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

I'm just re reading Call the Midwife and it's amazing how far we've come in 50 or 60 years. There was a great thread on here a couple of years ago with lots of nurses and midwives coming on to say how things had changes just in the 29 or 30 years since they'd trained.

Wrt thread - in Bronze Age UK people were spinning very fine thread out of bast from lime trees, and then weaving with it to make lovely soft cloth. They also used some wool to do the same thing.

People wouldn't have worn big slubs of "chunky" yarn because it is a very inefficient use of wool - which you either have to forage for or harvest from sheep that you have to spend all year maintaining (either following them or making sure they have good grazing etc if you pen them in) and protecting.

Relatedly, in the Iron Age, Romans reported that Ancient Britons didn't really wear any clothes (short leather cloaks excepted), as a) that would have covered up their extravagant tattoos and b) would have got in the way when they were wading about in bogs. This may be true only of the specific people that the Romans met when first invading though (warriors/scouts ready for combat), as it seems as if other people at the same time wore variations on the theme of layered blanket.

DH has just creased up listening to the lecturer on the Lloyds Bank Turd! Thank you.

When I went round the Jorvik exhibition aeons ago, they included a faint whiff if what it would have been like.

And what was that whiff like to your modern nose?

icy That is amazing about the sword in the stone!

I suspect that that's right, Best - about them only meeting certain people. (Or, at any rate, choosing to write only about certain people.)

Not much different from Naples in the summe combined with the pig farm next to the school I went to, I suppose because my home was right next to a dairy farm I'm used to whiff. It was a little more compacted, I'd say. And meatier. Stronger. Perfume rather than Eau de..

They've probably 'toned' it for modern noses. I saw a documentary once about the firm that makes smells - e.g. to put in gas or to allow the smell of fresh bread to waft gently across supermarket aisles and they apparently did one scent that was so repulsive that people couldn't be in the same room as it when made.

(I forget why they made it or for whom. )

Dear god, the Turd! That must have required a ring cushion afterwards

And riddled with parasites, it was. Poor person.

Sorry yes I meant Gibraltar! Cor don't know where that poor spelling came from sorry !

I just wondered why does it belong to the UK, it's so random, it's hardly close.

On the mention of pigs, pigs produce some of the most foul dung. Where I live, they use it to fertilise the fields and it's nasty.
Pigs are also important carriers of disease for humans. Bad smell - disease risk.

Raspberry, yes Manx is a Celtic language. So is Welsh, Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Cornish and Breton. Cornish, Welsh and Breton are so similar that I can guess at words in Cornish and Breton and be totally right (i'm a Welsh speaker).

On another note, somebody else asked what we spoke before English. The answer depends on where you were in the country and at what point. But Welsh was spoken all over, near enough (last Welsh speaking community in what is now England was the kingdom of Elmet in Yorkshire). Germanic and Norse languages influenced the north and French in the south.

There is a compelling argument in academia that english was not an organic development but rather one created and enforced powerfully in the Elizabethan era to bolster the newly emerged 'English identity'. Between 1500 to 1700, 30000 new words were introduced to english and between the printing press and the church,peasants all over eventually adopted it but there was little choice involved.

This was The Golden Age of the English, and actually the start of 'Englishness' as we understand it. Somebody else asked why our school curriculums obsess about the Tudors, but this may go some way to explaining why that is. Ironic really, given the Tudor's Welsh heritage.

The pen gwyn / penguin etymology is disputed, not least because it translates as "white head" and penguins' heads are black.

Pin-wing seems more likely to me...

Ooh I live in Elmet!

An acquaintance of mine was a native Gaelic speaker and could (fairly easily) understand Welsh - although she didn't speak Welsh until she learned it properly.

In China and Korea until relatively recently the pig latrine was in use. Long drop toilet with a penned pig below to clean up the human "odure" . Flesh was a delicacy. Yum!

Someone asked about combs in the other thread. This is a good guide to how they might have been made. Also has ways of making cord from various things!

www.jonsbushcraft.com/comb.htm

My question is: do you think anything could have been done to stop world war one? I think war was bound to happen because of the general political atmosphere and the arms race, but I'd love to know what would have happened if Franz Ferdinand had survived and gone on to rule.

Some great stories out of Elmet re: the Celtic stronghold. Ted Hughes was particularly proud of its historical significance.

Scottish or Irish Cozie? I find that I can pick out words in Irish but Scottish is harder. That might just be down to pronunciation.

Interestingly, one third of English is Germanic (Germanic languages are the 'lexifier', the base of english, if you are interested in terminology). The rest is made up of French, Norse languages, Latin etc. But notably, just a handful of Celtic language words. Linguists see this as evidence of a cultural cold-front. It's hugely significant that neither side borrowed from each others' languages hardly at all. HUGE snub from both sides. Especially when you consider that in the North East, where the so-called Viking raping and pillaging was going on, they were swapping words and simplifying their language to better communicate. The opposite of what happened between the Welsh and English.

I love that linguistic history tells you so much about relationships between people and cultures.

Scottish Gaelic.

You would, until recently, find plenty fishermen and coastal dwellers who wouldn't touch mackerel, Weeds. For the same reason.

Sut hwyl CompanyOfCats

That's interesting Cozie because DH has always said that he wouldn't eat mackerel because 'of all the shit they eat'. I'd bet that he's never thought about this in literal terms but instead that it's passed on knowledge that has lost its meaning.