A great many French villages still have outdoor communal washing places – a ‘lavoir’. It won’t be long before you spot one on your travels. However, trying to describe what one looks like is very difficult as there are possibly as many designs as there are villages.

The name comes from the Latin ‘lavare ’which means to wash with a liquid. So the first pre-requisite must be water. Some ‘lavoirs’ are situated by the side of a stream, some are built next to a spring and some are built in the middle of a village joined to a fountain.

Many are very picturesque. Today they are often beautified with hanging baskets, troughs of flowers and one near Reims now contains aquatic plants and goldfish!

What fascinates me is that there are so many of them throughout France, yet none in the UK. The mayor of Birmingham was concerned that in 1914 there were still 40,000 homes without an indoor water supply out of a population of more than 630,000 indicating that the majority of the houses in that crowded industrial city had piped water. Yet in our village the ‘lavoir’ was built in 1892 meaning that at the beginning of the twentieth century it was normal for households to have no tap and for women to be washing clothes outside in river water. One of my lady students reminded me that many rural homes would have had a well and could heat water on their stove. She also added that up until the 1940’s rural people were not renowned for washing themselves very often. One bathful of heated water would suffice for all the family on a Saturday night!

The sudden appearance of many new ‘lavoirs’ in the last half of the 19^th century was due to a law passed in 1851 which offered each mayor a subsidy of 30% of the cost of construction. Some mayors and councils built ‘lavoirs’ under a newly constructed town hall. While the good women laboured below, the men climbed grandiose curved stairways to meet in the council chamber above. Remember that votes for women didn’t arrive in France until 1944.

We spotted one lavoir that was a small brick building. If it had not been for the letters L A V O I R on the exterior we would have mistaken it for a garage. But in reality, this enclosed space was far more congenial for the women that used it than our one down by the river protected from the elements by just a projecting roof.

Pity the poor women of Ecueil where a fountain fed a large rectangular stone bath right in the middle of the village square.  Not a scrap of protection from sun, wind or rain was provided for those housewives. Another lavoir in our region is just an open-air ground level rim of concrete where ladies had to be on their knees to access the water, but perhaps it was a dual purpose one as often large reservoirs ‘les égayoirs’ were used to wash horses and their carts as well.

Our lavoir in Cormontreuil was said to be quite ingenious. Partially sunken barrels were tied together along the front of the washing place and each user had to climb into a barrel. Water flowing by at waist height meant that it was not necessary to bend over. I wonder if the man who thought of this idea ever tried it out? Perhaps he did, while wearing trousers, but I wonder how the voluminous skirts of the local ladies managed to fit into a barrel and how they managed to not splash any of the water on their below river-level clothes! Perhaps that is why it was the only one of its design in France!

A friend of ours arrived  in France as a young bride in 1953. While on holiday in Normandy she was intrigued to watch a woman arrive at the riverbank opposite, throw her linen on to the water, retrieve it, wring it and repeat the actions several times. All she had as a washing place was a flat piece of slate, so I suppose a lavoir would have been counted as a luxury.

The last documented use of a lavoir was in 1995. Someone asked a lady why she was using this outside washing facility. She explained that she was washing  a piece of tapestry and as she was not on mains water, she found the lavoir useful. As someone who tries to wash pillows and duvets on a regular basis, I can see that a large basin of water would be very helpful.

Also, it would be quite romantic to grow soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) flowers in the garden in order to boil up the plant to obtain a lather and to use my garden lavender as a freshening rinse before hanging my washing over my lavender bush to dry. French washerwomen were called ‘lavandiéres’ because of the close association of doing the laundry and the aromatic plant.

However beautiful your local ‘lavoir’ is now, think of the women carting wet laundry there that had been soaked overnight in washing powder made from cinders, washing the laundry with beef fat soap made with rendered fat and caustic soda, beating it with wooden paddles, hauling it over those roof rafters to drip dry. Their hands would be very rough and sore.

Give thanks that you have a washing machine and mains water and have no need to use your village lavoir however beautiful it looks today!

Joy’s Recipe

 50g dried lavender heads,

1 cup of white vinegar (supposed to brighten laundry)

1 cup water

Gently boil the lavender in the vinegar and water for 5 minutes and leave to infuse.

Strain.

Use 1/3 cup of the lavender water as the fabric softener in the washing machine.