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Hi listeners, we wanted to bring you an episode from Noise's brand new podcast. It's called The Curious History of Your Home. Look around your home. It's full of items you probably take for granted. Bed, bath, fridge, wallpaper, dishwasher, toothpaste. In fact, hiding in plain sight, these things have extraordinary histories. Join domestic historian Ruth Goodman as she guides you through the remarkable, often epic, tales behind everyday objects.
If you enjoy this taster episode, search the curious history of your home in your podcast app of choice and hit follow for weekly episodes, or click the link in the episode description. It's the year 235 AD and we're in Rome. I want you to imagine that you're a Roman citizen. It's the middle of a hot Italian summer and you've just spent a long day baking under the Mediterranean sun.
You want nothing more than to rinse off, cool down and relax. So you decide to head through the bustling city streets to the newly completed Caracalla Baths. Now, these baths have caused something of a stir. For one, they're the largest built in the city so far, sprawling over 27 acres and soaring to a staggering height of 130 feet.
The bath complex includes a library, an Olympic-sized pool, and an underground temple to the Persian god Mithras. But there's another reason for the public interest in the baths. They're also the project of the rather unpopular and recently deceased Emperor Caracalla.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed Caracalla after a special kind of hooded tunic that he liked to wear, was notorious for more than just his fashion sense. He rose to power after having his brother and co-ruler, Geta, murdered. If that wasn't bad enough, he followed up this domestic crime with a more public one, when he had thousands of his brother's supporters massacred.
Understandably, he had a bit of trouble gaining his subjects' trust after this. The baths were an attempt to curry public favour, in addition to showcasing the immense wealth and power of the empire over which he ruled. And they certainly have done that. Say what you want about Emperor Caracalla, but these baths are truly a wonder.
In the year 235, he's been dead for nearly two decades after being assassinated by one of his own soldiers, but the baths he built are a hit. As you step through the towering bronze doors, you are immediately transported into a world of opulence and extravagance. The immense bath complex stretches out before you. A vast expanse of marble and mosaic...
Your footsteps echo as you walk across the atrium. Huge statues decorate the room, branching off on either side. The most impressive is a ten feet tall marble replica of the Greek hero Hercules, rippling with carefully chiselled muscles.
The air is thick with the scent of exotic perfumes and the distant murmur of voices. As people from all walks of life gather here to seek solace and relaxation, everyone is welcome in Roman bathhouses, rich and poor, men and women. A hundred years ago, the Emperor Hadrian had tried to ban mixed gender bathing, but his edict had been largely ignored.
Communal bathing is much a part of the fabric of Roman life. Even enslaved people can come on special days. You follow the sound of cascading water and soon arrive at a massive indoor waterfall. This glistening wall of water leads you to the heart of the baths, the Natatio, an enormous swimming pool surrounded by columns adorned with intricate carvings.
Sunlight dances across the shimmering surface of the pool, the water reflected by the thousands of glass tiles scattered across the ceiling. The room echoes with the chatter and laughter of bathers. Elegant Roman ladies in vibrant silk gowns and bejewelled sandals lounge on intricately carved stone benches, gossiping and sipping wine while slaves attend to their every need.
This is a social space as much as a place to get clean. The climax of the Caracalla Baths is the caldarium. As you step into the chamber, the heat envelops you like a warm blanket. The walls are lined with intricate mosaics of gods and goddesses and the floor is heated by large underground furnaces.
The room is warm. People sit on marble benches, sweat glistening on their brows as they engage in philosophical discussions and sip on herbal concoctions. As you wander through this architectural wonder, you can't help but marvel at the grandeur of Imperial Rome. The Caracalla Bars are a testament to the power, wealth and sophistication of the Roman Empire. I'm Ruth Goodman.
I've spent my life exploring the extraordinary history of everyday items, the little things that we often take for granted. You see, every object in your home has a fascinating hidden history, a story that's just waiting to be told. In this episode, we'll be diving into the incredible history of baths. So come along with me and together we'll explore the curious history of your home.
