The Historical Ponderings Society

[EverySongbirdSays]

Following on from the thread "What questions do you have about stuff from History or am I the only one?" Which is here

Ever wondered how we got from the clothes of Cave people to the clothes of today?

Who was the first person to make and eat Cheese? Or cake?

How ideas became widespread

Why the Aztecs didn't have the wheel?

Why Elizabeth I never married?

How accurate historical fiction is?

Then this your thread and we are your people.

PROCEED HISTORY LOVERS

a lot of the 20th century's major crises started in summer when governments were on holidays and running with minimal staff.

Riots and uprisings tend to be more of a summer occurrence, mainly because it's too cold to be milling about and not just getting on with your business and straight back home to shelter in winter. (Not exclusively, though.)

Great list Rusty. Think my house will remain dusty and garden weedridden through 2017 now.

Does anyone else have a recurrent time travel fantasy when you show people from the past how things turned out? Often in a good Shakespeare production I imagine him sitting beside me being amazed.
My friend in Sydney has a vision of driving of the Harbour Bridge with Captain Cook beside him and gesturing expansively at the millions of houses, glittering waterways etc etc.

I remember my linguistics tutor being excited when he went to Yorkshire and heard someone saying they were 'starving' from cold, which is a very old usage.

Random question. A history teacher told me that women back in Georgian times would actually urinate at the dinner table as it was impolite to leave. Lap dogs were given their name as they would sit under the table and lap up the urine.
He insisted it was true but I suspect from googling that he was winding me up. Has anyone else heard of this?

This thread is brilliant! (Loved the previous one too)/

human pooh smells bad because we are omnivores

As a strictly herbivore family I can state categorically that (whilst cat and dog poo has a distinctly offensive smell) this is not true- except for my own which obviously smells of lavendar! Anyone who doubts this need only use our loo after DH or DS.

Dropmealine- I suspect that you were being wound up (although I can't say for sure). However, I was once told that the idea of small 'lapdogs' becoming fashionable was partly so that, as well as eating dropped food from the floor, they would clear away vomit at large feasts when the men threw up so as to be able to fit in more food and drink. Again not sure if this is true.

One that I suspect is true is that our etiquette of holding out knife in the right hand and fork in the left was from naval traditions as the right hand was for holding one's cutlass.

Something I'd like to know more about is women's health issues in history and back to pre-history. We know that prior to today's sanitary protection used fabric to absorb menstrual blood but when did this become possible? What did women do before that? (As pps have said, woven fabric would have been costly until relatively recently in historic terms).

Pidlan - I’d love for the myth about the sword in the stone to be true. In some ways, it does make sense, because kings/chiefs/warlords were only occasionally important if there was a battle to be fought; but good sword/axe-makers/metal workers/blacksmiths were always important for hunting and agriculture. I’m sure I’ve read about blacksmiths officiating at marriages in very rural communities where there wasn’t a priest handy.

TipTop - I’ve watched many Time Team episodes where broken swords and knives and other metal objects have been found in ritual sites. I’m not sure if there’s conclusive evidence as to whether those were already broken objects or if they were whole objects that were broken just before being cast into the waters. Nevertheless, there was obviously a lot of meaning to those people. It’s interesting to do the timeline, and realising that the Lady in the Lake myth came so long after the ritual that probably the writers at that time had no idea why swords were sometimes found in lakebeds and made up their own story about that.

I am so pleased that the focus of history has moved from just being about the monarchs and battles (the “facts”, which was all I got back in the day – the ‘50s and early ‘60s, which is fast becoming history ) to more about what ordinary people’s lives were like.

"Lap dogs were given their name as they would sit under the table and lap up the urine."

This is not actual knowledge - but I doubt it, dogs wouldn't be particularly likely to do that.

I'm pretty sure that lap dogs are in fact dogs that sit on your lap.

EBearhug - Yes, you’ve reminded me. “Beestings” when I was young, in Hampshire, as just a townie; though farmland was never far away. So I kind of knew somehow that it was about beast-ings rather than bee-stings. That’s at least one example where the spoken and written language don’t precisely coincide.

I’m sure I’ve read about blacksmiths officiating at marriages in very rural communities where there wasn’t a priest handy.

Isn't Gretna Green the old blacksmoth''s forge?

