10 Gross Facts That Confirm the Middle Ages Were Beyond Filthy

The Middle Ages weren’t the cleanest and most hygienic time to be alive. People didn’t live nearly as long as they do today, and a big part of that was because the medical care, basic hygiene practices, and quality of food were all horrific compared to what we are used to now. It’s difficult to state just how bad those things really were, though. After all, we’re talking about an era of time that is now multiple centuries in the past. It’s difficult to conceive of just how gross daily life must have been like back then!

Well, that’s why we’re here today. In this list, we’re going to take a look at the actual situation on the ground for medieval peasants. Their lives were brutal, their work was difficult, and their happiness was limited to very fleeting moments of joy. And they were filthy all around! This is the real story of how disgusting life was back in the Middle Ages…

Related: 10 Ways That Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Society

10 Bathing? Nah!

Upper-class people during the Middle Ages most often had access to tubs in which they could bathe with water. However, even many of the middle-class folk—or what was roughly considered to be middle class by our modern-day designations—didn’t. And if you were poor? Well, forget about it.

Peasants had to make do with very infrequent access to public baths if they were lucky, but most of them were plain unlucky. So they were forced to haul huge buckets of dirty and grimy river water or illegally gained well water to their homes by hand. Then, with the unheated and dirty water, they had to bathe by hand. Better not waste any water, though! The buckets weren’t huge and there was no faucet or pipe to easily pump in more if they were liberal in applying it to their bodies.

For those who were lucky enough to live near rivers or lakes, they simply jumped in every day when it was time for a bath. That was easy, but it also brought its own dangers. Obviously, the river water was completely untreated. In many cases, it carried its own germs and parasites.

Peasants mostly didn’t have access to soaps (and certainly not to shampoos!) at that time. So all they were really doing was washing off the dirt and grime that had accumulated on their bodies after a long, hard day of manual labor. They’d go to sleep, get up, do it all over again, and repeat the cycle endlessly. Peasants who were less fortunate or not situated near bodies of water bathed a lot less often. And some didn’t bathe at all. We know it must have smelled crazy in there.^[1]

9 When Ya Gotta Go…

Well-to-do people living in castles and on estates had benches with holes in them to use as primitive toilets during the medieval era. But normal people mostly didn’t have access to even simple and rudimentary things like that. Instead, they were forced to use outhouses at best—and share them with large community groups all at once.

At worst, they were given chamberpots or waste buckets. When the urge came to use the bathroom, they had to go in the little pot and then somehow manage not to ruin their tiny hovels with the stench. When the chamberpots started to become filled up, they had to drag them out, careful not to spill any waste on their stuff, and get rid of the mess.

Disgusting, right? Well, it gets worse. There were no pipes to run sewage and human waste along like we have nowadays. So, there were only two places for peasants to toss their excrement when their chamberpots filled up. The first was at the local river. Yes, that would be the very same river from which peasants were pulling out water to bathe or jumping in to get cleaned off. Gross!

The second spot was the street. Peasants would simply take their chamberpots out to the street, turn them over, and dump their wet contents all over the cobblestones. And that was that. See, back then, people believed that the smell of waste was what caused disease, and not the germs in it. So, they were keen on getting rid of the smell as quickly as possible. If only they knew…^[2]

8 Clothing Conundrums

Many people who had means in medieval times dressed in several layers of clothing. Among other reasons, that was so they could avoid having to wash their outer garments too often. But peasants didn’t own several layers of clothing. They pretty much just wore one thing day after day after day.

Now, impressively, etiquette books from the time actually counseled people to wash their clothing regularly. They even advised that one should change their underwear every day! Peasants mostly couldn’t read and didn’t have access to those books, but culturally, the practices nevertheless made it down to them. Seems less disgusting than you would have expected, right? Well, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses like that.

As we’ve already learned, the average peasant really only had access to regular water if it was in a nearby river or lake. So they would go down to the river once a week or so and try to scrub their dirty clothes in the water. If they were lucky, they had access to some lye soap to clean their clothes as best they could. If they were unlucky—and most were unlucky—they could only use the dirty river water alone. And as we’ve seen so far in this list, that water was filled with all kinds of nasty bacteria.

