Laundry in the middle ages was as bad as you think.
Laundry in the middle ages
was as bad as you think.
Yes, medieval people washed their clothes, and (for once) the historical myths are real medieval facts. I love historical myth busting and medieval history myths are rarely true, but the history of doing laundry will make you very grateful you are not washing clothes in medieval times!
Wait, weren’t the middle ages dirty?
Whatever we think about medieval hygiene (and let me remind us all that medieval people did bathe), medieval people did do laundry. And let me tell, you, Medieval laundry day was nowhere near as easy as it is today. Laundry in the middle ages was a complicated process, and historical laundry was done with the same methods for centuries afterwards. Medieval laundry involved intense physical labor, making your own laundry soap, some pretty frightening cleaning products, and literally beating the dirt out of your clothes. This is one of the few middle ages myths that is almost every bit as bad as bad as you think it is.
Okay, but what was laundry day like?
The history of doing the laundry is, predictably, pretty dirty. Washing machines, and even old-fashioned mangles hadn't been invented, so the history of washing clothes is full of little tasks that had to be done by hand. Most people in Medieval Europe wore linen undergarments that covered their whole bodies to keep their outer layers cleaner, and only laundered their linens. There was no medieval laundry room, instead you had to take your clothes to a stream, river, fountain, or communal city wash-house and do them there. The history of laundry soap isn't any more pleasant, with most people using home-made lye solutions made from ashes or harsh black liquid soap, and gentle Castille soap being much more expensive. Sometimes clothes had to be soaked for hours at a time in lye or ammonia to bleach stains and grayness out, before being taken to the river and rinsed, beaten with a paddle, and rinsed again. Finally, after washing, a medieval laundress had to rely on the weather and spread the wet clothes out on the fields to dry, hoping and praying that it didn't rain.
What’s the deal with the washerwomen?
Doing laundry in the middle ages was an incredibly hard job, and the social position of medieval laundresses could range from highly-paid employees of royal households, to an underclass of low-status female workers who frightened the medieval patriarchy by doing mutual aid when rejected by religion-based social services.
It's very rare for me to talk about historical myths that are true instead of busting them, but medieval washing clothes was almost every bit as awful of a job as we picture it. Are you feeling more appreciative of your laundry machine now? I know I am!
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Medieval V : So you just . . . dump the clothes in?
Modern V : Yeah, in here.
Medieval V : And then you pour soap on top of them?
Modern V : Yup.
Medieval V : It doesn't turn them gray?
Modern V : [dubious] Why . . . would . . . soap do that?
Medieval V : And you give it coins. [coins clink]
Modern V : Yeah, and then you push the button. [button beeps]
Medieval V : Wait, where are you going?
Modern V : Oh, it'll be done in 45 minutes or so.
Medieval V : It washes the clothes for you?!!?
Modern V : Why else would it be called a laundry machine?
Medieval V : WITCHCRAFTTTTTTT.
Look, I find laundry day as annoying as the rest of us do, but at least it is nowhere near as hard as it used to be. I'm V : dressmaker, fashion history nerd, and unashamed user of modern technology, and for all the time I spend saying that people in history were not backwards or incapable or stupid . . . this is one of the many things that makes me glad to live in the 21st century.
So let's chat about how medieval people cleaned their clothes, and maybe it'll help us not procrastinate doing laundry in the present day . . . I shall be focusing on medieval Europe because I'm most familiar with the clothes and sources and context from that setting. If I tried to describe how laundry was done across the entire planet, I'd probably get a lot wrong and this video would be several hours, and then my clean clothes would definitely not get folded. If you know things about how clothing was cleaned elsewhere in the world, please share in the comments because I am really curious!
First, we’re going to have to agree that people in Medieval Europe did wash their clothes. They cared about hygiene and sanitation and wanted to be as clean as they could with the methods they had available. We have sources that mention or show washing clothes as far back as the Rule of St Benedict from 516, and illuminations in manuscripts right through the middle ages and into the Renaissance or early modern period. Medieval people did laundry. Let’s accept that and move on.
(If you also think myths like that are silly and enjoy seeing them busted, you should subscribe, because that’s what we do here.)
The type of fiber cloth is made from is one of the biggest factors in how it can be cleaned. Synthetics like polyester and nylon just straight-up didn’t exist back then. Cotton, which nearly everything I am wearing is made from, was not terribly common in Europe until the 18th and 19th centuries— you might be able to get it through trade with Southwest Asia and North Africa, but it was a luxury good. There was a huge trade in silk through Asia, and despite being out of most people’s budgets it was heavily used by those who could afford it. Your average person was dressing in linen, and wool.
