Did medieval people really live in filth? Historians' answer: no
Popular culture's portrait of the Middle Ages often describes a period of "filth, foul smells and a lack of hygiene"; but according to documentation gathered by historians in the past thirty years, that portrait deserves a comprehensive reassessment. The detailed analysis published in HistoryExtra sets out, step by step, the period's understanding of cleanliness through urban infrastructure, religious commandments, household practices and personal care products.
In medieval Europe, cleanliness was framed as a religious value. Christian theology did not formally articulate "cleanliness is next to godliness," but it required washing of hands and face before morning and evening prayers, and prescribed bathing in preparation for fasts. In the Islamic world, ritual cleanliness (wudu / ghusl) was required before each of the five daily prayers; this was a key reason why bathhouses and water infrastructure were more developed across the Islamic geography.
In cities, cleanliness regulations were on the agenda of trade guilds and town councils. A 14th-century London ordinance carried a fine for dumping waste in the streets; the administrative records of Paris in the same period direct butchers to specific points at specific hours. In Norway, the city of Bergen developed a system of timber-paved streets with rainwater drainage from the 13th century onwards.
Public bathhouses were among the important social spaces of medieval Europe. London had as many as 12 large bathhouses by the early 1500s; Paris ran a similar number. Bathhouses were not just for washing the body but functioned as community meeting points — much like today's coffee shops. They began closing in the 16th century after plague outbreaks, but those closures were not a sign that hygiene was an idea that did not exist; they were a product of epidemic fear.
Personal care was an important part of the daily routine. Soap was produced as an olive-oil base in the Mediterranean basin and as an animal-fat base in northern Europe. In city centres, soap workshops were prestigious crafts on a par with silk and spice stores; Marseille, Castile and Bologna were centres famous for soap production. Salt water, linseed oil and mint were used for tooth cleaning; washes with beer or vinegar for the hair appeared in medical books.
Laundry was an important part of the domestic economy. Linen shirts, washed in cold water with ash, were worn as undergarments in direct contact with the body and changed daily. Wool outer garments were cleaned less often, but stains were brushed out and odours were lifted with charcoal dust. At village level, laundry day was usually a weekly collective event; women would go to streams or the town's water source and wash together.
A point particularly emphasised in HistoryExtra's analysis is that medieval people, despite not knowing about germs, came to sense the link between hygiene and disease through experience. After the 14th-century Black Death, Italian city-states subjected the sanitary conditions of food-selling tradesmen to strict regulation; regular cleaning of meat residues on the street was required; and the relocation of cemeteries away from city centres became widespread.
In cultures east of Europe, the Roman water-conduit system inherited by the Byzantine Empire continued to function for centuries. The cisterns, customs streets and bathhouses of Constantinople (Istanbul) were among the most advanced examples of cleanliness infrastructure of the period. Likewise in the Islamic geography, the public water systems of Baghdad and Cairo were well in advance of contemporaneous European infrastructure in the 9th and 10th centuries.
In northern Europe, the Hansa cities (Hamburg, Bremen, Tallinn) established joint cleanliness regulations in the late 14th century. These regulations introduced specific cleanliness standards for commercial wharves, smithing and tanning workshops and grain storage. One of the infrastructural reasons for the success of Hanseatic trade was the reliable product quality that those standards produced.
The HistoryExtra article points, as a final word, to this: "Medieval people did not live in filth; in their own toolset, they developed as much cleanliness as was possible." That development was not made to fit modern hygiene but in a manner appropriate to the technical conditions of the period. Shedding the templates of historical understanding requires a reading that does not do injustice to the people of the period and that measures what they actually did; today, historiography is shifting in that direction.