The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (32 page)

When lice and bedbugs are an irritating part of everyday life, and when you are at the same time trying to minimize your body odor, nothing is as important as fresh, clean linen. Gaddesden himself recommends frequent changes of clothes. In winter, when few people wish to bathe in a river or even strip off the upper body to wash under the arms in a basin, fresh linen is the most common form of cleaning. The linen soaks up the sweat. The body may then be scented, and once more you are presentable in public.

Yes, you say, all very well; but how clean is the linen? And how clean are your other clothes? After all, is not urine used in the fulling of cloth? The answer to that is yes, to a point: the practice of using urine continues until 1376.
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But fulling is only a means of processing wool. The cloth is dyed and washed before it is worn, and the washing involves soap. There are several varieties available. The best is Castile soap, available in cakes. This is made in Spain with Mediterranean potash, which is saltier, and thus harder and less caustic, than the northern European soft soaps. It costs about 4d a cake.
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Cheaper white, grey and black varieties for cleaning cloth are made in England. They come in liquid form, cost about 13s 4d a barrel in the 1380s, and are decanted into bowls for use. The washerwomen, leaning over their washtubs and washboards, or trampling clothes in a stream, tend to have their legs stained grey from the black soap. Obviously you cannot use black soap on white linen, so the more expensive white soap is necessary. Such soaps are powerful. You could not use the liquid soaps on your hands without damaging your skin—one glance at a washerwoman’s blistered hands, arms, and legs will put you off. These soaps are also widely available: Henry of Lancaster replenishes his soap supplies when he goes on crusade to Prussia in 1391. In some towns it is possible to hire washboards and washtubs: Henry does so when visiting Calais in 1396.
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If you have sufficient money, you can appear clean wherever you go.

Attitudes to hair are more complicated. Men expect their womenfolk to comb their hair for them, often beside a window, allowing them to see any lice and to remove them. However, excessive combing
of hair among men is frowned upon. Moralists write diatribes against the practice, castigating the Danes, who are supposed to be so vain that they comb their hair every day and have a bath every week. Women too come in for censure, largely because their personal grooming is seen as a display of vanity. Ignore such moralists: most people appreciate cleanliness. Besides, as women are not permitted to wear their hair down in public, it must either be styled or covered. Hence it is important for women to comb their hair so it may be dressed. Both sexes do wash their hair: brass basins are employed for this purpose. A mixture of spices is used, such as cinnamon, licorice, and cumin, rather than an irritating soap.
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Similar mixtures of spices are used for the teeth. In “The Miller’s Tale,” Chaucer’s characters chew cardamom and licorice. Aniseed, cumin, and fennel are sometimes recommended to women.
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The purpose is not to keep the teeth free from disease so much as to make the breath smell fresh. Clean-smelling breath is most important. Bad breath, it is believed, carries disease. The breath of menstruating women can make a wound go bad, and so can the breath of a physician who has recently had sex with a menstruating woman (or so the Nottinghamshire surgeon John of Arderne will tell you, apparently from personal experience). Similarly it is believed that the breath of lepers can give you leprosy; hence they are segregated from society. This means that almost all dental care is about smell, not about preserving the teeth. For this reason, the whole subject of dental care might make you squirm. Grinding grain between millstones means small particles of stone get into the bread, and the attrition of the teeth can be severe. The increasing availability of sugars means that dental caries is actually worse in the fourteenth century than it was in Anglo-Saxon times. Depending on where you are in the country, by the time they die adults will have lost between an eighth and a fifth of their teeth.
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Physicians will tell you that toothache is due to tiny worms eating into the enamel. Remedies include using myrrh and opium. If you cannot afford these, “take a candle of mutton fat, mingled with seed of sea holly, and burn this candle as close as possible to the tooth, holding a basin of cold water beneath. The worms [which are gnawing the tooth] will fall into the water.”
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Alternatively go to a tooth drawer, who will yank out the tooth for you. Then, like John Gaddesden himself, you may replace your own teeth with false ones.

The differences between medieval and modern personal hygiene account for relatively little physical suffering. Far more serious are such factors as inadequate diet, poor sanitation (particularly the proximity to feces and rotting meat), parasites, and shared living space. No matter how often you wash your body, simply being around other people is going to lead to the spread of illnesses, as it does in modern times. Even withdrawing from the world and residing in a monastery might not save you. In fact it might make things worse because monks eat, pray, sing, sleep, and work very near to one another. The average life expectancy for monks entering the urban monasteries at Westminster and Canterbury is about five years less than those living outside a monastery
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Being a monk in or near a town might actually shorten your life, despite the good sanitation and the much better diet.

You have no idea what destruction a disease can wreak upon society. When you see people consumed from within, as if they are being eaten alive by some invisible creature—when you look at the faces of mothers and fathers staring at their feverish blood-vomiting infants, lying in their own beds, in the very places where they parted with a kiss the previous evening, then you might get an inkling. When you are there in 1348, and have been relieved of any complacent assumptions that
anyone
will survive this hideous calamity, and have come face-to-face with the very real prospect that it will annihilate the whole of humanity, and that God has deserted mankind, then you will start to realize how destructive the plague is.

The Great Plague—the term “Black Death” is not invented until the nineteenth century—is one of the most horrific events in human history, comparable only with those traumas which people have inflicted on one another in modern times. Arriving at the eastern end of the Mediterranean in 1347; spreading along the sea-lanes to France, southern Spain, and Italy; and making its way up across the Continent to England by August 1348, it shakes society in every conceivable respect. It destroys large portions of the population and leaves parts of the
country completely empty of people. It starkly reveals the limits of both professional and amateur medical assistance. No doctor of medicine can help the victims; no one can attend the dying with any feeling but revulsion and despair. It reveals the inadequacy of a concept of society based on the “three estates.” Frankly, if “those who pray” cannot protect the population, and “those who fight” simply run away, why should “those who work” feed them? Similarly, the plague forces men to reappraise the fundamental relationship between themselves and God. This horrific disease does not just affect the sinful; it kills the innocent too. If this is the work of God, then He is indiscriminate in his judgments.

