Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 January 1894 — They Did Bathe. [ARTICLE]

They Did Bathe.

Rev. T. E. Bridget, of England, in a recently published historical essay on “Blunders and Forgeries,” takes a good deal of pains to refute the assertion made some years ago by Dr. Lyon Playfair that “for a thousand years there was not a man or woman in Europe that ever took a bath.” Mr. Bridget says that no one, even tolerably acquainted with the literature of mediaeval Europe, can doubt for a moment that the bath was in constant requisition. Among the accounts of Queen Isabella, wife of Edward 11., is an entry of a payment “for repairs of the queen’s bath and gathering of herbs for it.” In a narrative of the arrival of Louis of Burges, created Earl of Winchester in 1472, we find among other comforts provided for him that in the third chamber there “was ordered a Bayne, or ij, whioh were covered with tentes of white olother.” Mr. Dickson, the editor, tells us in the preface to the first volume of the accounts of the lord high treasurer of Sootland, that “bath-rooms were not uncommon in the houses of the great, and even the luxury of bathe in bedrooms was not unknown. The accounts show two payments for broadcloth to cover a ‘bath-fat’—that is, to form a tent-like covering over it.” The Abbe Thiers, in his “Traite des Superstitions,” mentions certain days on which silly people fancied it was wrong to bathe, a notion which would never have arisen had not bathing been a common practice.