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'm back to lurk with my afternoon coffee. Some of these questions have the wheels in my head rolling!

I agree, people must have been freezing and if they were poor there wasn't a great deal they could do to keep warm (aside from burning wood, really). I'm pretty sure the cold would have been a fairly leading cause of death ye' back when.

I wonder how it was ever decided (prior to bloodlines and wealth making decisions) who was to be King/Emperor/Pharaoh? Who suddenly though one day.. 'Right peasants, you're all under my command and off with your head if you decide otherwise?'

It was tribal wasn't it? Certainly as I understand how the High Kings of Ireland worked. Tribe vs Tribe strongest tribe wins, strongest tribe has it's most revered fighter, they are the King.

Stability with the crown and whose head it lands on really only happened after the Civil War and post Cromwell

It was still pretty much a case of "Whose is bigger?" in terms of Army until then.

Fish and chips - perfect merger of high grade agricultural land and a lot of coast in the UK. The fried fish idea was introduced by a Jewish immigrant in the East End of London is the 1800s or so. Fish and Chops caught on because the ingredients were cheap and they were easy to cook to order, at a time when working class guests were generally bland, and cooking facilities limited. George Orwell wrote about the role of chips in sustaining the physical and emotional wellbeing of mining communities in "The Road to Wigan Pier".

Grew up without central heating. No open plan then - rooms had doors that were kept shut when not in use. Thick curtains on all the windows that were closed before it got dark to keep the cold out.

There was a fireplace on the living room that was lit when we got home from school. The bedroom above (mine) was toasty as the chimney breast was warm from the fire below - yes to getting changed under covers in the morning then pulling back the curtains and seeing ice fans.

If you were could you were cold you put another layer on. Ditto for beds, didn't have duvets. Had sheets, blankets, eiderdowns, candlewick spreads and hot water bottles. Also tucked in tightly so no cold air getting in.

Joining up a lot of loose ends on here - if women were poor, physically hardworking malnourished, often pregnant and often breastfeeding - then surely their periods would have been limited anyway? Mine always stop for a while if I lose weight or I'm really tired.

The theory (fictional ) Is that his grandmother Elizabeth Woodville was a witch and cursed her own line by accident but if you want to know more about that you want the Philippa Gregory books

Sorry, have only skim read the thread, but please, please don't believe any of the bollocks that Gregory peddles as fact (or even having any basis in the truth). Songbird if you like historical fiction, try 'The Sunne In Splendour' by Sharon Penman. It's a novelisation of The War of The Roses and unlike PG's books, has been heavily researched.

I lived in a house without central heating, as a adult, in 2000!!!!

I also remember my parents getting a fridge freezer and a dishwasher after (their) DC4 was born in 1974.

Going back a bit, but the purple = royalty thing comes from the Byzantiums I think.

There was a Royal room completely decorated in purple rock, and babies had to be born in there in order to be considered Royalty, the expression was 'born in the purple'. There was one woman carrying an out-of-wedlock baby who went into labour and they tried to bar her from the purple room, she got in and therefore the baby was legitimate and royal. I forget the details but was fascinating, from the book Byzantium, the surprising life of a medieval empire, by Judith Herren. Recommend it as a read.

Regarding sex, I have one name for you - Galen. He was one of the key dudes behind the idea that men and women had the same reproductive organs, but men's were on the outside and women's on the inside. Back in the day, it was believed that women needed to orgasm (internally ejaculate) to get pregnant, so the female orgasm was considered important if trying to conceive. Georgian women often had a much more fun time in the bedroom than a 1950s woman, for example.

Unfortunately a side effect of this view was that rape resulting in a child wasn't rape, because she must have orgasmed. My understanding of Tess of the D'Urbevilles is that it was written when understanding of the reproduction system was changing (the Victorian idea of sex being something done to women, rather than it needing to be a mutual act) and that it was still rather a daring point to make that sex resulting in baby did not equal fun times. Puts Angels reaction into a whole different category if you think he may have thought extramarital sex, had baby, oh gosh she must have enjoyed it then, definitely a sinner.

I always wonder weren't people cold before central heating? No, I mean REALLY cold, shivering, teeth-chattering cold. Even with double glazing, central heating and warm clothes sometimes I'm still cold.

There are still houses in this country with no central heating and no double glazing.

You acclimatise (I still don't heat my bedroom and sleep with the window open.) You wear more clothes, including thick socks and jumpers. There's an exhibition about underwear at the V&A currently, and one of the exhibits is a quilted petticoat. Layering of underwear. Wool stockings rather than 10 denier sheers.

You focus on heating one or two rooms only. You get goid at managing ooen fires. More blankets on the bed, proper night clothes rather than shorts and t-shirt. Hot water bottles/stone pigs/warming pans. Cuddling up close (another reason for sex - it warms you up.) And there's still ice on the inside of the window when it's frosty, but you're all toasty and warm under the covers.

