Episode 173 was about the art of Taking the Waters.
In this episode of the Renaissance English History Podcast, Heather explores the intriguing evolution of bath culture in Tudor England, from Henry VIII’s crackdown on public bathhouses to the rise of spa towns and the practice of “taking the waters.” Discover how beliefs in the healing properties of mineral springs shaped health practices, influenced religious and political dynamics, and even sparked the beginnings of secular travel for relaxation and wellness. From Bath to Buxton and beyond, Heather delves into the fascinating intersection of medicine, leisure, and early modern English society.
A very rough transcript on Episode 173: Taking the Waters
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and our future. and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is episode 173 and it’s about taking the waters or spa days as we might know them. The show notes will be up at englandcast. com slash spa. About a year ago or so I did an episode on the Tudor bathroom during the little series on the Tudor home that I did and In that episode I talked about the decline of public baths under Henry VIII Baths had been quite popular up until the early 16th century With people going there to have parties and eat a nice meal while also getting clean But Henry ever the fastidious monarch I was worried about disease spreading.
The thing was that most people, especially men, who went to the bath houses got more than a simple meal in a bath. And as syphilis cases began to rise in the early 16th century, they were often centered around those very same bath houses. So the entire bath culture got a bad rap for several decades when it wasn’t actually the fault of the water at all, but the extracurricular activities that were going on.
In the bathhouse, but then under Elizabeth, you start to see a rise in people going to spa towns to take the waters. Mary Queen of Scots was often being given permission to go and Elizabeth’s favorite Robert Dudley died while en route to baths at Buxton. So I got curious about this change because I started, you know, to notice in letters people talking about going to the baths later on.
And I wondered how that change started to happen. So how do we go from this culture where Henry VIII shuts down all bathing and bath houses and everything to a place where the nobility and even Mary Queen of Scots is going off to take the waters and enjoy a bath. So that’s what this episode is going to be about.
Also, on a personal note, I’m a total beather and one of my favorite things in the world is hunting for hidden hot springs in Iceland. I could totally live in Iceland if only because of all the bathing in naturally hot water that they do there. So bonus points to you if you’re currently listening to this episode in a spring or a hot tub or a bath.
Many of you are familiar with the town of Bath in Somerset, a beautiful spot, especially at this time of year with rolling hills and a glorious cathedral and lots of Jane Austen history. And a bridge across the water that still has shops on it the same way London Bridge would have had several centuries ago.
But of course the thing that makes Bath so special, and in fact its entire reason for existence are the natural hot springs. I also want to add that over 20 years ago when I first moved to London straight out of university I got a young person’s rail card which gives you a reduced rate on the trains.
For anyone under 26 I think it was, maybe they still exist. Anyway, I kept a map of England in my room and each weekend I would close my eyes and randomly point to a place wherever my finger landed was where I would try to get to that weekend. Which led to some amazing adventures in very random places I never would have gone to otherwise, like Whitby or Macclesfield.
But the point is, the very first place that my finger landed on back in June of 2000 was Bath. And I knew absolutely nothing about it then, not even the Jane Austen connection. And I But I quickly fell in love with it and have been back loads since. So extra bonus points to you right now if you’re listening to this in Bath.
Personal share over. Back to Baths. In Bath. In 1562, Dr. William Turner wrote a book called The Book of Natures and the Properties of the Baths of England. And this changed everything. In it, Dr. Turner lists over 60 disorders, which could benefit from bathing, including, but not limited to, miscarriage, Files migraine, sciatica, worms in the belly, forgetfulness, dullness of smelling, palsy, cramp in the neck, and the failure of menstruation.
For us, with all of our snazzy, modern medical knowledge of things like germs, these conditions don’t seem at all related. How is miscarriage and I don’t know, palsy related. But remember that pre modern physicians followed Galen, and they believed that diseases were caused by an imbalance of the four humors, phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile.
Most of the diseases in Turner’s list were due to an excess of phlegm, which was the cold and moist humor. And the cure for that, of course, Was to heat and dry the patient’s body using hot mineralized water. Early modern people knew that our skin would absorb anything put on it. The same way we know not to use lead makeup on our skin today.
And they thought that bathing in minerals was the fastest way to get the benefits. But you could also drink the water and get the same benefits, just not as quickly. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word bath as immersing the body or any part of it in water or other liquid for the sake of some effect, health, warmth, cleaning, promoted by the action of the liquid.
During the Elizabethan period, we start to see more references to bathing. and the restorative effects of a bath. For example, in Edmund Spencer’s The Fairy Queen, at the end of book one, during the battle against a dragon, the hero knight Red Cross falls into water and it’s the power of that water that gives him victory.
He was thrown into the well of life, which is described thus, for unto life the dead it could restore. And guilt of sinful crimes clean wash away, those that with sickness were infected sore, it could recure and age at long decay. Renew as one were born that very day. The water also gives Red Cross the mental fortitude to take on the dragon.
So there’s psychological effect as well as physical effects. Later on, Lady Mary Roth, she was an English writer at the beginning of the 17th century. And in her book, the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Characters dive into the frigid sea water and immerse themselves in baths underground and drink from healing springs.
