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Thu 14 Apr, 2005 09:07 pm
Here's a little something that was forwarded to me today in an email. Hope someone else finds it as interesting as I did.
Life in the 1500's
The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500's:
These are interesting...
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet , so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off.. It was a sign of wealth that a man could "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."
Hmmm, okay, thanks. I wonder why anybody would bother making something like that up? Can't see the point. Either way, seemed interesting.....at the time.
Dunno. It's reads kinda like someones creative writing exercise.
Could just be someone with too much time on their hands. Internets full of 'em.
Reyn,
Yes, this is a hoax, or urban myth if you will.
You can see an example at
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/1500.htm
hehe, Thanks 'trep'......but Adrian already kindly supplied that page - 4 posts up from here! :wink:
Oops, I see it now ;-)
Either a case of great minds think alike, or fools seldom differ :-o
REyn wrote:
Quote:I wonder why anybody would bother making something like that up?
Perhaps they just wanted to see how stupid a statement would have to be and still be believed. Sad fact is that people will believe practically anything they read.
Below is something I found on a "origins of phrases" website. It can only have been invented by someone deliberately pushing absurdity to the limit - they can't possibly have believed it. Most of the oher "origins" on the website were wrong too, though this is the silliest of them. And yet that site is listed by any number of educational sites as "a useful resource for English-language studies".
What can you do?
Quote:PATENT LEATHER After the Patten shoe which the young women wore in the buttery. When the cream spilled on their shoes, the fat would tend to make the leather shiny.
- oh, and by the way, here's an even more detailed debunk of "Life in the 1500s":
Well, there was once a fashion for shoes that were raised on extremely high platforms. This was basically a style reserved for the very wealthy in Italy. Originally a fancy sort of clog -- the wooden soled shoes of the peasant -- the more shapely, carved and decorated base became a fashion statement. Eventually, the bottoms, which may have been called patens, were so high, women had to walk accompanied by servants who literally held the walker up.
My father once told me that patent leather was short for patented and that all patent leather was synthetic. That's not true. I've owned shiny shoes that were made of plastic and others that were made of highly polished leather.
The 16th-century platform-soled shoes were called chopines. Shakespeare mentions them in Hamlet.
Patent leather has been made since 1707 and was just what it sounds like: leather that has been varnished by an industrial process protected by a patent granted to the inventor. The process has certainly been updated many times since then and fresh patents will have been granted each time. It wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the shoes sold as "patent leather" nowadays are wholly synthetic.
But even if the meaning of "patent leather" weren't a known fact, this story about pattens and butteries couldn't possibly be true, for at least four reasons:
- A buttery wasn't a room for making butter in (you did that in a dairy). It was a room for storing "butts" (i.e. barrels) of provisions. Drinks such as wine and beer, as well as solid foods such as salt meat or apples, were what you would keep in a buttery, not cream.
- Pattens weren't shoes. They were a kind of clog, in use in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, consisting of a wooden sole raised off the ground by a metal ring an inch or so deep. They were put on over the shoes when walking out of doors in dirty roads, to keep the wearer out of the mud and protect the shoes. They were therefore never worn indoors, in butteries or anywhere else, any more than anyone would wear galoshes indoors.
- Cream was a valuable product, and any dairymaid who habitually spilt it would very soon be an ex-dairymaid.
- Housewives and dairy farmers have known for hundreds of years, even though they had never heard of bacteriology, that the cleaner you kept your dairy, the better the quality of your butter and cheese would be. They hired the cleanest, tidiest dairymaids they could get and would have been horrified by the idea of a dairy in which the workers squelched around treading in spilt cream!
I LOVED the original post and Id like to believe it all as they sound completely reasonable.
Why would somebody bother to make up a hoax about something so irrelevant??!!!
Maybe the person who said it was a hoax was lying to us.
As someone said, its difficult to tell if what we read is true so to me, if it makes sense,I may as well believe it.
I told my boss who is getting married in 3 months about why its traditional for the bride to hold a bouquet.
material girl said:I
Quote: LOVED the original post and Id like to believe it all as they sound completely reasonable.
