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 think power had moved away from the crown by Hanovers times - George I spoke little English and Walpole was first Prime minster under him and sort of developed parliament more to what we have today. They did all fall out with their first born sons - so drama there.

I think the civil war and it's aftermath dominate and overshadow the Stuart's a bit.

Tudors had a lot of personal power and were divided by religion and the religious changes sweeping Europe and England at the time. Plus there was lots of sex and intrigue surrounding them.

When you think about Early Man, it's a miracle we aren't alraeady instinct.

How did dogs go from threat to pet?

Queen Anne? Just a woman, innit...

Christ it's upsetting. She was pregnant 17 times. SEVENTEEN. 15 of these were either stillbiths, miscarriages or died with an hour(s) of birth

I read historical fiction by Jean Plaidy - worked way through a shelf at secondary school which promoted me to look up stuff about many figures subsequently so do know little about her. One of her sons did make it to teenage years but was always ill though liked by William - but did die.

Read since she almost certainly has a malformed pelvis to lose quite so many children.

With her though it more about the people round her - the rise of the Churchills - Sarah Churchill being a close friend and her husband a respected general and politician.

Queen Anne did have one son who survived early childhood, William, Duke of Gloucester, but he suffered from hydrocephalus and died at the age of 11, before Anne became Queen.

It was his death that prompted the Act of Settlement, which tabularasah mentioned, which laid down that if there were no heirs from William III or Anne the throne should go to the Electress Sophia of Hanover and her heirs. Sophia was the granddaughter of James VI and I and the nearest suitable Protestant candidate. We nearly had a Queen Sophia, but she died two months before Anne, so it was her son George who became King in 1714.

How did dogs go from threat to pet?

Read in New scientist about some research in Russian with wolves - takes very few generations to bred friendly docile wolves - I think they said two or three as you pick docile parents to bred from.

They were probably scavenging food from early man camp sites and few got closer and were docile or lost parents and were cute pups so gradually got domesticated and then bred from.

"Walpole was first Prime minster under him and sort of developed parliament more to what we have today."

That's why I think there's less interest in the Hanoverians...that's pretty much where the monarch becomes a figurehead and politics aren't controlled by them anymore.

There's the odd person that people are still interested in, but it's in more of a scandal and sensation way.

Where with the Tudors you've got all of that plus power and huge changes going on.

"How did dogs go from threat to pet?"

I think the theory is that they hung around scavenging and people noticed they might be useful and trainable, or if you read Jean m auel...it was all Ayla, rofl.

I do find it odd that they didn't have horses till the Spanish invaded - as I have such an image of plain Indian's on horse back - that what I remember from primary school and our history lessons.

Horses actually evolved in North America, then spread to Eurasia, but became extinct in North America (forgot when and why, but possibly similar to other large mammals then).

The horse was reintroduced by the Spanish and quickly taken up by some native American tribes.

The safety pin wasn't invented til the 20th century so your Regency women certainly wouldn't have been using them.
Do wonder how they coped though.

I read a biography on Queen Anne, she almost certainly didn't have gout either. The author speculated that she was large because she was ill, not the other way round. Some kind of genetic condition IIRC, if you look at the pattern of when she lost the children along with her other symptoms it suggests something but can't remember what

I was educated in NI and we covered none of this stuff other than a slight touch on Cromwel

I was educated in England, but by the Sisters of Mercy, I learned about Daniel O'Connell and the potato famine.

I did learn about the Tudors, but in a slightly warped way, ie Mary I was a good queen for returning England to 'the true faith', no mention of the hundreds she had executed.

After Queen Anne had no surviving children, people actively wanted Electress Sophia of Hanover as next in line for the throne - she was seen as intelligent, learned, a good ruler and generally an all round good thing. So they did a bit of creative juggling with succession. Unfortunately Sophia died younger than expected, leaving William III ready to inherit the throne of Britain, and everyone saying 'whoops, not our plan...'

I was educated in Wales - we learned NOTHING about the history of the monarchy, or of Welsh history, or of WWI or II

We learned about the Industrial Revolution. That's about it. Bloody stupid National Curriculum.

