Life in 1370: No Showers, No Toilet Paper — The Harsh Reality of Medieval Poland

Life in 1370: No Showers, No Toilet Paper — The Harsh Reality of Medieval Poland

Imagine waking up in the morning in Krakow.  It’s dark, it’s cold, and the air reeks of smoke, manure, and something you really don’t want to identify.  Shower, toilet, glass of clean water.  None of this exists in your world.  Outside the window, or rather behind a hole in the wall covered with animal membrane, you can hear a rooster and the sounds of people pouring chamber pots directly into the street.  This is not an apocalypse.

  It is an ordinary morning in 1370 in one of the largest cities of the Kingdom of Poland.  It was 1370. The year Casimir the Great, one of the most powerful rulers in Polish history, fell from his horse while hunting and never recovered.  But his subjects had completely different problems than politics and succession to the throne.

   The year was 1370 and the Kingdom of Poland was experiencing what historians call the golden age of the rule of the Last Piast.  Kraków already had solid defensive walls, Gothic churches, and the Kraków Academy, which had been operating for six years, the second highest institution of higher education in Central Europe.

Casimir the Great, as the old proverb goes, found Poland made of wood and left it made of brick.  But this saying is a bit of an exaggeration.  In fact, most buildings in Krakow, even in this golden age, were still made of wood.  And outside the city walls, basically everything there was made of wood, straw and clay.

  But before we talk about the everyday life of an average Pole in the 14th century, it is worth setting one thing straight.  When you hear the Middle Ages, you probably think of knights in shining armor, hilltop castles, and romantic courtly feasts. Forget it.  For 90% of people living in Poland at that time, everyday life looked completely different.

And it is this everyday life that we will talk about today.  Let’s start with where these people slept.  A typical peasant cottage in 14th-century Poland was a low wooden building with one room.  One room for cooking, eating, sleeping, working and keeping the animals.  In wealthier farms, cows and pigs had a separate building next to the hut, and the whole was surrounded by a fence, creating the so- called corral.

  But on poorer farms the family is on one side of the partition and the cattle are on the other.  In winter, animal dung served an additional function because it generated heat.  Think about this for a moment.  Your bedroom, kitchen, living room and barn in one room with an area of ​​maybe 15 square meters .

  There were no windows in the modern sense .  The holes in the walls were covered with bull bladders or oiled cloth, because glass windows were a luxury that remained rare in Polish villages for several hundred years. Furniture, a bench, a stool, maybe a wooden chest for clothes and bedding.  Beds in the modern sense did not exist.  People slept on sacks stuffed with straw or simply on the bare ground covered with skins.

  The entire family, often multi-generational, grandparents, parents, children in one room, around one fireplace, which was the only source of heat and light.  The roof was covered with straw, sometimes reeds or heather, depending on the region.  When it rained, the straw got soaked and moisture entered the room .

  When strong winds blew, the roofing had to be repaired immediately, otherwise winter could mean death from hypothermia.  Now think about Krakow, a big city.  Conditions were better there, but better is a relative term.   The tenement houses on Floriańska Street or in the Krakow market square had several rooms, cellars for storing goods and sometimes even private baths in the courtyard.

  But the streets are a separate story.  And here we come to a topic for which you need a strong stomach. The toilet in 14th-century Poland was, let’s say, a flexible concept.  In castles, so-called danske were built, i.e. towers with holes in the floor through which the waste simply fell [music] down to the ground or into the moat.   The famous dansker at the Teutonic Castle in Kwidzyn had a 54-meter corridor leading to a tower with a privy.

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  54 meters that the monk had to run when nature called.  By the end of the Middle Ages, castles began to have seats with a lid instead of the usual hole in the floor, which was a definite step forward.  But these are locks.  Perhaps a few percent of the population lived there.  In cities, there were isolated public toilets along canals and rivers, but most residents used chamber pots.

ceramic pots placed under the bed at night, and the contents of these chamber pots landed on the street literally through the window, straight on the heads of any passers-by.  In some European cities, a rule has been introduced that a warning must be shouted before the chamber pot is spilled, so that passersby can move away.

  People moved on wooden footbridges that were placed above the layer of mud and dirt covering the street.  These footbridges were rotting and had to be replaced regularly. Archaeological excavations in Elbląg show that the street level in the 11th-century city was 4 meters lower than today.  These 4 metre layers are layer upon layer of garbage, mud, animal excrement and human filth accumulated over generations.

  In the countryside it was simpler, but not better.   The traditional latrine was a hole dug behind the hut, sometimes covered with boards, and toilet paper was non-existent.  People used what they had on hand.  Moss, hay, leaves, old rags, which were treated as a completely normal part of life.

  If you’ve made it this far and are still watching, subscribe to the channel because things will get even more interesting.  Each week we return to a story you won’t hear in textbooks.  So the royal capital stank of filth , and the peasants slept with animals.  But what about bathing?  And here’s a big surprise, because contrary to popular myths, people in medieval Poland were not as dirty as is commonly believed.

