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 ?

[PerspicaciaTick]

Only rich girls married young for much of history, due to the dynastic implications of their marriages. Most other women probably got married in their 20s, I've read that ordinary medieval women probably had their first baby around the age of 25. By the end of the 18th Century the average age of first marriage for women was still mid-20s.
They just packed in an awful lot of pregnancies, often one a year.

[ThatGingerOne]

Giddy Its not to hard to see if a person suffered from late stage syphilis as it actually shows up in the bones of their skeleton. Like so... pretty cool! (I'm studying this at the moment)

Songbird Wash them out and reuse them kind of thick! haha!

[RustyBear]

He wanted a healthy male heir - but he wanted a legitimate healthy male heir, so there could be no question of their right to inherit. Legitimacy was a bit of a sore point in his family - his uncle (Edward V) had lost the throne because he was said to be illegitimate, and his father's claim to the throne came through ancestors born out of wedlock and later legitimated, but still barred from inheriting the throne. So a changeling really wouldn't do.

[GiddyOnZackHunt]

General cooking baffles me. Kidney beans. Uncooked they have arsenic I think but boil them for an hour and rinse and it's fine. How many people died in the quest to eat a bean instead of cocoa? Bread too. Grind up the lumpy seeds of a plant. Why? Who wants to eat dust? Let's mix it with water. Yes that makes sense so now we have gooey paste. How do you go from that to mixing yeast, kneading and baking?

[GiddyOnZackHunt]

Rusty legitimacy went back to John of Gaunt. The whole Tudor claim was a bit shakey on the topic of legitimacy so it really was their bugbear.

[EverySongbirdSays]

What are some other bizarre things you know about history OP?

One of the things I remember from school was people saying that Hitler's hatred of Jews began when he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute.


I have no idea if this is true or a playground myth.

The rise of antisemitism in Europe came when one of the Popes can't remember which during the reign of one of the Edwards, can't remember which, banned Christians from lending at interest because it was unChristian. As they were not Christian Jewish people didn't have to uphold this rule, this led to Jewish people becoming money lenders and therefore rich which bred resentment across Europe for centuries to come.

[PerspicaciaTick]

I expect that humans (being humans) have always looked for ways to show off to one another how much richer or more powerful they are. So you wear a posh brooch with a bit of Baltic amber in it to show that you (or your wife) has plenty of dosh. Then you have enough leisure time to weave a fiddly border into your hems. Then you buy expensive dyes from beyond your local areas resources. Then the rich implement sumptuary laws and show off that their women don't need to work by dressing them impractically and next thing you get a full blown industry to meet the demand of "better", "newer", "more expensive".

[Handsoffmysweets]

Place marking! Up with a poorly child so it's going to be a looonnnnggg night!! This thread is facinating. My question would be, how on earth did women manage the pain of childbirth before gas and air etc? Tricky births in particular. Doesn't bare thinking about I suppose 😩

[GiddyOnZackHunt]

Presumably somebody decided to cut some wool off a sheep because they didn't have fur and then twiddled it. A bit of fiddling later and you had some strong. Flax and nettles were being twisted into strong and woven so that wouldn't be much of a leap.

[EverySongbirdSays]

Possibly Opium

Everybody was on heroin at one pointt!

They used to prescribe cocaine for dental pain so possibly Coke too

[PerspicaciaTick]

I've always wondered what drives people to create fiction and fantasy. At what stage did we shift from recording stories as fact (albeit myths and legends which were believed to be the truth) to saying "here's a story that I made up by myself from scratch" and getting other people to listen appreciatively,

[EverySongbirdSays]

I know that at one time (because I've read Wolf Hall) only royalty was allowed to wear Purple

Purple was really hard to get

Didn't they get it from the blood of beetles

[RustyBear]

Yes, that was the ancestors I meant - John of Gaunt's Beaufort children by Katherine Swynford - they were married later on and the children were legitimated, but still excluded from inheriting the throne. Henry VIII's grandmother Margaret Beaufort was descended from this line.

[PerspicaciaTick]

Roman purple came from sea snails.

[EverySongbirdSays]

The other ponder is periods.

Obviously Regency women and later used the equivalent of old rags pinned to their knickers

But what ig a safety pin got loose and went up your chuff?

What if you bled through onto someone's couch whilst meeting Mr Darcy because obviously bedsheets aren't absorbent

Who came up with the tampon? And how?

Did Cavewomen just free bleed?

[emotionsecho]

Mortality rate for women during childbirth was high, of course there are still parts of the world where women have to manage childbirth without any medical help or pain relief. In Tudor times women were confined to their rooms for weeks before and after giving birth, the rooms were pretty much 'sealed' and kept warm, no wonder so many died of infections.

[GiddyOnZackHunt]

Stories were verbal. History was told and repeated. The more interesting your story, the more memorable (Your minge!) The more it was retold. The earliest written histories relied on the popular oral histories and these were selectively told in print.
Gerald of Wales in the 13th C was a collector of good tales. He wrote a history based on tales.

[GiddyOnZackHunt]

Regency women? 20th century women.

[emotionsecho]

Margaret Beaufort was lucky to survive giving birth to Henry VII, and was only 13 at the time.

[lananzack]

Ah, I have thought of one! I was discussing this with a friend the other day, just sprung to mind.

How did 'witch' come to be an established term? What I mean by that is... Who was the first witch? And why were they considered that? And what lead it to be such a terrible thing - to the point 'they all must die'?
The only logic I could make of it is perhaps 'the fear of the Unknown' but even then... Meh. Not really a good enough reason, is it (even considering 16th century reasons for being murdered by law!)

[GiddyOnZackHunt]

Rusty DH is a Beaufort descendent (amongst better and worse claims) :) Has been a right treat for a history buff to discover all this flummery amongst the dc's family tree :)

[emotionsecho]

Storytellers have been around for a long time, they used to travel all over.

[Hamiltoes]

I thought witches came from the bible? Or did I make that up?

And yessss i've often wondered how ancestors did periods!

[PerspicaciaTick]

But how did we shift from wonderful oral and written histories where the core of the story was believed to be true, to wild flights of fancy produced from the author's imagination and accepted as being entirely fictional - but having value in their own right?

I'm just trying to imagine the reaction that someone like Douglas Adams would have got 2000 years ago. Would his stories have been welcomed, or would the audience have rejected them?

[HuckleberryGin]

The "How did they decide idea to make bread" and things is down to collaboration. I heard something on R4 I think. The point is, one person didn't suddenly decide to add ingredients together. But unlike many other animals we developed language and discussed. And through trial and error, accident and collaboration we started to notice that mixing certain things, or grinding could be beneficial.