Thus the scriptwriters of the successful television comedy ‘Blackadder II’ (1986) satirized a prevailing belief that life in medieval England was unremittingly squalid, and the populace slovenly. Mrs Pants's retort (it's what you expect that matters) is reminiscent of an anthropological dictum: attitudes to dirt and disease are relative, circumstantial and socially constructed. Because of this, it is considered anachronistic to transpose biomedical notions of antibacterial sanitation on to the evidential record. Now historians are asking: by what standards did men and women of the period evaluate cleanliness, and what steps did they take to foster it? Part I of this book establishes the concepts of the body and of the natural world that were available to men and women living in medieval and early modern Norwich; the next few pages point to some particular landmarks which may help the reader to navigate what follows.

The fundamentals of hygienic theory in this period drew upon certain principles of health care that were already considerably over 1,000 years old. These originated in the Greek-speaking world, and are known from the works attributed to Hippocrates of Cos, b. 460 BC (actually, a collection of textbooks, lectures and polemics written by various authors between 430 BC and 330 BC), and ‘his’ intellectual heir, Galen of Pergamum, b. AD 129, a philosopher-physician. One of the most important texts arising out of this tradition was the Hippocratic treatise ‘On the Nature of Man’, which bequeathed the following precept: ‘some diseases are produced by the manner of life that is followed; others by the life-giving air we breathe’. The author went on to explain exactly how these circumstances could be distinguished. If a significant proportion of the inhabitants of a region or town fell ill with the same disease the cause was clearly something common to all, the most likely culprit being a ‘morbid secretion’ contained in the atmosphere.