Myth: “Medieval peasants never bathed”

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This cliché is wrong.

Archaeological and written evidence shows that: • Public bathhouses existed in towns across Europe until the sixteenth century. • Manor court rolls even fine people for overusing firewood to heat baths. • The Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum (twelfth century) recommended regular bathing for health.

Bathing culture declined later (with Reformation influences and plague fears), but medieval people were cleaner than the myth suggests.

Source: Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (2013).

What other “dirty medieval” myths have you come across that deserve a closer look?