Well, I have an degree in British archaeology and have studied the history of everyday life in Britain for thirty years, and it sounds like crap.
I could take up several pages telling you why but the two URLs that were given earlier in this thread have already done that. Have you bothered to look at either of them?
Quote:Why would somebody bother to make up a hoax about something so irrelevant??!!!
Who knows? (Why did somebody bother to fake Piltdown Man?) But a hoax it certainly is. Perhaps it wasn't originally meant to deceive; perhaps it was a spoof, or a creative writing exercise along the lines of "write the stupidest thing you can think of with a straight face".
Quote:Maybe the person who said it was a hoax was lying to us.
Nope.
Quote:As someone said, its difficult to tell if what we read is true
But it gets easier if you read an intelligent critique - go look at those websites. Or - here's a radical idea - try checking any of it out for yourself. Any good library should have reference books which will tell you that the origins of "threshold" "wake", "graveyard shift" and "dead ringer" are not remotely like what "Life in the 1500s" says.
Quote:so to me, if it makes sense, I may as well believe it.
Fine, if you want to be taken for a fool.
Quote:I told my boss who is getting married in 3 months about why its traditional for the bride to hold a bouquet.
Then you've told her a stupid untruth.
I got half way through and thought the real accounts were dull.
I wont mind being taken for a fool.
My boss is a he and he liked it.
So people never used to carry perfumes around to cover bad smells?
Whose the Piltdown man?
Piltdown man was a hoax perpetrated for obscure reasons, very likely just to get attention, by some men who had just enough credentials to cause their claims to be taken seriously. At a rock quarry in Piltdown in Sussex, in 1911, a gentleman named Dawson claimed to have found remains of a hominid, and there was quite a flurry in the relevant fields of study. Neanderthal man had been discovered, Peking man and Java man had been discovered, but there were still "missing links" which would fill in the gaps in the "family tree" of humans. Piltdown man was advanced as being one of those links.
It proved to be one of the most durable hoaxes of all time. The examination of the fossil fragments was handled badly, and it was more than 40 years before the hoax was exposed.
You will find a complete discussion of the Piltdown man hoax
here[/url].
It proved to be very embarrassing to science, the more especially in light of the outraged response which "revealed truth" christians had had to the publication of
The Descent of Man in 1870. It gave the "creationists" of two generations ago a lot of ammunition to shoot at a theory of evolution.
syn, your links did not work.
Hey, Set. I knew that, but not in the detail which you describe. Surprised?
Reyn, interesting thread, hoax or no!
syntinen -- Thanks for the point about butteries: that was something I knew (I had been a docent at the Henry Ford Museum while in college and in the Village part of the museum is a cottage from the Cotswold region with a buttery.) but, somehow, the word was submerged in the short piece of text.
And thank you for the word chopine. I'll have to look at Hamlet for it. When I was a young sprout, I wanted to be an archaeologist and I read and reread many books on the subject as well as other books about material culture. One of my favorites was, "the Story of Clothes," by Edith Allen, which is where I learned about chopines. Haven't read the book since 1960 or 61.
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Material Girl -- Actually, the reality is much more interesting. the original post was just too facile to be believable.
It's when the players arrive at Elsinore, and Hamlet says to the boy who plays the Queen something along the lines of "By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer heaven by the height of a chopine" in other words, "My, how you've grown!"
I haven't got my copy of Hamlet to hand, so that line's from memory, but it's something like that.
Pattens were generally country or working-class wear, but for some reason in the Regency period it was socially OK for ladies to wear them in the streets of Bath, and a Regency lady wrote that one of the things she couldn't stand about Bath was "the ceaseless clink of pattens" as the ladies clumped to and fro on their clogs. (Bath, being in the West Country of England, is proverbially wet, so the streets were very often muddy, calling for extra protection for ladies' shoes.)
Sorry about the link - try this:
The Bad Old Days
I have a series of books on word and phrase origins from around the 1950s, put together by a retired prof., so I knew that some of the etymologies here were spurious.
I wonder whether the author of this thing was someone who thought himself right?
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