A medieval stocking filler for the man or woman who has everything?

Christmas shopping looms and as we are being deluged with online promotions for ‘Black Friday’ ( a decidedly un-English concept in my opinion ) and it occurs to me a  recently publicised late-medieval archeological find from near Kings Lynn in Norfolk may have once been, for all we know, a medieval stocking filler or ‘New Year Gift’ for a man or woman who had everything - well almost.

It is an ear scoop and nail cleaner which has been dated to the second half of the fourteenth century. Such items for personal grooming are known from other discoveries and survivals, but are equally the type of thing that gets lost in daily life, and forgotten in the popular memory.

The BBC News report about the find can be seen at Earwax scoop find in Norfolk gives insight into medieval hygiene

Given where it was found one wonders if it was once the property of a pilgrim to Walsingham or the Holy Rood of Bromholm, or of someone who knew Margery Kempe in what was then Bishop’s Lynn, or maybe somebody who knew the Pastons, or a present from them to Sir John Fastolf, or lost by an English soldier sailing from Lynn and going to fight with the Teutonic Knights against the pagan Lithuanians, or by someone accompanying King Henry IV’s daughter on her way to be Queen of Denmark, Sweden and Norway ……..almost certainly none of these possibilities given the probabilities of daily living, but a reminder that people had such things.

The olfactory sense of History

The  Daily Telegraph has a quite lengthy and scholarly article by the standards of even the contemporary ‘quality’ press which originates with the latest film about King Henry VIII. The fact that whilst filming the set was sprayed with a scent designed to simulate the odours which it was thought would have accompanied the aging monarch with his infected leg ulcers and associated sickroom smells is the starting point for an examination of how sixteenth century people and their predecessors accommodated such odours. It can be read at what is actually a slightly misleadingly entitled article at Yes, Henry VIII really was that disgusting

The article challenges both the idea that everything in the period was rank and gross - a point I have made here on the blog quite a few times - and that covering malodorous airs with pleasing ones was standard practice. It also looks at the fact that people did wash regularly, and change their clothes, so as to avoid giving offence. The fear of bad air as a carrier or vector of disease was well established as health advice. As the article shows King Henry had bathrooms at his palaces, as had his predecessors for at least two centuries. Earlier still King John liked to have a warm bath each day when travelling. What was possible for the monarch might indeed not be available to many, but the use of half casks from the wine trade as baths is frequently shown in illuminated manuscripts or referred to quite far down the social scale. The fact that people did try to make themselves pleasant and presentable is clear, as in the numerous Books of Courtesy to which I alluded recently in discussing Daniel of Beccles’ poem the Book of the Civilised Man.of advice to young men from about 1200.in How to get on in Society in Angevin England

Keeping yourself clean was a way of keeping your clothes clean, and that when the range of most people’s wardrobes was far less than that of today. Ordinary fabrics ran the risk of colour loss with much washing, and washing was not practicable for luxury fabrics. 

The article makes the point that urban streets were often dirty in the period, but that was not for want of civic ordinances against nuisances left or dumped in the streets by traders and householders, and people were apparently quite vociferous in complaining such matters.

Modern bathing facilities are just that, modern. You do not have to look far back to see a society with far more limited resources. They may not have had power-showers seventy odd years ago, but it does not mean that people did not try their best with the resources available to be clean and to present themselves well. That applies for much earlier periods, and survivals of personal grooming tools, and not just combs, bears this out back to the Anglo-Saxon period.

We might well be shaken were we to encounter the aromas of the past, but we should remember their absence from our lives is a very modern thing.