The New Murrey and Blue blog

Well, according to this article we were a lot cleaner than our present-day selves insist on thinking. Our naughty bits weren’t to be scrubbed, for fear of making them even naughtier…but it seems it would have been okay to splash around in a river every day (in the summer, at least). Plus, you could have a wooden tub in your house. The only trouble is getting it out to fill it…and as for the river, well, you needed to be near one.

But the article is very informative about all the things you could do to keep clean and smell nice, so I guess our present-day self wouldn’t keel over in a faint if our 15th-century self sat down next to us. Um, unless we were terrified by such a manifestation, of course!

Poor old Richard III’s worms get another airing, even though the whole association fails to take into account that a Victorian outside loo was constructed practically on top of him. Maybe those little varmints were Victorian, not medieval.

Anyway, I recommend the article as being well worth a read. A warning, some of it is a little graphic.