21st century people don't wear nearly as much wool, but we still know that if you throw it in the washing machine, it shrinks and felts up and you probably can't wear it anymore. People in Medieval Europe knew that too, although they didn't have washing machines— wool does not like being washed in soap and hot water. Linen, on the other hand, launders beautifully, doesn't really shrink after the first wash, and will get softer and softer and hold up for years. With those as your options, the layers people wore make a lot of sense : wear soft, washable linen under your wool clothes so the wool doesn't get dirty. In this early medieval outfit, my linen smock is preventing my wool dress from touching my skin at all. This pattern continued through every development in Western fashion until the 1920s came along and changed everything. You always wore a layer of something washable closest to your body, to keep your outer layers clean. If you've ever wondered why historical "undergarments" cover more of you than modern-day "overgarments" . . . that's why.
Linen is also better at absorbing sweat and body oils than the cotton we’re used to. If I wear a cotton chemise like this 19th century style one under a historical outfit, it'll fail the sniff test by the end of the day. But a linen one, like this, I can often get two or three uses out of before it needs cleaning. Linen doesn't need washing as often, saving labor and resources because it'll last longer. In medieval Europe, linen was used for just about every textile that would touch a human body, whether that was clothing like underwear and hair coverings, or household textiles like napkins and towels and bedsheets. In the 1337 household inventory of Hugh le Bever, a tavern-owner in London, his 7 linen sheets are listed— and together, they’re valued at more money than a coverlet with fine silk decoration! I love linen bedsheets and use them myself- or I would, if most linen sheets weren’t ludicrously expensive, so I had to settle for a linen-cotton blend. They’re worlds better than the cheap cotton sheets they replaced, but I’ve always wanted to try pure linen ones . . . . and thanks to Brooklinen, the sponsor of this video, I have! If you would like to get yourself some historically accurate bedsheets, Brooklinen is offering my viewers $20 off any order over $100 if you use my code “SnappyDragon” at checkout; there’s a link below.
I spend a lot of my life in bed, for many reasons . . . So I had better be EXTREMELY comfortable. Linen bed sheets were historically the standard, but these days they're seen as this expensive, niche, luxury thing. Brooklinen's sheets are the sort of luxury quality that are worth an investment, except with a much more reasonable price tag because they've cut out the middleman. Historical costumers know good quality linen when we see it ,and this is really good quality. Everything I've said about linen is going to be true of these sheets as well. Considering how much longer these are going to last, the financial cost will even out, and the environmental impact will be so much better than wearing through pair after pair of budget cotton bedsheets. I got the linen Hardcore bundle, which I did not even have to get out of bed to order. There's a sheet set, extra pillowcases, and a duvet cover, and it costs 25% less than buying the same items individually. You can mix and match over 20 different colors and patterns, and sizes, which is great because I have a massive oversized duvet. Sleeping in them is like sleeping in AIR. I wasn't cold or anything because I've got the giant duvet, but they're SO light and SO breathable, it's amazing. With fibromyalgia you never really wake up feeling well rested, but I think I woke up feeling about as well rested as I ever have. So next time I film historical underwear or sleepwear loungewear I will have the perfect backdrop to film on. The linen clothes I've made get softer and softer for several washes, so I can only imagine how comfortable and soft these sheets are going to be in a few months. And you can watch them by machine too, no special treatments or fancy extras needed. Considering what I’m about to tell you about medieval laundry methods, that’s a really good thing . . .
Let's walk through what a medieval laundry day was like. There aren’t many written descriptions from this period, on account of us having fewer written sources from this period, full stop. A lot of the written sources are from the very late middle ages or the early modern period, probably because books get much more common in the 15th and 16th centuries once the Gutenberg printing press was around. Drea Leed has a really great paper that outlines how these later written laundry instructions would have been based on Medieval methods, which is good enough for me! There will be little source annotations up in the corners if you want to do your own research, and I also publish annotated bibliographies for my Patreon supporters, so if you want nicely organized links and notes and suchlike, you can find that link below.
