Baths equaled 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 bathwater.”
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 pets,
dogs, cats and other small animals, mice rats, 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 outside.”
Also, there was nothing to stop them 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. So they found if they made beds
with big posts and hung a sheet over the top, it addressed that problem.
Hence, those big beautiful 4 poster beds with canopies.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt;
hence the saying “dirt poor”. The wealthy had slate floors, which would
get slippery in the winter when wet. So they spread thresh on the floors
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 at the entry w ay, hence a “thresh-hold.”
They cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every
Day, they lit a the fire and added things to the pot. They mostly ate vegetables
and didn’t 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. Sometime the stew
had food in it that had been there for a month. Hence, the rhyme: peas porridge
hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old.”
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused
some of the lead to leach onto the food. This happened most often with tomatoes,
so they stopped eating tomatoes….for 400 years. Most people didn’t have pewter
plates, but had trenchers…a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl.
Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms got into the wood.
After eating off wormy trenchers, they would get “trench mouth.”
England is old and small and they started running out of places to bury people.
So, they would dig up coffins and would take their bones to a house and reuse the
grave. In reopening these coffins, one 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 their wrist and 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 and listen for the bell. Hence, on the “graveyard shift” they
would know that someone was “saved by the bell” or he was a “dead ringer.”
