughmen, seldom wash their hands, as appeareth by their filthiness, and very few times comb their heads, as is seen by flocks, nits, grease, feathers, straw and such like, which hang in their hairs’.
¹³
Nothing in that list is a serious health threat; rather Bullein is disquieted because these country folk are not socially presentable. Thus cleanliness serves as a marker to distinguish between those that are cultured and sophisticated and those that are not. The rich expect their own kind to do something about their bodily smells, to be clean and decent, even fragrant. The socially respectable classes are similarly ashamed of smelling as if they have not washed for weeks. But as you go down the social scale, especially in an urban environment, people place a lower priority on disguising their bodily odours. In the Elizabethan mind, filthy people are associated with corrupt vapours and ill health. They smell so bad that they have become walking miasmas, and people believe that their stinking breath or the foul air around them will cause other people to fall ill.

As you can see, Elizabethans clean themselves for both social and health-related reasons, very much like us. But, unlike us, the
ways
in which they clean themselves are constrained by social and health-related factors too. To understand this, you need to think about water. Sixteenth-century people believe that water can infect them through the pores of their skin and the crevices of their body, and so they display a marked reluctance to immerse themselves wholly in a bath unless they know the water is pure. In the previous century Londoners frequented the bathhouses at Southwark, where they were tended by Flemish women in steaming hot tubs. The men amongst them were normally treated to more than a wash and a rub down, so when syphilis arrived in England in 1500 it spread rapidly through the bathing community. In short, people who bathed fell ill. Henry VIII accordingly shut down all the bathhouses in Southwark. Although a small handful opened up again under Edward VI, people are subsequently more cautious. In Elizabeth’s reign, having a bath is seen as risky and unnecessary: not only might you catch a disease, but it costs a great deal of time, effort and money to prepare one. If you are living in a town you will have to go to the conduit and carry home enough water, heat it above a fire and pour it into a bathtub; in an age of trickling water supplies and firewood shortages, that is not something you can do very often.

So what should you do to clean yourself? Sir John Harington offers the following advice:

When you arise in the morning, avoid [i.e. empty yourself of] all superfluities as well by urine as by the belly … avoid also from the nostrils and the lungs all filthy matter as well by cleansing as by spittle and cleanse the face, head and whole body & love you to be clean and well-apparelled for from our cradles let us abhor uncleanness, which neither nature or reason can endure.
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Harington is a courtier and so this advice is to be trusted if you want to impress people of high status. However, he is unusual in suggesting that you should clean your
whole body
every morning. Francis, the schoolboy in Claudius Hollyband’s book, is nowhere near as thorough:

Francis
: Peter, bring me some water to wash my hands and my face. I will have no river water for it is troubled. Give me well or fountain water. Take the ewer and pour upon my hands: pour high.

Margaret
: Can you not wash in the basin? Shall you always have a servant at your tail? You are too wanton!

Francis
: Wilt thou that I wash my mouth and my face where I have washed my hands as they do in many houses in England? Give me a towel, maiden; now give me my breakfast, for I am ready. Make haste!

Note that he dresses first and washes himself afterwards, and then he just cleans his hands, face and mouth – the parts that show. Schoolboys have never been the most attentive students of bodily cleanliness, but his morning routine is not dissimilar to Andrew Boorde’s advice: ‘comb your head often … and wash your hands and wrists, your face and eyes and your teeth with cold water’.
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William Vaughan prescribes a complete morning ritual along these lines:

1. When you are about to rise up, stretch yourself strongly …
   
2. Rub and chafe your body with the palms of your hands, or with a coarse linen cloth: the breast, back and belly gently but the arms, thighs and legs roughly, until they seem ruddy and warm;
   
3. Evacuate yourself;
   
4. Put on your apparel, which in the summer time must be for the most part silk or buff, made of bucks’ skin, for it resisteth venomous and contagious airs …
   
5. Comb your head softly and easily with an ivory comb …
   
6. Pick and rub your teeth …
   
7. Wash your face, eyes, ears and hands with fountain water.
   
8. Say your morning prayers and desire God to bless you.
   ¹⁶
   

But what about the rest of the body, you may wonder? What about the schoolboy’s feet? What about his hair? Francis’s bedchamber must smell like a miasma all on its own. This is where all that linen underclothing comes in useful: linen absorbs the moisture of the body and soaks up the sweat. People therefore ‘wash’ in linen, rubbing the skin with linen towels and changing their shirts every day. In the modern world we are fixated with washing in soap and water, but there are many other ways to remove dirt. The Romans used olive oil and a strigil. In the late sixteenth century, when water is scarce and liable to carry infection, it makes sense to clean your body with something else – like linen. Hence the importance of having access to a good laundress: a respectable family will want to have clean linen every day – towels as well as shirts, smocks, ruffs, hose and socks.
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Linen is also used for cleaning hair. Lady Ri-Melaine asks for her rubbers (linen towels) to be warmed by the fire prior to having her hair rubbed clean with them. A more thorough hair washing can be done at a basin filled with hot water and lye. Of course, not everyone does this. ‘Some cherish their bushes of hair with much combing and washing in lye,’ writes William Horman, implying that others do not. Christopher Sly has his ‘foul head balmed in warm distilled waters’ to convince him that he is a lord in Shakespeare’s
Taming of the Shrew
.

