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 ?

Oooo pollymere - more titles please

But there wouldn't be loads of milk, without farming: cows / goats only keep producing milk because we keeping taking it from them regardless of whether they have a baby to feed or not

Anne Frank died of typhoid in the concentration camp

Why was Henry VIII named Henry rather than his older brother (Arthur)?

Yeah I have often wondered who was the first person to milk a cow, and why weren't they arrested? The massive perv.

Henry VII was very keen on emphasising his (alleged) descent from the ancient British and Welsh kings, claiming descent from both KIng Arthur and the Welsh Cadwaladr. Mainly because his descent from later kings was a bit dodgy. So naming his first son Arthur gave a message that he was bringing back the Golden Age.

Fox Arthur and Henry's dad Henry vii believed he was descended from King Arthur. He liked the idea of the heroic young King, and bought into the myth and wanted his son to be the second King Arthur, chivalric and heroic.

X-post!

Interesting question, Fox. Perhaps Henry VII was doing the whole Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus thing as a recent 'taker' of the throne - cementing the line's claims etc - but he doesn't seem to have been the most whimsical of men? It's a strange choice.

Why was Henry VIII named Henry rather than his older brother (Arthur)?

I suspect Tudor PR - nod to legendary King Arthur of the Round Table. Tudors weren't very secure at the time hence marriage to Spanish royal family with Catherine of Aragon who had a bit more stability about them.

Prince Arthur he was in good health until shortly after his marriage at 15 - look like Victorians who thought he must always have been sickly- so would have expected a King Authur in due course.

Going back to the personal grooming question- the Vikings were quite keen on personal grooming. They had regular baths and liked to keep their hair and beards neat and trim.
In medieval times, bath houses were popular and it seems the 'great unwashed' was more prevalent in Tudor times.

I guess, also, that the way things were with pregnancy and childbirth in those days, you had no guarantee of having more than one living child, let alone two living sons.

We didn't have central heating until 1997. We just had a gas fire in the living room. DC1 was born in February, during the snow, so we didn't leave the living room during the day for the first 2-3 months.

As for preparing food, if you have a gas stove (as we did) you can turn on all the burners and/or the oven and it soon heats the room up.

My gran lived in a house with no bathroom her entire life, until she died in 1983. They had a scullery behind the kitchen where they washed, and behind that, but outside, was the toilet. You had to go out the kitchen door, down the path to the toilet. I hated going out there when it was dark because the door had a huge gap top and bottom. It was very cold!

it seems the 'great unwashed' was more prevalent in Tudor times.

I was just checking when exactly the "dirty centuries" were said to be and found this article which will be of interest on quite a lot of points:
www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/history_of_home.shtml
Though I think it's not quite right in saying there were two dirty centuries - more like three, as it was in the nineteenth that washing with water became popular again.

Dream Babies by Christina Hardyment is a fascinating book for anyone interested in birth and childrearing practices throughout the ages

Yeah I have often wondered who was the first person to milk a cow, and why weren't they arrested? The massive perv.

Perhaps I'm taking this question a tad too seriously...

It is most likely it wouldn't have been seen as sexual, just as shearing a sheep isn't considered sexual now. Not all contemporary human cultures sexualise human breasts, and breastfeeding would have been universal and very commonly seen during prehistory and thus breasts and milk were not taboo.

Therefore I don't think the rest of the following is really relevant, but:
Modern ideas about bodily boundaries are also... very modern.
Bestiality is prohibited in the Bible but the fact they had to spell it out suggests it was something that went on, and other cultures may not have considered it as bad. Animist traditional cultures do not see humans as separate from animals as Abrahamic religions.

expat - they did, I think. Brooches are more of a fashion because there's the potential for decoration. But thonged leather and 'lace' - strips of fabric or cord rather than modern lace - go way back.

Part of the difficulty is that the clothing most likely to be immortalised in pictures, is the clothing of the richer people. And to an extent, this may also be true of clothing that survives. For example, the Opus Anglicanum exhibition is very dominated by clerical vestments, but much ordinary clothing would simply have been worn out or rotted away.

Those same richer people would often not be wearing practical clothing. At times, they'd even wear clothing that was overtly intended to be impractical - because it'd show they were rich enough to afford someone to dress them.

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!

It wouldn't be absolutely unheard of for men to come into a royal birthing chamber, though. Plus why wouldn't women talk, too?

A couple of other things about historical antisemitism, not directly about Hitler, but which inevitably formed part of the toxic background to his ideas:

• Jews were considered to be responsible for killing Jesus, and by staying Jews they showed didn't believe in him as the Messiah
• the Blood Libel, the medieval idea that Jews ritually killed children, which began in medieval England (the William of Norwich case) and spread throughout Europe; other scapegoating ideas during epidemics accused them of spreading disease and poisoning people

tip, this is totally not relevant but it amused/shocked me, so:

I went to a talk recently about punishments for adultery. There are books on the subject, illustrated with the guilty couple parading through town, tied together by a string around the woman's wrists, between her legs, and fastened to her unlucky partner's penis!

Anyway, alongside one of these cases is a description of a man who had been having sex with a local cow. The entire population was appalled and put to death, not just him - but also the poor cow!

If I ever had the resources to do it properly, I'd love to research why the female equivalent of castration as punishment for adultery was to cut off her nose

LRD, perhaps it's a sign of having read too much history (if such a thing is possible) but unfortunately I'm not in the least shocked by that. Awareness of victim blaming as we now understand it was not really a strong point in most of the past.
I do hate hearing details about execution and torture though; would far rather a dry academic talk than Horrible Histories!

Yeast. Put flour and water together, the mix will ferment - now called sourdough.

How they discovered flour has to be guess work.

Milk. Your baby's hungry, you're out of your own. Animal nearby is feeding her kid, so you figure you'll have some that.

Sewing. Kill an animal, ligaments far too tough to eat, light bulb moment.

They had the time to think.

Oh, sorry! I didn't mean to upset anyone. But it is quite nasty.

oleanna - ew! When?! That's awful.

I'm glad this thread is shifting away from that Tudor shite. Boring as hell, you'd think they were the only people on the planet in the past.

I wonder how much of people's odours would have been covered up by the smell of woodsmoke.

If I ever had the resources to do it properly, I'd love to research why the female equivalent of castration as punishment for adultery was to cut off her nose

I'd assume it had the double advantage of making it visible to all and sundry and not making her infertile - men's ability to impregnate women is something they profit from, but women's fertility is a resource patriarchy wants to exploit, and something that can be used to keep her under a man's thumb. So, they wouldn't want to render her infertile. (Not to mention that they probably wouldn't have been able to without killing her, anyway.)

And if the goal was to prevent the adulterers from ever doing it again, well, a woman with no nose is not going to have many admirers.