Far from shunning baths, medieval people enjoyed hot water, scented herbs and even meals in public bathhouses. From kings who travelled with their own bathtubs to physicians who prescribed dozens of different ways to bathe, cleanliness was an important part of medieval life.
It has been said that the Middle Ages were ‘one thousand years without a bath.’ Certainly, there are stories of medieval people who rarely bathed. St Fintan of Clonenagh, for example, was said to take a bath only once a year, just before Easter, for twenty-four years. Meanwhile, a thirteenth-century English chronicler attributed the Vikings’ success with English women to their habit of bathing every Saturday, combing their hair and dressing well.
These stories, however, tell only a small part of the history of medieval bathing. While bathing habits varied considerably according to where people lived, their wealth and their religious beliefs, washing and bathing were far more common than popular perceptions of the Middle Ages would suggest. Public bathhouses were a familiar feature of medieval towns, physicians wrote extensively about the benefits of bathing, and people of all social classes sought opportunities to keep themselves clean.
Personal Hygiene in the Middle Ages
British Library MS Additional 5474 fol. 144r
Numerous literary references and works of art reveal that bathing was a familiar part of medieval life. People were well aware of the importance of washing their faces and hands, and health manuals from the period stressed the need to get rid of dirt and grime. They also explained why it was important to keep the entire body clean.
The seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville even associated bathing with emotional wellbeing, believing that baths could relieve people of their anxieties and sorrows.
By the twelfth century, medieval medical writers were recommending detailed routines for everyday personal hygiene. The Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, a popular medical poem associated with the medical school at Salerno in southern Italy, offers this advice, as translated by Elisa Ramazzina:
In the morning, when you wake up, wash the eyes and the hands in cool water Then run a little here and there, a little your limbs Stretch out, comb your hair, brush your teeth: these things Invigorate the mind and the spirit, invigorate the other bodily parts. Heat the bath, and after the meal rest or enjoy the cool for a little while.
Washing, brushing one’s teeth, combing one’s hair and exercising were all considered beneficial to both body and mind. The recommended morning routine also included taking a warm bath before breakfast.
Medieval Medical Advice on Bathing
Bas-de-page scene of a man bathing in a tub, with attendants – British Library MS Royal 13 B. VIII, f.28v
Medieval physicians believed that bathing could help maintain good health as well as treat a wide range of illnesses. Their ideas were largely based on the theory of the four humours, according to which good health depended on maintaining a balance within the body.
In early medieval England, the medical text known as Bald’s Leechbook, preserved in a tenth-century manuscript, recommended bathing for numerous ailments. One remedy for knee pain involved pounding together woodwax and hedgerife, mixing them with ale and leaving the concoction overnight. The patient would then drink the mixture, bathe with it and apply it to the affected area.
Bathing also played an important role in women’s healthcare. The twelfth-century Trotula, a collection of medical texts produced in southern Italy, prescribed baths for conditions ranging from infertility to complications arising from childbirth. One treatment for infertility involved bathing in a mixture of seawater, rainwater and seven different herbs.
The fourteenth-century Italian physician Maino De Maineri stated in his work Regimen sanitatis that “the bath cleans the external body parts of dirt left behind from exercise on the outside of the body.”
He also adds a second reason for bathing:
if any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath.
There was a strong connection between bathing and eating, which could affect one’s overall health (these ideas have not quite left us, as many people might remember their mother telling them not to go swimming for an hour after a meal). Baths could aid digestion and stop diarrhoea but, when taken improperly, could lead to weakness of the heart, nausea or fainting.
Medieval writers saw bathing as a serious activity that required care. One medical treatise, the Secreta Secretorum, has an entire section on baths. It notes that spring and winter are good times for bathing, but that it should be avoided as much as possible in the summer. It also warns that excessively long baths lead to fatness and feebleness.
Meanwhile, Maino De Maineri offers over 57 different ways to take a bath, depending on factors like old age, pregnancy or just travelling. His rules for bathing run to 1,500 words.