In addition to nature’s regular onslaught, rivers were horribly polluted, with people upstream thoughtlessly dumping their waste into it. Downstream, then, peasants were forced to wash their clothes in that same water. How’d you like to put those garments back on your body afterward?^[3]

7 Look Out for Lice

When it came to living in medieval times, head lice and fleas were simple facts of life. Parasites like that were ubiquitous because nobody had any idea what shampoo was. And soap, as we’ve learned, was really a hit-or-miss affair. Plus, horribly dirty water from rivers and lakes was the best people could do to “bathe,” if you can even call it that.

So comb makers had to get creative with how they produced their products to make up for all that. And create, they did: During the Middle Ages, comb makers started putting more and more fine-toothed fingers on their combs. The hair of the average medieval peasant was so thick with lice that the combs with tight, tiny fingers could actually yank them out. Of course, sleeping in squalor meant the lice just went right back in the next day. But at least they were trying, right?

That’s not all, either. Peasants eventually got around to figuring out ways to delouse themselves and each other. And the delousing groups were so important to overall health and so fun to take part in that they actually became a social activity! Sure, we might think of a social outing as a trip to a bar, going to see a baseball game, visiting the zoo, or something like that.

However, in the Middle Ages, people routinely took their social time by helping to delouse one another and get as clean as they could. Women who were skilled at delousing even made a bit of a side hustle out of it, successfully charging militaries and other groups to come along and do the delousing of a large group of people for a fee. Anything for a buck, right?^[4]

6 Hangin’ at the Cesspit

In the modern era, we flush our toilets, rinse our hands in the sinks, and go on about our day. Way back when, peasants would all, uh, hang out at the cesspit. Sadly, we’re not totally kidding about that. See, whenever a chamberpot became too full with excrement, peasants had to haul it off to the local cesspit. In many cities, towns, and villages back then, this was a communal cesspit in which everybody would dump their waste together.

Many people also dumped old food, rotten fruits and vegetables, and other forms of garbage into the pit. Can you even imagine how bad it must have smelled? And it’s even worse to think about how those cesspits would inevitably leak into the ground, contaminate the groundwater, and make the surrounding soil for quite a considerable area absolutely disgusting.

However, that wasn’t even the worst part! The worst part is that much of the contamination likely traveled very quickly to areas where water had descended, including rivers and lakes. Water always finds the lowest point, of course. And so, too, does the waste that tracks along with it. Just imagine a big area right on the outskirts of a city in which everybody is tossing out their human waste with nary a care in the world. They’d lug and dump horse and livestock waste, too, with nowhere else to leave it. Gross, right?

In bigger cities, the cesspits were even worse. That’s because, in those cities, many people would dump their chamberpots from second and third-story balconies where they lived right onto the street below! Inevitably, the mess would attract mice, rats, and other vermin. And that’s not to mention the smell—and the splatter zone that would inevitably be created around the mess…^[5]

5 Horrible Sleeping Habits

The average medieval peasant slept on a bed made of straw—and some slept on hay and other bedding. But while that might seem better than, say, sleeping on the floor, it came with its own major problems. Sure, peasants were comfortable and relatively insulated from the cold by sleeping on straw. But they were also sleeping with rats, mice, and tons of things they couldn’t see, including bedbugs, fleas, and lice!

People in the Middle Ages didn’t exactly understand how germs worked, and they didn’t have a pressing drive to get rid of them. They did do one thing, though: They used scented flowers and herbs to try to make things seem cleaner. You know how you tend to spray Febreze to liven up a place? It was sort of like that. But it didn’t kill any of the bugs!

There were other issues when it came to medieval bed and sleeping rituals, too. Namely, peasants often slept in tandem or group bedding situations. Entire families would sleep together in bed either to keep warm together or because they lacked the money for multiple beds. Some even lacked the place to put down multiple beds in their tiny hovels.

This meant that if one person was even slightly sick, they would immediately and undoubtedly spread those germs to everyone else around them. Can you imagine the issues with flu season when it came to people sharing beds like that? We need to take some Vitamin C just thinking about it!^[6]

4 Women’s Woes

If you think all peasants had it equally bad in the Middle Ages when it came to hygiene, we have news for you: Women had it much, much worse. (Certainly, any woman reading this list right now is probably nodding along, knowing the whole time that this was coming, right?) Women have so often had it worse throughout history, and the medieval era was no exception. And specifically for the purposes of this list, it’s their menstruation that is drawing attention.

