Handmade Soap Lavendar

Little is known of the use of soap in the Dark Ages which followed the fall of Rome. Personal hygiene was probably not a high priority in regions where life was precarious.

The manufacture of soap in Europe and the Mediterranean region had re-emerged by the end of the first millennium. Early centres of production were Marseilles in France and Savona in Italy. It has been suggested that the French word savon, for soap, may have been derived from the name of the latter centre.
In Britain references began to appear in the literature from about 1000AD, and in 1192 the monk Richard of Devizes referred to the number of soap makers in Bristol and the unpleasant smells which their activities produced.

The chemical process for the production of soap has not fundamentally changed. Fats are boiled with alkali which produces soap and glycerin. Potassium salts produce soft soaps whereas sodium soaps are harder and more widely employed. When the metallic radical is calcium or magnesium, then insoluble soaps are produced, which form the scum produced when soap dissolves in hard water. The quality of soap produced is very dependent on the quality of the materials employed in the reaction. Early attempts at soap production relied on ash, produced by burning various vegetable materials, as a makeshift source of alkali. For example, in Spain, the plant salsola was burned to produce an alkaline ash called barilla. This, used in conjunction with locally available olive oil, offered a good quality soap which, by salting-out or "graining" the boiled liquor with brine, allowed the soap to float to the surface, leaving the lye, vegetable colouring and impurities to settle out. This produced what was probably the first white hard soap: Jabon de Castilla, or Castile soap. Originally an important product for the Castile region of central Spain, Castile eventually became the generic name for hard, white, olive oil soaps.

In Britain early production of soap was usually based on rendered animal fat, such as tallow from beef or mutton. Later, growing imports of oils such as palm, coconut, olive, linseed and cottonseed oils offered a wider choice of raw materials and favoured production of soap in sea-ports such as London and Bristol.

It is recorded that a type of black soft soap was known as "Bristol soap". Another harder type, "Bristol grey soap", was claimed to have been supplied in large quantities to London by 1523 at the price of one penny per pound. Volume production of soap in London probably dated from the 16th century.