Medieval Health Spas
The thermal baths of Tripergola, believed to treat physical weakness, stomach ailments and mental disorders, depicted in Peter of Eboli’s De balneis Puteolanis. 13th century, Biblioteca Angelica, Rome, MS 1474
People in the Middle Ages could also travel to places renowned for the healing properties of their waters. Natural hot springs were particularly valued, and medieval physicians devoted considerable attention to understanding which waters could treat particular ailments.
At the end of the twelfth century, Peter of Eboli wrote De balneis Puteolanis, a collection of poems describing 35 thermal baths around Pozzuoli and Baiae, near Naples. Each poem describes the properties of a particular bath and the illnesses it could supposedly cure.
Peter even encouraged people who could not afford medicines to seek out these waters. As Elisa Ramazzina suggests, illustrated copies of his work could have served as a kind of catalogue, allowing prospective visitors to identify the baths most suitable for their medical conditions.
Some famous bathing sites had their own rules. In 1336, Pietro de Tussignano formulated twelve rules for those coming to the Italian town of Bormio, which lies near Switzerland, to get the healing effects of its baths.
They stipulate that the person should not have had too much sexual intercourse beforehand (nor have abstained from it) and that he should also enter the bath on an empty stomach (or, at most, just two spoons of raisins with a little wine).
You could only pour the water over your head if you were clean-shaven; otherwise, your hair might impede the effects of the water. The person should take the baths for fifteen days, spending up to an hour a day getting washed. If all went well, the bather would enjoy improved health for over six months.
By the later Middle Ages, some Italian physicians were even using distillation and other techniques to investigate the mineral composition of thermal waters, seeking to understand why particular springs were beneficial in treating certain illnesses.
How Kings and the Wealthy Bathed
Bathing in a 15th-century manuscript. British Library IC.41148, LI
Wealthy people who could afford a private bath would use a wooden tub that could also have a tent-like cloth over it. Attendants would bring jugs and pots of hot water to fill the tub. In his Book of Nurture, written in the second half of the fifteenth century, John Russell advises servants that if their lord wants a bath, they should:
hang sheets, round the roof, every one full of flowers and sweet green herbs, and have five or six sponges to sit or lean upon, and see that you have one big sponge to sit upon, and a sheet over so that he may bathe there for a while, and have a sponge also for under his feet, if there be any to spare, and always be careful that the door is shut. Have a basin full of hot fresh herbs and wash his body with a soft sponge, rinse him with fair warm rose-water, and throw it over him.
He adds that if the lord has pains or aches, it is good to boil various herbs like camomile, breweswort, mallow and brown fennel and add them to the bath.
Records from medieval England show that its kings often enjoyed these baths. When King John travelled around his kingdom, he took a bathtub with him and had a personal attendant named William who handled it. Meanwhile, in 1351, Edward III paid for taps of hot and cold water that went straight to his bathtub at Westminster Palace.
Royalty throughout Europe often entertained guests with baths, trying to impress each other with how luxurious they could make them. This tradition even goes back to the Carolingians. Einhard says that Charlemagne loved taking baths, and that “he would invite not only his sons to bathe with him, but his nobles and friends as well, and occasionally even a crowd of attendants and bodyguards, so that sometimes a hundred men or more would be in the water together.”
Bathing in Medieval Monasteries
Wealthy monasteries could often pipe in water and have baths as well. Some monastic rules suggest that monks did not take regular baths. The monks of Westminster Abbey, for example, were required to have a bath four times a year: at Christmas, Easter, the end of June, and the end of September.
It is hard to know if these rules were being followed or if they were intended to mean that the monks could only bathe at those times. We do know, however, that Westminster Abbey employed a bath attendant who was paid two loaves of bread daily, as well as a stipend of £1 per year, which seems to indicate that his services were regularly used.
Religious institutions also played a role in providing bathing facilities for the wider population. In medieval Denmark, wealthy individuals sometimes left money in their wills to pay for poor people to visit a bathhouse, often providing them with a meal as well. These charitable acts, known as soul baths, became particularly common in the fifteenth century.