At least those who had access to the baths.  In 14th-century Kraków, there were public baths that were more than just a place to wash. These were social centers.  People came there not only for bathing, but also for simple medical procedures such as cupping or bloodletting. We even know of a specific example from a 14th-century house on Floriańska Street in Kraków, where a daughter living in the house with her father and brother had the right to use a private bath in the yard once every two weeks.

provided she warmed it herself, because that was the main problem.  Bathing required a huge amount of work.  Water had to be brought from the well in the street, heated on the fire, and poured into vessels.  It was an expensive and time-consuming ritual, not something done every day.  The Church did not help anyway.

   The clergy repeated after Saint Jerome that whoever was cleansed by baptism did not need to bathe again. Some people treated not bathing as a form of mortification. Przemysław, Duke of Greater Poland, did not bathe at all for the last four years of his life, and this was perceived as a sign of piety.

  But what is worth emphasizing is precisely why the chroniclers wrote about it. If not washing was the norm, no one [musician] would bother to note it.  The tradition of steam baths in Poland dates back a long time .  until the times of Bolesław the Brave, who, according to Gallus Anonymus, received guests in his own bathhouse, and now food.

  And here we come to a topic that truly shows the gap between our world and 14th-century Poland.  The basis of the diet of an average Pole in 1370 was bread, groats and legumes. Everyone from the king to the last peasant ate bread, but not the same one. The nobility and wealthy townspeople ate wheat bread.

  The peasants ate rye bread, often with an admixture of bran, and in bad years with an admixture of tree bark or sawdust.  Bread consumption in 14th-century Europe is estimated at around one to one and a half kilograms per person per day.  This is almost three times more than the average Pole eats today.  There was also beer.   The average Pole in the 14th century drank over 2 liters of beer a day.

  It wasn’t alcoholism, it was necessity.  The water in the cities was dirty and dangerous, and the brewing process, which involved boiling the water, killed most of the bacteria. Beer was safer than water. Simple, it was weaker than today’s, cloudier and thicker, more like liquid oatmeal than what you buy in the store.

  But it served its purpose.  Everyone, adults and children, drank it from morning till night. Cooking took place over an open fire in a hearth that stood in the center of the room.  The smoke rose up and escaped through the hole in the roof, or at least it should have, because in practice most of the room was constantly filled with smoke.

  Clay or iron pots, wooden spoons, bread knife.  That was all the kitchen equipment.  Food was served on wooden bowls or on thick slices of stale bread that served as plates.  After the meal, these bread plates were eaten by the family or given to the poorer.  Meat was rarely served on the peasant table, perhaps a few times a month.

  At noble feasts at Wawel Castle or in Krakow’s tenement houses it is a different matter.  There they served beef, pork, game, and even swans and peacocks.  But the church imposed strict fasts that lasted for almost half a year.  On fasting days, no white meat or eggs were allowed.  This meant that for about 180 days a year, even the rich ate mainly fish, groats, and vegetables.

The nobility ate most of their food with their hands, or perhaps with a knife.  Forks reached Poland only at the end of the Middle Ages and only at the courts of the wealthiest.  For the average Pole, a fork was as abstract as teleportation is to us today.  Which aspect of everyday life in 1370 seems the hardest to you, you probably haven’t heard it yet, because now let’s talk about what happened when someone got sick.

  Medicine in 14th-century Poland was a world in which the boundary between science, magic and religion was practically non-existent.  Doctors, or rather the few educated medical practitioners, diagnosed diseases based on the humoral theory inherited from the ancient Greeks.  The body had four humors, namely blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.

  Illness meant that the humors were out of balance.  Treatment, bloodletting, purging, cupping.  The Kraków Academy, which Casimir the Great founded in 1364, had two medical departments modeled on the Italian universities of Padua and Bologna, but these educated physicians treated only the elite.  In the Polish countryside, the only doctor was a healer or herbalist who treated people with herbs, spells, and rituals.

Most people believed that illness was a divine punishment or the work of evil spirits.  And here comes the story of King Casimir the Great himself, which perfectly illustrates the level of medicine at that time.  On September 9, 1370, Casimir fell from his horse while hunting near Przedboże.  A leg injury caused a fever.

  Two royal physicians, Henryk of Cologne and Mateusz of Stachów, managed to bring down the fever. They advised the king not to eat hazelnuts, raw fruit and hard to digest foods, but above all not to go to the baths. Casimir did not listen.  He went to the baths in Sandomierz.  The fever is back. On the way to Krakow he drank cold water, which made matters worse.

  Doctors again brought down the fever with laxatives.   The king felt better again. He ignored the recommendations again and the fever struck for the third time.  On November 5, 1370, Casimir the Great, the last king of the Piast dynasty, died at Wawel Castle.   He probably would have survived if he had just stayed in bed and rested.

