If somebody from the 15th Century was stood in front of you, wearing jeans and a top, do you think you’d be able to tell they were from a different era?!

[Parrotanne]

I’m bored! I know that people are said to have become taller as the centuries pass but I wondered if there would be any other discernible differences. Differences that would be obvious just by looking - the 15th C speech would most likely be a bit of a clue!

So if, for instance, 15th C person was stood in front of you at the bus stop, dressed in Boden/Primark/Next/Any High Street Shop would you realise something was a bit different?!

I loved Catweazle but looking at pictures of him on google images I can't see that sort of thing being commissioned today! He does look slightly alarming

@MareofBeasttown

I feel like I read somewhere that Queen Elizabeth bathed once a month, and was thought reckless and overly persnickety because commoners bathed once in six months!

But that was baths. They did hands face feet and teeth daily.

I think willow bark (the precursor of asprin)was used to make a pain killing tea from quite a long time ago as it is a native plant. Although this might lead you to get burned as a witch!

Women used to use a tincture of belladonna to give them attractive dilated pupils. I think overuse had the drawback of causing them to go quite barmy though!

[quote MuseumGardens]The man in this colourised photo from 1865 looks very modern (and very good looking.)
www.google.com/amp/s/boingboing.net/2016/08/03/colorized-1865-photo-of-abraha.html/amp[/quote]
That's amazing how modern he looks. Colouring photos definitely makes people more relatable. It's like the WW1 footage that was colourised (and sound added) "and the men immediately looked and seemed so contemporary.

@lljkk

Bad teeth*, bad body odour, home-haircut (men), no hair cut (women). Smallpox scars? Skinny as feck if like 95% of the population in that era.

Yeah, those things might be give-aways.

*There's a reason no one smiled in old portraits. Greek statues don't feature smiles. Roman coins don't feature smiles. Ancient Egyptians & Mexicans had dentures & a Roman had dental implant by age 30. No one had great teeth in adulthood.

Nope, this is because showing your teeth was associated with lust or rage.

If you look at archaeological records, there are plenty of people with perfectly decent teeth. In the fifteenth century, I would expect people's teeth to be a bit abraded - bread is quite gritty, especially if you're poor - but not horrifically rotten.

(I bet there are more 'the bad teeth' posts but I had to stop and reply. I'm a medieval historian; this is one of my pet peeves.)

My father wouldn’t watch WW2 in colour when it first came out because he found it too upsetting. He could watch documentaries in black and white with no problem. He was a naval lieutenant in the D Day landings and flat out refused to watch colour footage of it.

@BeenThruMoreThanALilBit

Depending on class, 25yo woman would probably look a lot older than your average, Western modern 25yo woman.

She will have borne children most likely, had a decade or more of work behind her, probably be illiterate. Possibly a bit coarse. Her mannerisms, gait, manners, body language would all reflect unspoken norms of the era: men first.

Hair would probably be long.

Not necessarily. At points in the medieval period, as many as one in three women never married; often it was as many as one in four. Average age of marriage in England was early to mid 20s, and premarital sex was frowned upon.

Fascinating thread, as PP have said teeth would’ve been OK as no sugar (for most), people would have been smaller and healthier. I wonder what a 15th c. Person would have made of a 18th C. person? Would they be more similar to us or them?

@PineappleWilson

When did the letter J get added to the alphabet? I've got it in mind that it was later than C15th so they probably couldn't read, but if they could, may query the letters we use.

I and J are often used interchangeably (as are u and v), but this isn't quite the same question as whether they were in the alphabet. The alphabet fifteenth century children learned was the Latin alphabet, usually, which never includes w (that only gets firmly incorporated in the seventeenth century), and which also includes some common abbreviations that people treated like letters.

If you're writing in English, though, you have extra letters. There's thorn, which makes a 'th' sound and looks like a y (so you get 'ye olde tea shoppe' which is really 'the olde tea shoppe'). And there's yogh, which looks like 3 and makes a 'gh' or 'y' sound.

They wouldn't easily read our handwriting or print, and we wouldn't easily read their handwriting. But most reasonably well-to-do people could read.

I think if a 15th century person in modern dress was at the bus stop you would subconsciously register difference but you would explain to yourself it in a way that made sense - neurodiverse, foreign.
I would be interested in the question of what if they were in 15th century clothes- would you just think ‘reenactor’ or would there somehow be a coherent package of differences such that you would realise?

