“Balnea si calidis queras sudantia thermis,
In claris intrabis aqua, ubi corpus inungit,
Callidus, et multo medicamine spargit aliptes’,
Mox ubi membra satis geminis mundata lacertis
Laverit et sparsos crines siccaverit, albo
Marcida subridens componit corpora lecto.”
Already, in the time of Saint Louis, the number of bath-keepers was so great that they had a trades union; they were almost all barbers, too; they washed the body, cut hair, trimmed corns and nails, shaved and leeched.
Bath houses more than multiplied from the twelfth century, imitations of Oriental customs, due to the crusaders. Baths were run not only by men, but by old harridans and fast girls. No respectable woman ever entered a public bath-house; Christine de Pisan bears witness to that fact in the following lines: “As to public baths and vapor baths, they should be avoided by honest women except for good cause; they are expensive and no good comes out of them, for many obvious reasons; no woman, if she be wise, would trust her honor therein, if she desire to keep it.”
The establishments known as vapor baths, as early as the time of Saint Louis, had already degenerated into houses of prostitution. The police, in defense of public morality, were finally obliged to forbid fast women and diseased men from frequenting such places.
In Italy, vapor baths were recognized officially and tolerated as places of public debauchery; this was also the case in Avignon. The Synodal statutes of the Church of Avignon, in the year 1441, bear an ordinance drawn by the civil magistrates and applicable to married men and also to priests and clergy, forbidding access to the vapor baths on the Troucat Bridge, which were set apart as a place of tolerated debauchery by the municipal authorities. This ordinance contained a provision that was very uncommon in the Middle Ages, i.e., a fine of ten marks for a violation of the law during day time and twenty marks fine for a violation occurring under cover of night.