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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jester47" data-source="post: 1755873" data-attributes="member: 2238">It really depended actually.  Mainly on who, time, and place.  Newer research indicates that those who could afford it bathed fairly regularly up until the Black Death.  It was after the Black Death that people developed the idea that bathing was bad.  Again, teeth was a class/diet thing rather than a no technology thing.  This was a society without sugar.  Honey was pricy.  Tooth rot was not as common as once believed.  Peasants in places where the nobility did their job well (keep order and provide defense) had fairly ok teeth.  In fact peasant teeth are showing to be better than the nobility and the clergy who could actually afford sugary foods and had sedentary lifestyles.  The thing is they never dug up peasants.  They only really studied clergy (rich ones at that) and nobles.  The assumption was that obviously nobles had a better life and so if they were missing teeth...  But the only thing that would cause you to loose teeth is fighting or advanced tooth decay.  With the peasant diet being much healthier (fruits, vegetables, and grains with less meat with more rounded out exercise) than the noble one (assuming what they owed the nobles was fair) they typially had better teeth.  The misconception about teeth also occured because typically men were studied rather than women and children.  People were in fact much cleaner and healthier (on the most part) than we have been taught to believe previous to the black death.  This misconception can be pretty much traced back to sexist assumptions when carying out archeological studies.  Further confirmation of the tooth misconception can be traced to two things:  One is the colonial period.  What made detal technology better in the colonial period?  There were no serious advances.  True there was the occasional dental catastrophy (George Washington is known for his wooden false teeth) but the fact that history makes a point of it means it was an oddity, not the standard.  The other is nicknames.  From the middle ages all the way to modern times, nicknames with regards to missing teeth were on the record.  However, this indicates that missing more than about 25% of your teeth was somthing worthy of a nickname.  As a result, we can assume that this was relatively uncommon.  This is not to say that the middle ages were all hunky dory.  If you were injured, you were pretty much forked for life, and considering that most peasentry was involved in the agrarian sector, farming injuries must have been common as well as some random brutality.  What wrong with stuffing kids in armor and letting them fight with sticks?  Man I would have loved some real armor when I was fighting with sticks as a kid!!  Such sanitised upbringings these days...  back in the dark ages of my youth jungle jyms were made of steel, and we hit each other with sticks, and we liked it!!</blockquote>

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