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 ?

IIRC from the Tracy Borman biography, we don't know how Cromwell's wife and daughters died, just that the wife died around the time of the sweating sickness epidemic in 1528 and then the girls appear in his will and then they don't. I think from the rough dates, Mantel decided it was likely to have been sweating sickness, and she dramatised what we know about the sweat, which was that it could happen within a day.
They could have died of pretty much anything but she made a reasonable guess.

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.

Very true.

The Sweat is so weird.

Appears out of nowhere, kills a bunch of people, pops up every now and then for a few years, terrifies people (understandably) then disappears forever.

(happy to be corrected on any one of those points)

Probably a hanta virus of some sort, going by the descriptions. (No-one knows for sure.)

And who is to say that it couldn't return!

yy, it is weird.
It kills people so quickly.

I find the case of bloody Marys pregnancy both interesting and sad. Was she really never pregnant?

I remember writing an essay on Victorian death (my first argument with a spellchecker - it didn't recognise bombazine.) One book talked about 1 in 6 in the 19th century died of TB, and I remembered wondering how good their diagnoses were, and whether consumption covered a range of lung conditions, not just tuberculosis, but things like lung cancer must have been prevalent because of all the open fires (I grew up with open fires; I've breathed in a lot of smoke in my time, so I can't help wondering.) And many people would not have seen a doctor anyway (because of the cost,) so similar symptoms could easily be confused. It's not like they'd have been routinely taking biopsies and bloods and so on to check whether check microbes were about - there just wasn't the knowledge or equipment to do that until the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. There was still a common belief in miasma in the first half of the 19th cenury. (Diseases being spread by bad air and smells, rather than invisible bacteria and viruses.)

Typhoid is a waterborne bacterial infection, related to salmonella (is - it's still a risk in many parts of the world.)

Pestilence is usually some sort of infectious disease, including bubonic plague, but sufficiently vague to cover other things.

Distemper in dogs is viral - I assume the human sort is similar.

I remember when I went travelling to remote parts of the world, overviews on tropical medicine usually gave symptom's as "flu-like symptoms, sometimes varied with "head chef, fever, nausea and vomiting." A few give a rash. But basically, lots of diseases have similar symptoms unless you've got 20th/21st century laboratories to test them in.

Forever = until now :o

If it did return, we wouldn't even know if it was "The Tudor Sweat" or some new thing that just happened to be similar.

I think people used the term 'distemper' very broadly, to just mean an illness - not sure if there was a more specific meaning I am missing.
I know it sometimes meant a sort of bad mood - dis-temper. ('I am much distempered at the surfeit of trolls on Mumsnet of late' type thing.)

Yes - what the hell was The Sweat?

Images of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII comedic terror at the sweat.

That program was so bad, and yet I watched every one.

The symptoms indicate a sort of hantavirus, Songbird. (HPS - like.) No-one knows for certain, though.

So glad to see Philippa Gregory books being rubbished!
And would second (third, etc) the recommendations for Guns Germs and Steel, and Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Tudor and How to Be a Victorian, which will help answer a lot of the types of question on this thread. The Goodman books are recent and should be in a lot of bookshops at the moment too.

A big thing with a lot of these questions is that people just didn't know any different, and accepted the norms around them. Such as bloodletting. Look at how medical and dietary advice has changed even in the last few decades on various things and how most people accepted it at the time, like the changing ideas about low fat diets and especially dietary cholesterol.
Similarly with sex, people didn't have the same concepts of consent and there would be a duty element in it as well. Religion was exhorting people to multiply.
Nagging misgivings about all kinds of things wouldn't get as much mental attention, you just had to get on with it, and many of the people who had survived childhood would be relatively resilient about putting up with stuff.

Bicycles couldn't really take off until rubber tyres were made for them, another product of British colonialism importing raw materials. They also require reasonably smooth roads. A bike with no tyres (no cushioning) on roads full of mud, grit and holes? You'd be much better with a horse.

Cows in houses - another benefit of this would have been, although people probably weren't directly aware, catching cowpox and thereby being immune to smallpox.

Witches - beliefs in magic of various sorts appear to be the oldest type of religious and supernatural belief. The idea of good and bad shamans, magical experts - the bad ones might just have been from another tribe, or outcasts of some sort - follows naturally from that.

although the families are mixed so the tree resembles a bowl of spaghetti,

I love this phrase, I looked at an ancestral tree from a small village and that is such a good way to describe it.

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 interesting!

