How did people wake up before alarm clocks?
Pre- Industrial Revolution, work starting times were much more aligned to sunrise, though people often did have to be at work at or not long after sunrise. Cockerels and other bird and animal sounds, which start a little before that, woke most people up - no double glazing to keep out the noise.
There's a youtube video from tv in the 70's or 80's with an old man speaking dialect. He says "yowp over t'yat" for leap over the gate.
:) Can you remember what the video is called?
Another bit on Arthurian swords - the Lady in the Lake this time. Swords were a common ritual deposit in water around the Iron Age. Later on (Roman, early medieval times) they were quite often randomly found. Nothing especially weird then about a sword turning up in a lake.
Weaving and knitting - yes, on some level I also find it strange that weaving is probably older than knitting (probably because we know weaving only as an industrial process, but knitting as a home based craft) - but when you consider activities like plaiting human hair, or making baskets from reeds, it seems more obvious how creating similar strands of other things came up as an idea. For those who are members of Ravelry, there are some great threads on there about history of knitting and particular knitted garments.
Knitting appears to have been introduced to Britain in the late middle ages (some legends attribute it to Catherine of Aragon's court, and that, known earlier from North Africa and Moorish areas - which is unexpected as in the West it's so associated with colder weather - it would have arrived via the Spanish).
Some other things about knitting:
People were so adept at it they could knit accurately in the dark, or while walking along:
www.theshed.co.uk/oldhandknitters
^Not only was knitting a source of much needed income for the poor (especially in rural communities) but also a craft that brought people together. Moving on rotation from house to house in the evening, knitters (both men and women) would sit in the dark (the candles snuffed out to preserve the wax) and exchange gossip and tell stories. Knitting songs, like sea shanties, were sung to pass the time and encourage the knitters to greater speed.
Wordsworth writes in ‘Michael’, (1800):
‘…..while far into the night
The housewife plied her own peculiar work,
Making the cottage through the silent hours
Murmur as with the sound of summer flies.’
‘For centuries, hand knitting was a way of life for the dalesfolk of Yorkshire and Cumbria. They knitted as they drove the cattle to the fields, as they walked to market, and as they gossiped and sang around the fire on winter evenings. The few pennies they earned from making stockings, jerseys, caps and bonnets were a vital source of extra income.^
This:
www.oldandinteresting.com/default.aspx
www.oldandinteresting.com/sitemap.htm
is a very site for info about household items, housework and crafts in history
if the connection is made between to sewage and infection. The Romans worked out there was a connection, but didn't know the why. Then we lost that and went back to sewers near water.
This is an excellent example of reasons in favour of calling the Dark Ages the Dark Ages - knowledge and technology was lost with the fall of Rome and took hundreds of, sometimes over a thousand years to get practical application again.