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 ?

"I don't know how people coped without freezers."
You dry food, you salt it, you smoke it, pickle it, or you eat it fresh before it goes bad. A lot of vegetables, and other foods, can be kept for ages in a root cellar.
There was a mini ice age from the middle ages until the early 19th century, so it was obviously much cooler than it is now, making it somewhat easier to keep food from going bad.

Periods were probably a faff until relatively recently. When DM (born in 1950) told me what she used to use I nearly fell off my chair.
You had to wear some sort of belt with straps at the front and back from which you would hook a piece of terry cloth. She said disposable pads were available but most people couldn't afford them so had to stick to terry cloth.

A lot of women in centuries past probably didn't have regular periods - either because they were constantly pregnant or breastfeeding, or potentially because they were malnourished - so it might have been less of a problem than we think of it as being.

"Mary, Queen of Scots give birth to her son James 1 of England, 6 th of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle in a very small room. Many years later a small skeleton wrapped in a velvet cloth was found behind a panel in the same room"

There's no evidence of that at all, nothing more than unsubstantiated rumours and it's said to be the banqueting hall that was being renovated, not the same room and it was 300 years later, not a few.

So all in pretty unlikely.

How did things rot before maggots/flies evolved?
Things don't rot because of flies.
It's the bacteria, and the later evolved moulds.

how people coped without freezers
Also, food usually went straight from the source to the consumer.
Killing a large animal was a huge social event. Then think of ham and chorizo, for example.

I have also often wondered about kidney beans, like Giddy.
Eat kidney beans - die
Eat kidney beans - die
Boil the pants off the kidney beans for a couple of hours - All ok
Invent chilli

I've always wondered about vanilla? Why/who thought to take such an ugly looking thing and scrape out the equally horrible looking seeds would make something taste delicious?!

But how did we shift from wonderful oral and written histories where the core of the story was believed to be true, to wild flights of fancy produced from the author's imagination and accepted as being entirely fictional - but having value in their own right?

I'll go with metaphors and myths.

Humans learn from experience. Stories tell us of others' experiences and what they did. We learn a lot, including about human relationships, from fake stories (which often have some inspiration from real events).

I've always assumed a lot of cooking started by accident - natural yeast started growing in the dough for a flat bread, can't afford to throw it out, and lo! Leavened bread! Likewise, someone noticed those poisonous beans didn't kill everyone that time they were dropped into the stew pot accidentally and left to boil, so maybe we'll try that again.

Just found this about periods in medieval times: onthetudortrail.com/Blog/2015/02/10/the-lady-in-red-medieval-menstruation/, copied and pasted in case you don't want to click.

"To start, medieval women had fewer periods than today’s women. The reason for this is threefold. First, although the average age of puberty then is not much different than today, (between 12 and 14 years of age), women reached menopause earlier, often in their late thirties. Second, fewer medieval women had regular monthly periods. Poor nutrition and hard work meant that many women had low body fat. A woman needs to have some amount of body fat or her reproductive system slows down and menstruation ceases. Today, this is only problematic for girls suffering from eating disorders or competitive athletes like distance runners or gymnasts. Lastly, mothers in the Middle Ages typically had more children and breastfed their children longer. Breastfeeding stymied menstruation. All this means that, over the course of her lifetime, medieval women had vastly fewer periods to contend with than today’s females.
Yet, they did have periods and they needed some way to handle the menses mess without the feminine hygiene products we have today. Medieval women had two choices, much like we do today: she could find a way to catch the flow after it left her body, or find a way to absorb it internally. In our modern words, medieval women could use a makeshift pad or a makeshift tampon. Pads were made of scrap fabric or rags (hence, the phrase “on the rag”). Cotton was preferred because the material absorbs fluids better than the alternative, wool. Wool not only repels liquids, but it is itchy and uncomfortable. (And menstruation is uncomfortable enough!) Medieval ladies then had to devise ways to keep the pad in place as panties and underwear were not yet popular. There is some archeological evidence to show us that some women may have worn panty-like garments to hold the menstrual pad. Women could also wind cotton fabric around a twig and use it as a proto-tampon.
Here is an interesting side note: A common type of bog moss found throughout medieval England, sphagnum cymbifolium, is remarkably absorbent. It was used as stuffing for menstrual pads, as toilet paper, and as a battlefield dressing for wartime wounds. The popular name for this moss is blood moss; etymologists contend that this moniker comes from its use in battlefield first-aid. This account, of course, oozes of heroism and masculinity. But is more likely the case that blood moss earned its name by helping medieval women with their uniquely feminine problem.
Whether they chose a homemade pad or a homemade tampon, medieval women worried about leaks and stains. This is a main reason why red was a popular color for medieval petticoats. The scarlet color was not only fashionable and decorative, but also functional as to disguise the menses.
So, instead of having the luxury of visiting the drugstore to pick up supplies for the monthly visitor, medieval women turned to nature. Or, she simply wore red."

