Soap has existed since before recorded history, though if you read my short history of soap and hand washing, you know that using soap for hygiene practices like hand washing is less than 200 years old. But did you know that using soap for household cleaning like laundry, dishes and mopping is also relatively recent?
For most of that history, soap was far from the ubiquitous cleanser that it is today. Before soap, most households used dry cleaning methods like sweeping and brushing for the majority of tasks. Greasy chores like laundry and dishes were accomplished with wood ash, to make a form of lye, (for laundry) and sand scrubbing (for pots and dishes). What drove this change? The answer, surprisingly, is household coal burning in London!
Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge the excellent book which was my primary source for this article: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman. This book covers the many aspects of life that were changed when Londoners converted from wood-burning to coal-burning around the turn of the 17th century (far earlier than anywhere else). In this article I mainly look at soap use in the household, which are covered in chapters 8 and 9.
The Usefulness of Ashes
If you have a wood stove or have gone camping, you may have encountered the usefulness of wood ashes. I sprinkle ashes on icy paths in the winter and have used them to help scrub a greasy pot in a pinch on a camping trip. If you know a bit about soap making, you may have heard that lye (an essential ingredient in soap) can be made from wood ashes.
Coal ashes, on the other hand, simply make everything filthy. They are sticky and black and will cling to walls, floors and clothes. Even if you don't burn coal, if your neighbors do, it will come in your windows and still make your house dirty!
Before the switch over to coal burning, wood ashes were essential to household cleaning routines. Laundry was soaked in lye from wood ashes before being rinsed and beaten. A strained lye solution from ashes could be used to help clean greasy pots and dishes. Why would any household waste money on ready made soap when they had a ready supply of free wood ash?
Soap certainly existed but it was relatively expensive, especially if you wanted the nice stuff!
The Switch to Coal
The first city to switch almost entirely to household coal burning was London at the end of the 1500s. The primary driver for this was that coal was much more readily available to Londoners than wood, since it could be cheaply shipped in. For a while, London was the odd one out in Britain. With most of the population still rural, wood was easy to come by for them. In Scotland, peat was the fuel of choice.
But coal was gaining a reputation for cheapness and efficiency (coal is a denser energy source than wood or peat) and London has always been a bit of trendsetter for the rest of Britain. So over the following decades, much of the country switched over. By the time any of the known household management manuals are being written, (e.g. Mrs Beeton) coal is assumed to be the primary fuel.
The Switch to Soap
Once a household switches from wood to coal, a whole host of changes comes with it. The first thing you might notice is that your walls are becoming gradually filthy. When before, a little sweeping of dust and cobwebs was all that was needed, now a black substance called "coal smuts" starts to build up everywhere and can only be shifted with soap and water.
Deprived of wood ashes, you have to figure out a new way to do laundry. Once again, soap steps in! Another item that it gaining popularity at the same time is pottery and china dishes, replacing wood and pewter. Wooden bowl and spoons were typically "scoured" with a cloth dipped in sand, while a lye solution from wood ash might be used on the more delicate pewter. Pottery, however, is scratched by the sand treatment and a lack of ashes prevents the homemade lye solution. Once again, soap takes over as the cleanser of choice.
We're not in London anymore
While all that hopefully makes sense, you may be wondering why London household management decisions had any effect on you, who (statistically) are probably NOT in London. The US and Canada, after all, have never really run short on trees and even mainland Europe and parts of rural Britain kept burning mostly wood or peat until later in the industrial revolution (after which, we started using gas and electricity anyway!)
As you may have guessed, it's all down to immigration, colonization and the British Empire. Even as Brits set up households in wood rich areas of the world like North America, their understanding and experience of running a household was firmly coal based. Families that had been burning coal for several generations probably didn't even think that there might be a different way to do things without coal.
Also, as soap was becoming more popular, it was gaining its association with "purity" and "godliness." Good, hardworking people had clean houses and clean clothes and the only way to accomplish that was with soap. It didn't take long for soap to be culturally ingrained.
The Domestic Revolution
If you're at all interested in history and how it can explain why we do the things we do today, I would highly recommend Ruth Goodman's book. The history of everyday tasks in the household is an especially underexamined area of research and I personally find it far more interesting than the political and military side of things. Because realistically, our ancestors spent far more time washing dishes and doing laundry than they did fighting in famous battles!
Ruth has not only done a lot of research but she also has long experience doing living history experiments that are sometimes the only way to learn how things might have been done in the past. She has spent extensive time running both coal and wood fired households, often while wearing period dress, so she really knows her stuff!