The Caracalla baths represented the very pinnacle of Roman bathing culture, but their origins lie in a rich tapestry of ancient bathing traditions that stretch across continents and millennia, a global narrative of human fascination with water, purification and communal relaxation. More than two millennia before the Caracalla baths were built, there was the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro,
Mohenjo-Daro was one of the largest settlements of the Indus Valley civilization, and its bath dates back to 2,500 years BC. Now, the written language used at Mohenjo-Daro is still a historical mystery, but based on their excavations, archaeologists believe that this large, meticulously designed bathing pool probably had religious and ritualistic significance.
In fact, for much of human history, bathing was inextricably linked to spirituality. Like the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro, ancient Buddhist monasteries often featured communal baths where monks purified themselves before prayers and meditation. And ritual around cleanliness still exists in many modern religions.
Bathing has always been about far more than just washing away daily dirt and grime. It symbolises spiritual renewal and purification too. The idea of getting clean simply for hygiene is extremely new. So just how did baths go from being a frequently spiritual, often communal practice in ancient times, to the solitary, hygienic activity it is today?
Or, to put it another way, when do we move from bathing to merely washing? Well, believe it or not, that's a story of epic proportions. It takes in the decline of empires, devastating plagues, and deadly warfare. As the centuries rolled on, imperial bathhouses like the Caracalla Baths began decreasing in number. They fell into ruins completely in late antiquity.
Now, people often blame the rise of Christianity as Rome's state religion for the bath's decline, but this isn't really accurate. In reality, a lack of funding and environmental factors did for the Roman baths. Fuel to heat the baths became more expensive around the 4th century when Rome began importing wood from North Africa.
Then, of course, there's the small matter of the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. After this cataclysmic event, the aqueducts, sewers and bronze piping that provided clean water to public bathhouses and individual homes fell into disrepair. In 537, when the Ostrogoths were besieging Rome, the city's aqueducts were deliberately cut off.
All over Europe, the grand Roman baths were abandoned. There is a general misconception that as soon as Rome fell, everyone in the West stopped washing. When you think of medieval Europe, you probably imagine it smelling awful. But I am here to tell you that that is simply not true. The idea of the smelly Middle Ages is partly rooted in tales of famous non-bathers.
St Anthony, for example, was said to never have washed so much as his feet. Monks who dedicated their lives to God were only supposed to bathe once or twice a year. And St Jerome insisted that after being bathed in the baptismal font, Christians never needed to wash again. Religious men like these saw bathing as a sign of vanity and luxury. And they are partly to blame for the idea of the unwashed Middle Ages.
but they were only a minority of the population. It is true that after the fall of Rome, bathing became a bit more difficult. Much of the Roman water infrastructure was damaged or fell into disrepair. People started moving away from the now crumbling cities and demand for indoor plumbing diminished.
In place of the advanced plumbing systems, Roman urbanites had enjoyed, medieval European villages relied on nearby springs, rivers, lakes, wells and cisterns for their water supply. People had to go and fetch water from these sources using buckets. This took considerable physical effort. So taking a bath every day simply wasn't feasible for most people and the fuel to heat baths was expensive.
Full baths at home were thus seen as a luxury reserved for aristocrats, kings and queens. Just because not everyone had the privilege of taking a full bath doesn't mean they didn't wash. A small bowl of water and a cloth allowed one to give oneself a good scrub. And since most meals were eaten without cutlery, washing one's hands before and after meals was also commonplace.
And even with saints like Antony forgoing bathing, the religious associations between bathing and purity didn't totally go away in this era. Most medieval knighthood ceremonies, for instance, involved both a lot of prayers and a scented bath. Now, you might be thinking that compared to the Roman period, bathing in the Middle Ages was more about keeping clean than enjoyment and merrymaking.
