The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it,
think about how things used to be.
Most people were married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June.
However, they were, nevertheless, beginning to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide their body odor.
Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the first, or cleanest, water,
then all the
other sons of the household, then the women and finally the children; last of all were 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."
Most houses had thatched roofs with thick straw-piled high but no wood
roof panels underneath. It was the only place
for animals to get
warm, so all the cats and other small creatures (mice, bugs, etc.) lived in
the roof. When it rained, the
straw became slippery and sometimes the animals would fall off the roof....inside the house! Hence the saying, "It's
raining
cats and dogs." 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 seriously mess up your nice clean bed.
Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. And that's how canopy beds came
into existence. The floor was dirt.
Only the wealthy had something other than dirt.
Hence the saying, "dirt poor". 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
added more thresh until,
when you opened the door, it would start to slip outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway to stop this,
hence the saying a "threshhold".
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, occasionally able to add a
little meat. They would eat the stew
for dinner, leaving leftovers in the
pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Thus, the
stew, sometimes, 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."
Sometimes they could obtain pork, (the meat most preferred by
their powerful Roman ancestors) 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 their guests and they would all sit
around
and "chew the fat."
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid
content caused some of the lead to leach into the
food, often
causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for
the next 400 years or so,
tomatoes were considered poisonous.
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 the "upper crust." Lead cups were widely used to drink ale or whisky. This
combination also caused a
nasty chemical reaction that would sometimes knock the
imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along
the road
could take them for dead and and arrangemnets would be made to prepare them for burial. The "corpses" were
laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait to see
if they woke up or not. Hence the c ustom of
holding "a wake."
England is old and a relatively small country and the local folks
started running out of places to bury people. So, they
would often
resort to digging up coffins, then take the bones to a "bone-house," and
re-use the grave. When reopening
these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins
were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they eventually
realized they had been burying people alive! So they began to tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through a
hole in the coffin, then up
through the ground where they would tie it to a bell. Someone would
be designated 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 finally considered a "dead-ringer."
And that's the truth. Whoever said history was boring?!!