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 hate people playing fast and loose with history because it's more 'romantic' or 'juicy'. Gah!'

I don't mind so much as long as they are honest about it, but Gregory trumpets her accuracy.
I didn't mind The Tudors changing whatever they wanted because they made no claim to it all being true. Gregory should have a historical note at the end that owns up and says 'this probably didn't happen, I've done it this way to make a better story.' There's a YA historical author I love, Katherine Longshore, who goes with the youngest possible age for Anne Boleyn in her novel, Tarnish, so that she is still a teenager when she comes back from France, even though it's far more likely she was older. She explains at the back of the book that she's done this and why, which I really like - it actually shows the reader something about the gaps in the sources and how much we don't know.

I thought the weight gain was later - after the jouncing injury - so probably not that bad at Ann death?

I knew he had issues with problems with potency - that may have started then George Boleyn wife mentioned it in a letter as something Ann had told her- but I thought it was the actual mentioned it so publicly that lead to Ann brother death and possibly hers?

I'm wondering if that came from dramas I've seen rather than biographies I've read.

Though Catherine of Argon had proven a persistent pain to Henry perhaps he though sod going through that again I'l just kill her.

So, I wonder if there was a fashion for draughty houses for a bit? ...That can't have been great for babies

It's a later period but I was blipping past BBC 4 - there were looking a death rates in London - oppose to countryside and why women, infants and children were higher.

Apparently we didn't understand how to build proper chimney so air was drawn up - they were too small or too wide.

With wood fires this meant wood smoke in rooms - bad for lungs but visible. Coal fires looked better - less visible smoke but the showed there were harmful particulates - that would have cased lung damage.

Women and children spent more time indoors in town and cities - so were more adversely affected with lung damage. A lot of infant teething deaths were probably damaged lungs.

You don't think about window and chimneys being technology that could impact on health - though there was plenty of other stuff to die from.

Though it's only having recently seen steam Ahead on BBC that I've actually understood the impact railways had.

x posts

Re George Boleyn mentioning the impotence at his trial, IIRC that is real, but the belief that it is what sealed his fate is a bit of an assumption. I'm sure it didn't help, but I don't think we can assume that if he hadn't said it, it would all have been fine.

Thanks - and x-post about armour size.

Apparent many of the Lords thought he might get off as his defence was so good - though how you'd convict Ann of incest before his trial and not find him guilty is a puzzle - so perhaps that's why I've picked that idea up.

Cozie - yyyy.
My mind is always blown by the number of servants in great houses and the number of people in a noble retinue.

"Apparently we didn't understand how to build proper chimney so air was drawn up - they were too small or too wide."

As well as smoke, there'd be carbon monoxide - a fair few deaths must have come about because of carbon monoxide poisoning...

whitewash, that's so sad but also so unsurprising, about coal smoke indoors.

I was watching that drama about Elizabeth II (which is surprisingly good) and it showed the smog that killed so many people in London, and it really convinces you why it would be so dangerous.

I find smoke very interesting to think about.
We camped a few years ago at a Lake District campsite, Fisherground, where all the pitches have firepits. The massive pall of smoke that filled the sky in the evenings when all the fires were lit was amazing. I am sitting now, looking out of my window at the town below me, mostly 18th & 19th c houses, and I can see literally hundreds of chimneys, smoke coming out of 2 or 3. It's mind boggling to imagine how much smoke there would be over the town if even half of them were in use.

Re Tudor and medieval houses, I only really understood about smoke when I read the bit in Ruth Goodman's How To Be A Tudor where she talks about rushes on floors, furniture and the relation to the adoption of fireplaces with chimneys through the 16th c. No chimneys=smokey air inside house, the higher up you go the worse the smoke is. So sleeping directly on the floor (on the rushes, which insulate and are a bit soft) puts you as low as possible and means the air is better. You also don't want to sleep high up in the roof so in a one-room house you use the space in the eaves for storage. Then when you get fireplaces, the air higher up is better, but the fire drawing well creates more of a cold draught at floor level, so you definitely want to be sleeping raised up a bit on a bed. (And now the air in the eaves isn't smoky any more you can put in an upper storey and go and sleep upstairs.)

Oh, I need to read that!

Also, someone needs to write a cultural history of smoke. Because it strikes me that it's not odd people didn't realise how unhealthy it is, is it? After all, they'd have seen that smoke preserves meat, so they might well have thought it was quite a good thing. And you can use it to fumigate houses, too. So it isn't surprising there are also medical treatments based on breathing in smoke, or standing in smoke.

'With wood fires this meant wood smoke in rooms - bad for lungs but visible. Coal fires looked better - less visible smoke but the showed there were harmful particulates - that would have cased lung damage.'

