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 ?

I’m reading the inventories (and their wills where they survive) because I’m trying to write a history of my old village. It’s worth remembering that only the better off farmers, perhaps the top 20%, made wills. The pestles and mortars would not have been used for ordinary grain because that was done in the local water powered mill. Many of these people have pewter plates but the poorer people would have been eating from wooden platters which aren’t listed in the inventories. I was surprised to read that some of these better off villagers had windows which were valued separately and which were taken from house to house. The poorest people would just have had shutters.

On the children working thing I guess we did not specify what age we were talking about.

I was thinking of the "what do you do with a 4 year old?" kind of thing (take them with you, see if they can be more useful than a nuisance), rather than talking a 7 yr old down a mine and saying "sit here, open the door when something comes past, if you do it wrong you could lose an arm".

Re children and mills: children used to sleep in cloth hammocks slung under the looms. Possibly not in the big mills, but round here weaving was a cottage industry. The looms took up the whole upstairs. The parents would sleep on a pull out bed in the kitchen. There's a heritage conservation weaver'/ cottage in the next village which is fascinating.

srta

I can absolutely see why she made the remarks she did at her actual execution - but I can't square those initial phrases. Can you think of a reason she might have made them?

I guess if you are in the kind of circumstance where

a - you desperately need the money or you will starve
b - there is nowhere else for your child to go

then you'll be willing for your children will be exposed to increasingly more risky situations from a very young age (or merely unable to prevent it)

Your child will either get good at obeying instructions and behaving sensibly and being alert to danger, or they'll die.

So by age 5 they will be much more street-smart than a modern 10 year old (or they'll be dead).

" I was surprised to read that some of these better off villagers had windows which were valued separately and which were taken from house to house."

When they moved? Not like some sort of timeshare...

I've often wondered as well about how entire speeches are recorded hundreds of years ago. Eg It's quite widely accepted that Ann Boleyn said a few sentences before her execution and they are reported as fact. I've no reason to disbelieve that and yet I do think 'how did anyone write that down word for word accurately? '

Shorthand (an informal kind even if not a recognised shorthand language)?
I would think there were plenty of clerks around who were used to taking dictation and making rapid notes, so I would think it would be possible to make an accurate record even if that wasn't always what happened.

Tabula - no just when they moved to a bigger or smaller landholding. All of the land belonged to the titled man who lived in the big house. It's just that the windows were regarded as personal property and not part of the building which was owned by the landlord.

"no just when they moved to a bigger or smaller landholding."

That's what I figured, and it was interesting...but I just couldn't get past the idea of taking them from house to house on like a weekly basis, rofl.

DW had an earth closet, a tin bath and no running hot water until just after the first Moon landing. Her parents' landlords have been notable arseholes for 500 years.

The question that I often mull over is why Vikings are considered a wholly different people to Anglo-Saxons? Geographically they lived so close to each other. Their Pagan beliefs seem similar, with similar gods. I know that there were different tribes of people etc and you sort of need to think less about geographical locations / countries as they are today but still..

*Cozie
*
From the first associated arrest (Smeaton) to her death, Anne lived for 21 days. Things were moving so fast and inexorably that I think that the reasons stand. As the prosecution was led by her maternal Uncle, I think from when she was taken to the Tower, she knew she was doomed, so was wise to self deprecate without admitting anything.

This is a good article:

m.historyextra.com/feature/tudors/why-did-anne-boleyn-have-die

Talking of moving house, I struggle to get my head round the fact that wealthy Tudors and especially the court were frequently on the move from one house to the next, taking the furniture with them. I understand why they did it (cleaning, and in the case of the court, supplies running out in the different areas), it just seems like such a horrendous faff, especially given how difficult travel was.

In 1862 there was a pit disaster here in which 204 men and boys died, the youngest was aged just 10 and one family lost nine of its members. I can't even imagine how you'd carry on after a loss like that.

There's a living history museum not far from here, it has all different eras and in the 1840s area they had an event in the summer where the lord of the manor came down to the fair to hire workers. They said my 4yo was the perfect age for going out to work in the fields, scaring crows. 4yo didn't want to go for this exciting career opportunity so his lordship reminded us that in 1840 it is perfectly acceptable for a husband to beat his children and his wife provided he uses a rod no thicker than a thumb, a sound beating would encourage 4yo to get out into that field and chase those crows. Before this age children would be at home but would entertain themselves with any older ones who weren't at work (usually girls) helping to take care of the younger ones.