Unfortunately, tampons and other period products were very much not a thing way back then. In their places, many women resorted to absolutely insane methods to collect and soak up blood during their monthly cycles. Most notably, some women used dirty and soiled pieces of rags to do the job. Others wrapped strips of cloth around tiny twigs to use as a de facto tampon. Still, others resorted to using absorbent moss as an impromptu pad. Yes, really—sticks, twigs, and moss as period products.

Even worse than that, religious authorities at the time regarded menstruation as being shameful and disgusting. So, many women of the Middle Ages felt significant pressure to hide their monthly movements from the men in their lives. Lots of women carried around scented herbs and flowers in a bid to mask the smell so men wouldn’t be able to tell.

Also, you have to remember that women’s lives were so brutally hard and their overall health so poor during the Middle Ages that it is likely that they may have routinely missed periods. That would at least get them off the hook when it came to soaking up the blood and masking the smells, but it certainly wasn’t easy on their bodies. Truly, women suffered worse than men during that period in so many ways—monthly menstrual cycles chief among them.^[7]

3 Primitive Dental Care

There were no such things as toothbrushes around during the Middle Ages. So, without them on hand to clean teeth, peasants resorted to using twigs to brush out any excess food particles. Well, the ones they could find and root out, at least. Plaque and gingivitis and all that were completely unknown, of course. Some peasants would even go so far as to place a piece of wool over their teeth and then rinse their mouths out with water.

Those who were slightly better off and had access to salt would create a mixture of that and sage to form a very primitive paste that could freshen their breath. It would even whiten their teeth—you know, ‘whiten’ being a relative term considering how terrible dental care was way back then.

Now, as disgusting as all this sounds, things weren’t so bad for peasants. That’s in large part because sugar was virtually entirely absent from their diets. They had no money to pay for sugar being imported from faraway lands (in the rare cases that it even was imported at all). So, without it, their teeth held up better than you’d expect.

Still, if they had to remove a problem tooth, the work was absolutely barbaric. There was no such thing as anesthesia. And dentists at the time weren’t doctors as much as they were butchers. Peasants would often get extremely drunk before having their teeth pulled just to try to dull the pain as much as possible. It rarely worked.^[8]

2 Wine for Wounds

Alcohol wasn’t only used to dull peasants’ senses when it came time for primitive dental work. Wine was also used as a medical option to help cure ailments—and help anesthetize patients in early ways. As you might expect, most peasants believed that prayer was the answer to all their health issues.

They had minimal schooling if any at all, and with the church functioning as such an important part of their lives, that’s where they turned for help. Slowly, however, knowledge of science and medicine began to spread across Europe. And when it did, it manifested itself in some strange (but actually understandable) ways.

Take the use of wine to clean wounds as an example. At the most primitive hospitals and surgery centers of the medieval era, doctors had figured out that alcohol could be used to successfully clean wounds. They also learned that any lacerations they made could be cauterized to get closed back up nice and tight. So, if you went in for an operation of any kind in the Middle Ages, you were going to be doused with wine and then burned back until your skin closed at the end of it.

As you might expect, a great many people died from infections in this context since nobody knew the first thing about hygiene. But at least you could maybe get drunk and bathe in wine while perishing. Yay?^[9]

1 But They DID Wash Their Hands!

Here is possibly the most crazy fact of them all: many medieval peasants washed their hands. Like, very often! Keeping one’s hands clean was seen as an important custom of the Middle Ages. It went back to showing that one took pride in one’s appearance. It was also considered common etiquette to keep one’s hands clean and free from dirt and grime. People in the Middle Ages knew nothing of unseen germs and bacteria, but they nevertheless wanted to keep their hands routinely washed just to showcase their civility to others. And so they did!

There were a few things people did when it came to hand-washing etiquette. First, they always washed their hands and face in whatever water they had available after they woke up. Then, they continued to wash their hands at various points throughout the day. After work and before dinner, they very often washed their hands to ensure that they were clean enough for the meal.

That was particularly important, too, since silverware wasn’t really a thing. Virtually all people in the Middle Ages—and certainly all peasants—ate with their hands and typically grabbed food with their grubby fingers from out of a communal bowl or dish. Better hope everybody else washed their hands, too, in that scenario!^[10]

fact checked by
Darci Heikkinen