What questions do you have about stuff from History, or am I the only one?

[EverySongbirdSays]

Hi all, HQ here. We're moving this thread over to History Club now where Songbird will be starting a Part 2 thread for more History quizzical shenanigans

The main history thing I've been pondering for the last couple of days since the weather shifted is the history of clothes.

So... how did Early Man manage in the winter, how did they make clothes out of animal skin?

After that, I understand that clothes production as we know it today began with the industrial revolution.

But how did people manage for clothes you know before we had cotton or machinery

How/when did we realise you could knit wool to make a jumper?

I'm sorry if it's a bit of a stupid question

Has anyone got any stupid questions I might know the answer to ?

Most small kids probably just went along to work with their parents and did a bit of fetching and carrying and picking up - because they couldn't be left alone.

Presumably you don't beat them, InsideVoice...

"Most people don't know who their fourth cousins are."

Hmm, I'm in my second small town where they definitely do though, lol.

But yes part of it is the record keeping, part of it is because they were deliberately intermarrying constantly.

conference - ooh, please share!

tabulah - thanks! That makes sense.

emotions - well, I was wondering along those lines too, but didn't want to offend any Americans on the thread!

I also have a vague recollection of a Prof Alice Roberts program where she went to visit a tribe in a very cold place IIRC & they made her some clothes & boots in the old way. I've been on the so that may not make much sense....

Olenna, 20K!

That's hardly subtle!

But having done a lot of work involving researching the British Army during WWII, it's noticeable that it got less elitist during the course of World War II. Suddenly you get carpet salesmen becoming majors.

It's my understanding that Cromwell not only banned celebrating Christmas but closed down all the theatres, which was an almighty shame. When Charles was restored to the throne the 1660s became a bit like the 1960s with "free love" etc. They had a merry old time then. Feel free to correct me.

Most small kids probably just went along to work with their parents and did a bit of fetching and carrying and picking up - because they couldn't be left alone

Small kids were used for all sorts of jobs up here in the North. They worked in mills, going under the machines whilst they were in use because adults couldn't fit and they went down the pit as well, working alone in the dark as trappers etc. In a nearby village, in 1838, 26 children died in the Huskar Pit Disaster, with the youngest being only 7 years old.

Presumably, they were brought up knowing they had to earn their keep and they had no choice but to go along with it.

Conferencepear - I would imagine they were using some spices but I don't think that's necessarily the main use for a pestle and mortar. You might grind nuts, grains to make them more digestible, or just use it as we would a blender. Pounding things is quite a common instruction in recipes iirc.
Oh, and sugar too if you can afford it - comes in lumps that you have to grind.
When I was pretending to be a 17th century kitchenmaid I once spent ages grinding up roasted eggshells in an attempt to reproduce a contemporary laundry whitener (failed miserably and everyone got their linen back with bits of eggshell all over it).

I think from consulting Alison Weir's 'Britain's Royal Families'plus some googling, that Anne of Cleves was descended from Edward I's daughter Margaret. It's a fascinating book, a detailed genealogy of English, Scottish and British royal families from 800AD to 1990 (last entry being Eugenie).

From it I found my favourite 'did you know' fact - that, despite the tradition that the English Crown goes to the eldest son, since the Norman invasion, only 11 of the 41 monarchs were the first born son of the preceding king or queen.

Re the teeth thing. For centuries Sugar wasn't available and teeth were cleaned with salt/crushed egg shell and a twig a tasty urine rinse was used too
When sugar arrived and only the rich could have it it became a marker of wealth to have brown rotted teeth yummy
As for gum disease I think it was as common as it is now although there was a belief that you would loose a tooth for every baby so it wasn't uncommon for a girl to have all her (healthy-ish) teeth removed before marriage as part of the dowry
Mind you it was only 50 ish years ago that dentist would fill teeth so you didn't 'get decay'!

I've another question for all your clever people.

'I'm not sure if that's true or not, but as the Chinese were pretty clever and seem to have invented everything it wouldn't surprise me.'

So the Chinese were pretty bright, as we're the Greeks and also the Romans.

How come they were so vastly ahead of other civilisations, for example, Aborigines in Australia?

