Answering William Savage's Cleanliness and Class

1) Answering William Savage's Cleanliness and Class · 2) "If you wanted bacon you had to make it yourself—and what a lengthy, laborious job it was!" · 3) Fridge Logic · 4) Speaking of Drinking Problem for Georgians? That is Anachronistic. · 5) A Distinction and a Gratitude to William Savage

Source for quotations from him

Cleanliness and Class
Posted on October 12, 2016
https://penandpension.com/2016/10/12/cleanliness-and-class/

William Savage

Being clean was expensive.

HGL interposes.

Oh, yeah?

William Savage

All water for washing or bathing would have to be fetched in buckets from a well or a stream.

HGL interposes.

Unless someone strong enough to take a tub with water helped carrying (ok, don't see many paintings with men carrying tubs of water, point granted, probably didn't happen too often).

More to the point, the expense in this case is of work, not of money.

And the well was usually not far off. When you lived in town.

William Savage

Then it had to be heated by burning suitable amounts of wood or coal.

HGL interposes.

Depending on season or your willingness to take ablutions in cold water even in winter.

Btw, ablutions may be made by a glove dipped in little water and applied to body, these gloves are still offered as part of showers in France, even if original intent is no longer there.

Not sure if this was used in England, though.

William Savage

To heat enough even for a shallow bath

HGL interposes.

Meaning the writer had not considered gloves dipped in water.

Perhaps they never were in, in England?

William Savage

would take a good deal of fuel — fuel which otherwise could have been used for cooking or heating a room.

HGL interposes.

Who says it couldn't be used for both at the same time?

You heat water in cauldrons on a fire, you have to light it. You light it and it gives heat to the room as well.

And who says it would really be all that great a quantity?

William Savage

Many of the wealthy would have used perfumes to keep themselves smelling good — another expense beyond the reach of the poorer classes — and had access to clean underclothes, shirts and bed-linen whenever they wanted. If you couldn’t afford the large quantity of linens needed for this, you might wash, but you wouldn’t stay clean for very long. This was a time when washing clothes was both labour-intensive and expensive, as I shall show in an upcoming post, so even the better off might undertake it once only every few weeks.

HGL interposes.

Labour intensive, granted.

If poor could NOT afford the labour, that means they were being too much harassed and their labour taken too much in requisition by the paymasters or landlords. This only happened at Industrial revolution, where it was at its most intense.

But expensive, not if you did it yourself at a lavanderie - a large basin where water would fill in (given for free by the city, in France) which could be propped so you could let your laundry soak and then rince it. Obviously, women would take turns washing.

And if you have enough clothes for keeping clean with a large wash once every two weeks (unlike homeless who cannot carry that much clothes), this should be no problem for cleanliness.

William Savage

However, while this might have been fine in the summer, outdoor winter bathing during the “Little Ice Age” was never going to be possible.

HGL interposes.

Meaning that the fuel for heating your bath was doing double work in heating also your room.

William Savage

What any type of bathing, or even extensive washing, needed was energy to fetch water, heat it and carry the used water away afterwards. That energy was supplied by servants.

HGL interposes.

In case you were rich. In case you were poor, you served yourself.

William Savage

I’ve included time and leisure in the list of essentials for two reasons. Although actually bathing or washing might take no longer for the individual than it does today, the entire process was lengthy. Servants engaged in making it possible would need to be taken off other duties. Fine, if you had many of them. Not so easy if you had only one or two.

HGL interposes.

The argument presumes people were as harrassed by financial pursuits as the girl working overtime until she killed herself on last Christmas Day or Christmas Eve in Japan at age 24!

Not true for people before the Industrial Revolution. His argument was most apt about Manchester in later part of 18th Century.

William Savage

Working people would be on the go from dawn to dusk, probably six days a week. When could they find the time for more than an essential minimum of washing?

HGL interposes.

If you were working on your farm, you decided that for yourself. If you were working as a farm hand, your farmer decided it for you when you stank.

If labour hours or opening hours were indeed dawn to dusk, they were not without pauses or as intensive as in a Lao Gai.

As for six days a week, probably exactly Saturdays had an afternoon off for housecleaning and washing and such - except during Industrial Revolution.

William Savage

Artisans and the poor — the very classes most likely to become sweaty and grimy in the course of their employment — would have least time to clean themselves.

HGL interposes.

An artisan was usually self employed, meaning he could take time off when he thought he needed it.

Imagine a notice on the cobbler's front porch: BATHING, WILL BE BACK IN HALF AN HOUR OR LESS.

Or even more, WILL BE BACK IN HALF AN HOUR without specifying exactly why. Happens when people own their own shops.

William Savage

Perhaps the unwillingness of their masters to come into more than the essential contact with the servants — more marked as you passed into the 19th century, when the facilities for the family to wash were much improved — stemmed originally from trying to avoid unpleasant human smells. Certainly the 19th century records of Felbrigg Hall show quite a few servants being dismissed for being dirty.

HGL interposes.

That is 19th C. and an increased work burden for the employees. AND after Industrial Revolution had really taken off.

William Savage

Was cleanliness next to godliness? Maybe it was in the evangelical 19th century, when the links between hygiene and freedom from disease were becoming clear. Before that, it was more likely to be next to wealth and social class, as so much else at the time. The rich man in his castle enjoyed a clean body in clean clothes. The poor man at his gate had neither, and never would have. That was the way of the world.

HGL interposes.

No, not really. And when we talk about "castle" we talk about Middle Ages, and thus of times when, excepting high seasons, work was even though spread from dawn to dusk not too intense for surviving that.

If William Savage had set his historical novels in Manchester 1800, he might have been more likely to be right, but Norfolk was not among the earliest victims of Industrialisation.