More often than you'd think — about once a week
Contrary to the popular myth that medieval people never bathed, public bathhouses were common across much of Europe, and the Church generally encouraged cleanliness. These bathhouses faded mainly in the **16th century**, as fears that water spread disease — especially the syphilis epidemic that arrived in the 1490s — combined with moral disapproval, not in the immediate wake of the 14th-century Black Death.
