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 ?

Love the carpenter story!

One of the main sanitations of the Grimm bros was turning the mother in many of the original stories into a stepmother. They felt that mothers trying to do away with their teenage daughters (and sexual jealousy of their own children)wouldn't be accepted by their audience so adopted the stepmother variant.

Angela Carter's Bloody Chamber is a good place to start you thinking about how the tales could have developed.

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

so, quick lesson about eggs - if a chicken lays a fertile egg, it doesn't start to grow. It sits in the nest as it is, until the chicken has a clutch of eggs, at which point she starts to sit on them. The warmth of her sitting on htem every day starts the growth process. So a clutch of 20 eggs, laid one each day, all start to develop at the same time on the day she starts sitting.

If you remove all the eggs every day she never has a clutch, so she never starts to sit.

Also eggs keep for a surprisingly long time. Eggs at room temperature keep for 5 weeks after they are laid.

They used to lay eggs down in barrels of salt or aspic jelly (or something else which I can't remember) in order that they would last the winter, as most chickens stop laying in the autumn.

Another tip about hens and eggs.
The chicken must be ready to incubate the eggs. With a raised temperature, IIRC from my grandparents.

Another way of preserving eggs was to store them in eisinglass.

Love the carpenter story!

fairy tales - I had always assumed that most of the fairy takes were told as cautionary tales. When the countryside was heavily wooded and wolves were still prevelant, the woods were a dangerous place, you could get lost, or attacked. Even when paths and roads were wider and safer, there were plenty of robbers along the way.

So it was important that children didn't wander off into the forest. Tales of witches, children being stolen, wolves etc frightened the children and kept them close to home.

Interestingly, fairy takes are remarkably similar right across Europe. The same tales were told in eastern Russia as in UK. Which probably suggests wandering storytellers?
We went to a children's performance of red Riding Hood in Central Asia, in the Russina Children's theatre. We took ds who was about 4. Big mistake. It was the Grim's version and terrifying to a small child! (yet the audience was full of small children loving it!)

eisinglass! yes that was the other thing I couldn't remember. Weird stuff I think.

I expect most people on this thread already know this, but it was another lightbulb moment when I read that the timing of Lent meant that it gave the chickens a chance to rear a clutch of eggs in the spring.
You would be desperate for eggs because the hens would have only just started laying again, and it would be tempting to scoff them all, so you would need a strict rule to tell you not to, if you wanted any more chickens for the next year!

google:

eisinglass is a transparent from of gelatine made form the swim bladders of fish.

What??? How many fish to make a bowl big enough to store half a dozen eggs?

Re: fairy tales and the original versions vs the Disney versions, there's a brief article here about some of them.

www.buzzfeed.com/josehernandez/these-are-the-most-cruel-stories-behind-the-disney?bffbmain&ref=bffbmain&utm_term=4ldqpgp#4ldqpgp

You add water to the swim bladder to make eisinglass I think, so would only need a couple.

Spring was also the "hungry gap" in 1000 (there's a good book called The Year 1000), as you'd be running out of your stores from the winter, but while new shoots and flowers look lovely, it wouldn't be until April that there would be significantly more to eat. So societies would make a virtue out of necessity and declare it a time of fasting (Lent), with a new lamb sacrificed at the end for a feast along with eggs, new milk etc. Apparently hunger plus drinking mildly alcoholic small beer, plus eating food contaminated with ergot (mould) and whatever early plants they could find (often mildly toxic) meant lots of people having hallucinations around that time of year. Which may explain some mythology and ghost stories (possibly including Christianity).

They told us in school Edward I and supporters would tie springs of broom (the shrub) to their clothes to recognise each other in battle - hence Plantagenet . Could have been later kings.

I remember my aunty (v well travelled) saying she spoke what is referred to as 'traders arabic' a simplified form that is generally understood all over the Arabic speaking world, because the different dialects (say between Iraqi Arabic and Egyptian Arabic) are really quite different and it can be very difficult to understand each other. So traders Arabic is used when travelling. I wonder if that kind of thing would have been involved in initial translations and then the more languages diverged the intermediary language was dropped and actual translators were relied on instead.

