Charlemagne’s courtesie … the southern lands … the Salerno Regimen … grooming zones … the Trotula corpus … the public baths … bath-feasts … diplomatic baths … spring baths … the stews … the failure of the baths … syphilis

From this point onwards we move northwards into western and central Europe to investigate patterns of personal health and hygiene from the medieval period through to what later Europeans triumphantly called the Early Modern and Modern world – finally putting the economic and demographic disasters of the fall of Rome well behind them. The ‘civilising process’ that seeped through cash-strapped Europe in these medieval and Early Modern centuries, was the slow escalation of domestic luxuries, spread thinly over more ancient ways of subsistence life – hut life – that endured well into the twentieth century. Apart from the economy, the Church, education and baths, the greatest single difference in the physical regime of medieval personal hygiene (whether because of tribal history, northern geography or Christianity) was probably the development of underlinen and the close-fitting tailored garment,either of which can trap the body’s evacuations in a layer above the skin, allowing foetid bacterial decomposition to take place; elsewhere in sub-tropical Eurasia robes and loose clothing remained the norm.

On the face of it, there is every justification for the old-style textbook descriptions of swarming lice and manure-like stenches in medieval life, but the closer you look, the more it seems an exaggeration. Like their biological ancestors medieval people certainly groomed themselves, and – so it seems – a great number of them tried to be as well-groomed and cleanly as it was individually possible to be. They improved their houses and their manners, dressed well, knew their medical regimens, and used baths and cosmetic care. To say that medieval faces, hands and bodies were always dirty, their clothes tattered and evil-smelling, or that the rushes on the floor were always greasy, would be to condemn generations of careful and hardworking medieval housewives, and the honour and dignity of their households.

Using the many available sources from the highly visible European upper ranks to reconstruct post-Roman European domestic life is rather like trying to reconstruct a whole society from ‘society’ magazines in c.2000 AD – you miss ninety per cent of the population. But even if the very rich were the tip of the iceberg, what they did and had many others would have aspired to. So far as the rich were concerned in c.800 AD, the long ‘Romanesque’ party had only just begun.