Re the particulates, Ruth Goodman talked in one of her programmes about how much more extra cleaning coal fires create than wood fires, with constant black dust appearing over everything. No wonder they damaged your lungs.

'Because it strikes me that it's not odd people didn't realise how unhealthy it is, is it?'

Absolutely. And when diseases like lung cancer take decades to develop it's not surprising they wouldn't see the connection.

It wasn't just coal, remember. There was much burning of wood in braziers in the middle of rooms and among my own forebears, peat was burned in an open hearth in the middle of the room, with smoke escaping - after a fashion - through a hole in the roof. The animals e.g. a cow or two were also housed, in winter, in byres at one end of the house, providing some warmth at one end.

Survival was hard as hard back then for many people.

I don't know exactly which periods this applies to, might just be prehistoric, but I have heard that experimental archaeology is throwing doubt on the hole in the roof in favour of letting the smoke just filter out through the thatch. With big Neolithic roundhouses they've found that the hole just lets rain in and puts the fire out (duh!) and contrary to expectations the fire doesn't draw any worse without it.

I think it was Ruth Goodman' in steam Ahead - coal fires having become common than wood due to trains.

She looked at extra cleaning and how even cooking practise had to change - cooking with coal taints the food with nasty taste. It had huge implications - more washing needing to buy different style cooking pots and that they didn;t last as long.

Can't remember what the BBC4 program was but it was focused on London and like tabulahrasa I was thinking more about carbon monoxide poisoning but they focused on lung damage over slightly longer period seemed a more hidden damage.

Went to a Turor house in Tenby - they claimed to keep babies out of danger and off floor they were hung in like straight jackets/wraps the in front of the fires - like Christmas stockings - didn't seem terrible plausible to me personally but it was a National Trust house and the staff seemed knowledgeable. They claimed "left on the shelf* came from unmarried girls sleeping on the shelf around the fire.

I'm going to have to add How To Be A Tudor to my book list.

I don't think it was just 'noble retinues', Countess. I was reviewing census records from the late 19th century and I was staggered to discover just how many people were living in one of my family's cottages. (Described in the census as 'servants' but that notion was ludicrous and most likely down to 'having to pick a category'. They were just there.)

That may well be the case for some cultures - the letting the smoke filter out through the thatch. I, myself, have seen smoke-holes but they may not have been universal or even widely used.

That's v v interesting about coal.

Hanging swaddled babies on a peg - yup, this is real, and some cultures did it until recently.
When dd was a baby she had a chest infection once and would only sleep when held upright. Through several very exhausting nights dh and I resisted the temptation to hang her up on a peg (she loved being swaddled) but we did wonder if there was a connection between this tradition and the prevalence of lung infections in babies in smoky houses.

How To Be A Tudor also has some interesting reflections on child labour, based on her daughter's experiences making silk braids - where other little girls do friendship bracelets and loom bands, her daughter Eve, being the child of a re-enactor, was taught finger-loop braid weaving instead, and very early on started producing enough to sell.

Going back a bit, early sheep used to shed their wool so it's likely a person found some on the floor (or wherever) and thought this looks like the fibre we weave, I'm going to have a bash at it.

Only once woolen clothing/industry was established did selective breeding come into play so sheep held onto their wool. (Much quicker to take the fleece off in one lump rather than wander around gathering all the bits of it.)

Many early sheep would have looked something like this:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soay_sheep

Hanging swaddled babies on a peg - yup, this is real

Wow - though I wonder if pfb is to blame a bit for my scepticism - she had to be held by me constantly or scream blue murder till she crawled- so I got used to doing most things with one hand or with her in simple sling. Putting a baby down is a bit of an alien concept to me.

You know when Thomas Cromwells wife and girls just died in their sleep? Could that have been Carbon Monoxide?

What was Typhoid anyway?

Pestilence?

Distemper?

You would likely have lost a few babies 'along the way' back then, MrsWhite. And you probably wouldn't have had the sheer time - if you were, say, a farm-worker - to carry her around. You had to work, work, work while you were awake.

It might have been CO poisoning. More likely to have been the Sweat, though, I reckon - depending on dates etc.

Typhoid is a bacterium- it's spread like food poisoning, by drinking or eating something contaminated by an infected person's faeces. Naturally, spreads like wildfire.

Actually, wiki says typhoid is actually of the salmonella family. No winder it's so virulent.

I thought it was the sweating sickness - which there were a few out breaks at that time.

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/what-was-the-sweating-sickness-in-wolf-hall-10037168.html

I blipped pass another program where the importance of sewing to human survival was being talked about. They found needles from a long time back and no idea where idea first came from. The were having shoes made from animal fur which is still apparently the best product to keep feet warm in very cold climates.