Not sure you can say Sophia died 'younger than expected', she was 83. And it was George I, her son, who inherited, (as laid down in the Act of Succession) not William III, who had died 13 years before.

What's the deal with monarchs taking on their special monarch name, and when did it start?

Victoria was Alexandrina and is the oldest one I know of - were any of her predecessors using pretend names?
Edward VI was Albert after his father
George V was actually called George
Edward VIII was David (David is a good King name you'd think - why haven't we had one? Is it too presumptuous? It's not as if his parents didn't know he'd be the next King when he was born)
George VI was Albert

In terms of what languages were spoken in England before the Anglo-Saxons, there is speculation that there may have been Germanic speaking tribes already present in the south and east. This is due to same tribal name appearing also in mainland Europe e.g. Belgae and the fact that the Anglo-Saxons only seem to have contributed about 30% to the gene pool. It is possible that Celtic and Germanic speakers were already living near each other. There is also the question then of why so many would abandon speaking Celtic languages in favour of English. However, there is no absolute evidence for that hypothesis and it certainly depends on assuming that tribes such as the Belgae were speaking a Germanic language. I read a fascinating book about the history of the Dutch language and the theory is that the linguistic border in Belgium is very old.
Genes can tell part of the story but language/culture is more complex. It only takes a couple of generations of concerted effort to make people abandon what is perceived as the 'inferior' language. France was hugely successful at eliminating its minority languages - hardly any Flemish, Catalan or Breton speakers left for example.

'I did learn about the Tudors, but in a slightly warped way, ie Mary I was a good queen for returning England to 'the true faith', no mention of the hundreds she had executed.'

I think my Protestant education was equally warped. We seem to have done 'the causes of the Dissolution' mainly by drawing pictures of monks doing dodgy things (I still have my exercise book), nothing at all about the good the monasteries did or the fact that Henry wanted the money.

The Irish Potato Famine never came up at all, neither did any other bad things the empire might have been involved in - that slave trade thingummy for example...

I think the teaching is more thoughtful these days.

(BTW, re pestles and mortars in Tudor cookery, the Peter Brears English Heritage booklet on Tudor food gives spinach flan - 'put the spinnage in a stone morter, grind it smal with two dishes of butter melted, and foure rawe eggs', cheese tart - 'take cheese, pare it, mince it, and bray it in a mortar with the yolks of Egs till it be like paste' and various others.)

I love this thread.

"Queen Anne? Just a woman, innit..."
I think that a lot of what we're thinking about here would have been regarded as trivia by former generations and it's only since we've had more women historians who are interested in women's lives have done some research.

"safety pins" When I was a student I had the good fortune to go behind the scenes at the V & A where they had many Georgian dresses made from the newly available printed cotton which women had made for themselves. Lots of them had ordinary dressmaking pins rusted into them which the museum staff daren't take out. Obviously the young women had gone to the ball with an unfinished dress. The woman who was showing them to me said she thought that perhaps women feined 'the vapours" because their dresses were falling to pieces.

CountessofFitzdorrel - thanks for the information on mortars and pestles.

I read a really interesting book about rabies the other day, sort of a cultural history covering everything from the domestication of wolves/dogs to the fascination with rabies in media (Cujo, anyone?), links to werewolf mythology, and attempts at treatment and prevention over the years. It was really good, and now I'm planning to do some more reading around medical history because the story of Louis Pasteur in particular is just staggering to me. Just the sheer number of lives saved by his work and that of the other scientists working with him (whose work he may have passed off as his own because incredible men have incredible egos).

He developed a rabies vaccine which was given as a course of I think 13? injections as a post-exposure treatment to stop the virus from reaching the brain. The first human test subject was a 9 year old boy called Joseph Meister who'd been attacked by a rabid dog, and whose GP had heard about Pasteur's studies and sent the boy to Paris as his only hope of possible survival. The boy wasn't yet showing any symptoms (if he had been, it would've been too late for the vaccines to do anything) and they started the vaccine course, with Pasteur looking on as a paediatrician administered the injection each day - Pasteur himself wasn't allowed to give the vaccination, even though he had developed it, because he wasn't a doctor and didn't have a medical license. The treatmet worked - at the end of the course Meister was sent home in perfect health, having never displayed any sign of rabies symptoms.

