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 1500s:
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. 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 dogs, cats and other small animals (mice rats, and 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 really 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 on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start sliding outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entryway, hence, “a threshold.”
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 the stew had food in it that had been there for quite awhile - 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 a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale paysan bread which was so old and hard that they could use them for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood and old bread. After eating off wormy moldy trenchers, one would get “trench mouth.”
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 whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them 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 they 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, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought 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.”
Stand up and walk out of your history. - Phil McGraw
Peace is preferable to a place in history. - Justo P Benitez
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. - Virginia Woolf
It's a very good historical book about history. - Dan Quayle
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. - Winston Churchill
History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot. - Mark Twain
You have to look at history as an evolution of society. - Jean Chretien
We learn from history that we do not learn from history. - Georg W F Hegel
The trouble with history is its dependence upon diplomats. - Gerald F Lieberman
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. - Edmund Burke
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living. - Lawrence Durrell
I'm just the smallest dot in a big map of human history. - Ben Casnocha
Study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft. - Winston Churchill
A people without history is like the wind on the buffalo grass. - Lakota Sioux Proverb
Nowadays the clinical history too often weighs more than the man. - Martin H. Fischer
Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy. - Margaret Thatcher
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke. - Max Eastman
If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography. - William Lyon Mackenzie King
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. - Thomas Jefferson
Women with pasts interest men. They hope history will repeat itself. - Mae West
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition. - Henry James
All of history is fused with His meaning because history is HIS-story. - Ravi Zacharias
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. - Mark Twain
History never repeats itself. The historians repeat each other. There is a wide difference. - Oscar Wilde
Once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. - Seamus Heaney
I can't understand why I flunked American history. When I was a kid there was so little of it. - George Burns
Step out of the history that is holding you back. Step into the new story you are willing to create. - Oprah Winfrey
There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good. - Stephen Colbert
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present. - Bil Keane
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. - Aldous Huxley
Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is God's Gift. That's why we call it the 'Present.' - Bill Keane
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. - Dwight D Eisenhower
I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power. - Robert Frost
Street League Skateboarding is the premier professional skateboarding league in the world, with the biggest prize money in history. - Rob Dyrdek
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. - Mitch Ratcliffe
Hillary Clinton was the worst Secretary of State in the history of the country. The world came apart under her reign as Secretary of State. - Donald Trump
I know of no other man in our time, or indeed in recent history, who so convincingly demonstrated the power of the spirit over material things. - Stafford Cripps
The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth. - Jim Harrison
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic. - Bertrand Russell
see also History Section
1910 Street Light Replacement
1920 Strongwoman
1934 Modern Home
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