The Tudor Housewife

 Bathing, washing your hair, and brushing your teeth are all second nature to us modern-day people. Supermarkets are filled with shelf upon shelf of hygiene products: soaps, shampoos, body washes, and bath bombs. But how clean were the people in the Tudor era?

Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t as filthy as we often think they were. We don’t know for sure how often they bathed, but there are surviving recipes for soaps and ‘hand washing waters’. Sage, marjoram, camomile, rosemary, and orange peel were some of the ways the Tudors scented their soaps. Regular bathing was a luxury reserved for the better off; in order to bathe, you would need to have a wooden tub, line it with linen sheets, and have enough available water and fuel to heat it. This complicated process meant that a bath every day wouldn’t be very practical. But there is evidence that they ‘washed’ at least once a day. A ‘wash" would be more like a sponge down with scented water or soap.

The lower classes could expect a bath perhaps once a month if they were lucky, and multiple people would use the same water. Baths were often taken with a ‘shift’ on for modesty reasons. At the time, there was a strong belief that bathing in hot water opened up the pores and left the body vulnerable to illness. A mid-1500s physician, Thomas Moulton, wrote that people should avoid bathing in hot temperatures, for they "openeth the pores of a manne’s body and maketh the venomous ayre enter for to infect the blood".

While a lot of people subscribed to this belief, it didn’t stop people from bathing. King Henry VIII was obsessed with bathing and keeping clean; he overhauled the water systems in some of his most favourite royal houses. In 1529, Henry VIII ordered a new bathroom built on the first floor of the Bayne Tower at Hampton Court. Windsor Castle and Whitehall Palace also benefited from improvements to the plumbing system. This made bathing easier, but only for royalty.

Unlike her father, Queen Elizabeth I was said to boast that she only took a bath once a month and her dental hygiene was terrible. She loved sugar, and on the rare occasions she brushed her teeth, it was with a honey and sugar paste, which probably exacerbated the decay. In contrast, the skeletons of both Henry’s sister Mary and (the purported one of) Anne Boleyn show their teeth were in good condition.

Sources:
The Tudor Housewife, 2010, Alison Sims
The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, Dr. Simon Thurley