While communal bathhouses continued to be a feature of societies elsewhere around the globe, including the medieval Islamic world, this generally wasn't the case in Christian Europe. But there were still some places where the Roman habit of communal bathing continued.
Hi again, listeners. If you're enjoying this episode of Noise's new podcast, make sure to search the curious history of your home in your podcast app and hit follow to never miss an episode, or click the link in the episode description. Now, back to the story. It's the year 1400, and we find ourselves navigating the labyrinthine streets of medieval-era London, a city teeming with life and intrigue.
Our curiosity leads us to Southwark, a notorious district where vice and pleasure intertwine in the shadows of narrow alleyways and dimly lit taverns. As we venture deeper into this seedy underworld, the cobbled streets grow muddier underfoot and the air becomes thick with a scent of wood smoke, cheap ale and something altogether less savoury. We hear raucous laughter of revellers emanating from a nearby building.
Its wooden sign reads "The Siren's Delight" and is adorned with a rather suggestive painting of a mermaid. The dimly lit interior beckons us inside. The heavy wooden door creaks open and we step into a world of debauchery and decadence. The scents of ale and various perfumes mingle in the warm interior and the room buzzes with a cacophony of voices and laughter.
It immediately becomes apparent why this place is known as a stew. The room is dotted with massive wooden tubs measuring 15 feet across. They are filled with naked men and women drinking wine and nibbling on snacks. Yes, you heard me right. Men and women. Seems a bit strange for this era, doesn't it? Well, medieval bathhouses weren't just a place to get clean and relax in the tub.
Many of them doubled as brothels. Providing sex workers for clients was a way for the owners of the stews to make some extra cash on the side. Some medieval bathhouses did stay on the Straden Narrow. There were 26 in 13th century Paris where you could just get clean. But many of them jumped at the prospect of making some extra money. Of course, the stews weren't solely brothels and not everyone went to them for that reason.
They also provided medicinal baths of brewer's wort, mallow, fennel and rosewater. And you could even enjoy a hot meal while you bathed. But all the marshmallow root in the world couldn't save the stews from the plague that would cause them to all but disappear in the mid-16th century. It actually wasn't the Black Death that put an end to the stews.
In 1348, this plague had swept through England, killing an estimated half of London's population. But as we've seen, Southwark soon bounced back. In fact, one so-called cure for the Black Death was a medicinal bath in rose water and vinegar. The plague that sounded the final death knell for bathhouses arrived during the Tudor period. Syphilis.
Syphilis arrived in England in 1497 and quickly ravaged the stews. People understood, of course, that it was a sexually transmitted infection, but they also began associating disease transmission with bathing in hot water because the stews were an ideal breeding ground for this nasty new disease.
The theory went that disease could enter through the pores once they had been opened in steamy hot environments. So taking a long luxurious soak in a tub was deemed very bad for your health. In 1546, to try and combat the scourge of syphilis, Henry VIII finally ordered the Southwark stews to close. And for the next few centuries in England, it stayed that way.
That is, until the 18th century, when people in Britain rediscovered the healing properties of water. During the 18th and 19th century, health spas experienced a significant surge in popularity all over Britain. Wealthy patrons flocked to these therapeutic retreats to partake in mineral water treatments and socialise with their peers. At the renowned spa town of Bath,
The Roman baths were rebuilt in grand, near-classical style. These spas were fashionable destinations and they played a pivotal role in shaping the era's social and cultural landscape. Health spas weren't entirely new. In fact, the one in Bath had been in use on and off since the Roman period. What changed in the 18th century was how the medical community viewed water.
when doctors began revisiting the ancient Greek concept of hydrotherapy. This had first been popularised sometime around 400 BC by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who prescribed hot and cold baths for all kinds of ailments. But British physicians in the 18th century began prescribing their patients an entirely new type of hydrotherapy, sea bathing.
These physicians believed that the sea's magical blend of salts and minerals could do everything, from soothing sore muscles and joints to clearing up skin conditions and even helping with respiratory issues. They saw seabathing as a natural detox, a way to purify the body.
