In the old days, did people use to bath in the open at wells?

They didn't bathe much at all.

>>297322
Falacy

>>297334
Not really. Christians believed washing was a sin.

>>297363
>people still doubted the existence of the Dark Age
lmao

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>>297334
>falacy

>>297334
>>297373
"The 16th-century Iberians inherited that pan-European fear of water, but they had an additional, peculiarly Iberian aversion to cleanliness. Like every other part of the Roman empire, they had had their own well-patronized bath-houses. But when the Visigoths conquered Iberia in the 5th century, they scorned hot baths as effeminate and weakening, and they demolished the bath-houses. By the time the Moors invaded the country in 711, the Iberians had lost the old, bath-loving link. At that point, they saw the Moors’ well-washed ways as part of their heretical convictions, and their own dirtiness as a Christian virtue. (Some early Christians had regarded cleanliness as a dangerous luxury, along with good food, wine and sexual enjoyments, and tried to abstain from it; Iberia continued in this austere tradition longer than most.)

Arab Iberia sparkled with water, whether in fountains, pools or hundreds of bath-houses. Christians in the north of Spain, not under Arab rule, continued to revel in their squalor, washing ‘neither their bodies nor their clothes which they only remove when they fall into pieces,’ according to a contemporary observer. The more their Arab conquerors washed, the more suspicious, decadent and un-Christian the practice seemed to the Iberians, and their dislike endured long after the Arabs had left".

>>297392
"Richard Ford, a 19th-century English traveler who knew Spain well, spoke for many when he connected a centuries-old Spanish distaste for washing with the Moorish occupation. He wrote:-

The mendicant Spanish monks, according to their practice of setting up a directly antagonistic principle [to the Arabs], considered physical dirt as the test of moral purity and true faith; and by dining and sleeping from year’s end to year’s end in the same unchanged woolen frock, arrived at the height of their ambition, according to their view of the odor of sanctity, the olor de santidad. This was a euphemism for ‘foul smell,’ but it came to represent Christian godliness, and many of the saints are pictured sitting in their own excrement.

Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, himself a Franciscan - wrote Ford - persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to close and abolish the Moorish baths after their conquest of Granada. They forbade not only the Christians but the Moors from using anything but holy water. Fire, not water, became the grand element of inquisitorial purification.

Sure enough, one of the first things the Spaniards did during the Reconquest was to destroy the Moorish baths (just as the Visigoths had destroyed the Roman ones). Even after that, suspicions remained: Moors who converted to Christianity were forbidden to bathe. During the Inquisition, one of the worst things that could be said about Jews as well as Moors was that they were ‘known to bathe.’ As Richard Ford noted, these attitudes were still current in the 19th century. He tells the story of the Spanish Duke of Frias, who visited an English lady for a fortnight and ‘never once troubled his basins and jugs [on his washstand in his bedroom]; he simply rubbed his face occasionally with the white of an egg.’ This, Ford assures us, was the only ablution used by Spanish ladies in the time of Philip IV, and apparently it was good enough for the Duke."

>>297363
what about non christians

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>moors taught white people how to bathe

People bathed semi-regularly but their hygiene otherwise was filthy

>>297314
No
People also didn't drank water from the well.

>>297813
Speak for yourself, -East Asians

According to Tacitus Germanic tribes used to bathe with hot water. It's not like hurr white people never knew how to be clean, it's just that medieval Europe developed a disdain for Roman bathing culture.

>>297813
Stop it, not everyone is a white pig like you

-Muslims

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>>297393
> You will never venture into the thick, oily jungle that are Isabella of Castille's pubes.
> You will never get to lick stray egg whites off her smegma-ridden clit.
> You will never tenderly wring out the oil out of her hair to cook some fresh bacon for breakfast the morning after.
Why live?

>>297506

From what I understand Muslims have always been keen on hygiene. Not stinky Christians though.

Moorish baths were essentially brothels where men went to fuck boys.

Muh dark ages meme

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/13/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-take-baths/

One needs to realize in medieval times urban population was only a few % in most countries, most people lived in small villages typically located close to rivers, streams, lakes or springs.

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>>297855

>>297363
Damn, really?

Would have thought with all the stuff in the Old Testament about washing yourself for doing practically anything (touching dead bodies, fucking, jizzing, being near a woman who's having their period) would have made them see it as a necessity.

Then again, it's not like most peasants had access to scripture anyway.

>>298422
Christians (and Jews to a much lesser extent) take an arbitrary approach to the Mosaic law. Sometimes it counts as written, sometimes the stuff it says is mandatory really isn't, sometimes the stuff it says is okay is actually a sin, it goes all over the place.

Harappans bathed, christians baptized.

Washing was rare but it jappened occassionally.

>>298456
Basically this, this is all societal interpretations. This is the people, really.
And they were dirty cunts.

>>297363
>>298422
It's not that it was a sin so much as it was seen by certain pious people as a luxurious indulgence. Generally people washed themselves in lakes and streams in the country, or in bathhouses in the city, but every so often you'd have an esoteric order of monks or some circle of nobles that distinguished themselves for bathing very rarely or never at all.

At certain times however bathhouses acquired very sinful reputations as they doubled as brothels (and a vector for STDs).

>>298456
Quite true.
Christians have always picked and chosen from Mosiac law (and in general really). There were even debates in early Christianity over "do gentiles really have to follow these specific laws for jews" recorded in the Bible.

Why bump the thread? All answers are here in a longish article.

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/13/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-take-baths/

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/13/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-take-baths/

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/13/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-take-baths/

>>298509
that doesnt mention anything about whether people bathed at wells

>>297889

>Royalty throughout Europe often entertained guests with baths, often trying to impress each other with how luxurious they could make it. 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.”

> You will never take a group bath with Charlemagne and half his Castle.

Why even live ?

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>>297855