Yes, icy, definitely beest-ings for pronunciation.

About women peeing during dinner, I had some recollection of the pee being collected, or having pots about.

So, ladies, I give you the Bourdaloue.

www.google.pt/amp/s/janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/regency-hygiene-the-bourdaloue/amp/?

I don't know about other lap dogs but we have a miniature pinscher. She's extremely small, most minis are no bigger than 32cm inches and ideally only 29cm high. They are extremely loyal and love a good lap.
They are also working farm dogs, they fit into rat/rabbit/snake holes. Ours has been retrieved from various animal holes as we don't really encourage that but as a farm dog she is actually a great at keeping the rat population down. I suspect many small breeds were used in a similar way, but their small, loyal nature made them fashionablé with the aristocracy.

Before fabric menstrual protection - dried moss, sheep's wool, sponges, depending on what was available in your local area.

At the height of the wool trade in England people were using waste wool as toilet paper (traces have been found in excavation of privies). I can't remember the source for this bit but apparently sometimes it was dyed and perfumed! At other times wool would have been too precious.

On a recommendation on the previous thread, I have been reading Dream Babies, which is about changing methods and philosophies of child rearing through the ages. Very interesting read.

Rusty, I tried to post last night to thank you for the list, but I was on my phone...
So many thanks - you must have a thing for bibliographies!

Christians believe that Jesus come partly to reinforce what was actually important. That the Jews of the time had become weighed down with laws and rules. Jesus says it is what comes out of your mouth that makes you sin not what goes in, which is believed to be him disregarding the kosher food laws. There are also stories of him deliberately opposing the Sabbath laws (picking corn for his hungry disciples) and facing up to the Pharisees.

So the early Christians were Jews, but believed themselves to be reformed Jews. As time moved in they became separate

saffron definitely - especially if someone worked hard for something and never saw it finished or knew the impact it had. The Doctor Who episode where the Doctor takes Van Gogh to see how loved his art is was definitely written by someone with the same fantasy!

Whenever I go to Shakespeare I imagine him there saying 'what is this? Why aren't you all drunk? Oi that was a rude joke did you not get that? Had the Globe lot in tears, people pissed themselves it was that funny. You need a drink come on now, let me tell you about the bishop and the carpenters wife...'

I know he's a great playwrite etc etc but there's a lot of innuendo in his plays and I can't help imagining him as a right lad.

I do wonder if I timetravelled to the future what I would see being held up as a great classic of our time. Have a feeling Coronation St might feature...

I'm a bit late to this thread, so apologies for the random contributions...

Grockle isn't Westcountry dialect (though "emmet", the Cornish equivalent, is the Cornish word for ant)

There is quite a lot of work by psychoanalysts on disgust and how it changes from culture to culture - I'll see if I can find some suggestions to add to the book list (thank you rusty!!)

I find it fascinating how some languages spread and some are contained - I think the pp upthread who said that Welsh was deliberately contained was right, and I suspect the same could be said of Cornish.

Sad to think that we are fast losing some regional dialects (or indeed languages). I grew up in rural Devon, and had friends with grandparents who spoke a completely different language to me. I can only remember odds and ends (like "mazzards" for cherries), but I agree that Bristol and further west has lots of words that someone from ye olden days (sorry LRD ) would recognise

Emmet is an ant on Dorset, too. Emmet butt is an anthill.

HEADS UP HISTORIANS :

There's a program on the Beeb tonight (BBC2) Mayflower Pilgrims THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MYTH. 8pm.

Oh, that's interesting about "bee stings" as colostrum. I'm from rural Ireland, so I did wonder how the same coloquilism is in very different places, although wiki includes 'beestings' as an alternative name: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colostrum

I'd like to know what happened at Roanoke. Was it just a virus?

Marking place

It's definitely not bee-stings, but beest-ings.

I've finally worked my way through both threads!!

If there are any evolutionary buffs - when did animals (and us) start dreaming? Do all animals dream? When humans didn't have language what would a dream look like? Would humans have had more nightmares or bad dreams because of the harsher living conditions? I'd like to know all about dreams please!

Dropme - similarly, I was once told at a National Trust house that Edwardian / Victorian women wearing skirts with large hoops would just wee standing up in public, as there was nowhere else for them to go, and only whores wore underwear anyway...

Watching the Pilgrims