Some of the best Medieval descriptions of laundry are not from the people doing laundry but from religious sermons and texts. Laundering was used as a metaphor for returning to spiritual or moral righteousness, leading to such things as a personification of Penitence offering-slash-threatening to launder a person’s soul. I say “threatening” because doing laundry was kind of violent?! There appear to have been three types of laundry : First, spot-cleaning wool and silk (we’ll get to that later). For linens, you could do small loads of things like underclothes frequently and at home, and then there was “the Great Wash” done every several weeks at most, an involved process during which all of a household’s linen was bleached as well as cleaned. Indoor plumbing was not really a thing in most of Europe unless you were royalty. For a small wash you had to haul your water in from the well or stream, or haul your laundry to the water and do it there. If you did laundry at home, you’d use a large tub or pot or basin. As for cleaning products : you could easily make lye by straining water through wood ash, or use a plant called soapwort that makes gentle suds. Actual soap was also common, but the quality varied a lot based on your budget and location. If you had money or lived nearer the Mediterranean you could get soap made from olive oil and a local type of potash that made a solid, colorless bar and was gentle enough to bathe with. Otherwise, you could buy or make liquid soap; either way it was made by combining lye with animal fat. This was much harsher and could be black, or a costlier white that wouldn’t stain linens. You might be able to bathe with the finer grades, but professional laundresses could get chemical burns from the less gentle stuff. We also have recipes from several early modern books that describe mixing things like alum or eggs into soap for specific fabrics or stains. You could also boil laundry over a fire, scrub dirt out on an early washboard, or use more violent methods like stomping or beating it. Then you’d wring the water out and air-dry your clothes outside or in front of the fire, and you had another week of clean underthings. So, for the medieval equivalent of throwing your socks and undies in the machine, you still had to haul several buckets of water, build and tend a fire, wring out out wet linen, and hang it or spread it out, all with your own two hands, plus wait a few hours while it dried and hope the weather didn’t turn on you.
As for the Great Wash, you’re about to understand why most households only did this every several weeks. This was an intense “deep-cleaning” of linens, and you might do every item your household owned all at once to make it worth the effort. White linen can go dull or grayish from use even when it’s being cleaned regularly, so you’d start by making a bleaching solution to pre-treat your laundry with. You could use that same homemade lye, or you could make ammonia by leaving urine to ferment. Gross, but, it worked, and it was free. The pre-treating process could involve soaking or boiling with your chemical of choice for many hours, or pouring the pre-soak through the linens repeatedly. Heat and strong chemicals would bleach out stains and grayness, loosen dirt and grease, and kill microbes. Medieval people may not have understood the science, but you don’t have to understand how something works in order to understand that it does work. The 15th century “Nuremberg Kunstbuch”, a manual for the nuns of St. Catherine’s convent in Nuremberg, has a dozen or so recipes for cleaning everything from ordinary clothes to valuable religious vestements. To wash under-dresses, it says : “take three measures of ashes and put them in a great open vessel and pour first hot boiling water thereon and then cold water so that the vessel is full and let it become strong, and sieve it then through a cloth and dunk the gown therein and wash it when cool, otherwise it will be yellow, and rub it well with soap on the collar and the sleeves, and where it is sweaty.”
With all that done, you had to haul your wet, chemical-soaked linens to a stream, river, or maybe a communal fountain or washing-house if you lived in a town or city. This was not always close by, and wet clothes are heavy; we have images like this one of needing two people to carry a laundry basket between them. Washing in a river also meant dangers like cold and ice during winter, pollution from human or industrial waste, and falling in if you slipped. The Hotel Dieu, a massive hospital in Paris, employed a boatman during flood tides to rescue any of their laundresses who fell into the river Seine. An indoor wash-house was not necessarily safer : In 1276, a laundress named Emma died of her injuries after falling into a lead vat of boiling water. Once you got to the river or stream or wherever, you would throw your load of pre-treated wash into the water on top of rocks or a wooden block, and literally beat the dirt out of it with a giant wooden paddle. You know the agitation cycle on modern washing machines? This was the equivalent. It was also probably a really good way to vent your frustration, at, well, everything about being a working-class woman in the 15th century. Once it was clean, you’d wring the water out of it, with your own hands since mangles hadn’t been invented. There’s a great demo in the documentary series “Tales from the Green Valley” which shows the whole Great Wash process on an early modern farm. They twist the laundry around a “wringing post” to squeeze the water out, and Ruth Goodman says there are wringing posts on a mid-Tudor era map of London, at Moorfields. I checked the Agas Map and the Copperplate Map, both of which do show laundry being done at Moorfields, but I didn’t see the wringing posts, so if you know where this is, please tell me in the comments. What these maps do show is laundry being spread out on the fields to dry, which was the final step of the process.
