Did the peasants in the mediaval ages wash?

Answer 1

AnswerOf course they did! problably not too often though; Must have washed about every week... MoreMedieval peasants washed quite often. People in the Middle Ages had two compelling beliefs that made them wash.

One was religious, which was that cleanliness is next to godliness. They believed the way a people took care of their bodies was an indication of how they took care of their souls. Clearly, by this way of thinking, a person who was dirty was liable to trouble in the afterlife.

On a material level, they believed that bad air was a vector for diseases. So they tried hard to avoid bad air. The easiest way to tell that the air was bad was that it was likely to smell bad. So anything that smelled bad was likely to be cleaned up.

The result of these beliefs was that they had public baths in most all villages except the smallest. I have read that people even bathed in streams in the winter, if that is how they had to keep clean.

The idea that medieval people were stinky and dirty was promoted by those of the Renaissance, who wanted to look down on medieval people, but had forgotten the reasons to bathe because they had perfume and did not care much for religion.

There is a link below to the history section of an article on bathing.

Answer 2

They seldom used plates. Most of the time they used a hard chunk of bread to hold the food and either ate it or threw it to the dogs when they were done.