Connected to the high maternal and child mortality rates which I kind of do and don't understand, there are a lot of descriptions of children and sometimes later adults being weak and frail etc, people who spent a lot of their lives in bed etc. Why so many frail children?
Presumably there would have been less disability since premature babies or babies that needed help at birth - antibiotics, oxygen etc - would simply have died. Why do we just not have so many "delicate" children around that seemed so common in the past? And what probably caused a child being "delicate"?

Maybe childhood illnesses that they survived made them weak? I think all babies are frail, but they get stronger unless they get damaging illnesses. Or they could have had things like asthma, with no treatment so very susceptible to illnesses.
They royals, who we probably know most about, suffered from inbreeding too. Possibly most surviving peasants were strong and healthy until worked to death at an early age.
(This is all entirely theoretical. Just thinking out loud)

I think maybe the delicate children had chronic conditions such as asthma, epilepsy etc. Or perhaps TB?

Stringed instruments isn't hard to work out. Hunter idly twanging the string on his bows. The big one makes a different sound to the little one. And you have the beginning of instruments.

Henry viii did not have syphillis, the treatment at the time involved liquid mercury being injected into the uthura (sp?) and confinement for several days. There is no documented evidence for either of those things.
Anne Boleyn did not have a disabled baby. The first mention of this is at least a hundred years later. Disfigurement was a sign of sin in Tudor times so at least one of the many women in the birthing room would have brought it to someone's attention especially when Cromwell was gathering evidence for her trial.
Bloody Phillipa Gregory

But how did they invent the bow, user?

Throwing weapons at prey is easy to figure out - it's an easy leap from accidentally jabbing yourself on a broken stick to thinking this would be a more effective way to kill an animal - but where would you get the idea of catapulting the pointy stick using a bow from?

I don't understand the importance of sex in the lives of poor people throughout history. I only have one child and I'm knackered. I'd rather do without sex than have another. My sex drive after years with DP is pretty low anyway.

Yet only two generations ago it was normal for families to have a baby every two years even when living in tiny houses with no sanitation.

Is sex that good? I'd just say no thanks John I'm already shattered from looking after the six moppets we already have and living like this makes me feel as sexy as a bowl of gruel.

I sound flippant but it's something I genuinely don't understand.

I'm not sure the woman had much choice. Until 1991 it was still legal to rape your wife, as sex was a marital right.

Done some reading on Henry V III, there seems to be a theory that he may have had kells, which can cause miscarriage and still birth. Or that Anne Bolyen might have been rhesus negative.

Ah asthma and digestive issues makes sense.

There must have been some issue with Henry VIII (likely lifestyle related?) so result in such a horrendous birthrate plus amongst the royal family generally. I know birth outcomes were much poorer back then but still.

I often also wonder about surgery. I know originally surgeons and doctors were different and a surgeon basically had no medical training and would like let your blood or cut off bits.. why go to one?! It seems they caused a lot of death and if the "cure" for whatever ailment you were suffering from meant something incredibly painful and if you knew others that had died during that procedure or shortly after why would you still think it was a good idea??

Spinning wool or flax into yarn for the first time amazes me - you have hundreds of years of women spending most of their 'free' time with a drop spindle in their hands, until the invention of the spinning wheel I think around 1500, but it amazes me that making so much yarn seemed like a good idea when looms must have been really basic.

You can tell when cloth was really expensive by the fact that it wouldn't be cut much to make clothes, like Roman togas and cloaks. Only when it became cheaper and wasting some seemed reasonable did you start cutting holes in it and making patterns and having coats and shirts and trousers. Hence the slashing of Elizabethan velvet being a really boastful sign of wealth.

It could be genetics too. The tudors and most monarchs are/were fairly closely related.

My question would be, how on earth did women manage the pain
of childbirth before gas and air etc?

Once you are in labour you have no choice do you?! A lot of women give birth without any pain relief. I also gave birth in a hospital with no pain relief or gas and air - not because I didn't want it but because it wasn't available. For many years (and also to some extent now) the Church taught that pain was part and parcel of being a woman and just something to be accepted.

Re: freezers. A lot of people (at least in towns) used to just shop everyday for what they were cooking that day so there was probably actually less waste.