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 ?

Did Plantagenet get shortened to plant as you hear other dynasties as surnames such as Stuart or Tudor.

The surname Arthur exists and as does Paul but not the son bit, you don't get Georgeson either but George.

I used to have them all on video but I chucked them!
I hated the sequel, compared to the original. The original people were so determined and committed but the sequel was a low point in reality TV casting people who wouldn't get on just so that the conflict would make good TV. It distracted from the interesting archaeological stuff imo.

You need to look at Icelandic names, Olennas.

Yep, Paul isn't a common medieval name. Not for people nor for churches - churches tend to be Peter and Paul if they're anything.

Georgeson does exist as a surname these days, though, doesn't it?

I can say a bit about treacle's Soviet question - DH is Russian and was born in the USSR, as were his parents. His dad was (and remains) an Army officer.

My overall impression from talking to them about it, is that daily life was very difficult, even though jobs, healthcare, education etc were provided - even military personnel went through long periods of salaries going unpaid through various economic crises. Steppe's points about queuing and bureaucracy are spot-on. DH remains a champion queuer.

The story that stays with me the most from DH's childhood is when he, his mum and his older brother (10) heard that a local store had bread in. They went to queue, and his mum sent his brother on ahead to queue separately, so that they could get an extra ration. One of the neighbours spotted what he was doing and the whole queue rounded on him until he left. DH remembers his mum coming home and crying

What I find fascinating about this period is that the effects of it are still widely felt, even in very small aspects of Russian life. Most restaurants will display the weight of food, along with the price (to reassure customers that they are not being conned/getting something of poor value). My PILs hoard food (and other things) relentlessly, and they've set up a near-industrial veg garden and pickling operation in their dacha. They are forever asking us to send on old clothes, bedsheets etc, so they can get more use out of them. They (and DH, to some extent) really struggle with the idea of capitalist choice.

If anyone wants to know more about Stalin now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write Koba the Dread by Martin Amis is very good.

Meant to ask before, does anyone know where to find the full 1970s Iron Age / Living in the Past series? There are plenty of copies of the one off follow up documentary on Youtube, but not the main episodes. I'd rather like to see the 90s sequel again too... have been wanting to watch the original ever since that was first on.

Not what you asked, but Lynx Vilden came to my attention lately because of an episode of Ben Fogle's New Lives in the Wild - she teaches Stone Age living skills and seems to spend most of her time living on her land in Washington State in a SA way, and giving immersive classes there (and I think in France sometimes).

www.lynxvilden.com/

The episode is probably still available on the Channel 5 iplayer - I thought it was one of the more interesting episodes I'd seen.

Regarding names/surnames

A lot of people got their surname from their occupation not just their father - so in Pillars Of The Earth the main guy is Tom Builder, but you don't get many people called Mr and Mrs Builder these days.

You do get the following : Roper, Cooper, Dyer, Baker, Barrow, Smith, Fisher, Wood

and also place based surnames that have a silent "from" so Joey Essex is a good example of that.

I did meet someone with the surname Christmas once and I'm baffled about how that surname happened.

Possibly ancestor born on Xmas day?

Yeah, would be much more usual to be Mason than Builder, and I wondered why Follett didn't make it sound a bit more authentic by calling him Bulder instead of Builder.

Mondegreen I don't think I've ever watched the Channel 5 player for more than a couple of minutes. This show seems as good a reason as any to change that.

The Iron Age 90s series was probably one of the first reality TV series I saw - these days I am always surprised how well mannered and non-confrontational people on them are; I was never into Big Brother, so that show may be one of the reasons I expect everyone to argue. (On the topic of reality TV ignorance, it was only a few months ago that I realised Essex was Joey's real surname, like David Essex; I'd figured he was just called that because he was from the show, as it doesn't immediately sound like a surname.)

Does Tom Builder have the same middle name as Atilla Hun and Winnie Pooh?

Tudor /Tudor and Stuart/Stewart were Welsh and Scottish surnames before they were king's names. Plantagenet was a name or perhaps a nickname, adopted by Geoffrey of Anjou, who was the father of Henry II, it doesn't seem to have been used much as a surname at the time. In the 15th century, Richard of York (father of Edward IV & Richard III) started using it, probably to bolster his claim as a descendant of the royal line. There were various Plantagenets around in the late 15th & early 16th centuries, but the male ones tended to die in the Wars of the Roses or get executed by the Tudors, while the females married and took their husband's name.

Someone with the surname Christmas may have been a foundling, named by the parish/workhouse/orphanage, depending on the time.

I had a lightbulb moment when I heard that surnames like Bishop and King aren't your ancestor's actual job, they're the character he always played in the Mystery play.

Or perhaps teasing nicknames for someone very pious or pompously full of themselves.

Oh, about surnames - anything that ends '-ster' comes from a word that was originally feminine.

So, Brewer is a male maker of beer; Brewster is a female maker of beer. Baker is a male bread-maker; Baxter is a female bread-maker.

The survival of these words as surnames suggests that some people were taking names from their mothers - whether those women were widows, single mothers, or simply a bit more forceful than the men they were with.

I've just thought of a yucky one.

Did people make sure to keep hens and roosters apart - or did they just eat their eggs really fresh?

"Referring to previous page and mention of DDR Museum in Berlin: I have visited that museum and we're all supposed to ooh and aah over the spartan-ness of an East German home. But... it bore an uncanny resemblance to an English home - my English home - in the 1970s. In the 70s most people were not living amidst groovy decor - they had the sofas/curtains/carpets etc that had been bought when the parents had first set up home."

That is an interesting comment. I have just been reading Victorian Kitchen, and Margaret Powell's account of her life as a kitchenmaid/cook in the early 1900s. And again, very obviously supposed to ooh and aah over all the horrible things they had to do. Things like squeezing boiled potatoes through a sieve and dealing with live/raw fish and making your own gravy and getting told off for throwing away a whole untouched kipper. All things that were completely normal to me during my 70s Scandinavian childhood. (I still wouldn't be impressed if dh went and threw away edible food.) Powell's account is very interesting but I get the same feeling about that as I get when I read the account of Anne Bronte's time as a governess: "she sounds completely incompetent and I would find any excuse to sack her".

Was Margaret Powell the author of sweetmaking for Children, I used to love making things from that book.

Re. surnames - generally they were originally derived from either:

A home town or place (e.g. Hill),
An occupation (e.g. Smith, Baker),
Fathers name (e.g. Johnson),
A nickname about personality or appearance (e.g. Short)

With some origins being less obvious than others. For instance, the surname Walker is from a now obsolete trade in the linen industry, where walkers would trample the cloth in lye baths to strengthen it.

There'll have been plenty of less common surnames that have died out over the centuries, as the last male bearer died.

trills, I grew up eating eggs really fresh. You do anyway - you mark one egg in the nest with a pen and every day after, you pick up the second egg.

(And obviously the rooster gets to them because sometimes the hen will hatch that one chick - not usually, because hens don't seem to like to sit until they have a clutch.)

When I studied evolution at uni the lecturer reckoned teeth were a proof god doesn't exist, ha. Basically in most mammals they are difficult and prone to problems, infection etc. This idea that we only have bad teeth because sweets is too simplistic.

Basically teeth only require a fairly minimum standard to get you to the age when you'd die of something else anyway / have reproduced. Also constant pain isn't an evolutionary pressure in the same way death is. So teeth are a good example of something that if it was designed we'd have something much more suited to the job. As it is, they are barely good enough.

My surname is apparently the old Irish Gaelic word for "heron" , because my anscestors were tall and thin! The men n my dad's side still are.

I was at school with some Christmases.