Plus, the invigorating shock of cold seawater was thought to kickstart the body's systems, leaving you feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. By the 1750s, doctors were publishing treatises on the many benefits of sea bathing and running medically supervised bathing regimes for their wealthy clients. It's possible not everyone agreed with this newfangled cure. In Jane Austen's novel Emma, Mr Woodhouse declares...
is very rarely of use to anybody. Sure, it almost killed me once. But he was out of step with public opinion. People across Britain began flocking to seaside towns like Scarborough, Brighton and Margate to take the waters. Sea bathing as a health cure began to fall out of fashion later in the 19th century. Advances in medicine meant the doctors stopped seeing it as a miraculous panacea for most illnesses.
But the supposed benefits of taking the waters had transformed people's thinking, breaking the old imagined link between immersion in water and disease. And while people might have stopped going sea bathing for their health, it didn't stop them swimming in the sea full stop. Because in the 19th century, people in Britain began going to the beach for fun.
By the 1870s, people were flocking to the shore to luxuriate on the beach or take a quick dip in the sea. Funnily enough, some of these early British beachgoers seemed to have liked to bathe naked. One such enthusiastic seabather was the Reverend Kilvert, who in 1872 wrote...
I was out early before breakfast this morning, bathing from the sands. There was a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air and running down naked to the sea, where the waves were curling white with foam and the red morning sunshine glowing upon the naked limbs of the bathers. So you might have noticed that for much of bathing's history, personal bathtubs weren't really used unless you were wealthy.
People with less money just didn't bother with taking regular hot baths, and who can blame them? If you didn't have servants heating the water and filling the tub was a major faff. But this all changed around the 1880s. At the same time, the medical community began to accept germ theory. Now, you probably know about germ theory from school history lessons, but let's do a quick recap.
Before this period, doctors had mostly believed that disease could be spread in one of two ways. The first was through miasma or bad air. The second was through inherited susceptibility or lifestyle choices. These theories led to a deeply classist and racist understanding of how disease worked.
People believe that the poor and other minorities got sick more often because they were naturally dirty, non-intelligent and genetically inferior to the wealthy classes. Basically, if you were working class and you got sick, you had no one to blame but yourself. But when germ theory came along, this started to change.
In 1847, a Hungarian doctor was concerned about the number of deaths amongst women who had recently given birth at the Vienna General Hospital. Dr Semmelweis realised that women assisted by doctors caught life-threatening fevers more often than women seen by midwives. The reason? Doctors often came straight from performing autopsies to see their patients.
When Semmelweis made doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime water before examining the women, the hospital saw a huge drop in maternal mortality. In 1854, a cholera epidemic ravaged the working-class community of Soho, London. A doctor named John Snow, already a sceptic of the miasma theory of disease, traced the outbreak to a contaminated water source.
Now, he didn't yet know that it was bacteria in the water making people sick, but he encouraged the British government to improve public sanitation systems to prevent further outbreaks. In mid-19th century France, a chemist named Louis Pasteur discovered that a variety of microorganisms in the air cause beer, wine and milk to sour or spoil.
This led him to wonder whether microorganisms could also invade the human body and cause disease. Finally, in 1877, the German scientist Robert Koch developed a method for culturing bacteria in a Petri dish and discovered the bacterium that causes anthrax. Germ theory had arrived.
Eugenics didn't die out, but scientists and doctors did begin to spread the idea that working class people had the power to fight against the diseases that ravaged their communities. As well as campaigning for better public health measures, proponents of germ theory began recommending soap, particularly disinfectant-infused soap like carbolic, as a way to combat disease.
Such soap only activated in hot or at least warm water. So for the first time in British history, people across the social spectrum began taking regular hot baths. It's the year 1900 and we're in a typical home in a typical mining village tucked away in the Cornish Hills. Today is a special day. It's bath day. A galvanised tub sits in the centre of the main room.