The Meister family went on to donate towards the funding for the first Pasteur Institute in Paris. When Louis Pasteur died, he was interred in a crypt within the Institute. Joseph Meister got a job at the Institute as a concierge, and when the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940 he locked the gates and barricaded the doors to the crypt to keep them from desecrating the tombs of Pasteur and his wife.

To return to a question from earlier on.

Cgeese isn't just gone off milk. It's (mostly) cultured with an enzyme called rennet, which calves produce. (Nowadays modern rennet is produced by bacteria.)

I think that cheese, despite being a dairy product, owes its development to human investigations of "which bit of the calf tastes best?" I suspect that our predecessors discovered that the calf's stomach contents of slightly digested milk had an interesting taste, and it became a delicacy. After that, someone or several someone tried to recreate it by scraping bits of calf stomach lining out and mixing them with fresh milk. Trial and error improved the process.

I didn't learn much history at school -despite doing it until GCSE - 1066 at Primary school, then Tudor then Nazi then Industrial revolution.

Trills - apparently widespread and common practise throughout history. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnal_name.

I know it can be a issue in Egyptian history as both Ptolemaic and ancient pharaoh renamed themselves or had similar names to previous monarchs - it can be open to debate who incomplete records and inscriptions are actually talking about.

In England Victoria started it and in Scotland James III.

Most of my history come from TV and radio programs - and various books. I do think my children are getting a better history education - though even if they weren't horrible histories TV program has sparked their interests and there are loads of good history books for kids around at the minute.

Oops, speaking of Pasteur claiming other people's work for himself - it was Emile Roux who developed the rabies vaccine in the first place (he was working with Pasteur at the time!).

"recent kings named John had turned out badly" :o

I've hard it said that Charles won't be Charles III because kings called Charles have turned out badly - in that case WHY call him Charles in the first place? It's not a surprise that he's going to be king.

Re: pain & childbirth, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, pain in childbirth was held to be one of the things women had to endure due to The Fall. (Convenient, no?). There was no particular interest in alleviating the pain of giving birth because it was felt to be going against The Natural Order. However, once Queen Victoria used chloroform during labour (the initial dose when she was giving birth to Princess Beatrice was administered by Prince Albert!!!!!!!) it became socially acceptable (in the British Empire, at least) with the sort of rapidity you'd expect!

On subject of clothing, clothes are a fantastic way to look at patterns of conspicuous consumption. I found it a mixture of baffling & hilarious the amount of people who got INCREDIBLY worked up about the costuming for Reign. It is alt!hist, they can thus do somewhat ridiculous things with their costumes & just say in their timeline (& their show's costume budget, which is emphatically NOT like that of a big costume drama) that's how they dress. Probate inventory can be fascinating. As I once found myself explaining to quite a large crowd of people at a museum when one of my Brownies asked how they'd know what what rooms in "normal people's houses would look like [in the C16]?" I was explaining to the Brownies & as one does when talking to a hordelet of small people, looking downwards so I was looking at them not over them, and when I looked up I had An Audience. Mind you, they were better than the man who stalked me & my best friend from uni round the Degas exhibition at the RA - he'd eavesdrop a bit, then haul the woman he was with over from whatever she was enjoying looking at to pontificate loudly, sharing "his" knowledge. If he'd not been so unsubtle I'd not've noticed & he'd not have made even more of an eejit of himself by talking utter twaddle. I may have made up some words. I am a Bad Person 😶

But returning to conspicuous consumption, I find clocks/watches fascinating. I know about the development of them - props to the person[s] who figured out basic sundials - but I think it says a lot about humans that we're so obsessed with the idea of "owning" time & commodifying it. I suppose it's driven by an awareness of our mortality & our species' Special Sort Of Arrogance?

Does anyone else have a fondness for counterfactual history? I love all the What If?s - though an awful lot of them are, of course, terrifying 😱

As for the person who asked about the Restoration of the Monarchy, I'm afraid I can't resist answering with this:
Yes it's a simplification, but...

dances off thread singing