According to the papal physician Guy de Chauliac, the first two months of an outbreak see it at its most virulent, with a continuous fever and spitting of blood. This will kill you within three days, sometimes within hours. This phase of the infection passes and a second, less virulent stage takes over. This too is marked by continuous fever but it also gives rise to the boils and black buboes of bubonic plague in the groin and armpits. Catching the disease in this phase will kill you within five days.
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For those affected in the first waves of the plague, death can occur overnight. Some people go to bed and never wake up. These are the lucky ones. If you feel something is wrong, and you are beginning to feel feverish, lift up your arm and start tapping around in your armpit: if something makes you wince, prepare for your final hours of life.

The often-quoted figure of one-third dead—”a third of all the people in the world” as the contemporary chronicler Froissart declares—may lead you to believe that two-thirds of the population survive the disease. This is misleading. If you catch it you will very probably die of it. Those who survive are predominantly those who do not catch it, having some natural or genetic defense against the infection, or just being plain lucky. When it gets into a monastery, normally half the monks die, if not more. At Peterborough in Northamptonshire, thirty-two of the sixty-four monks perish. At Henwood in Warwickshire, only three nuns are left out of the original fifteen. Scare stories spread—of how in some towns tens of thousands of people are dying, and how in Bristol nine-tenths of the population are already dead. There is utter panic. No one can tell really how many people are dying up and down the country. In London two hundred are buried
every day. Those clerks who compile episcopal registers have the best measure of the scale of the mortality: they at least can see how many clergymen are dying. In the dioceses of York and Lincoln, 40 percent of all the beneficed clergy die in 1348-49, some of them infected while administering to their dying parishioners. In the far southwest and Herefordshire, the figure is higher, almost 50 percent. The peasantry fare little better: half the population of a manor dying is not unusual. Fifty-five percent of the tenants of twenty-two manors belonging to Glastonbury Abbey die; 43 percent of tenants on three manors in Essex; 39 percent of those holding land from the bishop of Winchester.
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To put these figures in proportion, remember that less than 6 percent of the adult male population of the United Kingdom perish over the whole four years of the First World War, and the overall mortality figure is just 1.55 percent.
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Guy de Chauliac’s advice to those wishing to avoid infection is as follows: “Go quickly, go far, and return slowly.” It is good advice but most cannot follow it. Among those who can—the gentry and esquires—the death rate is a little lower, at 27 percent. But even if you survive the 1348-49 outbreak, you are not safe. The Great Plague is just the first of several waves of plague that sweep across Europe. Miss it in England in 1348-49 and you can catch it later in 1361-62, 1368-69, 1375 (with various minor outbreaks in subsequent years) and 1390-91. The 1361-62 and 1390-91 outbreaks are particularly distressing, as they kill many children. Twenty-three percent of all young heirs of estates die in the 1361-62 plague.
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Overall, the death rate from the second visitation probably kills about 15 percent of the population, and the third, in 1369, about 10 percent. Although the mortality rate is thus in decline, the population continues to shrink further with each outbreak. By 1400 about half of all those born over the previous seventy years have died of plague.

The deaths in 1348-49 are so numerous that the statistics are much easier to talk about than the individual tragedies. Looked at from the safe distance of the twenty-first century, one can see its beneficial effects—how the Great Plague cauterizes feudalism, frees up capital, and allows society to develop in a more democratic way. But a visit to the time reminds you, with a sharp shock, of both the reality and the scale of the suffering. If anything, it proves the value of virtual history—of understanding historical events as lived experiences, as opposed to
impersonal facts. Imagine a disease were to wipe out 40 percent of the modern population of the UK—more than 25 million people. Now imagine a historian in the future discussing the
benefits
of your death and the deaths of your partner, your children, and your friends .. . You would want to cry out, or hang your head in despair, that historians could blithely comment on the benefits of such suffering. There is no shadow of a doubt that every one of these people you see in 1348—whether they will die or survive—deserves your compassion. When you see women dragging their parents’ and children’s corpses into ditches, weeping and screaming—when you listen to a man who has buried all five of his sons with his own hands, and, in his distress, he tells you that there was no divine service when he did so, and that the death bell did not sound—you know that these people have entered a chasm of grief beyond description.
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In the fields lie dead and rotting sheep, five thousand in one field alone, according to Henry Knighton. As you look around and see ravens flying through deserted streets, and half-wild dogs and pigs eating the corpses abandoned on the edge of a village, you will see something which no historian will ever see. The doors of houses left blackly open, thus to remain as night comes and day dawns, until someone enters and finds the cold body of the owner. The passing bells are banned by the church, the traditional laments thrown away. Even prayer fades into a mere whisper of horror.

Beyond this, although one could say a great deal, there is little which needs to be said. What you will see is just too shocking.

Put plague in a category of its own as a cataclysm beyond human understanding but do not regard it as the only horrific disease. Before 1348 leprosy is the most terrifying illness which people can imagine. Leprosy is known to us as Hansen’s disease but in the fourteenth century it can include all manner of skin ailments, including eczema, psoriasis, and lupus. Basically if you have a skin disease which results in long-term disfiguration you need to cover it up for as long as possible. If it is seen, and if it is judged by other people to be
possibly
leprous, then in line with the decree of the Third Lateran Council (of 1179) you will be shunned by society, forced to wear a covering cloak and to ring a bell wherever you go, and be regarded as one of the living dead.