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Throughout history, the Middle Ages have been associated with a picture of filthy streets filled with garbage and stench, people living in squalor and disease, and a lack of sanitation and hygiene. Many even believe that this period saw a complete absence of sanitation laws, regulations, and public health care.
However, the truth about hygiene in the Middle Ages is far more nuanced than we often imagine. While life during those times wasn’t always clean and sweet-smelling, we can’t simply claim that everyone lived in a “pigsty” from the fall of Rome until the Renaissance. In fact, there’s evidence suggesting that hygiene in the Middle Ages may have been better than we assume, and actually declined during the Renaissance and Reformation.
The population growth in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, reaching unprecedented levels before the bubonic plague struck in the mid-14th century, clearly demonstrates this. While the population increase occurred in both rural and urban areas, the expansion of towns and cities until the mid-14th century indicates a boom in urban populations. The fact that these towns and cities could survive and thrive for centuries before the Black Death suggests that medieval people employed effective sanitation techniques.
Furthermore, while outbreaks of infectious diseases certainly existed before the Black Death, none were as widespread and devastating as we might expect if “the streets of medieval towns were constantly foul-smelling and full of filth, owing to the lack of closed sewers, private or public conveniences, the custom of throwing refuse into the streets, and the failure of municipal authorities to clean the pavements.” This is supported by the fact that epidemics of dysentery and other diseases caused or exacerbated by inadequate sewage disposal and contaminated water supplies were not everyday occurrences. They were most often recorded in medieval chronicles as happening in besieged towns and cities, military encampments, and other settings where sanitation infrastructure was under extreme stress, hampered by external interference, or simply nonexistent.
With these facts in mind, let’s explore a surprising world of medieval sanitation.
00:00 Hygiene in the Middle Ages – It’s Not What You Think!
32:10 Were the Middle Ages Really Filthy?
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