Every morning, bathhouse servants went through the streets crying that the water was hot. A thirteenth-century poet, Guillaume de la Villeneuve, wrote the cry down among the street cries of Paris: "Seignor, quar vous alez baingnier et estuver sanz delaier, li baing sont chaut, c'est sanz mentir." Lords, go and bathe, and steam, without delay. The baths are hot, and that's no lie.

The tax roll of 1292 counts twenty-six bathhouses in the city. The steam bath cost two deniers, steam and tub four. The keepers' trade had statutes: no lepers, no night-roamers, closed on Sundays and feast days. And nobody was to have the baths cried before daybreak, the statutes say, "for the perils that may come to those who rise at that cry to go to the baths."

People wanted the steam enough to get up and walk into an unlit street. So the rule made the cry wait for the sun. Breaking the statutes cost ten sous: six to the King, four to the sworn men of the trade.

Paris had its steam baths; Finland still has the cry. Every Saturday, someone calls through the house: sauna on lämmin, the sauna is warm.

Would you have got up at that cry?

Sources: Guillaume de la Villeneuve, Les Crieries de Paris (13th century); the statutes of the étuveurs in the Livre des métiers, the register of Paris trades begun under the provost Étienne Boileau, as given by Alfred Franklin, La vie privée d'autrefois: Les soins de toilette (1887); the Taille of Paris, 1292. That the peril was the dark street is Franklin's reading: the statute says only "the perils". The film is drawn as a stained-glass window of the period; no real window is copied.
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