Bathing in rivers was a normal part of medieval life, though it would horrify a modern health officer. Rivers were everywhere, free, and useful, so people washed themselves, their clothes, and sometimes their animals in the same stretch of water.
In summer, bathing was practical. Labourers came off the fields filthy, overheated, and sore, and a river was the quickest way to cool down. Children swam, splashed, and learned early where the deep holes and strong currents were. In towns, designated bathing spots sometimes existed, though modesty was flexible and often seasonal rather than strict.
The problem was that rivers did everything else, too. Fortunately, people weren't morons! Downstream someone was tanning hides, soaking flax, or dumping waste. Upstream another group was filling drinking vessels.
Medieval people understood this more than we give them credit for. Many towns had rules about where washing, slaughtering, or toileting was allowed, even if enforcement was uneven.
Bathing also carried moral baggage. Mixed bathing worried church authorities, who associated it with temptation and idleness. Sermons complained about nakedness, flirtation, and people lingering too long in the water when they should have been working.
Still, rivers remained the bathhouse of the poor. For most people, a clean body depended on the weather, the season, and how foul the water happened to be that day.
© MedievalHistoria
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
