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

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/why-our-feet-are-getting-bigger-9481529.html

www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/03/british-feet-longer-wider-say-experts

I think skeletons have gotten bigger thanks to better diets.

People changed their names, though, Weeds. (Particularly with the advent of the Great War.) You just don't know.

I've heard that Olenna - my stepmother told me that she had Scandinavian ancestry because of her pointy feet (and obvs. Normans were norse so our stories match up)!

Let me tell you all a (relevant) story.

A very close acquaintance of mine was, many years back, travelling in the Pyrenees and stayed over in a small mountain village. The massively aged 'grandfather' of one of the local families he met used to sit in the corner with a stick and a pipe, saying nothing, but my friend decided to engage him in conversation. To truncate the story - the discussion was in bad Catalan/Spanish and bad English - it turned out that he was actually a deserter from the English trenches who had fled through France and ended up being taken in by this family in this Pyrenean village. He'd stayed of course. (And had very little English left by the time my friend talked to him.)

No-one else in the village knew quite where he was from any longer - if indeed they ever had. They were aware that he came from 'over the mountains' but that was as far as it went.

So - if someone comes onto the board and says that they have heard of a Spanish family who call their children things like Lucy and Elspeth? Who can tell the background and what really happened?

(Caveat. I didn't talk to this man myself. He would be long dead now in any case.)

Do people have to was all the same length?! I've never noticed this - I must have Norman feet! Feet are getting bigger. I am a size 5, which used to be perfectly average. Now a 6 or even 7 is average. My mother is a 4 and she used to get all the sample shoes from her father's friends factory as that was average then. Her sister and my eldest cousin are a 3. Quite a change in a short period of time. I am also taller than all of them but not especially tall. The shoe museum in Street had lots of tiny shoes (including Chinese foot binding shoes). A lot of them were brocade or really soft leather so must have had a bit of give in them. Working women probably had something a little more robust.
Cozie I know male relatives were in WW1 in the British army so any German connection would be prior to that. My aunt has done a lot of research on mother's side of family and no Germans there, but Dad's side the knowledge is sketchier.

toes not to was. This phone autocorrects to complete gibberish! Not even aslerp tonigt cozie !

I was told, once, that toes - being largely vestigial - were generally shortening with evolution.

I guess everyone will be inspecting their feet tonight!

if someone comes onto the board and says that they have heard of a Spanish family who call their children things like Lucy and Elspeth?

I have a Spanish cousin: Luz Marina - "Lucy" - in English.

I dunno about Norman vs Saxon feet, but I do know that Dupruyten's contracture (where the connective tissue tightens and a finger can't be straightened) indicates Viking ancestry.

I think it depends where they're from, lurking. The Spanish and Catalan authorities were both, traditionally, a little 'rigid' about first names but - as in all things - the really out of the way places might just have been a little bit more.......approximate in toeing the line.

www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/footloose-in-archaeology.htmP

weeds - not quite all the same length, but my first two toes are exactly the same length, the next two are slightly shorter and nearly the same length as each other and my little toe is really quite small. So my feet are pretty square shaped

cozie - I was told once that the little toe was the most important, as it stops you over balancing. Not sure if that's true (wouldn't we learn to re-balance with four toes??), but I suppose we don't on the whole need to grip things like branches with our toes anymore. Whenever there is a thread on here about the things pp can do with their bodies there's always someone who says that they can pick things up with their toes and their DH cannot - so maybe some people are already losing that skill as evolution decides it's not necessary.

Weeds my grandmother was a Teed. They came from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. Not sure where before that though.

Ooooh we might be related in some dim and distant way workshy !
I can pick up things with my toes and even write ( right foot only) although not exactly neatly.

I can't remember if anyone previously linked a really interesting website that maps surnames in the UK? Beware - you will spend hours putting in the surnames of everyone you ever knew...

Weeds - thank you for that archaeology article. I've made a fascinating discovery that DS has got Scots-Irish feet. This is interesting because he also (unlike anyone else in the last two generations) has Celtic colourings (red hair, pale skin, green eyes), so there's clearly some deep-rooted genetic material showing through in him that's stayed hidden in DH and me and our parents

Interesting site thanks

I have the Scots Irish foot, with a very definite longer second toe. DH and DD very clearly have the modern English foot. We're both Welsh with a lot of West Country ancestry but I do have some Irish thrown in about 5 generations back.

Is it just me the archaeology foot link doesn't work for? 404

Try this link for the foot article

I can't remember if anyone previously linked a really interesting website that maps surnames in the UK? Beware - you will spend hours putting in the surnames of everyone you ever knew...
And it will turn you into a surname nerd, who goes when a Radio 4 afternoon drama about Victorian Preston includes a character with a surname you KNOW comes only from Ipswich.
I really should get out more.

I wonder mainly about cooking - whipping egg white or cream, in particular - you have to beat them for ages by hand to make any sort of difference to the texture, & with egg white you need certain circumstances to guarantee success - why even bother in the first place?

I can "get" butter - barrel of cream bumped all the way to market in a cart = butter perhaps, so deliberately shaken the next time.

Very glad someone bothered though

I think that a good many recipes were developed in the 18th and 19th centuries and particularly in the large houses who would have had a dedicated cook. If you look at real medieval 'receipts', they were often pretty basic.

Ahah! Thurmuthis (or Thermoutheus or various spellings) was the Pharoah's daughter who found Moses in his basket. So I guess my Thurmurther/ Thurmothen etc is probably a corruption of that.

Thanks that link works 😊 Can't figure out what type of feet I have though!

Brilliant, BestIsWest!