Was it because of their proximity to each other?

Re Anne Boleyn, for Cozie

Anne was warned to be very brief in her remarks before death, and within her few words she praised Henry as a "Most Merciful Prince" and asked that no one took up her cause.

Along with her reported remarks to Kingston, it all paints a picture of a woman terrified for the fate of her toddler daughter, and her remaining own sister, Mary Boleyn.

Secondly, at her trial she DID protest her innocence but knew by then that it was helpless.

Finally, she was initially sentenced to burn, but Henry was "merciful" and commuted the sentence to death by Calais swordsman.

For my part, I have no doubt that she was innocent of all charges and was one of the first of many of Henry's political murders.

Necessity and war are the parents of invention.

Generally you get greater innovation in places that have extremes of climate / periods of hardship, and of course settlements are more likely to experience hardship than people that can just move on, so settling drives invention.

Proximity to other tribes and peoples generally involves war which drives inverntion. The Greeks and Romans loved a ruck.

olenna which regiments do that? I've worked with some of the supposedly most prestigious and they have officers from lots of backgrounds. Granted, many Etonians etc but also a decent number of "normal" middle class folk. Including some who've transferred in from the Corps.

lumela did the elitism return to any extent post WW2?

Gen, I don't know: my knowledge of the post-war army is limited.

olenna 'not the fun loving ones' so funny. Can't get Wierd Al, Amish Paradise out of my head now.....

Regarding leisure/entertainment and not freezing to death, I recently read Independent People by Halldor Laxness which is a novel about a family of subsistence farmers living in an Icelandic croft at the beginning of the 20th century. There is definitely nothing 20thC about their life though - the crofters continued to live in pretty much the same way they had since medieval times, well into the 1920s if this book is anything to go by.

For most of the year there is very little time or energy to spare for leisure - spring is lambing season, summer is spent harvesting hay to feed the animals over the winter, autumn is a struggle to keep moving the sheep to better pastures, trying to get them fat and healthy enough to survive winter while they keep trying to drown themselves in bogs! In the winter though, everything kind of stops - being Iceland, it's dark 24 hours a day during midwinter and the snow is over 10 feet deep. The ground floor of the croft is given over to animal stalls and the family lives in a loft above, so the warmth of the animals would act almost like underfloor heating, and they don't have to venture outside to feed them (although when their flock gets bigger they start wintering the stronger sheep in a barn outside, so they have to spend a lot of time shovelling snow in the dark to keep a clear path between the house and the barn). But apart from clearing snow and looking after the sheep, there's not much work they can get on with and they basically have nothing to do but sit around indoors with only the kitchen fire providing a little light. They sew clothes in the semi-darkness, mend tools, eat the same meagre rations every day, and mostly they tell stories. The father recites the old Norse sagas for the children, teaches them to memorise the verses, makes up some poems of his own.

That's why Iceland and other Nordic countries have such a strong and well-preserved stock of folklore, and value literature and storytelling and poetry more than most other countries - when you're stuck in permanent darkness for months at a time, telling stories is the only way to pass the time.

If you want a quite-serious book that looks at the question of why people from Europe went out and colonised the Americas and not the other way around, you'd like Guns Germs and Steel.

If I recall correctly lot of it is about available plants and animals for domestication, and the ability to share and spread those animals and plants because of the continent being biggest West to East (so similar climate, so you can grow the same things) rather than being big North to South (if you take a plant too far out of its comfort zone it won't grow, and you cant expand your agricultural civilisation).

(I should point out that my claim about the value Nordic cultures place on literary traditions is just based on my own observations, not facts!)

I saw a review or something once for a book about how important the oak tree had been for Britain i.e. trees=> ships => the navy + trade = world domination.

And while we'e on books, has anybody ever come across a book about the impact of dogs on the development of human culture? Yeah, I know it sounds bonkers, but think about it: without dogs, we'd still have the bugger of a time herding or hunting. They were used for haulage, and for guarding camps and flocks, and they also cleaned up behind the children (vom: they still do, given half a chance...)

Without dogs, we'd have been a bit of disaster as hunters, and we'd never have become nomadic herders. Somebody must have written about it.

That's fascinating, Starchild.