Getting your laundry dry after washing might actually have been one of the trickiest things. If the weather turned wet, you were kind of screwed, since anything put away damp would mildew. Ideally you'd lay things out in direct sunlight for a final round of bleaching and sanitation. Laundry could even be spread over lavender bushes to make it smell nice, and the lavender plant probably got its name from the Old French word “lavandre”, which is in turn from the Latin root “lavare” or “to wash”. Institutions like the Hotel Dieu, which has records of laundering over 500 sheets a week might have an indoor space for hanging laundry in the winter, but the Hotel Dieu was huge and had 15 full-time laundry workers. Your average housewife or laundress was going to have to hope, pray for, and guess at good weather, and the medieval book of “housewife wisdom” called the Distaff Gospels mentions praying specifically to St Clair, or predicting rain based on whether your cat was licking its rear end. Theft of laundry while it dried was another common issue. Cloth was worth a lot in those days, and if it was lying out in the open unattended . . . however, since professional laundresses would be liable if any of their clients’ items went missing, they defended them zealously. A stone roof boss from Norwich Cathedral shows a laundress fighting off a thief, and given that doing laundry was back-breaking manual labor, your average Medieval laundress was jacked, and also probably armed with a giant wooden paddle. Not someone you wanted to get in a fight with.
This whole process was a lot of work, even by Medieval standards, so many people had a professional do their laundry. Thanks to medieval Europe's rigid and nonsensical gender norms, this intensely physical job was 100% "womens' work". Religious orders made rare exceptions, either because the head of a monastery didn’t think the brothers would keep their hands to themselves, or because women weren’t considered holy enough to handle important religious items. However, that also meant that working as a laundress was one of the few ways a medieval woman could earn her own living, even if she was unmarried, or widowed, or even if she was married but needed extra cash. A laundress in a royal household could earn an impressive wage of 1 shilling a week, as well room, board, clothing, and maybe even a retirement plan : Matilda de Hauskeye, a royal laundress in 1317 was given room and board in Westminster Abbey when she became too old to work. Most laundresses appear to have been self-employed rather than full-time employees of a household. They would have regular clientele, just like modern businesses, and might be paid a yearly or weekly stipend, per-load, per-item of clothing, or with barter (financial records are pretty thin). The records we do have put the going rate for a religious institution’s usual laundress at 4 shillings a year plus occasional small bonuses. These wages didn’t rise much even when the Black Death pandemic led to wage increases in nearly every other industry. Individual clients like an official at Westminster Abbey might pay 2-4 shillings a year, or apparently twice as much for a monk there, perhaps due to paying per-item? Highly skilled craftsmen like masons and glaziers were paid 3 to 4 pence a day, for comparison. A successful laundress with several top-tier clients like these could make good money, but your average laundress was probably paid a lot less and with a lot less security.
Even this small measure of economic agency for Medieval women came with serious backlash. To avoid soaking their own clothes, laundresses worked with their sleeves rolled up and their skirts hiked up out of the water, exposing their arms and legs. They moved around freely to collect and deliver clothes, sometimes on their own and certainly without male supervision, and they gathered in groups together, also without male supervision. They were often the only female staff attached to large groups of men like high-status households, armies, and monasteries. Medieval society put all this together and decided that laundry couldn’t possibly be a good enough explanation for all of this, and “laundress” became a euphemism for “sex worker”. Yaaay, sexism . . . [yaaaaay!]
Furthermore, women who were already considered suspicious simply for being poor, single, both, or if they actually did do sex work, could and often did work as laundresses because it was one of the only ways they could make ends meet. Since they were often rejected by religion-based social services like alms-houses, these women would provide mutual aid to eachother outside of established structures. In the 1270s, a migrant worker in Paris named Nicole de Rubercy suffered a medical crisis (possibly a stroke) and couldn’t work, but was supported through her recovery by other low-status women. So here you have a collection of physically imposing, unsupervised women with their own incomes and support systems outside of the patriarchy . . . yeah, the Medieval social order found that pretty scary. The laundresses of royal or aristocratic households usually escaped this sort of suspicion, but might get dragged into political intrigues instead. You can tell quite a bit about someone from seeing their dirty bedsheets and underclothes, like if they’d had overnight guests, if they’d gotten their period . . . or if they had not gotten their period for several months. For some very high-ranking people that was literally a matter of national security, and it would not shock me if this is how the phrase “dirty laundry” got its significance.