What is it about the Tudors?
Well, the personalities and the drama, but also that this is a time from which there are lots more surviving records, more in English, more portraits of what people looked like, printing. There is a lot more literature showing how people thought and felt. It is the beginning of all kinds of things that seem recognisably modern, borders and the nation state. The propaganda the Tudors used to boost their claim to the throne bleeds into the idea of Britain as a strong country, something that was going to become the British Empire. It is clear what was going on, Tudors are a lot less complicated on the surface than the Wars of the Roses. There is enough that's familiar but enough that's different and exotic to really interest people.
But it is also just one of those cultural trends, with its own bandwagon and momentum. Like the media interest in Scandinavia this decade.

Queen Anne
Well, there's enough interest in Liz and Victoria that it doesn't follow that it's because she was a woman that there is less about her. But it wasn't such an eventful reign politically, and that, combined with being stuck between defined dynasties with well known stories, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, doesn't help.

What I was pondering was why we know more about some countries than others. I know lots about the Romans, the Greeks, the French, a bit about the Spanish, Russia etc
All I could tell you about Finland is the capital and where it is. Otherwise NOWT.
We hear more about countries which are politcally influential, where there are newsworthy (ie bad) events happening (they need to be worse to get in the news, the more obscure the country), where widely spoken languages are used, where there are traditional links (eg the commonwealth, languages taught in schools). Otherwise you need to seek it out. The guardian is good for having pages for stories about particular countries and regions. I don't know about youbut the main thing I hear in news about Finland without looking specifically is its education system being statistically one of the best in the world.

Considering men were not allowed near the birthing chamber I'd have got a "servant" to smuggle in a boy just to keep my head attached!

Why did it take people so long to develop a better way of doing up a cloak besides just a broach?

I'd love ANY recommendations about little known historical events from countries which aren' big players on the world stage but the stuff should be more known like the events portrayed in

The Act Of Killing documentary (genocide in Indonesia)

or the film

Rabbit Proof Fence (treatment of Aborigines in Australia by the British)

Well how would you do one, expat? For most of history, a cloak has just been a large piece of material that you slung around yourself to keep out the elements. Like a shawl. A brooch - or buttons when they came in - are almost redundant, I reckon.

I've remembered my cave men question, but it's more modern society.

When did hair washing become a thing?

Because people still had to make their own soap in say the Regency period, and teeth washing maybe became a thing in Tudor times.

Hairbrushes too. When did we stop being tramps and get into grooming.

Do you mean coats rather than cloaks?

cozie But something is necessary to keep them closed so the wearer can use their hands for activities other than holding the cloak or shawl closed.

Thinking more about bicycles as an idea, it can seem counterintuitive that something can balance on two thin wheels in line with one another. And more so when many people never saw many outdoor surfaces smooth enough for that to be possible (especially without the aid of tyres which they wouldn't have known about).

I have just found out through reading about early bikes and trikes, though, that the earliest known wheelchair (according to Wikipedia) was invented in the seventeenth century by a German watchmaker who had become disabled himself - it had 3 wheels.

sorry if someones asked this, im not able to read every post:

What set off Hitler hating the Jews so much? he had a Jewish family doctor and in his student days he had Jewish friends.

Also, How did women manage when they had their periods in the days before underwear and san products were invented?

plus they must have stank of wee and poo as they didn't have means of cleaning themselves, 'dripping' everywhere.

We did discuss antisemitism in Europe earlier and it has to do with religious rulings about moneylending - Christians were told it was sinful. This led to Jews becoming the major money lenders. Which led to them becoming rich and envied, and at certain points in time were "driven out" of areas so that Kings did not have to pay what was owed.

Antisemitism was already rife in Europe pre Hitler. He just tapped into that anger. Not dissimilarily to how Trump, Farage, Le Pen and pals have tapped into modern Islamophobia

there's also the prostitute story that is probably untrue

I agree, TipTop. But that's just something to hold it, isn't it? (While you're reaching for your sword or getting on a horse etc. )

Washing? I rather suspect that you need to distinguish between the privileged and the rest. Hot water would have been a pretty labour intensive thing in early times. But Yes - I imagine that they might not smell so great to a modern nose. Although, presumably, if everyone smelled, people didn't notice it so much?

How many people ever got hit by flying sewage when people used to fly their turds out windows?

Many many many pages back some posters were talking about glass and how amazing it is someone came up with it.

It just reminded me of a QI episode where they were saying glass was the one notable thing the Chinese didn't invent (hence all the more breakable porcelain, etc).

The important thing is without glass you can't make lenses...without lenses you can't make microscopes and telescopes....

The world would probably be a very different place if the Chinese had cottoned on to glass earlier on!

The world might well be a different place if people had had access to the collection of the Library of Alexandria. Who knows what was lost when that was eventually destroyed?