ArrenMcStealsalot wrote:
This image of brown and dirty Middle Ages is just a myth. Public baths and saunas were a thing back then.

In the early middle ages, the waterworks built by the Romans broke down, so that there were big problems in taking water to cities, but in the first half of the middle ages cities become depopulated so this didn't matter that much (but I read that herbal teas become popular in this period because people started to boil thoeir water before boiling it).

In the second half of the middle ages, after the year 1000 roughly, cities became more populated but had horrible sanitation, with people abitually throwing their shit on the public streets. Those conditions are likely what caused the explosion of various plagues in the 2nd part of the middle ages.

So they weren't dressed brown (colorful clothing were way more popular), but I suspect that for modern day standards they weren't all that clean either.

When my mother (born 1949) was a kid, she lived in a rural-ish part of Italy. She lived in a small city, but when she went at her uncle's house, who was a farmer and lived on the nearby hills. They didn't have either electricity or running water, so women had to walk to the spring downhill, fill some big buckets that they placed over their own heads and walk back uphill. They had to wake up very early in the morning to do this, which makes me think that people in that situation would have been more conservative with their water use that we are today.

Too bad we don't have anyone with a degree in Medieval studies to clear things up.

Nah, who wants evidence based analysis when we can all revel in fantasist mythology.

The plagues of the later Middle Ages are very well documented. Yersina Pestis Fleas on rats. People lived with animals and had fleas. So it spread.

The other endemic diseases of Southern Europe never stopped from the plagues of the Roman empire up until the 19th century when swamps were finally drained. You can bathe everyday and poor sanitation will still give you any number of diseases. Have to keep the bathing and waste disposal water away from the drinking and cooking water or boil it before use. Plenty of places still don't do this, so you have all bacterial diseases from untreated human and animal waste.

It was poor waste management, not necessarily poor hygiene.

Yes, but poor waste management in cities is more likely to lead to poor hygiene than poor waste management in a situation where cities are small and people live far from each other.

HAHAHAHA! Stop talking about poo! XD
I swear… so many coprophiliacs…

I mean… if you're troubled by poo, technically one can still be a “knight” or a princess today. Cowboy (apart from living / working at a ranch) is more like a fashion statement today if I understand it correctly… and 99,9% of people with internet access are pirates or pirated something. Unless you'd prefer to loot cargo ships in Somalia with machine guns. Yeah, I guess about half of these got reduced to a fashion statement and the other half is more like a title, without too much power. Yaaay.

When talking about bathhouses and saunas I'm talking from perspective of a Slav, so forget about something like Romans had, with pipes, running water and big pools. Slavs had something like modern Russian banya - simple wooden building, often close to river, where you could wash in warm water and generate steam by pouring water over hot stones.

And no we won't stop talking about poo and pee! It's very important part of life. In my comic I pay special attention to how characters are dealing with this issues! (Not really. I just like history and while I don't have a degree in that, my definition of fun is reading how societies functioned.)

*takes deep breath* And now let me talk about what samurai used large wooden buckets for during next 30 minutes :)

Yeah, sorry, when I speak of the middle ages I unconsciously spoke of the middle ages in Italy, other places might have been different, apologies.

OMG Medieval poo! XD
It actually wore armour and road horses and carried swords into battle XD

Cowboy poo had tiny little cowboy hats HAHA!

Ewwwwwwww, you guys1 XP