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New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 152, 31 March 1876, Page 7

The " Dictionaire de I' Architecture Francaise " says under the article " Etuve ." " From all the quotations -which I have given, we may conclude that during the middle ages the use of baths, as they are now taken, was very common; that there were public bathing establishments, in which there were vapor baths and every thing that belongs to the toilet, where refreshments could be had, and where people cotild even spend the night ; that in the castles and great houses there were rooms set apart for baths, nearly always in proximity to the bed-rooms ; that the use of baths during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was much less common than it had been before that period, and was confined almost exclusively to the higher classes." Mr. Wright, in his " History of Domestic Manners and Customs in England," says that : " The practice of warm bathing prevailed very generally in all classes of society, and is frequently alluded to in the mediaeval romances and stories; that people sometimes bathed immediately after rising in the morning, sometimes after dinner, or before going to bed. A bath was also prepared for a visitor ou his arrival from a journey/