The Popularity of Medieval Bathhouses
A scene showing a public bath from a 15th-century manuscript – Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms-5221 réserve, fol. 287r
For most people, having a private bath was not an option. It was simply too costly and too time-consuming to have their own baths. That does not mean they went without bathing, for public baths were very common throughout Europe.
By the thirteenth century, one could find over 32 bathhouses in Paris. Alexander Neckham, who lived in that city a century earlier, says that he would be awakened in the mornings by people crying in the streets that “the baths are hot!”
In Southwark, the town on the opposite side of the River Thames from London, a person could choose from 18 hot baths. Even smaller towns would have bathhouses, often connected with the local bakery, as the baths could make use of the heat coming from the ovens to help heat their water.
Public bathhouses were also widespread in medieval Scandinavia. The historian Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard has found evidence of bathhouses in at least 25 medieval Danish towns. Owning a bathhouse could be a lucrative business, and nearly all the known public bathhouses in medieval Denmark were owned by religious institutions at some point in their history.
People from across the social spectrum, including royalty, frequented these establishments.
What Was a Medieval Bathhouse Like?
A bathhouse in the 15th century – Konrad Kyeser, Bellifortis, around 1405, 2 Cod. Ms. philos. 63 Cim.
While medieval illustrations often depict people sitting in wooden bathtubs, another form of bathing was widespread in northern Europe: the sweat bath, which resembled a modern sauna.
In medieval Denmark and Germany, sweat baths appear to have been more common in public bathhouses than tub baths. The latter were considerably more expensive. In the German town of Bamberg, for example, regulations from 1480 reveal that a tub bath cost at least six times as much as a sweat bath.
A German poem from the late thirteenth century offers a detailed description of what a visit to a bathhouse was like. Once the bathhouse had been heated, its keeper would announce that it was ready by shouting, blowing a horn or hanging a sign outside. This sign might take the form of a bundle of birch twigs or a washing basin.
Bathers would undress before entering a heated room, where they could sit or lie on wooden benches arranged along the walls. A stove covered with large stones provided the heat, and water could be poured over the stones to create steam.
To encourage sweating, bathers would be struck with bundles of birch twigs. They could also wash themselves with soap or lye before rinsing themselves with cold water. Some German bathhouses even provided beds where customers could rest after bathing.
Medieval bathhouses offered a variety of other services as well. Customers could have their hair washed and cut, undergo bloodletting or cupping, and even have teeth extracted, wounds treated and broken bones set. A visit to the bathhouse could be as much about medical treatment as personal cleanliness.
Bathing in the Medieval Islamic World
The Sultan Inal Hammam in Cairo, dating from 1456 – photo by Jorge Láscar from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
If one were under the impression that public bathhouses were a European phenomenon, then it should also be pointed out that they were even more popular in the Middle East and North Africa. According to one eleventh-century writer, the city of Baghdad alone had 60,000 bathhouses, likely an exaggeration, but it does reveal just how common they must have been.
Known as hammams, these bathhouses were also the subject of extensive medical literature. Among those who wrote about them was Ibn Hubal al-Baghdādī, a physician born in Baghdad in 1122. His medical encyclopaedia, The Book of Selections in Medicine, completed in Mosul in 1164–65, includes an entire chapter devoted to bathing and bathhouses. In the following section, he explains what made a good bathhouse:
The most suitable hammam is one of older construction. If the hammam is newly built, its walls tend to retain moisture, and the odors emanating from its water reservoirs may be detrimental. Hammams with wide interiors are preferable to narrower ones, as their steam tends to accumulate in the upper areas of the structure and can be more easily ventilated. Moreover, the water used for bathing should be fresh, since fresh water is more in harmony with a healthy temperament compared to saline or other types of water.
Ibn Hubal describes three chambers within the hammam, each with different levels of heat and humidity. The first chamber was cold and humid, the second was warm and humid, and the third was warm and dry. Bathers were advised to move gradually between these rooms, adjusting to the different temperatures.
Like their European counterparts, physicians in the Islamic world were concerned about the relationship between bathing and digestion. Ibn Hubal believed that bathing immediately after eating could help people gain weight, although he generally advised those in good health against entering a hammam on a full stomach.
