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.
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.
A Change of Clothes
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.
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.
Eagle Dung for Epidural
Even with epidurals and cesareans being available to pregnant women, giving birth is still not an easy matter. And it is still something that frightens many expecting mothers. That said, we’d take going into labor in the modern age any day over giving birth in the Middle Ages. When a woman went into labor, she drank a mixture of vinegar and oil, while eagle dung was a homemade poultice that was used for her labor pains.
As smelly as it sounds, eagle dung was a medieval epidural. We’re not sure how effective it is for labor pains, but we’re guessing that most expecting mothers would give eagle dung a skip nowadays.