Soap and washing: Did they have soap in medieval times?

as anybody that works with their hands knows maybe you work with horses or maybe you work in a garage or something like that or farming quite frankly any manual labor whatsoever your hands are going to get dirty it was exactly the same in the medieval period so after a day's work and your hands are filthy maybe with horse sweat or mark or dirt or whatever it might be how do you get them clean I have some ideas let me explain [Music] first thing you do if you've got lucky hands is and we all have done this as kids it just wiped them on the ground and I'm sure that was done many times you probably wouldn't wipe it on your clothes though because your clothes it's difficult to get them clean as well so you'd sort of try and avoid that but wiping things on the ground is perfectly reasonable the next thing you do is of course water you would bring with you some water it doesn't have to be particularly clean water you could just scoop this straight out of the well or straight out of the stream and if you use that you can just rub the worst of it on your hands and get some of it off now the problem with water is it's heavy to carry you obviously if you're going to wash with it you don't really need it to be good for drinking so you can use this of a secondary water or water you've got from a puddle or whatever it is and it takes off the worst of the muck and the problem is that doesn't actually get rid of all the dirt and it doesn't actually get rid of a lot of grease if you've got grease on your hands so if you've been working with horses for example grooming them tacking them up horse sweat and lanolin and all that kind of stuff actually it's a bit resistant to water so just actually using water on your hands wouldn't really work now we know there was soap in fact bizarrely soap is actually a very very early discovery in human civilization we think the Babylonians had soap and from about 2000 BC there is a recipe for soap written on a clay tablet a sumerian clay tablet which of course massively predates the medieval period by thousands of years when I use the word soap what I mean is toilet soap something that you can use to wash with wash your hair wash your hands or anything because soap technically is a group of chemicals which includes things like greases includes soft soaps all sorts of other things like that the key value I suppose of soap is that it dissolves grease and it also dissolves in water as well so there the molecule itself actually bonds to dirt and puts it into water and can wash it away so any kind of grease and any kind of alkali will react together to create soap it's a saponification process which is just a fancy way of saying soap is made we know there was a particularly fine type of soap that came from castile which was white and it was made with olive oil and some kind of alkali and it was ferociously expensive your average working person your average craftsman your average washer woman was not going to be able to afford castile soap it was the sort of thing reserved for lords ladies and nobility and if you had castile soap you would show it off there are two other types of soap that were made in England in particular there was a thing called grey soap which came from Bristol and was made there which was marginally cheaper than castile soap still too expensive if you're a modest manual worker there's another kind of soap which is even cheaper than grey soap it was called black soap I don't think it was jet black or anything like that it certainly wasn't colored because adding ingredients like that would have increased the price Oh basically I think it was called black soap because it was darker than grey soap it was available it was available in towns the city's probably not in the countryside it was still too expensive for ordinary people to use but from about the 10th century we had soap in England it's a little bit embarrassing of course because they had soap on the continent of Europe for hundreds of years beforehand and before then the ancient Babylonians had soap for goodness sake so the Egyptians would have had it all sorts of people would have had types of soap but we know from the records that soap really was only known in the British Isles from about the 10th century interestingly the Romans didn't really use soap it's unusual they used a olive oil and they scraped it off their skin with a thing called astral so the Romans didn't actually use soap as far as we're aware in medieval times people had to use what they had available you've come in from working in the fields the water's not doing it your hands are greasy is something what else do you have available to you in the medieval household you don't have raw ingredients particularly you've got some things well one of the things that's actually quite commonly available in medieval period is ash an ash is actually a source of alkali and bizarrely enough oh it's really interesting when I was doing the research for this alkali is actually an Arabic word which means ash so in fact the concept the word we use for alkali is actually talking about ash now this ash itself is as a hardwood ash it's got bits of unburnt wood in it this is charcoal it's got lots of bits of grit as well I probably think it's where we got some sand and some silica but it's a very fine powder and this powder itself is quite good for scattering on the ground it helps d acidify the soil if you run water through ash you get lie and lie is one of the key ingredients of soap making so throughout the world when soap has been made it has been made with elements of ash there are two main ingredients for any kind of soap you need an oil or a fat and you need an alkali which you get from soaking water in ash and depending on how long you leave it it gets stronger the best stuff was made of olive oil that's very expensive the cheaper stuff was made with animal fat now from the records it's pretty clear that it wasn't actually the best animal fat that was used it was probably the animal fat that was left over that was too stinky that had gone off because there's a couple of notes we have from monks talking about how stinky the soap works were that we're in the medieval town and they often had to be downwind of where people were living and that's the same for things like slaughterhouses and tanneries and everything so there's a lot of industry downwind of towns because medieval industry brought with it its own effluent and its own pongs you will need ideally to be down water of use so the fresh water comes in or you can drink it and the bad water goes out and flushes through the industrial centers but also you want the smells to be going away from where you're living ideally now obviously medieval people probably wouldn't have known that what they were doing is using the precursor to soap making to clean their hands but if you take a pinch of ash and rub it on your hands you wet your hands first take pinch of it rub it in your hands the grittiness of the ash helps take away some of the dirt from your skin and there is an instant saponification action instant soap making action on the grease of your skin and the grease on your hands so one needs to get it off quite quickly because it can be quite dangerous and I wouldn't recommend anybody doing this on a regular basis because the alkali is actually quite aggressive and can badly burn your skin so if you want to try this be very very careful but what it does do it has a very strong cleaning effect on your skin I can feel my hand has been quite nicely degreased so simple ash a water acts as a very very efficient cleaner of your hands so you come in from the fields grab a bit of water grab some ash wash your hands dry them or maybe just drip them or whatever drip them dry and then you're ready to eat your food I find it fascinating to think that water and ash actually can clean your hands quite efficiently you'd probably want to be a bit careful about using it too often because it is quite strong and the ash will vary in quality but basically you have all the ingredients you need to actually decrease your hands quite efficiently with a waste product from the fireplace and water got from a stream and I bet you this has been used for thousands of years and interestingly I think it's pretty obvious if you are camping in the middle of nowhere and you had greasy pots and pans or you wanted to wash something you don't have you've got grass around you you've got plants and things but if you had a fireplace and you have ash I think it's almost automatic to want to reach for some ash use it to rub your hands clean or clean something swill it away chuck it away and it might be that cleaning with ash predates civilization or predates the understanding and the invention of soap I reckon millions upon millions of human beings have used ash to take away grease without realizing that in fact what they were doing is creating a kind of automatic soap by doing so [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 1,127,222

Keywords: history documentary, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, game of thrones, dungeons and dragons, lord of the rings, horses, war horses, armour, soap, larp, role play, detergent, olive oil, camping, ashes, Medieval, fantasy, dnd, history, historical, hema, historical european martial arts, mount and blade, video, game, roleplaying, role playing, rpg, adventure, adventurer

Id: j30HOdWJ5gE

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2019