Bathing was important in the ancient Roman Empire. To a Roman of gentle birth, the high point of each day was the visit to the bath. Built over hot springs, & designed to look grand & beautiful, baths offered pools of cool, temperate, & hot water, fed by wooden or earthenware pipes. Gentlemen strolled among friends in the sunny courtyards, making sure you were seen with, & by, the right people. Political deals sprouted in the great baths. Senators whispered to special interest spokesmen-the lobbyists of that day. Conversations continued in the steam room as puffy politicians & their backers sweated out the effects of high living. Bath attendants were everywhere: one to massage; another to oil, then gently scrape the bather's skin; yet another to pluck out obtrusive hairs.
These temples of euphoria required the barest minimum of physical activity on the part of their patrons. But they were the offspring of the gymnasia of ancient Greece which were devoted to hard exercise. Here young men stripped-gymnos means "naked"-then, glistening with olive oil, boxed, wrestled, threw the discus or javelin-anything to work up a sweat & avoid much-dreaded flab. The ancient athletes exhausted themselves, then scraped off the oil, bathed, &, refreshed in body & mind, joined a group of listeners clustered around some noted philosopher like Socrates or Plato.
Archaeologists are often surprised by so many evidences of ancient cleanliness. Findings indicate systems of terra-cotta plumbing, with bathtubs made for royalty that look about the same as today's. The rich & powerful of three thousand years ago even enjoyed toilets that flushed with a controlled rush of rainwater. The Bible makes clear that if you wash someone's feet-and, if you're a woman, dry them with your hair-you've humbled yourself in a suitably Christian way. But the long tradition of sybaritic Roman bathing was enough to put baths into disrepute among early Christians. Only the monks kept the idea alive during the Dark Ages.
Monasteries often had communal baths, much simplified versions of Roman ones, with warmed water to make life a little more bearable for good monks, & cold to chill off naughty ones. Ordinary, unsanctified people had few chances for bathing, but at least the concept of large, public baths survived for a time in Europe. Fear of catching the Black Death, along with a growing shortage of wood for heating water, virtually ended public bathing. For a couple of centuries, common folk remained the great unwashed.
But such uncommon folk as kings & popes fared better. In the sixteenth century, Pope Clement VII, a Medici, could revel in a marble bath with many of the features found in ancient Rome-hot & cold water, for example. And in England, Elizabeth I, after whom Virginia was named, found a bath befitting to a virgin queen & took to it once a month "whether she need it or no."
During the Roman occupation of Britain, hot springs in the southwestern part of England inspired several Roman baths. One splendid example, with dark blue water that reeked of sulfur, was rediscovered in the twelfth century & gained a reputation for healing rheumatism & gout. By the reign of the Stuarts, the town of Bath was becoming fashionable.Diarist Samuel Pepys(1633-1703) visited in 1668, finding he must use the baths by appointment, before the crowds came-"very fine ladies; & in the manner pretty enough, only methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water." He bathed, found the springs even in the temperate bath "so hot as the feet not able to endure," &, before taking the coach for home, spent a shilling "to make a boy dive in the King's bath."
Hot springs have always tempted people, even those wariest of getting wet. On the last leg of their voyage to the New World in 1607, the vessels Susan Constant, Godspeed, & Discovery put in at the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Skipper Christopher Newport(1561–1617) thought, & doubtless prayed, that his weary & grime-caked passengers might bathe in the island's volcanic hot springs. They did, &, squeaky clean for at least a day or two, they continued their voyage to plant, at Jamestown, Britain's first permanent settlement in North America...
Ablutions were skimpy in British American colonial days. A little dab here & there with a damp cloth would do you, even in the fashionable capital of Virginia. To be sure, a so-called bathhouse, or bagnio, stands among the outhouses of the Governor's Palace. This little six-sided building, easily mistaken for a smokehouse or privy, existed as early as 1720, & Lord Dunmore, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore(1730-1809),Virginia's last royal governor, was especially fond of it. He didn't use it to clean up, but to cool down. Dunmore was a Scot, his sturdy frame pulsing with good hot blood to keep him warm-even in a kilt-throughout the chilly damps of his native sod. Arriving in Virginia, he found the Tidewater's tropical summers unendurable. Lord Dunmore didn't go to Virginia's hills, except sometimes with his friend Colonel George Washington. But on hot days he repaired to his little bathhouse & sat naked in it while servants poured cool water over him. It must have felt wonderful, but whatever cleansing effect it had was only incidental...
In America's colonial days, getting clean meant sponging off, usually just face & hands. A few of the better homes furnished bedrooms with chinaware washbasins & pitchers. Servants supplied the water, heated in the kitchen or laundry, & laid out clean shifts for the ladies & fresh dress shirts for the gentlemen. A shirt concealed the sweat that often flowed beneath it & kept it from staining the elegant silk or velvet waistcoat & frock coat that went over it. If you were a wealthy man, you might have fifty shirts...
If you insisted on thoroughly washing, a wooden tub would do a fine job. But it required hard work. It had to be lugged from the laundry house, or wherever it was stored, & filled with water, hoisted from the well, that had to be warmed. Something had to be found to use as a towel. And where in the world did the homemade soap get to? With all this ado, a semblance of privacy had to be preserved during the adventure. So a good, soaking bath was a luxury of only the well served, & few of them tackled the job more than a couple of times a year. Everyone knew that too much bathing would destroy your natural oils & leave you wide open to the ravages of various diseases...
In Williamsburg, shortly before the end of the eighteenth century, St. George Tucker(1752-1827) installed the first copper bathtub recorded in the city. Tucker put it in his dairy, piping in hot water from the laundry in the servants' quarters. The cold water pipe came in from his well. After he'd splashed about in it & scrubbed himself, he'd vent the bathwater right out of the house. St. George Tucker's Williamsburg tub was about as up-to-date as any American hygienic equipment in 1796. In fact, the French were likely the leaders in the bathroom business. French royalty quickly caught on & eagerly accepted the Roman notion of voluptuous baths. All important visitors to Versailles had suites that included baths. French tubs & bidets were made for all who could afford them. Often, like Mr. Tucker's, they were metal-producing a happier feeling on the naked body than cold marble. Toilets were routine furnishings in French palaces & many chateaux. Some, by ingenious French engineering, could be flushed with running water indoors...
Williamsburg jurist George Wythe(1726-1806) would have agreed. In his sixties he got into the habit of drawing several buckets of well water, filling a raised reservoir, & yanking a cord that dumped it gloriously all over him-a cold shower every morning, summer & winter. One of his law students wrote, "Many a time have I heard him catching his breath, & almost shouting with the shock." When the old lawyer bounded in for breakfast, "his face would be in a glow, & all his nerves . . . fully braced." Doubtless that's why Wythe, teacher of John Marshall, Henry Clay, Presidents Jefferson & Monroe, & other notables, lived to his eighties.