Ruth Goodman has a well written very interesting book on the Tudors. She has done a lot of reinacting and experimental archaeology and includes bits in the book on san pro, keeping clean, clothing etc. I really enjoyed it, I like the small details of normal lives from the past.

Trills part of the museum I mentioned is a mining village. They all lived in cottages owned by the coal board and, provided someone in the household worked down the mine, were able to rent them for a reasonable rate. If the husband/father was injured or died they'd be expected to move out within days and one way around it was to send the eldest son, if he was old enough, to work in the mine in order to meet the requirement of someone in the household working for the pit.

I've seen this suggestion a few times about Henry VIII not having many children -[ [http://www.history.com/news/did-blood-cause-henry-viiis-madness-and-reproductive-woes]]

I'd heard the suggestion Victoria must be illegitimate - It seems to be thought as the Haemophilia mutation in the descendant of Victoria is an usual one it originated with her - though it's possible Victoria, Albert parentage may not have been as advertise or their parents.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemophilia_in_European_royalty

Victoria appears to have been a spontaneous or de novo mutation and is usually considered the source of the disease in modern cases of haemophilia among royalty. Queen Victoria's father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, was not a haemophiliac, and the probability of her mother having had a lover who suffered from haemophilia is minuscule given the low life expectancy of 19th-century haemophiliacs. Her mother, Victoria, Duchess of Kent, was not known to have a family history of the disease, although it is possible that the mutation began at her conception and was passed down only to Victoria and not to her two other children.

If they had Porphyria being passed from Stuarts though Georgians and then through Victoria descendants more likely haemophilia was spontaneous.
www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/hanover_15.html

Talking of moving house, I struggle to get my head round the fact that wealthy Tudors and especially the court were frequently on the move from one house to the next, taking the furniture with them.

I just accepted that - wasn't until I read a biography about Catherine the Great and it was mentioned there that stuff was damaged in moves and lost - that I stopped and thought through the logistics.

Windows have long been a sign of wealth (glass being so expensive), as seen by the introduction of the window tax in much of the UK (17th century? I forget...)

Re moving the court around, I guess in a world with unreliable communications it was one way to keep in touch with what was going on in the world and make sure your opponents knew that you were on top of things. I find it harder thinking about travelling courts: imagine being in prison (horrific in the first place), then told that your case can't be heard for months because the court has jsut moved on and won't be back for a while...

bear my Mil was one of twelve, her and her siblings helped in the fields when she was a child, weeding, stone picking, scaring crows. That would be the 1930s. I think they were a fairly disciplined lot, her father was free with his fists and they'd pretend to be asleep when he returned from the pub. Her youngest sibling was born when she was 17, she helped out a lot, but left home asap.

Wrt dental care, even in the 20th century people would sometimes get all their teeth removed (21st birthday present, anyone?) to save them the agony of bad teeth later in life.

I think life in a mill was like life in a factory today in places like India. We saw lots of beggars who were missing a finger or even hand - not only had they had a life-changing accident they also lost their income and were basically reduced to begging

Yes I remember my grandad having false teeth. His were removed when he was conscripted in WW 2, standard procedure to prevent needing dental care during the war?

I was born just before 1970, and we had no heating at all upstairs or downstairs, only a coal fire and Rayburn in the kitchen which heated the water as well. We lived in the north and it was mighty frosty at times and I adore central heating now.
My older siblings went potato picking every Oct half term, and loved it as they got paid a comparative fortune. I wasn't allowed to go as you had to be over 8 years old. Funny to think this is mostly history now.

srta

I fear we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. She must indeed have been shocked but this was a woman who had spent over 7 years in the Tudor Court, machinating with the best of them, who had battled for many years against the Catholic Church and an established and much-revered Queen who was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella - if I recall - and who was herself an anointed Queen of England. I don't buy it - if indeed she spoke those words, I can see no reason for them. It would be too early to say.

As I said, I can't get my head round it. Everything else, Yes - but not that.