became
familiar, and the concealment taboo was broken down.[1517] The cities
were soon compelled to pass ordinances forbidding any one to appear on
the streets nude.[1518] In Denmark the historian tells us that people
slept naked because linen was dear, and that the custom lasted into the
seventeenth century. In the sixteenth century nobles began to wear
nightshirts.[1519] Upon the entry of kings into cities, until the
sixteenth century, mythological subjects were represented in the streets
by nude women.[1520] From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries it
was the custom that girls served knights in the bath.[1521] Through the
Middle Ages the sexes bathed together, and not innocently.[1522] The
Germans were very fond of bathing and every village had its public bath
house. The utility and pleasure of bathing were so great that bathing
was forbidden as an ecclesiastical penance.[1523] "A practice of men and
women bathing together was condemned by Hadrian, and afterwards by
Alexander Severus, but was only finally suppressed by Constantine."[1524]
The Council of Trullanum in 692 forbade the sexes to bathe together.[1525]
Other councils repeated the prohibition. This shows that Constantine did
not suppress the custom, nor did any other civil or ecclesiastical
authority do so. The ecclesiastics in Germany, from the eighth century,
condemned the custom of the sexes bathing together, but never could
control it.[1526] Christian men and women bathed together at Tyre in the
time of the crusades.[1527] All the authorities, beginning with Erasmus
(in the Colloquy, _Diversoria_), agree that bathing at a common bath
house was abandoned on account of syphilis. Leprosy, which was brought
from the East by the crusaders, had had less effect in the same
direction. In the sixteenth century there were other epidemics, and wood
became dear.[1528] The use of body linen and bed linen which could be
washed made bathing less essential to comfort and health.[1529] The
habit of seeing nudity was broken, and as it became unusual it became
offensive. Thus a concealment taboo grew up again. Rudeck[1530] is
convinced by these facts that "it was not modesty which made dress and
public decency, but that dress and the decay of objectionable customs
made modesty." He seems to be astonished at this conclusion and a little
afraid of it. It is undoubtedly correct. The whole history of dress
depends on it.

+469. Bathing in rivers, springs, and public bat