He also recommended that people who had been exercising should rest and allow their sweat to dry before entering the bathhouse. Once inside, they could pour water onto the heated floor, sit in the bath and apply oils to their bodies.
Cold-water bathing was also considered beneficial for certain people. Ibn Hubal advised those with warm and robust constitutions to begin bathing in cold water during the summer and make it a regular practice. They should leave the water once they began shivering or developing goosebumps. However, he believed that cold-water bathing was unsuitable for children, the elderly and those suffering from various medical conditions.
For people who developed headaches while visiting the hammam, Ibn Hubal recommended avoiding the hotter chambers and inhaling fragrances such as camphor, rose water and fresh lilies.
His advice about choosing a comfortable place within the bathhouse was simple:
Ideally, one should remain in a spot where they feel at ease, without experiencing excessive heat or skin shivering.
Bathing, Feasting and Sex
Jakob von Warte enjoying a bath in the early 14th-century Codex Manesse. Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 46v.
Bathhouses could also be places of entertainment and socialising. In her book Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, Virginia Smith explains:
By the fifteenth century, bath feasting in many town bathhouses seems to have been as common as going out to a restaurant was to become four centuries later. German bath etchings from the fifteenth century often feature the town bathhouse, with a long row of bathing couples eating a meal naked in bathtubs, often several to a tub, with other couples seen smiling in beds in the mid-distance.
Public bathhouses were very popular throughout medieval Europe, but they also raised controversy, as some objected to the fact that men and women could see and be with each other naked and that this could lead to illicit sex. A thirteenth-century church writer made this prohibition: “Hast thou washed thyself in the bath with thy wife and other women and seen them nude, and they thee? If thou hast, thou shouldst fast for three days on bread and water.”
In some places, authorities sought to prevent men and women from bathing together. In Flensburg, regulations issued in 1295 designated Mondays and Thursdays as bathing days for women. Any man caught bathing with them would have to forfeit his clothes.
However, medieval people also seem to have accepted that some bathhouses were not only places to get clean and healthy but also places where sex and prostitution could occur. The bathhouses in Southwark were called the Stews and were largely regarded as fronts for brothels. These practices were usually overlooked by local authorities, who believed that it was best to allow some sexual outlets for their young men rather than risk more serious problems.
Not all bathhouses should be associated with prostitution, however. Bjerregaard cautions that some medieval illustrations commonly used to depict mixed-sex bathing actually show scenes in brothels rather than ordinary public bathhouses.
Why Did Medieval Bathhouses Decline?
The popularity of public bathhouses declined rapidly in many parts of Europe in the sixteenth century. Several suggestions have been made as to why: were more puritanical religious people able to impose their moral values on the community, or were the diseases that had struck Europe since the Black Death convincing people to avoid them?
Syphilis, which spread rapidly in Europe in the late fifteenth century, would also have discouraged people from visiting establishments associated with prostitution.
Religious changes brought about by the Reformation may have contributed to the decline as well. In Denmark, the practice of wealthy people paying for the poor to visit bathhouses disappeared with the Reformation, depriving these establishments of one source of customers and income.
The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public bathhouse. “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths,” he remarked. “Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.”
While bathing did not disappear altogether, the decline of public bathhouses marked a significant change in European attitudes towards personal hygiene. For much of the Middle Ages, bathing had been an important part of medical treatment, everyday cleanliness and social life. In many parts of Europe, it was only after the medieval period that this tradition began to fade.
Further Readings:
Archibald, Elizabeth, “Did Knights Have Baths? The Absence of Bathing in Middle English Romance,” Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, edited by Corinne Saunders (Boydell, 2005)
Ramazzina, Elisa, “Bathing in Medieval Europe,” The Elements in the Medieval World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Water, edited by Marilina Cesario, Hugh Magennis and Elisa Ramazzina (Brill, 2024)
van Dam, Fabiola I., “Permeable Boundaries: Bodies, Bathing and Fluxes, 1135–1333,” Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia Baker (Brill, 2012)
van Winter, Johanna Maria, “Medieval Opinions about Food and Drinking in Connection with Bathing,” Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food (Prospect Books, 2007)
Far from shunning baths, medieval people enjoyed hot water, scented herbs and even meals in public bathhouses. From kings who travelled with their own bathtubs to physicians who prescribed dozens of different ways to bathe, cleanliness was an important part of medieval life.
