To wonder which ‘history facts’ aren’t true.

[LeslieKnopefan]

I understand that history isn’t always true and the further we go back in time the harder it is know what the truth is and what is simply made up.

However I recently posted that I thought it was true that Marie Antoinette hair turned white overnight after her best friends head was paraded in front of her and that I only realised it wasn’t when I told a mate who pointed out it couldn’t be true.

So which history facts that people think are true are known to be lies?

golly I am flattered that anyone is searching my 'posting history ' on a Monday afternoon... you really need to get out more..

Seriously though, I think this thread is going to die unless people start talking historical facts again. Let’s move on.

I do need to get out more. That is totally true.

Okay, just to lower the tone of the thread a bit more. Catherine the Great did not die because she was crushed to death by a stallion during intercourse. She had a stroke on the toilet. Like Elvia.

Iwasjustaboutosaythat :) xx

oh the Catherine the Great story ...wasn't the stallion thing put about to discredit her as a powerful woman leader?
I remember telling my mother and brother about her 'being crushed to death by a stallion' and they were just disgusted...with me...

My husbands hair was brown before I went into hospital grey when I came out 3weeks later

The theory of Scott mopping up captain Oates gravy with the last of the crusty bread was first proposed on Red Dwarf, I believe.

But many parts of Britain until more recently, was not that genetically mixed.

It was and it wasn’t. The idea of an ancient stock of Brits being wiped out by successive waves of Anglo Saxons and whatnot is generally regarded as untrue. These groups did arrive and did mix but they definitely didn’t replace people wholesale - the genetics of some of the bones found in the cheddar gorge for ages back match modern day people with a family history of living there quite well.

What we DID have seems to be a reasonably steady stock of people with regular admixture (in SOME parts of the UK) by other peoples - so you see small contributions for vikings, Anglo Saxons, Romans etc on top of that main stock.

The Romans were an interesting period because during their occupation we had people from all over the roman world here - again the main British populace remained as it was but the genetics of some urban cemeteries is up to 20% non UK genetics.

How much of an impact that had on us as a whole isn’t totally clear, but in general the genetic history of Britain is that our distant ancestors came here, stayed here and there were regular, small additions from all over the place.

Some barriers remained - until recently the Y chromosomes of men in the UK and what is now Belgium were more similar than those of men on opposite sides of offas dyke.

Human genetics is fascinating

Elizabeth of Bathory, the "Blood Countess", wasnt.

She was an incredibly influential and powerful widow and her lands and possessions were seized in a power grab by Count Thurzó who divided them up between himself and the king. Most of the witness accounts were obtained by torture (as was usual in those times). Its very likely that the Countess was a practiser of medicine as a lot of noble ladies were, and she certainly was not afraid of issuing very harsh punishments for any maids of hers that were caught stealing or disrespecting her - she was essentially a princess and expected to be treated as such - but none of her punishments would have been seen as especially unusual for the time.

The reports of "he burst in and caught her in the act" are laughable, you dont burst in to the private secret chambers of a princess in her own castle with no warning, but the law said that for someone of her rank to be prosecuted then she had to be caught in the act of harming someone of important enough rank BY someone of important enough rank.

One of my first "hang on a minute, there really are two sides to every story...." moments was reading about William the Conqueror.

At primary school we were taught about poor Anglo-Saxon Harold, fighting bravely to repel the nasty foreigners, only to be struck in the eye with an arrow through sheer bad luck and thus allowing the last successful invasion of our green and hallowed land.

Except...William came to England with his forces because he believed that he was the rightful heir to the throne. He had previously been named heir to Edward the Confessor (his first cousin once removed) and Harold had sworn to support the claim. It is very likely that William had papal support for his claim too, which was sort of the equivalent of the UN supporting someone's claim to be the democratically elected leader of a country where there are concerns about election fixing.

(Plus I love that the French persist in calling him Guillaume le Batard - ie William the Bastard - and that he was descended from a Viking named Rollo, "King Rollo" being a favourite childhood TV show )

Harold's claim to the throne was about as flimsy as William's. His family were extremely powerful though (his sister was married to Edward the Confessor's sister), hence how he wound up on the throne.

Looking at that link of Bundles, I can't see all of it, but it is talking about the genetic history of SE England at the end there. I remember that Kent in the aftermath of Roman collapse was weird. Generally England is spoken of as having been taken over by Angles, Saxons, etc, and we have Wessex, Essex, Sussex etc forming: but Kent is a Romano-British name, and the man who took control there also had a Romano-British name, Cerdic. Fascinating oddities
Don't expect history to be any more simple in the aftermath of collapses than our own time would be! We are talking about much smaller populations then too.
And the link to Belgium that Hypermice talks about - there was a much later influx of people from Flanders. Kickstarted the English wool trade.