Okay, so what about everything other than linen? Wool doesn’t like soap or hot water, and the lavish silks worn by the upper classes like them even less. The occasional cold-water rinse won’t hurt most wool clothes, so that’s definitely a possibility. Dyes weren’t as colorfast, though, so while wool fibers may tolerate a gentle rinse in cold water, that could fade the color and make the garment look cheaper since strong colors cost more to dye. What we do have evidence for was all kinds of spot-cleaning methods. Many books that give cleaning recipes say things like “wet the spot with it divers times” or “wash your spots therewith” rather than saying to wash the whole garment. There’s a late 14th century book on housework known as “The Good Wife’s Guide”, narrated to a possibly-fictional 15-year-old bride from her possibly-equally-fictional much older husband, expecting that she’ll marry again after he dies and wanting her to have, essentially, a successful career as a full-time spouse and homemaker. While this guide doesn’t go into anything as pedestrian as washing linens, it does talk about caring for fine garments and how to spot-clean wool and silk. “Verjuice”, a highly acidic liquid made from the juice of underripe grapes or other sour fruit, is a common stain treatment. The book’s author, known only as “le Menagier de Paris”, says that on rich silk fabrics, “soak and wash the stain in verjuice and it will go away”. This method was effective enough that he then advises to always have verjuice on hand “for it is useful for removing spots from dresses and bringing back their color. Fresh or old, it is always reliable.”. Lye solutions are also common, often made from specific types of ashes. The Nuremberg Kunstbuch recommends them specifically for green clothes, and The Good Wife’s Guide says to soak ashes or chick feathers in lye and rub stains with them. For extra kick, the lye solution could be made using lime, which is intensely alkaline and has a different chemical composition. The soapwort plant, which is much gentler, was also used for cleaning garments that couldn’t handle harsh laundering. “A Profitable Booke” says that “scarlet or velvet, of what color or sorte so ever it be” can be spot-cleaned with the juice of soapwort, “not chaunging the colors”. At the time, “scarlet” meant a kind of high-quality wool cloth, not a color. Absorbent ingredients like fuller’s earth, clay, and powdered bone are all recommended for removing oil or grease stains. This would be a great way to remove some of the grease without having to dissolve it with harsh lye or soap. The recipes say either to make a paste with water to rub on the stains, or to mix them with soap as a spot-treatment.
The only place where this system of wearing washable linen next to the body and only spot-cleaning other clothes breaks down, is socks. “Hose” in medieval Europe were usually sewn from woven wool cloth rather than being knitted. If you washed your hose like linens they’d felt up and be unwearable, and I can’t see a culture of people who thought bad smells could give you diseases willingly having super stinky socks. So, I surveyed a number of my friends who wear modern wool socks— by which I mean, I made a post on facebook asking people about their smelly feet, so this should not be taken as proper scientific research. My friends reported that their wool socks took between 3 days and “never” to get smelly, even on hikes or backpacking trips, and they wash wool socks after 3-5 uses on average. Cotton socks tend to need a full wash after every use and get smelly by the end of a normal day. Cleaning methods included everything from gentle modern wool detergent to overnight soaks in washing soda, and line-drying or low-heat tumble-drying. I wouldn’t expect any of this to translate perfectly to Medieval wool hose, but this does suggest that if someone owned two or three pairs of hose, aired them out between uses, and washed them occasionally with cold water and one of the gentler cleaning chemicals available, they wouldn’t be any worse than a modern person’s socks. Also, cotton doesn’t make a very good next-to-the-skin layer, since it gets gross and smelly faster than either wool or linen.
I think this may be the first time ever on my channel where I took a good, long, in-depth look into the history of something and went “Yup, that’s every bit as bad as popular imagination says”. So while I can't promise never to complain about doing laundry again, or that I will somehow immediately fold my clean clothes the moment they come out of the dryer . . . I am incredibly grateful that doing my laundry does not involve backbreaking physical labor, total dependence on the weather, chemical burns, or urine. Thank you to Brooklinen for sponsoring this video, for sending me historically accurate linen bedsheets that I will not have to wash in a river, and for offering my viewers $20 off any order over $100 with the code SnappyDragon. Likewise, I think it might be time to invest in some good old historical-style wool socks [laughs]. If you had fun, learned something, or developed a new appreciation for modern technology, check out my other videos on the history of clothes and fashion, and subscribe so you don’t miss the next one! Tell me in the comments about something you’re really glad you don’t have to do the historical way, and don’t forget to click the like button while you’re there. Until next time . . . Let’s all agree to not fall into the trap of thinking the past was automatically all better or all worse than the present, okay? We’re smarter than that.
[Medieval V] : You’re telling me a machine washes it and dries it, but I still have to fold it?
. . . I don't like it.
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