It has been said that the Middle Ages were ‘one thousand years without a bath.’ Certainly, there are stories of medieval people who rarely bathed. St Fintan of Clonenagh, for example, was said to take a bath only once a year, just before Easter, for twenty-four years. Meanwhile, a thirteenth-century English chronicler attributed the Vikings’ success with English women to their habit of bathing every Saturday, combing their hair and dressing well.
These stories, however, tell only a small part of the history of medieval bathing. While bathing habits varied considerably according to where people lived, their wealth and their religious beliefs, washing and bathing were far more common than popular perceptions of the Middle Ages would suggest. Public bathhouses were a familiar feature of medieval towns, physicians wrote extensively about the benefits of bathing, and people of all social classes sought opportunities to keep themselves clean.
Personal Hygiene in the Middle Ages
Numerous literary references and works of art reveal that bathing was a familiar part of medieval life. People were well aware of the importance of washing their faces and hands, and health manuals from the period stressed the need to get rid of dirt and grime. They also explained why it was important to keep the entire body clean.
The seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville even associated bathing with emotional wellbeing, believing that baths could relieve people of their anxieties and sorrows.
By the twelfth century, medieval medical writers were recommending detailed routines for everyday personal hygiene. The Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, a popular medical poem associated with the medical school at Salerno in southern Italy, offers this advice, as translated by Elisa Ramazzina:
In the morning, when you wake up, wash the eyes and the hands in cool water
Then run a little here and there, a little your limbs
Stretch out, comb your hair, brush your teeth: these things
Invigorate the mind and the spirit, invigorate the other bodily parts.
Heat the bath, and after the meal rest or enjoy the cool for a little while.
Washing, brushing one’s teeth, combing one’s hair and exercising were all considered beneficial to both body and mind. The recommended morning routine also included taking a warm bath before breakfast.
Medieval Medical Advice on Bathing
Medieval physicians believed that bathing could help maintain good health as well as treat a wide range of illnesses. Their ideas were largely based on the theory of the four humours, according to which good health depended on maintaining a balance within the body.
In early medieval England, the medical text known as Bald’s Leechbook, preserved in a tenth-century manuscript, recommended bathing for numerous ailments. One remedy for knee pain involved pounding together woodwax and hedgerife, mixing them with ale and leaving the concoction overnight. The patient would then drink the mixture, bathe with it and apply it to the affected area.
Bathing also played an important role in women’s healthcare. The twelfth-century Trotula, a collection of medical texts produced in southern Italy, prescribed baths for conditions ranging from infertility to complications arising from childbirth. One treatment for infertility involved bathing in a mixture of seawater, rainwater and seven different herbs.
The fourteenth-century Italian physician Maino De Maineri stated in his work Regimen sanitatis that “the bath cleans the external body parts of dirt left behind from exercise on the outside of the body.”
He also adds a second reason for bathing:
if any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath.
There was a strong connection between bathing and eating, which could affect one’s overall health (these ideas have not quite left us, as many people might remember their mother telling them not to go swimming for an hour after a meal). Baths could aid digestion and stop diarrhoea but, when taken improperly, could lead to weakness of the heart, nausea or fainting.
Medieval writers saw bathing as a serious activity that required care. One medical treatise, the Secreta Secretorum, has an entire section on baths. It notes that spring and winter are good times for bathing, but that it should be avoided as much as possible in the summer. It also warns that excessively long baths lead to fatness and feebleness.
Meanwhile, Maino De Maineri offers over 57 different ways to take a bath, depending on factors like old age, pregnancy or just travelling. His rules for bathing run to 1,500 words.
Medieval Health Spas
People in the Middle Ages could also travel to places renowned for the healing properties of their waters. Natural hot springs were particularly valued, and medieval physicians devoted considerable attention to understanding which waters could treat particular ailments.
