Soap, and how washing became a virtue
For several centuries in Europe, changing your linen was cleanliness and immersing yourself in water was dangerous. Then it reversed, and the reversal came with a moral charge that has never quite gone away.
Soap making is ancient and well attested, but the association between personal washing and virtue is comparatively recent in European history. Between roughly the late medieval period and the eighteenth century, bathing in water was widely regarded as medically risky, and cleanliness was managed through clean linen. The shift to water washing came with new medical theory, urban sanitary reform, industrial soap manufacture and advertising, and it acquired a moral vocabulary that is still audible in the way cleanliness is sold today.
Soap is a simple thing chemically. Take a fat, treat it with a strong alkali, and the fat splits into a salt of the fatty acid and glycerol. The salt is soap, and it works because one end of the molecule likes water and the other likes grease. That reaction has been carried out deliberately for thousands of years, and materials recognisable as soap or proto soap are attested in Mesopotamian and Roman sources. Pliny discusses a preparation called sapo, associating it with Gaulish and Germanic use, and describes it as being used on the hair rather than as a body cleanser.
That last detail is the key to the whole subject. The existence of soap does not tell you that people were washing themselves with it.
Cleanliness without water
The historian Georges Vigarello made the argument that has organised this field ever since: that cleanliness in early modern Europe was a system of appearances and coverings rather than a matter of scrubbing the body, and that immersion in water was regarded with suspicion for reasons that made sense within the medical theory of the day.
The theory ran roughly like this. The body's health depended on the balance of its humours, and its boundary with the world was the skin, which was porous. Hot water opened the pores. Open pores admitted bad air, which carried disease. Since epidemic disease was understood as travelling in corrupted air, opening the body to it was not a trivial risk. The public bath houses of medieval European towns, which had been numerous, declined sharply from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, and the association between them and both plague and sexual disorder is part of the story of that decline.
What took the place of washing was linen. A clean white shirt, changed frequently, was understood to draw impurities out of the body and carry them away. Cleanliness was therefore something you could see: the whiteness at the collar and cuff. The elaborate visible linen of sixteenth and seventeenth century dress, the ruffs and bands and cuffs, is among other things a display of the capacity to launder. This is why portraits of the period show so much white at the edges of expensive clothing, and it is why laundry was such an enormous part of household labour.
The return of water
Water came back over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it came back for several reasons at once.
Medical theory changed. Cold bathing was promoted from the eighteenth century for its supposed tonic and hardening effects, which is a different rationale from cleanliness and got people into water for other reasons. Later, as germ theory displaced miasma, the mechanism of disease transmission was relocated from the air into specific organisms, and washing them off became a coherent thing to do.
Cities became intolerable. The sanitary reform movement of the nineteenth century was driven by mortality statistics in industrial cities, and it produced public baths and wash houses, sewers, water supply legislation and a vast apparatus of municipal effort. British legislation from the middle of the century enabled local authorities to provide public baths and wash houses, and the buildings that resulted are still standing in many towns.
Soap became cheap. This is the industrial part. Soap was taxed in Britain until the tax was repealed in the 1850s, which had kept the price high. Industrial alkali production, following the development of processes for making soda from salt, removed the other constraint. From the middle of the nineteenth century soap was a mass produced commodity, and its manufacturers needed a market.
Cleanliness did not become a virtue and then get sold. It became sellable, and the virtue arrived with the advertising.
Where the moral charge came from
The phrase cleanliness is next to godliness is usually attributed to John Wesley, who used it in a sermon in the eighteenth century, and he himself presented it as a saying rather than a coinage. Similar formulations exist earlier and in other traditions. Its popularity in nineteenth century Britain is the significant fact, because it arrived exactly when soap manufacturers needed a reason for people to buy soap.
Nineteenth century soap advertising is one of the great bodies of persuasive material, and it is extremely well preserved in library and museum collections. Its striking feature is how rarely it argues on grounds of hygiene and how often it argues on grounds of character, respectability and social position. Soap advertising also carried a substantial imperial freight, in which cleanliness was presented as a civilising instrument, and those images are now studied precisely because they make the ideology unusually visible.
The most famous single instance is the acquisition by A. and F. Pears of Millais's painting Bubbles in 1886 and its conversion into an advertisement, which caused a public argument about whether fine art could be used to sell a bar of soap. That argument is worth noticing: it treats the crossing of art and commerce as a scandal, at a moment when the modern advertising industry was assembling itself.
- The claim
- People in medieval and early modern Europe never washed, and both smelled and looked filthy by any modern standard.
- Where it appears to come from
- This is a compression of the genuine historical finding that immersion bathing declined and that cleanliness was managed through linen. The compression drops the linen, which is the entire point, and the result circulates as a joke about the unwashed past. It is reinforced by a habit of comparing early modern practice with modern practice rather than with the medical theory that produced it.
- What is actually established
- Established: public bath houses declined markedly in Europe from the fifteenth century; medical opinion warned against opening the pores; cleanliness was displayed through frequently changed white linen and managed through dry rubbing, combing and changes of clothing. Established: soap existed throughout and was used, principally for textiles. Not established: that people were indifferent to cleanliness. They were extremely concerned with it and pursued it by a different method.
The residue
What survives from all this is a vocabulary. Purity, freshness, clarity, detoxification, the idea of the body as something that accumulates impurity and requires periodic removal of it. These are moral terms that have been doing commercial work for a hundred and fifty years, and they are the direct ancestors of the modern language of clean in cosmetics, which typically defines itself by absence rather than by content and which is examined in the essay on beauty copywriting. The bath house itself, and the very different civic traditions that kept it alive elsewhere in the world, is the subject of a separate piece.
The useful correction is the same one this magazine keeps arriving at. People in the past were not stupid. They were operating a coherent system with a theory behind it, and when the theory changed the practice changed with it. Ours will look equally odd from a distance, and probably for the same reason.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The Wellcome Collection and the Science Museum Group both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
Did medieval people really not bathe?
They bathed less by immersion than either the Romans before them or the Victorians after them, and public bath houses declined markedly from the fifteenth century. They managed cleanliness through frequently changed linen, dry rubbing and combing, which was a coherent practice grounded in the medical theory of the time rather than an absence of concern.
When did soap become cheap in Britain?
Prices fell substantially in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the repeal of the soap tax in the 1850s and the industrial production of alkali. Mass manufacture and national advertising followed quickly.
Who said cleanliness is next to godliness?
The phrase is generally attributed to John Wesley, who used it in an eighteenth century sermon and presented it as an existing saying rather than his own invention. Comparable formulations appear earlier and in other traditions.
What were public baths and wash houses for?
Both washing bodies and washing clothes, in buildings provided by local authorities under enabling legislation from the mid nineteenth century, in response to urban sanitary conditions. Many survive as swimming pools or have been converted, and their original dual function is visible in their plans.
Is soap different from detergent?
Yes. Soap is the salt of a fatty acid, made by treating fat with alkali. Synthetic detergents are a twentieth century class of surfactants made by other routes, which perform better in hard water and do not leave a scum. Most modern cleansing bars marketed for skin are not, technically, soap.
- Wellcome Collection History of hygiene, sanitary reform, medical theory and public health.
- Science Museum Group Industrial chemistry, alkali manufacture and public health technology.
- British Library Nineteenth century advertising, trade catalogues and periodical collections.
- Victoria and Albert Museum Dress and textiles, including linen, laundry and the display of cleanliness.
- The National Archives Records of public health and baths and wash houses legislation.
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