Hello Readers,
Welcome to the beautiful season of Spring, the season of ‘Homes and Gardens’. The shops are full of painting and decorating materials and gardens come alive with shrubs and plants. A time to make your habit look beautiful after the long, cold, dark Winter months.
Cleaning and getting tough on grime is big, big business and has been since the Victorian Era. Before that, all was grubbiness. If you go back to the days of ancient Rome, they were most obsessive about bathing, but from the sacking of the Eternal City, to the mid 1800’s, no one seemed too fussed about cleanliness and personal hygiene. There is that famous saying that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ and as a small child I thought this also worked the other way round, being godly also meant being clean. A simple assumption, but like most simple assumptions, probably hopelessly wide of the mark. There is no evidence that the medieval saints had more than a nodding acquaintance with soap and water. Their souls may have positively shone with purity, but their visible appearances were as grimy as everyone else’s.
The Vikings, who were the scourge of northern Europe, a bloodthirsty pack of seagoing warriors whose idea of a good day out was a spot of rape and pillage topped off with burning down a monastery and stuff like that didn’t leave much time for a schedule of personal grooming. These guys didn’t moisturise nor bother to wash their clothes or change their undergarments, so imagine how much dedication it must have taken to partying with these ‘great unwashed’ creatures? Imagine the scene on somewhere like Lindisfarne where one of the monks sniffs the wind that has suddenly sprung up from the North East. The stench that was blowing in the wind was so bad that it actually gave the monks time to hide the silver before being invaded. In days of old courtyards of royal castles were full of mud, pigs and chickens running a free range lifestyle had to be crossed by everyone going in and out, kings and queens included. Not to put too finer point on it, the courtyard also served as a midden. No doormat, no matter how efficient, could cope with what must have been trampled inside. If you take a look at the original kitchens of Hampton Court, of course they have been tidied up for tourists and visitors, but imagine the state they would have been in when the Tudors were in residence because every day a stable diet of salmonella was dished up, not to mention all the roasted meats and of course, washing liquid was not even invented.
It wasn’t until the 19th century when things really started to spruce up. Clean water was suddenly deemed essential to civilized life. It was then that the world’s first, advanced and comprehensive system of sewers was constructed. And while the upper and middle classes still tended to rely on domestic servants to keep the place ship shape, by the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, newfangled domestic appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines had been invented. Interestingly, as late as the 1930’s, there were mining villages where one particularly curious tradition persisted. It was thought that if a miner scrubbed his back completely clean, it would be weakened. Consequently, as small square of skin was left coal-blackened and unwashed.
These days there are so many cleaning products on the market that in my opinion there is no need for anyone to live in a dirty house or neglect their personal hygiene. The Lulas and I do not need to wait until the arrival of Spring Time to give our home and ourselves a good thorough clean because we do this on a daily basis, we have our routine…. and after all, good old soap and water does not cost that much does it?
Until Next Week
Love and Light,
Linda and The Lulasxxx
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