  Which, in retrospect, was either brave or incredibly stupid.  Now let us step back from the royal palace on Wawel Hill and return to the countryside, where over 80% of the population of the Kingdom of Poland lived.  A peasant’s day in 1370 began before dawn and ended after dusk.  Farm work was the only life they knew.

  They got up when the first light came through the cracks in the walls of the hut, fed the animals, went out into the fields, ploughed, sowed, harvested, and bred.  All by hand or with the help of a single ox, if the farm was wealthy enough for it.  Women took care of the house, weaving, caring for children and washing clothes, which in itself was a physical effort lasting many hours.

Washing required preparing a lye from ash and water, soaking the fabrics, beating them with a stick, and drying them in the sun or wind.  No detergent, no washing machine, no hot water on demand.  The peasant did not have his own land.  He used land belonging to a knight, nobleman or church dignitary, for which he paid rent in money and tribute in kind.

  Mainly grain, eggs and some farm animals.  In addition, there was serfdom, i.e. compulsory work on the lord’s fields, although in the 14th century it was not as burdensome as in later centuries.  It is estimated that a peasant worked on his lord’s farm for several to a dozen or so days a year.  That sounds benign until you realize that these days often fell during the hottest harvest season, when every hour in your own field was crucial to surviving the winter.

  Interestingly, it was Casimir the Great, called the king of peasants, who for the first time legally restricted the freedom of peasants.  His famous statutes introduced regulations according to which in Lesser Poland, a maximum of two kiets per year could leave the village without the lord’s consent.  In Greater Poland, the right to emigrate was valid only for one day of the year: Christmas.

  If a peasant wanted to leave, he had to leave the house in good condition.  These rules probably existed before as common law, but now they were written down and strengthened.  There was another shadow hanging over all this, one that determined absolutely every aspect of medieval life.  Death.  The average life expectancy in 14th-century [music] Poland was somewhere between 25 and 30 years of age.

  However, before you conclude that everyone died young, one important thing needs to be explained.  This statistic is so low mainly because of the high infant mortality rate.  A significant number of children did not survive beyond their first year of life, but if someone survived childhood and early adolescence, they had a real chance of living to the age of 40, 50, or even 60 .

  Casimir the Great himself died at the age of [music] 60.  Which was quite old for those times.  In monasteries, where conditions were more stable and food was more regular, nuns lived the longest of all social groups in medieval Poland. But the fear of death hung over every day.  And it wasn’t just about diseases.  Accidents while working on the farm, fires consuming wooden villages in a few hours, wolves in the winter forests of Małopolska, bandits on trade routes.

  The Worldly Pole was a place where danger waited literally on the doorstep of the cottage, and the clothes they wore offered little protection against this danger.  Peasants dressed in simple tunics made of thick cloth or linen, tied with a rope at the waist.  They wore leather shoes or rag wrappings on their feet, depending on their wealth.

  In winter they added a sheepskin coat.  One, maybe two [music] sets of clothes for the whole year, washed in lye and worn until they fell apart.  The Black Death, which  decimated Western Europe in 1348, passed over Poland relatively gently, but people knew what was happening beyond the kingdom’s borders.  They knew of cities in Italy and France where half the population died.

They knew the plague could return at any moment.  The clock was already ticking, but no one had heard the hands yet. The Church was the only answer to this fear.  Gothic churches in Kraków, Wrocław and Poznań were centers not only of spiritual, but above all of social life.  Here children were baptized, here the dead were said goodbye, here people sought protection from the plague and answers to the question of why loved ones were dying.

  The priest was the only person in the village who could read and write.  The church bell set the rhythm of the day.  Mass was the only event that took people away from the monotony of daily farm work. Kraków, which Casimir the Great built during his 37-year reign, still stands today.  Wawel stands, the defensive walls stand. Even some tenement houses in the old town remember the times of the last Piast dynasty.

  But the people who walked these streets in 1370 lived in a world so far removed from ours that it is difficult to truly imagine it.  In a world where waking up in the morning was a challenge, eating was a monotonous chore, illness could mean a death sentence, and showering was an unknown concept.  These people didn’t know they were living in the Middle Ages.

  They did not know that historians would one day describe them as dirty, primitive and superstitious. For them it was just life.  The only ones they knew.  They were born in a wooden hut and worked in the fields from the moment they could hold a hoe.  They married, had children, half of whom did not survive to adulthood, and died, often without ever leaving the vicinity of their village .  But they built.

  They built churches that still stand today.  They worked the land that feeds us to this day.  They created communities from which the cities in which we live grew.  What has survived from that world are stones and records in chronicles.  We will never get the people, their stench, their sweat, their fear and their daily struggle for the next day back, but it is worth remembering them the next time you complain about traffic jams on the avenues of the three poets or about the queue at Biedronka.

  If this film gave you food for thought, leave a thumbs up and write in the comments which part of life in the 14th century seems the worst to you.  Subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss more videos about history they don’t teach in school.