At the end of the twelfth century, Peter of Eboli wrote De balneis Puteolanis, a collection of poems describing 35 thermal baths around Pozzuoli and Baiae, near Naples. Each poem describes the properties of a particular bath and the illnesses it could supposedly cure.
Peter even encouraged people who could not afford medicines to seek out these waters. As Elisa Ramazzina suggests, illustrated copies of his work could have served as a kind of catalogue, allowing prospective visitors to identify the baths most suitable for their medical conditions.
Some famous bathing sites had their own rules. In 1336, Pietro de Tussignano formulated twelve rules for those coming to the Italian town of Bormio, which lies near Switzerland, to get the healing effects of its baths.
They stipulate that the person should not have had too much sexual intercourse beforehand (nor have abstained from it) and that he should also enter the bath on an empty stomach (or, at most, just two spoons of raisins with a little wine).
You could only pour the water over your head if you were clean-shaven; otherwise, your hair might impede the effects of the water. The person should take the baths for fifteen days, spending up to an hour a day getting washed. If all went well, the bather would enjoy improved health for over six months.
By the later Middle Ages, some Italian physicians were even using distillation and other techniques to investigate the mineral composition of thermal waters, seeking to understand why particular springs were beneficial in treating certain illnesses.
How Kings and the Wealthy Bathed
Wealthy people who could afford a private bath would use a wooden tub that could also have a tent-like cloth over it. Attendants would bring jugs and pots of hot water to fill the tub. In his Book of Nurture, written in the second half of the fifteenth century, John Russell advises servants that if their lord wants a bath, they should:
hang sheets, round the roof, every one full of flowers and sweet green herbs, and have five or six sponges to sit or lean upon, and see that you have one big sponge to sit upon, and a sheet over so that he may bathe there for a while, and have a sponge also for under his feet, if there be any to spare, and always be careful that the door is shut. Have a basin full of hot fresh herbs and wash his body with a soft sponge, rinse him with fair warm rose-water, and throw it over him.
He adds that if the lord has pains or aches, it is good to boil various herbs like camomile, breweswort, mallow and brown fennel and add them to the bath.
Records from medieval England show that its kings often enjoyed these baths. When King John travelled around his kingdom, he took a bathtub with him and had a personal attendant named William who handled it. Meanwhile, in 1351, Edward III paid for taps of hot and cold water that went straight to his bathtub at Westminster Palace.
Royalty throughout Europe often entertained guests with baths, trying to impress each other with how luxurious they could make them. This tradition even goes back to the Carolingians. Einhard says that Charlemagne loved taking baths, and that “he would invite not only his sons to bathe with him, but his nobles and friends as well, and occasionally even a crowd of attendants and bodyguards, so that sometimes a hundred men or more would be in the water together.”
Bathing in Medieval Monasteries
Wealthy monasteries could often pipe in water and have baths as well. Some monastic rules suggest that monks did not take regular baths. The monks of Westminster Abbey, for example, were required to have a bath four times a year: at Christmas, Easter, the end of June, and the end of September.
It is hard to know if these rules were being followed or if they were intended to mean that the monks could only bathe at those times. We do know, however, that Westminster Abbey employed a bath attendant who was paid two loaves of bread daily, as well as a stipend of £1 per year, which seems to indicate that his services were regularly used.
Religious institutions also played a role in providing bathing facilities for the wider population. In medieval Denmark, wealthy individuals sometimes left money in their wills to pay for poor people to visit a bathhouse, often providing them with a meal as well. These charitable acts, known as soul baths, became particularly common in the fifteenth century.
The Popularity of Medieval Bathhouses
For most people, having a private bath was not an option. It was simply too costly and too time-consuming to have their own baths. That does not mean they went without bathing, for public baths were very common throughout Europe.
By the thirteenth century, one could find over 32 bathhouses in Paris. Alexander Neckham, who lived in that city a century earlier, says that he would be awakened in the mornings by people crying in the streets that “the baths are hot!”
In Southwark, the town on the opposite side of the River Thames from London, a person could choose from 18 hot baths. Even smaller towns would have bathhouses, often connected with the local bakery, as the baths could make use of the heat coming from the ovens to help heat their water.
