Everyone now may want the bronzed “summer” body, but in the Middle Ages, fair skin was all the rage. In fact, medieval people’s obsession with pale skin led to “fair” being used as a synonym for “beautiful”. If you had fair skin, it meant you probably weren’t spending the entire day doing hard labor in the fields, and, thus, weren’t a peasant.
However, medieval folk didn’t want pale skin; they wanted the creamy milk-white appearance – and they went to “pretty” extreme lengths to get it. In Elizabethan times, a popular ingredient for face foundation was ceruse lead powder. Short-term it gave people the desirable creamy white skin, but lead is extremely poisonous. Long-term people weren’t only damaging their skin but harming their bodies.
A Change of Clothes
One of the modern luxuries most of us fail to appreciate is a daily – or hopefully, a daily – change of clothes. Back in the medieval period, people didn’t change their clothes very regularly. While modern people, for the most part, change their clothes daily, folk during the Middle Ages changed their clothes once a season. People only had a choice of four outfits, and each outfit was reserved for a season.
No wonder people made such a big deal about harvest and spring. It didn’t only mean more food but a change of clothes. Even royalty didn’t change their clothes that regularly. The King of Scotland, James VI, only changed clothes after some months had passed. He even slept in the same clothes.
Freckles Weren’t Fashionable
The medieval folk weren’t fans of freckles. They considered them to be unsightly blemishes. Some of the more superstitious folk may even have called them “witchspots” or “witchmarks”. Contempt for freckles wasn’t something specific to medieval folk because even the Romans saw people possessing freckles as being “polluted”. This was something the medieval folk inherited from former historical times.
Since people back then weren’t all into them, they invented numerous strategies for removing them. One method included grinding up cuttlefish bones, root of bistort, and frankincense, then adding water and rose water and applying the mixture to one’s freckles. Other methods were even more extreme. Some medieval people used to rub sulfur daily on their skin to remove these skin spots.
Eagle Dung for Epidural
Even with epidurals and cesareans being available to pregnant women, giving birth is still not an easy matter. And it is still something that frightens many expecting mothers. That said, we’d take going into labor in the modern age any day over giving birth in the Middle Ages. When a woman went into labor, she drank a mixture of vinegar and oil, while eagle dung was a homemade poultice that was used for her labor pains.
As smelly as it sounds, eagle dung was a medieval epidural. We’re not sure how effective it is for labor pains, but we’re guessing that most expecting mothers would give eagle dung a skip nowadays.
Tooth Worms
The Middle Ages weren’t for the faint-hearted. Now, there’s no actual thing such as a tooth worm – we really hope so anyway – but during the medieval period, people believed in such. In fact, the tooth-worm myth was something these folk inherited from their ancient ancestors. They really believed that the cause of toothaches was because tooth worms lived inside human teeth. And they had just the cure.
Back then, people used to light a candle or a basic cigarette to smoke out the worm. Then, they’d hang their heads over a bowl of water where the worm would fall in. We’re betting that this wasn’t an effective remedy for toothache. It’s certainly a blessing to know that what really causes toothaches are cavities and periodontitis and not tooth worms.