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THE WAY WE WERE...
(PERHAPS?)
(PERHAPS?)
INTERESTING ALLEDGED DETAILS ABOUT THE PAST...
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE
Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. She married at the ripe old age of 26. This was very unusual for the time. Most people married young by today's standards — with the average age being around 12 or 13.
Life was not quite as romantic as portrayed in the movies. Here are some examples…
- Anne Hathaway's home was a 3 bedroom house with a small parlor, which was seldom used (only for company), kitchen, and no bathroom. Mother and Father shared a bedroom. Anne had a queen sized bed, but did not sleep alone. She also had two sisters and they shared the bed with six servant girls (this is before she married). They didn't sleep like we do, length-wise, but all laid on the bed cross-wise. Well, at least they HAD a bed!
- The other bedroom was shared by her 6 brothers and 20 field workers. They didn't have a bed. Everyone just wrapped up in their blanket and slept on the floor. They had no indoor heating so all the extra bodies kept them warm.
- They had 27 people living in their house (not counting the field workers).They were also small people, the men only grew to be about 5'5" and the women were 4'6".
- Most people got married in June. Why? They took their yearly bath in May, so they were still smelling pretty good by June, relatively speaking. (Although they were starting to smell, so the brides would always carry a bouquet of flowers to hide their body odor.)
- Their yearly May bath was in one big tub that they would fill with hot water. The man of the house would get the privilege of the nice clean water. Then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last were the babies. By then the water was pretty thick. Thus, the saying, "don't throw the baby out with the bath water," it was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it!
- Their houses: you've heard of thatched roofs, well that's all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. So all the pets; dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, "it's raining cats and dogs."
- Since there was nothing to stop things from falling into the house they would just try to clean up a lot.
But this posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings from animals could really mess up your nice clean bed, so they found if they built beds with big posts and hung a sheet over the top it would prevent that problem. That's where those big 4 poster beds with canopies came from. - When you came into the house you would notice most times that the floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, that's where the saying "dirt poor" came from. The wealthy would have slate floors. That was fine but in the winter they would get slippery when they got wet. So they started to spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on they would just keep adding it and adding it until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. So they put a piece of wood at the entry way, a "thresh hold".
- In the kitchen they would cook over the fire; they had a fireplace in the kitchen/parlor, that was seldom used and sometimes in the master bedroom. They had a big kettle that always hung over the fire and every day they would light the fire and start adding things to the pot. Mostly they ate vegetables, they didn't get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner then leave the leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew would have food in it that had been in there for a month! Thus the rhyme: peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."
- Sometimes they could get a hold of some pork. They really felt special when that happened and when company came over they even had a rack in the parlor where they would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. That was a sign of wealth and that a man "could really bring home the bacon". They would cut off a little to share with guests and they would all sit around and chew the fat.
- If you had money your plates were made out of pewter. Sometimes some of their food had a high acid content and some of the lead would leach out into the food. They really noticed it happened with tomatoes. So they stopped eating tomatoes, for 400 years! Most people didn't have pewter plates though, they all had trenchers, that was a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. They never washed their boards and a lot of times worms would get into the wood. After eating off the trencher with worms they would get "trench mouth." If you were going traveling and wanted to stay at an Inn they usually provided the bed but not the board.
- Bread was divided according to status. The workers would get the burnt bottom of the loaf; the family would get the middle; the guests would get the top, or the "upper crust".
- When they drink they would use lead cups and drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days! They would be walking along the road and here would be someone unconscious and they thought they were dead, so they would pick them up and take them home and get them ready to bury. They realized if they were too slow about it, the person would wake up; also, maybe not. So they would lay them out on the kitchen table for a couple of days, the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. That's where the custom of holding a "wake" came from.
- Since church yards in England were small they started running out of places to bury people. When they began the practice of digging up old coffins and would take their bones to a house and re-use the grave. It was noticed on opening these coffins that some had scratch marks on the inside. One out of 50 coffins were that way, so they realized they had still been burying a lot of people alive. So the practice of tying a string onto the wrist of the dead person arose. The string lead up through the coffin, through the ground and to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen for the bell. That is how the saying "graveyard shift" come into use. If the bell rang they would know that someone was "saved by the bell"...
Find this little hard to swallow? Well, there's more!
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