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 ?

Lots of info in the past was passed on from settlement to settlement by drovers taking their cattle to markets/better grazing lands.

I loved the sooner in splendor it's one of my favourites. I live close to Middleham Xx

people were not actually as limited in their travel and horizons as we think they were. There was a lot of moving around the country.

In bed last night Dh and I were talking about this thread and being cold, and he reminded me that in Holland, beds were often built into the wall of the house. I have seen them for example in windmills. They are like bunk beds in the wall with either a curtain or a door across. They were also not full length, because people slept half sitting up. You occasionally find this sort of bed in new houses too. It is the poor person's version of the 4 poster.
No idea if this was common in England. I live in cotswolds and cotswold stone walls do not lend themselves to this, so I have never seen them locally.

Chen I am very jealous! We are hoping to call in for a few days next year when over in England and see Middleham then Sheriff Hutton, I'm a real Plantagenet fan but especially Richard III, the Tudor propaganda makes my blood boil especially about his nephews.

Anyone who hasn't made the link between sex and babies is clearly having so much sex the consequences of a lack of it have never been considered

Steppemum, there were definitely box beds, but I have never seen a surviving one, only reconstructions - the Crofter's Cottage in the Ryedale Folk Museum has one, only they are not generally short afaik.

I think you got them in stone houses too. Cynthia Harnett illustrated one in her book set in Burford, The Wool Pack. I don't know what her source was but she is generally extremely accurate and based her drawings on real originals.

Justilou - early ice skates were bone or antler. Maybe someone found a bit of bone lying around and discovered they could go faster skidding around on it, so they found a pair of similar sized ones and tied them onto their feet, and it all developed from there!

When I visited Russia, I was told that a lot of the older generations struggle with the new society because they had a lot more security under the old system. Admittedly you were told where had to live and you were allocated a job upon leaving school, but as long as you didn't trouble the authorities you could live quite happily. There was very little little to buy apart from necessities so people were not concerned about luxuries. Now homes, jobs etc are all uncertain and the country is flooded with all manner of goods. The society is more Westernised, with all of your worries and there is more discontent.

Now I thought box beds were the sort of cupboard-on-legs type of thing?

well the dutch ones were definitely in the wall.

Quite nice actually, some friends of ours had their kids beds like this in their house it was really nice.

I've seen the term used for both.
There's an article here which has some pictures of Scottish built-in ones, including some very short-looking ones!

Oh, wow! Those are very cool. Actually, they remind me of Margaret Forster talking about a 'bed in the wall' which was a bed in an alcove that also folded out - that's only early in the last century. I guess a kind of prefab version of these things?

When I was little, my room wasn't wide enough for a proper free-standing bed in it, so my grandpa built one that fitted exactly into the space. It was always very warm.

Oh - and aren't you meant to be writing?!

Sometimes they're in the space to one side of the chimney breast. Those must have been super-cosy. A heated bed, effectively.

Oops

I'll make tracks for 1380s lesbian London.

(This thread is brilliant, btw.)

Oh I found some lovely ones when I googled - double decker box beds with victorian ladies climbing in the top!
Some definitley short (couple of picture of people in them semi upright)

The thread has moved on a lot, but to whoever was talking about pins and Regency dress and suggesting that women not infrequently went to balls and assemblies in unfinished dresses (because of the presence of pins in surviving examples in costume musuems) - the pins weren't an indication the dress was unfinished, though.

Many periods of historical costume relied heavily on pins to hold garments together, the way way as buttons or tie-strings, and a lot of Regency dresses would have held the two sides of the bodice together with pins, or pinned parts of the dress together - our notion that a 'finished' garment comes all in one piece is not accurate for quite long chunks of dress history.

twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/pins-pinning.html

historicalsewing.com/regency-gown-closures

Incidentally, to anyone interested in Victorian clothes and domestic minutiae, Judith Flanders' The Victorian House is very good and well-researched - she moves around a middle-class Victorian house (morning room, drawing room, dining room, bedrooms, nursery, kitchen, scullery etc) and uses it as a structure for a huge amount of detail from childbirth, illness to hobbies to mourning clothes, food and laundry and the lives of servants.

While we're on clothes, and cold rooms, the fashionable woman at the end of the 19th century was wearing on average an astonishing thirty seven pounds of clothes.

There's a quite horrifying (but of course not at all unusual, given how ineffectual and painful the available treatment was) description of the progress of untreated breast cancer in Philip Gosse's memorial to his mother, Emily Gosse - an untreated malignant breast lump would just get bigger till it burst open on the skin surface and eat away the surrounding tissue, until there was only an expanding ulcer where the whole breast had been, and sometimes it eroded through the muscle of the chest wall and the ribs - it could take five years to die.

And in Fanny Burney's diaries a horrifying but incredibly gutsy account of having a mastectomy while conscious in 1811 -

newjacksonianblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/breast-cancer-in-1811-fanny-burneys.html

Most of the Scottish tenements I've seen had box beds in the wall - particularly the 'single-ends'. They've usually been removed these days and the space made into a 'dining alcove'. (They were generally in the kitchen.)

I love the history of colonists in Australia. Especially stories about explorers who went traipsing off across the continent carrying a boat then died. Mad bastards.

I went to Cambodia a few years ago. That horrible time in their history is so recent, it was really shocking. I read a book at the time called "First they killed my father" that really stuck with me.

"Most of the Scottish tenements I've seen had box beds in the wall"

Recess beds they're usually called, you find them in crofts as well...I'm sure I've even seen one in a castle, but I'm stuffed if I can remember where.

Actually OP most girls were not "up the duff" as put it , by the time they were 18. In the past it was only the wealthy that married their daughters off early to secure family estates etc and bloodlines. Most working folk did not get married until they could afford to set up their own household. In the 16th - 17th centuries the average age of married was approx 24 to 26. The common belief that many generations lived together in on household was not true generally in England. It was true of the Mediterranean countries etc where extra hands were needed to farm the subsistence farms. In England few ordinary folk were landowners so there was an advantage in having smaller families one could afford to raise. By late marriage family size was reduced. Historians theorise that this is the reason why England (and NW Europe) became wealthier than the rest of Europe -- there were more resources to go round and to food to feed the growing cities and people to work in factories etc.
See English Population History from 1580 to 1837 by Prof EA Wrigley and others. 1997.
Makes fascinating reading and shows we have many misconceptions about how our ancestors lived. The situation changed somewhat during the Victorian era when families did become larger.

Doesn't a box bed feature in Wuthering Heights? But they call it a press or something. I'm sure there's one (or used to be one) at the Bronte Museum at Haworth. It's a long time since I went so I don't know if I've imagined it, but it had a lot of carving on the outside and Charlotte used it a description for something in Jane Eyre.

Just so, tabulah. Recess beds is the proper name for them in Scotland. In fact, it sometimes was just a recess so you would find a bed to fit in it if you could. Most of them - in the cities, anyway - had heavy curtains covering the recess.

Steppe mum, I saw a trad box bed in Brittanny -- apparently you only lay down flat when you were dead. Can't think it was good for ones back but maybe they suffered with lots of coughs and lung infections?
Like you haven't come across it in England and certainly never seen any pics.
Scotland had very close links with France so maybe the tradition came from there?

My question about history, especially in the current climate is why the fuck we can't learn from it??