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 ?

The idea that married women have to agree to have sex is probably quite recent. Traditional Christian marriage dictates that the woman must submit to her husband, which means amongst other things submitting sexually. My local church still refuses to marry couples in 2016 if the woman doesn't agree to submit.

I would guess it was genetic too. Henry VIII could father healthy daughters, and healthy sons with some women, that does suggest a genetic condition that affected boys. Even more so when you think his one legitimate son was unwell.

Henry VIII would also have believed deeply that his right to rule came from god and that a son who wasn't actually his blood, born in legal matrimony, wouldn't have been a true king.

Plus royal births were very public affairs. Too many people around seeing the baby to swap.

This is a brilliant thread. I wish we'd learnt this kind of stuff at school. Instead it was just boring battles.

What a sad story about your uncle, Francis . Despite the current political madness, I do feel grateful to live here and now when I hear stuff like this. People dying so needlessly from minor things. Makes you realise why poor folks had so many children- have lots and surely some will survive to look after you in your old age.

I'm amazed anyone had sex at all. People must have reeked to high heaven and had terrible teeth and breath.

Pat I've always wondered about that too. Do you think people would all just have been oblivious because everyone smelt as bad as each other?

Although I'm sure I've also read that it is a bit of a misconception to think that people were always filthy, it was just that their ways of keeping clean were different to modern ways.

But how did they invent the bow, user?

That's a far more interesting question, isn't it? Maybe it was just through experimentation. They've killed an animal. Everyone is full and well fed, a couple of people are scraping the hides, someone else is making a tool out of the bones. Maybe someone else is messing about with the intestines, thinking, there must be something we can do with this, what are its properties.

What makes the bow work is the bending of the wood. That's easy to figure out from tree branches and bamboo type of plants. Just walk behind someone who's walking through thick woods. :)

The string allows to pull back the tips and the rest must have been a logical step.
But most of such advances took a long time to develop and they may have been due to luck, mistakes or geniouses.

had terrible teeth and breath

Not necessarily.
Teeth have been cleaned for ages with wood picks and twigs, for example. Without too much sugar and acidic drinks, and constant snacks, teeth would probably last longer than today.

A friend of mine refuses to eat cheese on the basis that he won't eat what was essentially a bucket of milk left in a corner for ages that became a container of stinky horridness.

With cloth/spinning, it's not quite as simple as 'industrial revolution' (mass production) versus 'pre-industrial revolution' (none).

In the period I study, people had just begun to use horizontal looms, which are big machines where you sit down, using your feet on pedals to work part of the threads and throwing a shuttle about with your hands. Prior to that, and for centuries/millenia, people had used smaller and less efficient looms that were either box-shaped or vertical.

Unsurprisingly, once sitting-down looms took off, weaving became a man's job rather than a woman's job, and one man might depend on multiple women spinners to provide the raw materials for his grand end product. So, people were already systematising the process - one person wasn't doing it all from beginning to end - and you already had a situation where the people making the raw material were paid much less than the person who did the last stage of the finished product.

There were also huge numbers of different types of cloth, some very simple or practical and some very fancy. It had a huge impact - I was told the other day that the streets of certain towns are the width they are, because they were designed around the needs of the cloth and weaving trades.

Very interesting coffee. Even growing up in the 70s in central London, a little boy in our street "failed to thrive" and the diagnosis of coeliac disease was a very long time coming. I remember him struggling to breathe and never being able to keep up with us running about. His mum actually put him on an elimination diet before any doctors did.

Yes but tooth decay certainly came in as a massive prob with the arrival of sugar. Weren't Liz I teeth black and rotten

Got my Antisemitism info off a documentary by one of the Snows can't remember title

Yes I am aware that I may be misinformed thanks to Philippa

So if I want to be informed about PROPER facts eg Tudors eg History of Clothes what should I be reading?

History isn't facts!

That said E. Jane Burns is a good (academic) scholar who looks at medieval clothing - not just the practicalities but also how it was thought about and what cultural connotations it had.

The seclusion of women in harems was perhaps a way of managing periods amongst themselves but I wonder if the relative independence of western women over the centuries is because they must have devised a more effective way of managing so that they could work and socialise.
Then again you have stories of Victorian women suffering 'the vapours' and I've always thought this was a euphemism for having a period.

Many young girls in Africa miss school during their periods. Rags are hard to come by and difficult to wash. Also, a school day might involve them being out of the home for long hours at some distance with no access to privacy so they can't keep themselves clean and so stay home.

Every Alison Weir is an excellent writer, Henry viii King and Court is a fab read. It takes you through his story plus how the court worked, what people wore, ate etc. Another book of hers Lady in the Tower goes into great detail on the last months of Anne Boleyn. She's got an easy writing style which isn't dry like a lot of historians.
Sorry for the mini Phillipa Gregory rant, while she's brought a lot of readers to history she states rumours as facts with no documented evidence.

I'm a sucker for Time Team and they frequently do 're-encatments' or what ever they're called...with kilns and such.

They spend ages grinding up stone (is it iron ore ?)...and I alwast wonder how on earth early man figured this out

'Disfigurement was a sign of sin in Tudor times.'

This isn't quite true. People sometimes associate disfigurement with sin, but often not, and there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest people who had what we'd now consider to be physical disabilities, were actually treated no differently from anyone else.

When archeological sites have been excavated, there have been found 'pens' inside the boundaries of dwellings. These have been assumed to be to contain livestock overnight but could they have been playpens to contain children?

Handsoffmysweets - I see what you mean. Sorry to be morbid, but it wasn't until I gave birth that I really thought about what "dying in childbirth" actually entailed. Must have been horrendous.