Medieval laundry involved intense physical labor, making your own laundry soap, some pretty frightening cleaning products, and literally beating the dirt out of your clothes. Most people in Medieval Europe wore linen undergarments that covered their whole bodies to keep their outer layers cleaner, and only laundered their linens. There was no medieval laundry room, instead you had to take your clothes to a stream, river, fountain, or communal city wash-house and do them there. The history of laundry soap isn't any more pleasant, with most people using home-made lye solutions made from ashes or harsh black liquid soap, and gentle Castille soap being much more expensive. Sometimes clothes had to be soaked for hours at a time in lye or ammonia to bleach stains and grayness out, before being taken to the river and rinsed, beaten with a paddle, and rinsed again. Finally, after washing, a medieval laundress had to rely on the weather and spread the wet clothes out on the fields to dry, hoping and praying that it didn't rain.
Doing laundry in the middle ages was an incredibly hard job, and the social position of medieval laundresses could range from highly-paid employees of royal households, to an underclass of low-status female workers who frightened the medieval patriarchy by doing mutual aid when rejected by religion-based social services.
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