The air is filled with steam and the sound of children's voices. Mum has been busily boiling up the bath water for several hours to get it as hot as she possibly can. A bucket of coal goes in first. And then the hot water is ladled carefully in as she tries to adjust the temperature. Everyone eagerly waits to get in. Dad goes first, stripping off all his clothes apart from his drawers. In he climbs.
A big bar of red soap is lathered up and the singing begins. Bath time has always been a very musical affair in this household. The kids sing as they wait their turn. As soon as dad is done, they are in, one after another, in whatever order they can organise between themselves. Because the first in gets the hottest, cleanest water and the last in gets the cold, murky leftovers.
Sometimes Mum organises them, cleanest to dirtiest, but everybody gets their turn in the tub. Although, have you noticed that Mum wasn't in line for the bath? She prefers a bit of privacy and still manages with a bowl of hot water and a flannel upstairs in her bedroom.
Scenes like these were typical across Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly amongst mining communities like those in Cornwall, because miners, as you can imagine, got home pretty dirty after a hard day's work. But what some of our younger listeners might not know is that the practice of families sharing bathwater was pretty common until at least the 1960s.
After the war, Britain struggled to rebuild. The economy was devastated, and building nationwide plumbing infrastructure to provide hot running water to every home simply wasn't a priority. Funnily enough, World War II had the opposite effect in the United States. There, the war ushered in a whole new era of domestic bathing.
In the States, the war led to a shortage of metal, metal that the Allies desperately needed to produce bullets, weapons, tanks and mortars. So the War Production Board started requesting that citizens turn in their scrap metal, while at the same time restricting the use of iron, steel and copper. This affected day-to-day life in all sorts of ways, but it particularly changed indoor plumbing.
Due to the scarcity of metal, American civil engineers turned to a new wonder material that had actually been developed by German chemists in the early decades of the 20th century: PVC. These plastic pipes were far less expensive than the old metal ones and suddenly more people could afford to have indoor plumbing. For the first time, hot running water became readily available.
At the same time, improvements in manufacturing technology led to a drastic decrease in the price of bathroom fixtures. In the years after the war, one could purchase an entire bathroom suite, including a bathtub, for just $70. That's about $1,000 in today's money. The domestic bathtub had truly arrived. But World War II also had another effect on bathing in America.
During their deployment in Japan, American troops loved visiting onsen or outdoor bathing facilities located near hot springs. These had been an important part of Japanese culture for centuries and often included large wooden tubs where you could have a soak and chat with friends. The troops returning home from the war loved the onsen bath so much that they tried to recreate them at home using old barrels or vats.
And in so doing, they sparked the hot tub craze of the mid-20th century. By the 70s, parties were all the rage, with people inviting their friends over for long soaks accompanied by drinks and snacks. Sounds a bit like a Roman bath. Or a medieval-era stew, doesn't it?
Nowadays, bathtubs are readily available in most homes, and yet most people prefer to take a shower. They're just faster and more convenient for the busy lives we lead. But we can see the remnants of more ancient bathing traditions. People still enjoy swimming together in pools and soaking in hot tubs.
And with the rise of showers, taking a bath has become again a ritual for many of us. Just like our ancient and medieval ancestors, we sent our baths with salts, oils and herbs for their calming and even healing properties. Today, science is even proving that our age-old instinct to luxuriate in hot water does have significant health benefits.
A 2018 study out of Japan reported that regular submersion in water heated to 40 degrees Celsius has significant health benefits. It can reduce stress, fatigue and pain, improve skin condition and generally lead to greater feelings of health. Another study in 2020 showed that taking regular baths is associated with a lower incidence of heart disease and stroke.
So even though showers have become more popular for their convenience and speed, next time you need to get clean, consider filling up the bath instead, pouring in some sweet-smelling oils and enjoying a well-deserved soak. We hope you enjoyed this taster episode from Noise's new podcast. To hear more episodes, search The Curious History of Your Home in your podcast app of choice and hit follow, or click the link in the episode description.