You're still sometimes cold, but rarely enough that hypothermia or frostbite would be a risk. Just being a bit cold won't kill you. The chilblains might be itchy, though.

Just had a look on google to satisfy my curiosity and apparently the first ever recorded King was Sumerian; apparently came into position when the gods granted his kingsmanship and he reigned for something like 30,000 years. Well, I guess that wonder will never be answered for an atheist like moi

Forgive me if this has been asked as I haven't read it all

When Charles was executed in 1649 we became a republic effectively so why was the Royal family reinstated later on. I never got this. From school history and have never understood it.

Even recently, I see 20th century fashions where the women are wearing skirts and stockings all year round, and think why don't their toes have frostbite.

Frostbite doesn't set in until your extremities drop below freezing. Not likely in the UK.

*good at managing open fires

I cannot explain my autocorrect. It doesn't know what is correct.

Yes High

The Songbird DO FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK STOP READING GREGORY has been heard

I'm looking for non-fiction alternatives that read well and aren't dry.

What's Starkey like?

He is a proper prick IRL though, so I don't particularly want to give him royalties.

It's not true that the Tudors didn't have buttons, BTW, just that it was one way out of several of doing things up and was only used for certain things, like men's doublets and then women's bodices started to imitate the men's style. And they're used less in the first half of the 16th c than the second.
There was indeed a lot of use of lacing and tying points, and also pinning especially in women's clothes, which seems a bit hazardous (normal pins, of course, not safety pins).

It's interesting, isn't it, that the cold climate has been the driving force behind so much advancement in technology. When we all lived in Africa there was probably no need for clothes or anything more than a rudimentary shelter. No winters so food was available all year round (barring droughts).

When humans moved further north they had to come up with ways to cope with the climate, so building became a thing, along with wearing clothes, which led to technologies like weaving, masonry, mining etc.

Every I heard from somewhere that Marco Polo brought noodles back to Italy from his travels in China which then became pasta. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but as the Chinese were pretty clever and seem to have invented everything it wouldn't surprise me.

vicki

I am vague on it but did used to know - Oliver Cromwell became something of a dictator and is still a particular figure of hate in Ireland.

Once he died a power vaccuum existed which resulted in the restoration of the monarchy, and the origin of the constitutional monarchy we have today.

Starkey does a great lecture but not keen on his books.

Alison Weir would agree generally good but don't Blood and Roses unless you're REALLY interested, I don't know how I managed to finish it so dry.

Queen Emma and the Vikings is an amazing book. Harriet O'Brien. She was a right goer (Emma, not Harriet )

Cromwell tried to put up his son as the next leader. Didn't go down well. Charles II was in exile being just so jolly and people thought if we're going to have inherited leaders lets get the king back, at least he knows how to do pomp and ceremony and pow wow with other monarchs.

Can I just say, I think the thing with Philippa Gregory isn't that she doesn't do the research - she seems to me to be perfectly on top of the detail in many cases. I think the problem is that rather than choosing the most likely possibility in each case she goes for the most sensational even where it's actually almost certainly wrong. A lot of her dubious stuff does have a basis in the sources or modern scholarship, it's just they're gossipy biographies from 100 years later, or fairly imaginative works of history.

Was Cromwell kind of like a president then, was he elected? I know he lead the winning side of the army in the civil war

I think Phillipa Gregory is being quite old fashioned in her attempt to fill the role of storyteller mixing facts and fiction. She's like the old ones who used to travel between grand houses - talk about kings, we all love a bit of monarchy TICK, witches, they're good for a yarn TICK etc

In many ways the stories she tells though not factually accurate are close to what would have been believed by ordinary people at the time. Which in itself is a fascinating insight.

Sorry songbird her books are really one of my bugbears though, especially The White Queen which I threw across the room in frustration.

countess I think you're absolutely right in what you say, but her portrayal of Mary Boleyn was verging on the hagiographic. By all accounts, Mary was a bit of a goer, and there was no suggestion that any of her children were Henry VIII's. But yes, she takes gossip and tries to portray it as the truth.

I've also always wondered who first thought to milk an animal and then decide it was a good idea for humans to drink it.

It was probably goats first, the reason female goats are called nanny goats is that they can be trained to feed children / babies.

When every day is a battle to eat any possible protein would be tried surely.

A person hungry to the point of starvation will give anything remotely edible a go. In WWII in mainland Europe people made soup using wallpaper because there was a tiny nutritional value in the paste, they tried eating shoes, acorns all sorts of things.

Cromwell was a driving force behind the New Model Army (a more organised fighting force). One of the key features of the New Model Army was that to some extent leadership was awarded on merit (good at fighting and organising) rather than title (Duke Watsit gets to lead the army because he's a Duke).

Cromwell was a General and part of the council leading the parliamentarians and ended up as a kind of President figure, yep.

But loads of ordinary people still believed in the monarchy, and bloodline, even though Charles I had been a bit of a twat. His wife was blamed for a lot of the troubles, conveniently being both female and catholic so clearly a wrong un.