If you have a bathtub, servants and enough firewood and reliable water, you might bathe as often as you like. However, as that list of conditions suggests, most people do not immerse themselves very often. In one of the most famous quotations of the period, the Venetian ambassador writes home with the news that Queen Elizabeth has a bath every month ‘whether she needs it or not’.
¹⁸
People have sniggeringly presumed from this that the queen is unclean while in fact it denotes nothing of the sort. Baths are normally taken for medicinal purposes, not for cleaning the body, so the Venetian ambassador is simply reporting that Elizabeth bathes regularly even if she is not ill.
You can be confident that Elizabeth washes every day with linen towels, washes her face and hands each morning and night, and cleans her hands with water before and after every meal. She is known to be fussy about her health. She travels with her own portable bath and has bathing facilities in all her palaces, so it is likely that she actually has a bath more than once a month. At Whitehall her bathroom has water pouring from oyster shells; at Windsor she has a bathroom panelled with large mirrors.
¹⁹
Such luxury baths are fragranced with herbs in the water and plentiful amounts of cloth are obtained to line the bathtub. Sponges are used to sit on and to wipe the body. If you are ever in the queen’s presence, you will not smell her body but her perfume.

The less wealthy have a bath as and when the need justifies the risk and the expense. Babies are regularly bathed because small bathtubs are easy to prepare.
²⁰
Londoners working in filthy trades, such as latrine cleaners, normally go for a swim in the Thames after they have finished their work. Labourers in the countryside often choose to do the same in local ponds and rivers. Thomas Staple, John Joplyn and George Lee are martyrs to the cause of personal cleanliness as all three men drown while washing themselves in ponds and rivers in Kent, Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire in the summer of 1558.
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In 1571 the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University forbids students from going into pools and rivers ‘whether to swim or to wash’. But prohibition is merely encouragement to some. Everard Digby, a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, publishes the first treatise on swimming,
De Arte Natandi
, in 1587. It is abridged and translated into English by Christopher Middleton in 1595, providing simple instructions for swimming safely, cheaply and healthily.

Just as people believe they can infect themselves by allowing water to enter the pores of their skin, so too they believe they can cure themselves of certain afflictions in the same way. For this reason some people take a bath not to clean themselves, but for medical reasons. William Bullein writes most approvingly on the subject in
The Government of Health
(1558):

There is also baths and sweating in hot houses for the pocks, scurvy, scabs, haemorrhoids [and] piles, which hot houses have the virtue of helping the said diseases … The best bathing is in a great vessel or a little close place with the evaporation of divers sweet herbs well sodden in water, which have virtue to open the pores softly, letting out feeble and gross vapours which lieth between the skin and the flesh. This kind of bathing is good in the time of pestilence [plague] or quartan fever; at the end of the bath it is good to anoint the body with some sweet oil to mollify and make soft the sinews. And thus to conclude of bathing, it is very wholesome [as long as] it be not done upon an empty stomach.
²²

As Bullein notes, not all baths involve water. There is a long if not widespread tradition of dry and moist baths in England, which work by making the patient sweat. In 1600 an entrepreneur starts advertising a ‘New kind of artificial bathes lately invented’. This contraption is a leather-covered box eighteen feet in circumference, which can be delivered to your house. With half an hour’s preparation you can use it to wash yourself in the following four ways:

First a dry airy heat warming the cold moist air and preparing the body for sweat by a clean fire in one side;

Secondly, a moist vaporous heat by a sweet boiling perfume;

Thirdly a dry vaporous heat by a sweet boiling perfume;

Fourthly, and lastly but chiefly, a moist heat by water, milk, oil or any other liquor, simple or compound, which commeth at pleasure from all parts powering downwards, flying upwards, sprinkling round about with many trickling streams like strong showers of rain by a continual circular motion, and therefore penetrating and working more powerfully upon all parts of the body, except the head, which is only free for the benefit of fresh air; so covertly that neither the party bathed nor the attendants in the chamber can either see, hear or well perceive, how, whence, or by what direct means the warm water or liquor cometh and goeth with such a manifold distribution and speedy conveyance.
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It sounds a bit like being trapped in an oversized dishwasher. As for showering in hot milk or oil, I’ll leave you to guess whether this is primarily for health or beauty.

ORAL HYGIENE

The bodily odour that Elizabethans tend to remark on most is the breath. You will recall Hugh Plat’s statement that his pomander
mixture will make you smell as sweet as any lady’s dog, ‘provided your breath be not too valiant’. You might also know the sonnet by Shakespeare, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun …’ in which he emphasises the corporeal and earthy character of her body; he does not mention her bodily smell, only ‘the breath that from my mistress reeks’. Indeed, Shakespeare often mentions smelly breath: ‘his breath stinks with eating toasted cheese,’ says Smith in
The Second Part of King Henry VI
, and in
King John
there is the ‘black contagious breath’ of night. But such things are not to be marvelled at, for cleaning the teeth and mouth is a difficult business in Elizabethan England. Most people are missing one or two teeth and suffer from severe dental caries.
²⁴
Even the queen’s teeth are yellow in the early part of her reign and they go completely black in her old age. Interestingly, a German observer states categorically that the reason for Elizabeth’s bad teeth is the English propensity to eat too much sugar, so the main cause of tooth decay is known.
²⁵

What can you do to clean your teeth and freshen your breath? Try picking your teeth with a toothpick made of a piece of quill or wood: this will help prevent decay and stops the rotting food caught between your teeth from making your breath smell. Not brushing your teeth results in the build-up of plaque, so remove this with a ‘tooth cloth’ (a length of wet linen).
²⁶
Boorde recommends washing the teeth every day with water and rock alum. For freshening the breath you could chew spices such as cumin seeds or aniseed. Or you could use a dentifrice (tooth powder) such as the following:

First in the morning eat or swallow two or three cloves and keep between the gums and the cheeks two cloves, or else … take an ounce of savoury, half an ounce of galingale, a quarter ounce of the wood of aloes, make powder of this, and eat or drink a portion in the morning and a little after dinner, and as much to bedward.
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