Not the wool trade, really, the cloth trade.

England had a thriving wool trade and exported a lot. Edward III invited Flemish weavers into the country to try to naturalise a cloth trade, since it was immensely better business to be able to make your own cloth or export home-made cloth (expensive) rather than home-grown wool (relatively cheap).

I recently did loads of research into this for a paper I'm writing, but it is also a minor plot point in Cynthia Harnett's fab children's novel The Wool Pack.

history is written by the victors hence it is only one side off the story

Please re-write your original question - It should read - Is it reasonable to post stuff I’ve heard as fact, without any research or due diligence of any kind? Or Is it Ok to choose to believe Historical facts even if they cannot be proved because they sound fun?... you choose.

The difference was that Harold Godwinson was recognised by the Witan, William was not. An important factor in Anglo Saxon law. Harold swore an oath, but he was a captive and disputed William's version of events. William carried the Papal banner because the Pope disapproved of the Saxon Church, Stigand and some pre Roman practises in England.

Makes you wonder how much of the science taught us has also been wrong, if hair can be affected by stress from root to tip..

I knew someone who was unlucky enough to be in the Kinds Cross station fire in the 1980's. Saw him a week later, no more. His hair went white.

LRD quite right, thank you!
Britain's never been entirely isolated from Europe.

Well, I was pretty disappointed, having based my whole knowledge of the Hanoverians on the "Four Georges" song from Horrible Histories, to find out that it was not George I who died on the loo, but George II. I no longer know what sources to trust

This is the genetic map of Britain. It shows:

The majority of eastern, central and southern England is made up of a single, relatively homogeneous, genetic group with a significant DNA contribution from Anglo-Saxon migrations (10-40% of total ancestry).

The population in Orkney emerged as the most genetically distinct, with 25% of DNA coming from Norwegian ancestors. This shows clearly that the Norse Viking invasion (9th century) did not simply replace the indigenous Orkney population.

The Welsh appear more similar to the earliest settlers of Britain after the last ice age than do other people in the UK.

So yes there are some areas of Britain where the population are genetically effectively the indigenous people. There are some areas where there is genetic mixing with people from France, Belgium, Germany and Nordic countries. But no we are not a nation of immigrants, with no such thing as a British person, as is often claimed.

Certainly many groups of skilled traders who came to this country were relatively small groups.

That does not mean Britain was isolated in terms of ideas in other countries. Especially before the Reformation, there was a great deal of international flow of ideas between countries that were catholic. This is demonstrated for example through architecture and art.

Lots of people do die on the Loo...

Francis Pryor emphasises the continuity of those peoples we call celtic in the British area possibly since the ice melted, but many others dispute that and the recent re-build of 'Cheddar Man' would suggest not.

Not sure who Francis Pryor is, but there's a gap of about 8000 years between the ice melting and the Celts (of whatever loose definition) arriving. There was a novel I read once that built on the idea of 'proto-Celts' going back to Stonehenge (IIRC it had a long section in the back on how the authors had discussed this as a real possibility with historians of that period when doing the background to the novel); but even that leaves several millennia to account for. Some of the pots found from the Neolithic seem to have quite a lot in common with Spanish pttery of the same era, so the likelihood is there were several waves of people.

Anyway, my (least) favourites:

• That stone age people made everything out of stone. Of course, that's the main material that's left to us: they would have had huge amounts of stuff that biodegraded or was simply too fragile to last.
• That stone age people walked around with skins draped over them and hair over their eyes. I remember being age 12 and having a bit of a strop over this in a fucking history book they made the family look like the Flintstones. If you live where it's -30C and need to have sharp responses for hunting, you're going to have proper clothes and hair tied back.
• That people in previous centuries "like, they all died at 25". Basic demography understanding FAIL.
• That people lived horrible malnourished lives as hunters & gatherers, then they discovered agriculture and were happy ever after. There were actually a lot of disadvantages of the latter way of life: ironically, people only took it up because their populations had grown too much to continue to be supported by H&G.
• That no-one ate grains until the Neolithic (my fave 'paleo diet' rant). For this to be true, someone would have had to have woken up one day and said, "Hey, you see those big areas of grass waving about outside the lodge? I've got an idea, why don't we give up eating bison steaks and just live on those grains instead? Like, from today." In reality, people have always eaten some grains, but ones that stayed intact on harvesting became 'self-selecting' for cultivation. (And don't get me started on the paleo types who will countenance milk where they won't grains--quite how a substance you can only get from a domessticated animal can be "paleo"...)

And breathe...

Lots of people do die on the Loo...

They do indeed. I used to work somewhere that brought me into contact with our coroner and he was always surprised at the number of men who die during sex in cars.

The strain of sitting on the lav can just be the last straw for anyone with something about to blow.