Public bathhouses were also widespread in medieval Scandinavia. The historian Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard has found evidence of bathhouses in at least 25 medieval Danish towns. Owning a bathhouse could be a lucrative business, and nearly all the known public bathhouses in medieval Denmark were owned by religious institutions at some point in their history.
People from across the social spectrum, including royalty, frequented these establishments.
What Was a Medieval Bathhouse Like?
While medieval illustrations often depict people sitting in wooden bathtubs, another form of bathing was widespread in northern Europe: the sweat bath, which resembled a modern sauna.
In medieval Denmark and Germany, sweat baths appear to have been more common in public bathhouses than tub baths. The latter were considerably more expensive. In the German town of Bamberg, for example, regulations from 1480 reveal that a tub bath cost at least six times as much as a sweat bath.
A German poem from the late thirteenth century offers a detailed description of what a visit to a bathhouse was like. Once the bathhouse had been heated, its keeper would announce that it was ready by shouting, blowing a horn or hanging a sign outside. This sign might take the form of a bundle of birch twigs or a washing basin.
Bathers would undress before entering a heated room, where they could sit or lie on wooden benches arranged along the walls. A stove covered with large stones provided the heat, and water could be poured over the stones to create steam.
To encourage sweating, bathers would be struck with bundles of birch twigs. They could also wash themselves with soap or lye before rinsing themselves with cold water. Some German bathhouses even provided beds where customers could rest after bathing.
Medieval bathhouses offered a variety of other services as well. Customers could have their hair washed and cut, undergo bloodletting or cupping, and even have teeth extracted, wounds treated and broken bones set. A visit to the bathhouse could be as much about medical treatment as personal cleanliness.
Bathing in the Medieval Islamic World
If one were under the impression that public bathhouses were a European phenomenon, then it should also be pointed out that they were even more popular in the Middle East and North Africa. According to one eleventh-century writer, the city of Baghdad alone had 60,000 bathhouses, likely an exaggeration, but it does reveal just how common they must have been.
Known as hammams, these bathhouses were also the subject of extensive medical literature. Among those who wrote about them was Ibn Hubal al-Baghdādī, a physician born in Baghdad in 1122. His medical encyclopaedia, The Book of Selections in Medicine, completed in Mosul in 1164–65, includes an entire chapter devoted to bathing and bathhouses. In the following section, he explains what made a good bathhouse:
The most suitable hammam is one of older construction. If the hammam is newly built, its walls tend to retain moisture, and the odors emanating from its water reservoirs may be detrimental. Hammams with wide interiors are preferable to narrower ones, as their steam tends to accumulate in the upper areas of the structure and can be more easily ventilated. Moreover, the water used for bathing should be fresh, since fresh water is more in harmony with a healthy temperament compared to saline or other types of water.
Ibn Hubal describes three chambers within the hammam, each with different levels of heat and humidity. The first chamber was cold and humid, the second was warm and humid, and the third was warm and dry. Bathers were advised to move gradually between these rooms, adjusting to the different temperatures.
Like their European counterparts, physicians in the Islamic world were concerned about the relationship between bathing and digestion. Ibn Hubal believed that bathing immediately after eating could help people gain weight, although he generally advised those in good health against entering a hammam on a full stomach.
He also recommended that people who had been exercising should rest and allow their sweat to dry before entering the bathhouse. Once inside, they could pour water onto the heated floor, sit in the bath and apply oils to their bodies.
Cold-water bathing was also considered beneficial for certain people. Ibn Hubal advised those with warm and robust constitutions to begin bathing in cold water during the summer and make it a regular practice. They should leave the water once they began shivering or developing goosebumps. However, he believed that cold-water bathing was unsuitable for children, the elderly and those suffering from various medical conditions.
For people who developed headaches while visiting the hammam, Ibn Hubal recommended avoiding the hotter chambers and inhaling fragrances such as camphor, rose water and fresh lilies.
His advice about choosing a comfortable place within the bathhouse was simple:
Ideally, one should remain in a spot where they feel at ease, without experiencing excessive heat or skin shivering.