I would think it would depend on the size of the fish! Sturgeon are big, aren't they? And presumably more widespread in the medieval period than now. I wonder at what point isinglass became something you would buy in rather than make at home.

Going back to the invention of the wheel, I guess it was inventing axles that made it more useful. Wheels on their own limited in functionality.

language.
There is a fabulous book about Eng;ish and how it spread and tracing bits of it. So North American accent is traced back to the area of UK that the first settlers came form, and Southern US accent is very similar to the first settlers in that area. Something like Crinish accents versus east Anglian, and they pick out the common vowle sounds etc. (sorry can't remember properly)

Also, Engish is actually quite simple relatively speaking, as it doesn't have complex cases. This is supposed to be because of how it evolved in a multi lingual country.
So (and this is a very sketchy version of it as I can't remember the details)

person A speaks Anglo saxon dialect, comes to London to sell his cart, and people there are speaking other dialect (or French? or ??)

if you have a case based language, the word order doesn't matte,r but the word ending does, so you can say "I sell you the cart" or "you sell I the cart" and they mean THE SAME because the endings on the words make it clear who is the subject (the seller) and who is the object (the buyer). But if you are talking to someone who has a sketchy understanding of your language, those niceties are lost and they just about understand the words 'cart' and 'sell' never mind the endings, and you can't communicate. Hence the endings got dropped and the word order became the thing, so it was easier to communicate when you have varying dialects.

The wheel - we forget that you need flat surface for wheels to work, so with narrow mountain paths, or rocky land, or lots of tree roots, or deep mud, wheels are actually a pain.
Wheels need roads essentially

Surely it is much easier to pickle eggs then mess around with isinglass?

I think working class women have always used slings/wraps for their babies. Certainly my mother showed me how to wrap a shawl and carry my DC's "Welsh fashion".

There are lots of box beds and wall beds at the Welsh Folk Museum, St Fagans in their reconstructed cottages. I have always been fascinated by them and got the opportunity to sleep in a very ancient box bed in a Breton gite. I found it incredibly stuffy and claustrophobic and actually had to abandon half way through the night due to massive asthma attack, probably brought on by feather mattress.

I think (but not certain) that eggs preserved in eisinglas remain raw, so can then be used in cooking? (pickled eggs being hard boiled)

I would have thought they tasted fishy though. Fishy Victoria Songe anyone?

The isinglass preservation was of raw eggs, so you could still use them to cook. I think it excluded air so bacteria couldn't multiply. I don't think it sounds difficult at all - just make up your mixture and pop them in and leave them. And extracting the isinglass would just be a matter of boiling up the swim bladders.

Steppemum that is a good point about wheeled vehicles. A sort of sledge was used for transporting hay in hilly districts well into the twentieth century.

The thing about wheels is that they are a good example of something where you use useless (or pretty much useless) independent parts to make a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. A wheel needs an axel, a road, other wheels, gears etc to function well.

Early man inventions are similar to evolution in that every independent stage had a clear use even if combined later.

The wheel is an example of leaping beyond that staged thinking into something more visionary.

OK I have decided I'm going to experiment with the isinglass and the eggs. You can buy isinglass for homebrew - won't bother boiling up my own.
I assume it wouldn't impart a fishy taste but we'll see. Will report back in a few months.

Wheels are used for more than carts on roads of course. (Just think of what any tracks must have been like backaways.) E.g. For water wheels in mills, for irrigation and so on.

They also imply dray animals, which might have been expensive. If you didn't have a lot to carry, panniers might simply have been the easier option.

You're right Cozie All the contemporary illustrations of pack horses crossing the Pennines ( boggy - tick - hilly - tick tick tick- muddy - tick) Have them wearing a pannier-type arrangement.