I am used to wandering through my local city in 15th century dress because I am a costumed interpreter for a heritage site and nobody turns a hair generally, though sometimes people ask if I am a Viking.

@SarahAndQuack it's fascinating how ingrained certain ideas have become isn't it? Do you have any sense of why the bad teeth, body odour image of the medieval period has got so fixed in our imaginations? Is it a Whig history progression from our dark past concept? Or maybe a Victorianism (the 19th century has a lot to answer in our understanding of the past I always think)?

I did wonder if it is a tv and film stereotype but the classic 1950s historical films and even modern stuff like the White Queen tend to be too clean so maybe not.

Someone mentioned the Mary Rose museum. They seem to be fighting an endless battle to convince people she didn't sink on her maiden voyage. They dont even know where the myth stems from! (Though they suspect Blue Peter...)

Also, I am very jealous you are a re enactor and get to walk around in 15th century dress. I would just think "oh cool" if I saw you...

I’ve never understood the bad teeth myth. If you don’t have sugar you don’t really have bad teeth.

@terrywynne, I think it's basically anti-Catholic sentiment that grows into Whig history. And the 'medieval' becomes a sort of handy container for all the negative stereotypes. People think witch hunts must be a medieval phenomenon, because surely they can't have to do with the Renaissance and sweet Protestant reason?

It's super racist, too. There's loads of rhetoric about 'medieval' Islamic culture or 'medieval' Iranians or whatever. Grim. As if they live 500 years in the past.

I could bang on about this for far too long.

There's a lovely bit in a book by Lucy Boston where she imagines a boy from the twelfth century time travelling into the modern day ('modern' being a few decades ago now). What he's really struck by is the silence and absence of wildlife - no birds singing, nothing rustling in the hedgerows. That really fascinated me and stayed with me.

Just watched the video a PP (sorry forgot who it was) linked to earlier about the way people talked in the past, really interesting so thanks for posting. I knew everyone had the Northern style short a in bath, glass etc, until relatively recently, but the accent sounded quite Northern until around the 1800s and only really London from the late 1880s.

Their teeth were actually mostly ok because they didn’t have sugar or carbonated drinks so their teeth would most likely be fine.
Smallpox scars could easily pass as acne scars.

Biggest giveaway would probably be the odour or the way they spoke.

@SarahAndQuack, interesting about the anti-Catholic element and, yes, "medieval" does still seem to be used as an insult towards other cultures.

The sounds thing is interesting. I know that there is a drive in some quarters to recognise the value of smell and sound when considering the historic landscape & the environment around historic buildings rather than just thinking in terms of sight.

Personally, I think my view of the medieval and Tudor periods when I was first learning history was heavily skewed by the Horrible History books. I loved the series and it really got me interested in history but, looking back, the entire premise is that history has to be gruesome and gory to interest children. With the result that the historic examples they use tend towards the extreme end of the scale because that was their selling point (and they do include some myths). If I remember correctly, the author was objecting to his own school lessons that he had found dull. As an adult I am no longer as sure that history can't be interesting to children unless it is "terrible", "measly" etc!

I know what you mean. I love Horrible Histories. But I think history teaching has got a lot more interesting. When I was at school it was endless world war stuff or dead royalty. At least now they do things like history of medicine, which could be interesting without necessarily being a gore-fest.

I still have my childhood collection of Horrible Histories! Though I haven't read them in a while... And I do like the TV series (at least the ones with the original cast).

I spent 5 years at school doing 19th century and an odd patchwork of 20th century history. Teachers did make it fun but they just had no interest in pre-1800 history, so Horrible Histories it was.

I often wonder this when I see old photos of really young men going off to war pre WW1, especially when the photos are colourised.

Sometimes the hair styles give away the era, but the faces could easily pass for current times.

Re periods, women used rags, sometimes rags stuffed with wool to be more absorbent.

If you say rags it sounds so much worse and more primitive than if you say menstrual cloths, doesn’t it?

I mean, I have no doubt it will have been pieces cut from worn garments rather than brand new linen but I bet you anything you like they hemmed them and folded or rolled them carefully rather than just ripping a bit off and shoving it up there.

Yes, rags really just mean worn out clothes.

It would probably be a darn sight more pleasant to have nicely time-softened linen, than those horrible scented pads Always keep trying to flog.

I love the Mary Rose museum and met someone recently who is working there on a project to try and determine the number of men on board when she sank (Battle of the Solent, and definitely not a maiden voyage as she had been in service for decades).

I love it too but I am a bit worried about the fact they are advertising a new fully immersive experience