Bathing, Feasting and Sex
Bathhouses could also be places of entertainment and socialising. In her book Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, Virginia Smith explains:
By the fifteenth century, bath feasting in many town bathhouses seems to have been as common as going out to a restaurant was to become four centuries later. German bath etchings from the fifteenth century often feature the town bathhouse, with a long row of bathing couples eating a meal naked in bathtubs, often several to a tub, with other couples seen smiling in beds in the mid-distance.
Public bathhouses were very popular throughout medieval Europe, but they also raised controversy, as some objected to the fact that men and women could see and be with each other naked and that this could lead to illicit sex. A thirteenth-century church writer made this prohibition: “Hast thou washed thyself in the bath with thy wife and other women and seen them nude, and they thee? If thou hast, thou shouldst fast for three days on bread and water.”
In some places, authorities sought to prevent men and women from bathing together. In Flensburg, regulations issued in 1295 designated Mondays and Thursdays as bathing days for women. Any man caught bathing with them would have to forfeit his clothes.
However, medieval people also seem to have accepted that some bathhouses were not only places to get clean and healthy but also places where sex and prostitution could occur. The bathhouses in Southwark were called the Stews and were largely regarded as fronts for brothels. These practices were usually overlooked by local authorities, who believed that it was best to allow some sexual outlets for their young men rather than risk more serious problems.
Not all bathhouses should be associated with prostitution, however. Bjerregaard cautions that some medieval illustrations commonly used to depict mixed-sex bathing actually show scenes in brothels rather than ordinary public bathhouses.
Why Did Medieval Bathhouses Decline?
The popularity of public bathhouses declined rapidly in many parts of Europe in the sixteenth century. Several suggestions have been made as to why: were more puritanical religious people able to impose their moral values on the community, or were the diseases that had struck Europe since the Black Death convincing people to avoid them?
Syphilis, which spread rapidly in Europe in the late fifteenth century, would also have discouraged people from visiting establishments associated with prostitution.
Religious changes brought about by the Reformation may have contributed to the decline as well. In Denmark, the practice of wealthy people paying for the poor to visit bathhouses disappeared with the Reformation, depriving these establishments of one source of customers and income.
The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public bathhouse. “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths,” he remarked. “Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.”
While bathing did not disappear altogether, the decline of public bathhouses marked a significant change in European attitudes towards personal hygiene. For much of the Middle Ages, bathing had been an important part of medical treatment, everyday cleanliness and social life. In many parts of Europe, it was only after the medieval period that this tradition began to fade.
Further Readings:
Archibald, Elizabeth, “Did Knights Have Baths? The Absence of Bathing in Middle English Romance,” Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, edited by Corinne Saunders (Boydell, 2005)
Bjerregaard, Mikael Manøe, “Badstuer i middelalderen,” Kuml, Vol. 57 (2008)
Caskey, Jill, “Steam and ‘Sanitas’ in the Domestic Realm: Baths and Bathing in Southern Italy in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 2 (1999)
Harvey, Barbara, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Clarendon Press, 1993)
Holmes, Urban Tigner, Daily Life in the Twelfth-Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 1952)
Kuş, Özgür, and Ahmet Aciduman, “Ibn Hubal al-Baghdādī’s Perspective on Bathing and Hammams in Medieval Islamic Medicine,” Journal of Clinical Practice and Research, Vol. 47:4 (2025)
Lucas, A.T., “Washing and Bathing in Ancient Ireland,” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 95, No. 1/2 (1965)
Newman, Paul B., Daily Life in the Middle Ages (McFarland and Co., 2001)
Ramazzina, Elisa, “Bathing in Medieval Europe,” The Elements in the Medieval World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Water, edited by Marilina Cesario, Hugh Magennis and Elisa Ramazzina (Brill, 2024)
Smith, Virginia, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford University Press, 2007)
van Dam, Fabiola I., “Permeable Boundaries: Bodies, Bathing and Fluxes, 1135–1333,” Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia Baker (Brill, 2012)
van Winter, Johanna Maria, “Medieval Opinions about Food and Drinking in Connection with Bathing,” Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food (Prospect Books, 2007)
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