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Dear
Lord, You are my hope, my trust, my strength, my comfort, and my
faithful helper in every need. AMEN
A Point to Ponder....
The
only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle,
which is exactly what it is.......A Miracle and Unrepeatable.
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.
Here are some facts about life in the 1500s:
1) 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 odor.
(This is where brides carrying wedding bouquets came from.)
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."
2) 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 dogs,cats and
other small animals (mice rats, and 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."
3) 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.
4) 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 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 entry way-hence,
"threshold."
5) 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."
6) 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."
7) Those with money had plates made of pewter.
Food with a 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.
8) Most people did not have pewter plates, but had
trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped
out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from
stale paysan bread that was so old and hard that
they could use them for quite some time. Trenchers
were never washed and a lot of times worms and
mold got into the wood and old bread. After eating off
wormy moldy trenchers, one would get
"trench mouth."
9) 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."
10) Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. 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."
11) England is both old and small and they 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, one out of every 25 coffins was 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, up through the ground
and tie it to a bell.
Someone would have to sit out in the
graveyard all night (hence the "graveyardshift")
to listen for the bell. Thus, someone could be
"saved by the bell"
or be considered a
"dead ringer."
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