One of the modern luxuries most of us fail to appreciate is a daily – or hopefully, a daily – change of clothes. Back in the medieval period, people didn’t change their clothes very regularly. While modern people, for the most part, change their clothes daily, folk during the Middle Ages changed their clothes once a season. People only had a choice of four outfits, and each outfit was reserved for a season.
No wonder people made such a big deal about harvest and spring. It didn’t only mean more food but a change of clothes. Even royalty didn’t change their clothes that regularly. The King of Scotland, James VI, only changed clothes after some months had passed. He even slept in the same clothes.
Handwashing
A recent phenomenon has reminded us of the importance of keeping our hands clean. In the Middle Ages, people mostly washed their hands out of good manners and to remove external dirt and grime. That said, not all were on board for this. The English King, James I, tended only to wash his fingers, while Louis XIV, a.k.a. “The Sun King,” would have his valet lightly douse his hands with wine.
Only centuries later, in the 19th century, the Hungarian physician and scientist Ignaz Semmelweis worked out the true utility of washing hands. Before that, it was just good manners to keep your digits less grimy, especially if you were tucking into a meal.
Boiling Fruit and Vegetables
Eating raw fruit and vegetables was a no-no during the Middle Ages. These folks believed that raw fruit or vegetables were the cause of disease, so they gave them a good douse of piping hot water. It’s hard not to see where the medieval folk were coming from as they often lived in squalor, so they probably believed anything raw was unclean.
“The Boke of Kervynge” (The Book of Carving), written in 1508, explains medieval thinking stating, “Beware of green salads and raw fruits, for they will make your master sick” (Bovey, 2015). Sadly, the medieval folk got it wrong, as boiling robs veggies and fruit of all their nutrients like Vitamin C. In fact, it has led some historians to think that this practice caused scurvy to be so prevalent.
Freckles Weren’t Fashionable
The medieval folk weren’t fans of freckles. They considered them to be unsightly blemishes. Some of the more superstitious folk may even have called them “witchspots” or “witchmarks”. Contempt for freckles wasn’t something specific to medieval folk because even the Romans saw people possessing freckles as being “polluted”. This was something the medieval folk inherited from former historical times.
Since people back then weren’t all into them, they invented numerous strategies for removing them. One method included grinding up cuttlefish bones, root of bistort, and frankincense, then adding water and rose water and applying the mixture to one’s freckles. Other methods were even more extreme. Some medieval people used to rub sulfur daily on their skin to remove these skin spots.
Lead Powder Cosmetics
Everyone now may want the bronzed “summer” body, but in the Middle Ages, fair skin was all the rage. In fact, medieval people’s obsession with pale skin led to “fair” being used as a synonym for “beautiful”. If you had fair skin, it meant you probably weren’t spending the entire day doing hard labor in the fields, and, thus, weren’t a peasant.
However, medieval folk didn’t want pale skin; they wanted the creamy milk-white appearance – and they went to “pretty” extreme lengths to get it. In Elizabethan times, a popular ingredient for face foundation was ceruse lead powder. Short-term it gave people the desirable creamy white skin, but lead is extremely poisonous. Long-term people weren’t only damaging their skin but harming their bodies.