History Of Britain

[mrbojangles]

Got this e-mail today with a load of interseting facts about the "good old days". Not a joke or riddle but i thought this was the best place to post it.

Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour. 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 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."

Houses had thatched roofs---thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and times the animals would slip and fall off the roof.. 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 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.

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 all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)

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 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."

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."

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 death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the drinkers 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."

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."

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 was found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So 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."

And that's the truth... Now, whoever said that History was boring!!!

[mnoorsapl]

"England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. "

so they move to New York.

[mrbojangles]

"England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. "

so they move to New York. 

Yeah, i picked up on that one but seeing as i didn't write it, i didn't think it my place to edit. Isn't the whole of the world "old" also

[astral]

"England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. "

so they move to New York. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeah, i picked up on that one but seeing as i didn't write it, i didn't think it my place to edit. Isn't the whole of the world "old" also

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not in California.

On a trip round San Francisco they were pointing a building that

dated all the way back to 1890........................

Positively modern in my book!!

[mrbojangles]

"England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. "

so they move to New York. 

Yeah, i picked up on that one but seeing as i didn't write it, i didn't think it my place to edit. Isn't the whole of the world "old" also

Not in California.

On a trip round San Francisco they were pointing a building that

dated all the way back to 1890........................

Positively modern in my book!!

Misunderstood me Astral, I was referring to the bit "England is old" not ref any buildings in England.

[meadish_sweetball]

They are also famous for their rich legal tradition, which sometimes goes a bit overboard in its efforts to make everybody obey the law, hence the saying 'Rule Britannia'.

Dyslexia knows no borders. Hence 'Covent Garden' where the monks apparently had a shot too many of the communion wine before the official namegiving ceremony.

Tax evasion was popular, and tax evaders would wear special upper garments in order to recognize one another. Hence Jersey.

Before the Brits started to import cannabis from their colonies, the local druids would eat various types of mushrooms to leave the mortal world and travel to the realm of the spirits - also known as Scotchland to Americans.

Sometimes the druids would be so stoned they couldn't find their way to Scotchland, but just had to lay around on the beach hallucinating, commonly claiming to see gigantic aquatic mammals. Apparantely the druids were no better than the monks when it came to spelling. Hence Wales.

Builders, especially roof-makers, were famous for their incestuous conduct. Hence Margaret Thatcher.

It is a fine tradition among Brits to complain as much as possible. When the druids were not lying around stoned on the beach, they would trick farmers into believing they had magic powers and were messengers appointed by the deities, so they could humiliate the farmers and keep them as slaves as they saw fit.

When the farmers were busy transporting huge blocks of stone up to the top of a hill which the druids later sniggeringly ordered them to pile on top of each other, the druids would imbibe copious amounts of other hallucinogenic drugs and take turns complaining to each other.

Hence Stonewhinge.

(Did I mention some of the druids were heavily dyslexic?)

[mrbojangles]

Nice addition Meadish.

Now, does anyone know where the saying "Rule of Thumb" came from? Clue, i wish it was still legal

[tripperj]

Nice addition Meadish.

Now, does anyone know where the saying "Rule of Thumb" came from? Clue, i wish it was still legal 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Q] From Eric J Michelsen in the USA, Frank Conway in Winnipeg, Canada, and several others: “I’d like to know what the term rule of thumb meant. I remember reading it had something to do with being permitted to beat your wife with a rod no thicker than your thumb. Is this correct?”

This sounds like the invention of somebody desperately trying to make sense of a traditional phrase—what linguists call folk etymology. And it’s quite certainly untrue. But there’s a lot more to it than just fevered imagination.

The expression rule of thumb has been recorded since 1692 and probably wasn’t new then. It meant then what it means now—some method or procedure that comes from practice or experience, without any formal basis. Some have tried to link it with brewing; in the days before thermometers, brewers were said to have gauged the temperature of the fermenting liquor with the thumb (just as mothers for generations have tested the temperature of the baby’s bath water with their elbows). This seems unlikely, as the thumb is not that sensitive and the range of temperatures for fermentation between too cool and too warm is quite small.

It is much more likely that it comes from the ancient use of bits of the body to make measurements. There were once many of these: the unit of the foot comes from pacing out dimensions; the distance from the tip of the nose to the outstretched fingers is about one yard; horse heights are still measured in hands (the width of the palm and closed thumb, now fixed at four inches); and so on. There was an old tailors’ axiom that “twice around the thumb is once around the wrist”, which turns up in Gulliver’s Travels. It’s most likely that the saying comes from the length of the first joint of the thumb, which is about an inch (I remember once seeing a carpenter actually make a rough measurement this way). So the phrase rule of thumb uses the word rule in the sense of ruler, not regulation, and directly refers to this method of measurement.

So where does beating your wife come in? Sharon Fenick wrote an article about its origins in the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban in 1996. She found that for more than two centuries there have been references in legal works to the idea that a man may legally beat his wife, provided that he used a stick no thicker than his thumb; but the references were always to what some people believed, not to established legal principle. The British common law had long held that it was legal for a man to chastise his wife in moderation, as one might a servant or child, but Sir William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1765 that this principle was by then in decline. So far as I can discover nothing was ever laid down about how such discipline should be applied.

Ms Fenick traced the idea back to a pronouncement that was supposed to have been made in 1782 by a British judge, Sir Francis Buller; this led to a fiercely satirical cartoon by James Gillray that was published on 27 November that year, in which Buller was caricatured as Judge Thumb. (Buller was a brilliant lawyer, the youngest man ever to be appointed a judge in Britain, at 32, but he was widely considered hasty and prejudiced in his opinions.)

It might be that he never made the statement that rendered him so notorious. Edward Foss, in his Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England of 1864 says that to Buller “is attributed the obnoxious and ungentlemanly dictum that a husband may beat his wife, so that the stick with which he administers the castigation is not thicker than his thumb”, but says he can’t find any evidence Buller said it. But the Dictionary of National Biography and other standard works say firmly he did, as did contemporary biographies.

However, it was only in 1976, so far as I can discover, that the traditional phrase rule of thumb became directly associated with this spurious legal maxim, through a bit of wordplay in a report that was misunderstood by readers.

It is extraordinary that we can so accurately pinpoint the moment at which this folk belief came into being. And how astonishing, too, that it should have survived more than two centuries to become part of the folklore of modern times.

god bless google

Edited July 18, 2005 by tripperj

[drummer]

Ive heard that "raining cats nd dogs" refers to old London flooding when there was a really big rain and drowning some of the soi dogs / cats. In the morning when people woke up, they'd see some dead cats and dogs around, making it look like it "rained cats and dogs" sort of a macabre joke...

Edited July 20, 2005 by drummer

[Sir Burr]

Whereas in America to insult a person you give them the "finger", in Britain you would give them the V-sign using the index and middle finger.

The origin of this goes back to the Battle of Agincourt in medieval times.

The English and Welsh were the only countries to use the long bow in war (for reasons I won't get into now).

The French knights hated bowmen with a passion. Before the battle, the French vowed to cut off the index and middle finger of every bowmen that they captured so that they would never be able to draw a bow again. When the English won the battle (mainly through the use of their bowmen, the bowmen taunted their enemy by sticking up their two fingers, to show that they still had them.