History "Facts"
The following was sent to me by a relative of mine. It comes from a document that makes the rounds on the Internet regularly and purports to be a collection of fascinating facts about life around the eyar 1500. My relative sincerely thought all of these facts were true. These are a treasure-trove of half-truths and pure nonsense that I present by way of showing how thoroughly one can misunderstand the past when one never bothers to do research.
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June.
Not true. For one thing, May is planting season. Nobody smelled good! In any case, people got married at all times of the year. Otherwise, most babies would have been born in March, wouldn't they? A simple check of parish registers shows this claim to be false. Oh, and people didn't take yearly baths.
However, they were starting to smell so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
Foolishness. Brides carry bouquets because flowers symbolize fertility and anyway girls like flowers. Flowers have been present at wedding ceremonies at least back to ancient Rome.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children-last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."
Bathwater was not shared in this way. People certainly had enough sense not to bathe a small infant in a big tub. Infants got bathed then as they do now, in a smaller, baby-sized vessel. We actually know the origin of this phrase. It's German, first appearing in a satirical work by Thomas Murner. It's a vivid phrase and it was picked up by Martin Luther, and so the saying spread. Source: Thomas Murners Narrenbeschwürung, ed. by M. Spanier. Halle: VEB Max Niemeyer, 1967, pp. 243-246.
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath.
This is only partially correct. Architectural styles varied, though straw roofs were common in peasant homes.
It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."
This is simply ridiculous. In the first place, if they were going to stay warm, wouldn't they live in the rafters or in the thatch itself? It'd be pretty dumb to sleep on top. In the second place, who boosted the dogs up there? Did they use a dog ladder? Did they come down to poop? Did the cats simply urinate into the roof? Did the dogs get the south side and the cats get the north side? In any case, cats were for mousing—get the heck off the roof! And dogs were for hunting (if you were noble) or for carting (if you were a peasant). Moreover, this phrase can't have applied in the towns, where many buildings were multi-storeyed and in any case were not roofed with thatch. Since the peasants were largely illiterate at this time, the only way the phrase could date to the 1500s is if it were written by an urban author.
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
Yeesh. First of all, beds weren't clean. Beds tended to have lice and fleas and the usual assortment of bugs. A canopy would not have addressed the problem anyway, since bugs have no problem at all climbing down.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying "dirt poor."
Not true. Plenty of floors were wood or even stone (in the Mediterranean). Those who worked in dirt, however, were usually poor, though they were not among the poorest. The poorest were those who had no land to work. My guess is that this phrase dates to the nineteenth century.
The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."
I don't know about this one. I couldn't find anything authoritative.
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."
Possibly.
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."
Nobody really knows. Here are some speculations I've found: "One guess is that this expression was originally a nautical one: Sailors working their jaws on the tough salt pork rationed out when supplies ran low constantly grumbled about their poor fare while literally chewing the fat..." From Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997). Another reference says, "...'Rag (or fat) chewing' we have had since the early 1880's. It was then classed as American Army slang, in Patternson's 'Life in the Ranks.' To my notion, although either expression may have been adopted into army lingo, both are much more likely to have alluded to ladies' sewing circles – to the 'rags,' or cloth, upon which they worked while tongues clattered, or to the 'fat,' or choice morsels of gossip upon which they could feast." From Heavens to Betsy! by Charles Earle Funk (Harper & Row, New York, 1955).
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Why did it most often happen with tomatoes? Why not with other foods? With so much lead poisoning, surely the wealthy would have died off? Phooey. In the first place, the tomato is a New World food, unknown to Europe until the 1500s. Obviously people in the 1900s (400 years later) did not believe the tomato was poisonous. People did, however, believe tomatoes were poisonous for rather a long time. This was not unusual with New World plants. Tobacco, for example, was first marketed as a medicine. Very often when new plants were brought to Europe from the New World, their first uses were pharmacological. Why Europeans believed the tomato was poisonous is a mystery, but by the mid-19th century that was no longer the case.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."
This is nonsense. Families in towns normally bought it at a bakery. Nobody was standing around breaking loaves of bread and handing it out two or three times a day to thousands (approx. 200,000 in Paris in 1500).
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."
A wake is simply keeping vigil over the dead. It's the old practice of having someone stay by the coffin until burial. That displaying of the corpse was done, at least in part, because sometimes people fell into a coma and then reawakened, and folks in earlier times had rather unreliable methods for determining death. So, you simply had someone stay awake near the body for a day or two. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."
"Dead ringer" is horseracing slang. As you probably know, a "ringer" is slang (American, 19thc) for someone or something false, pretending to be something else. The use of "dead" is as an intensifier, as in "an absolute fake". The other phrases are equally easy to date to a later period. Moreover, the alleged historical foundation is completely false. Nobody was checking for scratch marks inside coffins.
Beware of arbitrary and unsubstantiated precision. The text would have us believe that someone in 1500 took a survey or did some sort of research and ascertained that one out of twenty-five coffins had marks inside. But the text says that this phrase dates from 1500. We are forced to conclude that the phrase and the practice from which it derived originated at the same time.
Why Are People So Stupid?
People aren't stupid. Or, if you are going to claim they are, you must allow that either you too are stupid, or you are not a person. Take your choice.
The real question is: why are these statements believed?
They are believed in part because to disbelieve would require doing some research and people have other things to do. For most people, accuracy about the distant past is simply not something they care much about. That's fine and that's understandable, but something else is at work here.
People believe these things because the "facts" fit their preconceptions. People believe instinctively that the past was dirtier, more ignorant, and odder than the present. This is a peculiarly modern disease, but it's very nearly universal. So, when told something exotic but vaguely laughable, we fit the new fact very nicely in with our other "known facts" about the past. Indeed, if I were to start passing around an email that claimed that people in the Middle Ages cared about cleanliness, loved their children, and put no more dogs on the roof that people today do, it would instantly raise eyebrows and would be instinctively disbelieved. Why? Because such facts don't fit with common preconceptions and so get doubted at face value rather than accepted.
A degree of substantiation for my interpretation can be found in the closing statement of this perennial email (which now is appearing in blogs as well). The final line of the text says "And that's the truth...Now, whoever said History was boring!"
The capitalization of "history" is one indicator, but the real key is "boring." All the facts cited are colorful, exotic, even as they pretend to explain something about the present (the origin of a phrase), they serve to emphasize the distance between the present and the past, between us and them. History is boring because it isn't about interesting things like bugs dropping on beds. This is the stuff they didn't teach us about in high school. In truth, however, says this message, history is strange and weird and exotic; that is to say, the past is strange and weird and exotic.
There's no winning this battle. The past must be less than the present. That's one of its vital social roles. Only people willing to look beneath the surface, willing to challenge their own preconceptions, will get beyond the "facts" contained in Internet emails. These are the people we call educated.