Book 2, Chapter 6, The End of the Ninth Century – Anglo Saxon Furniture
We have little information on the secrets of the toilette of the Anglo-Saxons. We know from many sources that washing and bathing were frequent practices among them. The use of hot baths they probably derived from the Romans. The vocabularies give thermae as the Latin equivalent. They are not infrequently mentioned in the ecclesiastical laws, and in the canons passed in the reign of king Edgar, warm baths and soft beds are proscribed as domestic luxuries which tended to effeminacy. If these were really the thermae of the Romans, it is perhaps the hostility of the ascetic part of the Romish clergy which caused them to be discontinued and forgotten.
We constantly find among the articles in the graves of Anglo Saxon ladies, tweezers, which were evidently intended for eradicating superfluous hairs, a circumstance which contributes to show that they paid special attention to hair dressing. To judge from the colour of the hair in some of the illuminations, we might be led to suppose that sometimes they stained it. The young men seem to have been more foppish and vain of their persons than the ladies, and some of the old chronicles, such as the Ely history, say (which would hardly have been expected) that this was especially a characteristic of the Danish invaders, who, “following the custom of their country, used to comb their hair every day, bathed every Saturday, often changed their clothes, and used many other such frivolous means of setting off the beauty of their persons.”
Chapter 6, Ancient Towns and Highways
Domestic life of the Anglo-Saxons
Chapter 6, Internal Fittings of Houses
Chapter 6, Anglo-Saxon Furniture
The Toilette
Chapter 6, Anglo Saxon Hunting and Travelling
Chapter 6, Anglo-Saxon Language
Local and District Courts of Justice
Categories: Book 2
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