The idea of the healing waters was becoming popular, not just from Dr. Turner, but also later on there was a Dr. Walter Bailey who published a treatise in 1587 on the healing properties of the waters in Warwickshire’s Newnham Regis. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes as well. Talking about their composition and saying that they should be enjoyed in the summer.
One change that was happening in the mid 16th century was the view of doctors was shifting from being purely religious, a religious doctor of divinity was of course the earliest form of doctor, to being scientific. Of course this change would take a century or more to fully develop. We don’t see it really being developed until later in the Enlightenment and after the scientific revolution.
But we start to see the beginnings of it in the mid 16th century. People like Dr. John Jones was a physician and he published a Dial for All Agues in 1566 attacking medical ignorance and emphasizing the need for knowledge from physicians, not just clergy. So Elizabethan doctors were looking for new subjects and potential cures, including healing waters.
Within just a few generations, the most common thing to do when you were dying or when you were ill was to call a doctor rather than a clergyman. So we start to see this shift to physicians instead of just the clergy. When we’re sick, and of course those physicians are out there hunting and starting to find cures for sicknesses as well Elizabeth herself encouraged people to take the waters But only if there was no hint of religious idolatry, for example that no miracles were said to have taken place there.
Dr William Turner who I talked about before is this example of the new Protestant doctor He studied at Cambridge in the 1540s. He studied medicine in Italy and Germany, and he returned to England to become the chief doctor to Edward vi, uncle Protector Somerset. That connection is what led him to Bath in the first place.
Somerset had acquired estates in Bath and wells, but under Mary, the first Turner had to go back to the continent. But he was restored as the Dean in Wells under Elizabeth in 1559. He had studied hot springs throughout Europe and wrote his treatise on baths, and specifically had rules and ideas about how to make the baths even more efficient and better.
As part of his improvements, he believed that there should be general rules to be observed of all of them that will enter into any bath or drink the water of any bath. No man should enter any bath before his body be purged. For if a man should enter into any bath before his body be purged, he may fortune never to come home again.
For if he does come home, he cometh home most commonly with a worse disease than he brought to the bath with him. Of course, Bath isn’t the only town that has waters. Buxton was originally named Aquaea Arnamenteae during the Roman period. There are warm springs that come out of the River Wye with a constant temperature of 28 degrees Celsius.
That sounds lovely. The Romans built baths there. And for the following century, these springs have been a major source of importance and income for Buxton. There’s a spring at St. Ann’s Well, which by the early Middle Ages was already a place of pilgrimage. And by the Tudor times, it was established as a spa and by Elizabeth time, it was visited specifically for the spa by people like the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burley.
And this is the place where Mary, Queen of Scots was always asking permission to go because she was being held captive, of course. By the Earl of Shrewsbury and Bess of Hardwick at nearby Chatsworth. William Turner’s famous treatise on Bath showed a change in the official policy about the use of these healing waters and soon enough the nobility were patronizing the baths at Bath and Buxton and other hot springs.
The nobility and the gentry who responded to Turner’s treatise discovered that a week or two at the hot springs, baths, and wells Was more than a potential cure for disease, but it was also a really nice and relaxing way to take a break from responsibility and, you know, take a break from your land and your estates and your work.
And it was a really nice way to hang out with others of your same social class while relaxing and just kind of having a good time. None other than William Cecil was a patron of Turner and as early as 1552 he had plans to go to Bath and he later became a regular visitor. His son Thomas Cecil said in 1594 that if one went to Bath one was bound to meet courtiers and when he was the Earl of Exeter he went at least three times.
It was now just a normal part of life for the elite to go to baths, and where this fashionable set went, the rest of us are sure to follow. These trips to baths are actually some of the very first secular holidays that we see in England. Of course, people had traveled for pilgrimages before, but never had people just taken off and traveled for a week or two for purely secular reasons like going to a bath.
It was also now respectable to drink or bathe in the waters for medicinal purposes rather than simply religious reasons. Remember that water had always meant a rebirth in a spiritual sense as with baptism. But now we see people taking off and Saying I’m gonna go to bath for a couple of weeks and enjoy a nice spa time.
There was a new emphasis put on the medicinal part of taking the waters. But as with everything in the second half of the 15th century, religious strife enters the picture. Because in the last episode we connected musical therapy to string theory. So why not bring together Catholics and baths here? The Venetian doctor, Augustine Augustinian was a doctor to Henry VIII, but he left in 1546, and he wound up splitting his time between the Netherlands and Italy.
He would have known about the waters in Spa, now Belgium, which was then part of the Spanish Netherlands. Of course, now those of us who follow Formula One are familiar with it because it has a Formula One race there every year. Yay, Lewis Hamilton. I digress. Anyway, Dr. Agostini would have known about the waters at Spa and perhaps brought back news about the town and its healing waters.
By the 1560s, there were doctors writing books about the benefits of spa as there were in England, and some English visitors traveled to the Spanish Netherlands to heal a particular condition. But then again, Catholic recusants could Also travel together under the cover of a trip to the spa, but really to plan, plot, and to comfort each other.
