SMELLS IN HISTORY · CENTURY
17th century
SmellBook holds 1 checked passage that states this time: the 17th century. The passage records what one source wrote, not what everything smelled like then.
SmellBook records: In an 1876 edition of his History of England, Thomas Babington Macaulay writes that in the seventeenth century a traveller might come upon a village public house, of the kind Walton had described, whose bed sheets were scented with lavender.
Claim: Lavender-scented sheets in seventeenth-century inns · The History of England from the Accession of James II, Volume One (book), published 1876, image 355. The passage itself states the time it describes.
About this time
A period is the time a checked historical passage describes, kept at the precision the evidence gives: a century (only when the passage states one), a year, a month or a day; when a passage states no time, its publication date is used as the latest time it can describe. A smell is linked to it only through a VERIFIED claim on a historical source. Each link records what one source wrote, which may be later than the time it describes; it does not describe a whole city or era, it says nothing about the smell today, and it is not evidence that a smell has changed or disappeared. Decades and centuries only group these records for browsing.
For researchers and developers
Graph record
This period and its links, each with where it comes from, as data.
Permanent identifier smellbook:period:16xx · Graph record (JSON)
Cite as SmellBook. (2026). 17th century (period). SmellBook knowledge graph, dataset release of 2026-10-25. smellbook:period:16xx. https://smellbook.com/periods/16xx
Dataset history In the SmellBook dataset since the dataset release of 2026-10-19.