During this period, people had very different habits and ideas from ours.

Water was available in villages from nearby springs, rivers, lakes, wells and cisterns.

Indeed, most settlements had developed where they had precisely because of the proximity of a reliable water source.

The king of Scotland could use the same clothes for months.

Castles were provided with additional water from masonry-lined wells sunk into their interior courtyards.

Even had the possibility to draw up water from the well at every level of the keep using a system of buckets and ropes.

were typically prohibited from taking more than two or three baths in a year

A lord might have a padded bath for extra comfort and he usually travelled with one, such was the uncertainty of finding the convenience on one’s travels.

Would have made do with a quick swill using a basin of cold water.

Maked by: Alejandro Raygada and Estéfano Frayssinet.

The peasantry used a cesspit for their own waste, which might then be taken and spread on the fields as a fertiliser.

A wooden bench with a hole in it some comfort (as well as reducing the chances of falling into the cesspit).

Chamber pots were used at night and then emptied into the cesspit. Without toilet paper, or really paper of any kind, people had to make do with a handful of hay, grass, straw or moss.

The low standards of medieval hygiene certainly helped it along although there were other factors such as a complete lack of understanding of what caused it and the absence of effective quarantines.

In medieval times many flea borne diseases emerged in rats, the bubonic plague killed between 30% and 50% of the population wherever it took hold.