And this part of things was concerning to Elizabeth and her counselors. In 1567, the Duke of Alba, Arrived in Brussels with the main army of Spain. This, England saw as a really aggressive stance. The Spanish army was now less than 200 miles from London as the crow flies and it seemed like a perfect place for Catholics to travel under the pretense of taking the waters at Spa.
By 1570, Cecil’s spies reported that there were people daily arriving in Spa, including the rebel, the Earl of Westmoreland. The government did try to distinguish between the rebels and people who went to spa for true reasons. They issued passports to people who went with their approval, having taken an oath of allegiance.
One of those was Christopher Hatton. He was a gentleman, pensioner of the household who went to spa with the consent of the Privy Council because of his great sickness. And he was accompanied by a court doctor. Another one that was legitimately at spa was Henry Herbert. He was the second Earl of Pembroke after 1570.
And because he had a seat in Wiltshire, he was actually really interested in the waters of Bath. His second wife, Catherine, was the daughter of George Talbot. He was the Earl of Shrewsbury, Bess of Hardwick’s husband, who was keeping Mary Queen of Scots. She had some sort of fatal illness and may have tried the waters of Bath or of Buxton, near to her father.
But in 1575, because he was quite desperate, Pembroke took her off to try the waters at Spa, but the Countess died later that year. So Pembroke and Shrewsbury lost a wife and a daughter, respectively. But they had a common interest now of using mineral waters as a cure for disease and Pembroke patronized Bath.
Shrewsbury had begun to patronize Buxton. They decided to get together to promote these English baths as an alternative to the spa waters. This was a good public policy to bring people back into England and have them not go to spa where they could potentially get corrupted by the Spanish and, you know, plot rebellions, that kind of thing.
So, they found a joint publicist for the waters, Dr. Jones had been a physician at Bath and in Derbyshire, and in 1572, he published two treatises, The Baths of Baths, a dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke, and then also The Benefit of the Ancient Baths of Buckstones, which he dedicated to the Earl of Shrewsbury.
1572 is an interesting year because that also came after the Northern Rebellion, which And the Rodolphe plot, there was even more reason to want to publicize English waters and stop giving people any excuse to go to spa where they could potentially, again, like I said, get corrupted or plot with the Spanish and get involved in any of that scene.
They didn’t want people going there. So they have Dr. Jones. Publicizing the baths at Buxton and Bath and creating this whole idea around having people go to the spa in England rather than traveling abroad. Dr. Jones, as a side note, advised that in Buxton in particular, patients should first rest after their journey because it was harder to get to Buxton.
So rest for a few days before going into the baths. And he recommended that people visit for at least two weeks, maybe even up to 40 days That was also quite good for the people who had inns and, you know, early lodgings around the area. Visitors should bathe for two hours every morning and evening after exercising, but before eating.
Then, once his clothes were dried by the fires and his body was dried, the patient could go to bed with two bladders of hot water so that he would sweat in bed. So, immersions followed by sweating in bed was also the normal treatment at Bath. A few years later, this idea of having a domestic bath economy took off in Workshire in King’s Newdom or Newdom Regis.
This was only 10 miles from the Earl of Leicester’s main seat at Kenilworth. By 1579, there are parts of a register of visitors, like the same thing kept by the Warden of the Bath at Buxton. 18 people recovered from a wide range of problems. Between mid July and early August, around 40 or so arrived every month and would stay for an average of seven days, one person stayed for 21 days.
Five of the visitors were people who were from Warwickshire, but others came from the Midland counties, including a Robert story of the old hospital at Leicester. He was suffering from a migraine and black jaundice, the wind and colic. And a John Flower came all the way from Norfolk. People decided to promote King’s Newnham, Newnham Regis, as a local spa.
There was Buxton in the north, there was Bath in the south, and then right in the middle you could have the Midlands Spa at Newnham Regis. In June of 1580, Lord and Lady Warwick were at the Wells in Warwickshire, which were also known in other court circles as well. William Harrison was the Canon of Windsor, and He was also the household chaplain to William Brooke Lord Cobham, and he wrote a book, The Description of England, which talked about the discovery of King’s Newnham Spring in 1579 when it cured a wounded man’s injury.
And in 1587, he said that he had personally used the bath and that it drew as many customers at as the town of Bath and Buxton. So I’m gonna leave it there for now bathing as domestic and foreign policy the book recommendations for the week I’ve got two spa culture and literature in England 1580 to 1800 by Sophie Chiari and the English spa 1560 to 1815 by Phyllis May Hembree.
I’ll have links to everything in the show notes at englandcast. com spa Let me know what you thought about this episode. You can get in touch with me through the listener support line. You can text 8016tesco. That’s 8016839756, I believe. Or you can join the new Tudor Learning Circle, which is a free social network just for Tudor history nerds.
You can go sign up for free at TudorLearningCircle. com. Thanks so much for listening and I hope you’re having a great summer. I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye bye.
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
