Johnston R.A. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World

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Hygiene

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we have few pictures of combing, brushing, and primping, the elaborate

hairstyles of medieval men and women suggest a great deal of time spent.

Combs had been available since the early Middle Ages. The simplest ones,

sold in the North during the Viking era, were made of two pieces of bone or

antler. One had the teeth cut in it, and the other formed a riveted-on han-

dle. Later combs were wood or bone or, in their most expensive form, ivory.

Some were double sided. Mirrors were scarce, so most people probably used

a still basin of water. When they were available, mirrors were made of highly

polished brass or steel. Glass mirrors were invented in the 15th century.

Tooth care also must have varied greatly. Many people cleaned teeth with

salt or green twigs. When teeth went bad, the barber pulled them. Bad breath

was treated by chewing spices or rinsing with rose water. Clearly, this remedy

was only available to the aristocracy, since spices and roses were very costly.

A great deal of cloth laundering went on in medieval times, but not ev-

erything was washed. Wool clothing was not washed; it was brushed and

shaken to remove clothes moths. Furs, too, were brushed weekly. Once

or twice a month, all the towels, sheets, undergarments, and shirts had to

be washed. Clean undergarments twice a month was considered good hy-

giene. These white linen articles were boiled or scrubbed in soapy wooden

tubs. Many women still washed clothes in the nearby river, even when it

was polluted. (London records tell of many deaths of women who slipped

while washing clothes on the banks of the Thames.) Laundry needed to

smell clean to be considered clean. Laundresses for the upper classes folded

herbs into the dry linens. They used lavender chieﬂ y, but also chamomile.

Further Reading

Gies, Joseph, and Frances Gies. Life in a Medieval Castle. New York: Harper and

Row, 1974.

Gimpel, Jean. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages.

New York: Penguin, 1976.

Hallam, Elizabeth, ed. Chronicles of the Age of Chivalry. New York: Greenwich Edi-

tions, 2001.

Magnusson, Roberta J. Water Technology in the Middle Ages. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Singman, Jeffrey. Daily Life in Medieval Europe. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

1999.

Squatriti, Paolo. Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, AD 400–1000. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Woolgar, C. M. The Senses in Late Medieval England. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 2006.

Wright, Lawrence. Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and

the WC. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.

Iron

393

Ink. See Pens and Ink

Inns. See Taverns and Inns

Iron

Although the Iron Age, as deﬁ ned by archeologists, ended with the Roman

Empire, iron was still the most important metal for all weapons and tools

in medieval Europe. As with other crafts, the fall of the Roman Empire

brought down the skill level of mining and metalworking. During Europe’s

Middle Ages, these skills were reinvented and then surpassed.

Iron ore could be mined in many places in Europe, and primitive forges

were widespread. The basic process of producing bloom iron could be done

on a small or large scale. Iron ore was washed and roasted and broken into

pieces for the reduction furnace. Medieval forges had a chimney and two

openings: one for the ore to be added, and one for the lump of iron to be

removed. A simple bellows kept a steady draft of air to make the ﬁ re hotter.

The furnace burned charcoal, not wood, because charcoal drew out oxygen

from the iron ore and made the ﬁ nished iron stronger. The ﬁ re was not

hot enough to melt the iron, so it came out as merely a lump that could

be heated and shaped. The lump was called a bloom. The smith reheated

the bloom in a charcoal ﬁ re to temper (soften) it, and then beat it into the

desired shape.

In the early Middle Ages, most iron went into weapons: spear heads,

swords, helmets, and axes. Only a few tools used iron. Most blacksmiths

were located on estates and worked for kings and warriors. But as settle-

ment spread, there was more demand for iron tools, especially plow blades.

Towns grew, and their craftsmen needed tools, not just for agriculture.

Horses now wore shoes.

Between 1100 and 1200, blacksmiths moved from estates to villages,

where they could shoe horses and make tools. To make a carpenter’s saw,

the smith cut the teeth into hot metal; to make a ﬁ le, he struck a stick of

iron repeatedly with a sharp hammer to put ridges into it. Chisels had to be

hardened by repeatedly heating them to temper the metal, which was par-

ticularly important for stonemasons’ chisels and wedges. Carts needed iron

rims for their wheels, and mills needed iron gears and other machine parts.

Farms needed iron plows, horseshoes, spades, and hoes. Kitchens needed

large iron cauldrons, ﬁ re tools, and long forks.

Blacksmiths did a wide variety of metalwork. While some forged simple

tools or horseshoes, others repaired and sharpened tools for stone-cutting

masons at constructions sites. Some made intricate lattice railings. Some

blacksmiths specialized in nails; they turned out thousands of precise, well-

made nails for a variety of speciﬁ c uses. Blacksmiths were the original clock

Iron

394

makers, although clock making became its own craft in time. Blacksmiths

could do precision work: hinges, clasps, window grilles, hooks, locks, and

keys. Although locksmiths became their own specialty, they began as part

of blacksmithing.

Making these increasingly complex tools, while at the same time improv-

ing weapons, forced smiths to innovate and learn how to work iron more

efﬁ ciently. Monasteries were also a surprisingly powerful force in iron de-

velopment. Cistercian monasteries were the most active force in mining

and reﬁ ning the iron of Europe. People donated to them land that had iron

deposits, and they built factories to reﬁ ne it. They recycled the slag as fertil-

izer. Along with learning the properties of iron when worked cold or hot,

blacksmiths learned how to turn iron into what became known as steel.

Steel was a type of iron with extra carbon; its structure changed to a

crystalline pattern, and it was stronger than ordinary iron. The earliest dis-

coveries of how to make steel appear to have been in sword making with a

technique called pattern welding. Thin iron rods were covered with char-

coal and heated to red hot, and then wrapped around each other to form

a solid bar. Early smiths probably did not realize the iron picked up some-

thing from the charcoal. If the steel was cooled very fast by being plunged

into cold water, it became very hard but somewhat brittle. Slower cooling,

perhaps with some reheating, produced the best result.

At ﬁ rst, steel was only imported from Sweden, Spain, and Damascus, the

foremost iron centers. Blacksmiths forged steel edges onto iron tools and

blades. The technique spread to armor-making by the 14th century, when

plate armor was in development. The method was called case-hardening

with armor. Plates were case-hardened by covering the outside with char-

coal and heating it to red-hot again. The outer coating of steel allowed the

armor plates to be polished like glass.

The need for iron was constant, and ironworkers needed ways to process

iron ore more quickly. Waterpower was increasingly being applied to uses

outside milling grain, and craftsmen had learned how to turn its spinning

motion into many other kinds of motion to run industrial machinery. Wa-

terpower revolutionized metalworking. A water-driven bellows could raise

the temperature of the ﬁ re enough to liquefy the iron. Water-driven ham-

mers were better at forging the bloom of iron than a human smith’s ham-

mer. The ﬁ rst record of a water-driven bellows was in 1323, and, by 1380,

Flanders had a real blast furnace.

The medieval blast furnace was built over a ﬁ re pit, with a small hearth

and a very large chimney. The chimney was roughly diamond-shaped, wid-

ening like an upside-down pyramid and then narrowing, and as high as

20 feet tall. Large twin bellows were operated by waterpower to keep a con-

tinuous draft. The blast furnace produced iron with 4 percent carbon be-

cause the hotter temperature made it take in the charcoal’s carbon faster.

Iron

395

This lowered the melting point, so they now melted the iron to pour into

molds instead of producing lumps of bloom.

The impure iron ore was mixed with limestone and then layered with

charcoal. This mixture went into the blast furnace. The sand, clay, and

limestone were lighter than the iron and ﬂ oated as it melted. The waste was

called slag and was removed through a door at the top. The molten iron

ﬂ owed out into a sand pit to cool. Later the term “pig iron” came about

because the molten iron was channeled through chutes into several sandpits

or depressions to cool, which looked like the furnace was a sow and the pits

were piglets. A cooled “pig” weighed several hundred pounds.

Pure iron required a further step. The 4 percent carbon was removed from

the pig iron in a simple reﬁ nery. The metal was reheated with a separate

Iron technology drove the medieval industrial revolution. The heart of the iron

industry was always the blacksmith, whose work became increasingly specialized.

Some blacksmiths used early steel technology to case-harden armor and tools, while

others turned to ﬁ ne ironworks in machinery. Still other blacksmiths created larger

industrial shops to make large iron girders for use in bridges and tall buildings.

(William Caxton, The Game of Chesse [facsimile from the 15th-century original], 1872)

Iron

396

bellows to blow air into the molten metal. Oxygen combined with the car-

bon and blew away as smoke so that the iron was pure.

As iron manufacture became more industrial and less of a village craft,

blacksmiths were perceived as nuisances in towns. Their ﬁ res were danger-

ous and smoke producing, and their work was noisy. Worse, as wood ran

short, blacksmiths were among the earliest customers for the ﬁ rst coal.

This coal produced noxious fumes, and, although medieval people did not

understand the real dangers of industrial pollution, they believed anything

that smelled bad must be unhealthy. Ironworks were pushed outside the

city walls by ordinances and became increasingly industrial.

See also: Armor, Clocks, Coal, Kitchen Utensils, Locks and Keys, Mills,

Tools.