If the Shoe Fits

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By Sbaitz (Own work) Wikimedia Commons

Those of you who are old as the hills, like me, will probably remember the theme song to the show “My Three Sons,” which you can view here. In that intro, the shoes on the right with the dotted pattern are known as brogues.

In medieval Scotland and Ireland, laborers punched small holes in the tops of their shoes, which allowed water to drain out when walking through swampy fields. Brogues are worn today as part of business attire, and the perforations are decorative.

Another kind of shoe worn by peasants in medieval Europe was the “sabot,” which was made of wood; wood was inexpensive, easy to clean, and reasonably comfortable. The word “sabotage” (meaning to deliberately destroy property) may or may not have originated from disgruntled peasants revolting against their feudal lords and trampling the crops with their sabots.

By Olof Jernberg (1855–1935) via Wikimedia Commons

Tea for Two . . . Dozen?

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During the eighteenth century, after tea had been brewed for the family, the leaves were reused for a second brew for the servants. Afterwards, the twice-used tea leaves were often sold to the poor.

 

Source: Reader’s Digest Everyday Life Through the Ages

To Wield a Shield

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The shields of medieval knights, made of heavy oak and rimmed with iron, routinely weighed in at 25 pounds or more.

How ‘bout Those . . . Assyrians?

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Holiday time is fast approaching, and with it, the inevitable holiday parties where you find yourself next to people you don’t know very well, groping for something interesting to talk about. In one regard I admire men’s ability to fall back on that sure-fire topic, sports. Some women can do it, too. My friends Michaela and Eliza can talk baseball more effortlessly than anyone I know. Well this year, when conversation at holiday parties languishes, I have hit on a topic guaranteed to fascinate people and keep the conversation sparkling: ancient history. No, really.

Consider the Assyrians, for example.

The Assyrians are among history’s least appealing people. Their reign of terror began around 1200 BC. Fearless, savagely cruel to their enemies, and awful to their women, Assyrians often flayed their enemies, then entombed them alive. Women who committed adultery were impaled. They terrorized most of western Asia until the Babylonians finally conquered Ninevah, the Assyrian capital, in 612 BC.

On the fashion front, the Assyrians seem to be the first civilization to require respectable women to wear a veil in public. Assyrian men cared deeply about personal grooming. Soldiers rode into battle perfumed, rouged and powdered, with their hair and beards meticulously curled and coiffed.

To be fair, the Assyrians were also pretty scholarly, artistic, and innovative. They invented locks and keys, magnifying glasses, libraries, postal systems, and the seven-day week.

Now, wouldn’t you want to be sitting next to me at your next dinner party?

Never mind. It was a rhetorical question.

Whistling Dixie

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In Louisiana in the mid 1800s, French was the most commonly-spoken language. Banks there issued ten-dollar notes marked with ‘DIX,” which is French for ‘ten.’ The note became known as a “dixie,” and the name stuck as a term for the South.

What a Hunny

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After holy St. Ursula turned down Attila the Hun’s marriage proposal, he had her killed with an arrow and then massacred 11,000 of her followers.

The Historical 99%

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Sometimes when I read the news these days–about the dismal housing market, burgeoning homelessness, the ever-widening income gap in our country, or how certain members of the wealthiest 1% committed criminal acts that exacerbated our current economic crisis–I wonder what century I’m in.

Because statistically, things have been ever thus. Most people who ever lived have toiled and fought and suffered and died young, that the tiny percentage of the wealthy might be warm, comfortable, well-fed, and entertained. By no means am I saying this is just; it’s just true.

In my Poop book, I have an ongoing feature called “Icky Occupations,” which catalogs awful jobs people have performed over the course of history. Consider the job of hut builder, for instance.

Throughout the Middle Ages (and even later), a huge number of European peasants built their homes with “wattle and daub.” You start by weaving large reeds, willows, or other grasses (the wattle), and then fill in the gaps with a mixture of manure, mud, water, and straw (the daub).

To assemble, you stomp together all that muddy, smelly goo. Then you take a big glob of this mixture and smear it into the cracks. You weave together a roof from reeds or grass, which often leaks or attracts nesting animals.

Since glass was expensive, there wasn’t any in most peasants’ homes. To keep out snow, wind, and cold, people stopped up the windows with rags, straw, or anything else they had available. Viking settlers sometimes stretched out see-through animal guts and used them for windows.

For a very realistic and disgusting re-enactment of this process, you can check out this segment from a popular British television show.

In his fascinating book, A World Lit Only by Fire, William Manchester provides a harrowing description of a peasant home interior. If you were a prosperous peasant, you might have owned a bed, piled with straw that seethed with vermin. Everyone slept there, including your smaller livestock, children, inlaws, and any passing travelers. If you were a less prosperous peasant, you would probably have lacked both a bed and a chimney. You would have slept on the mud floor, with the livestock keeping you warm (and itchy). Smoke from the kitchen fire would make its way through a small hole in the roof, but your hut would have been fearfully smoky, especially on a windy day.

 

Got Slime?

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Food adulteration was common in the 19th century. Flour was often mixed with chalk, plaster of Paris, sawdust, bone meal, or lime. Snails were tossed into watered-down milk in order to thicken it with their mucus and to add an attractive froth.

Source: Terrors of the table by Walter Gratzer

BeetleJuice

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My loyal readers will know how much I love ebay. I’ve made some fantastic purchases there. Here’s the most recent: a Chinese blister beetle. Isn’t it beautiful? Five bucks including shipping. I don’t know the exact species (there are over 1500 of them), but it’s one of the beetles in the order Coleoptera, and it produces a vesicant (blistering agent) called cantharidin. Certain coleopterans are also known as Spanish fly–even though they’re neither a fly nor particularly Spanish–which is thought to be an aphrodisiac. Like so many blister beetles, mine is lovely to look at; can you see its iridescent underside?

Male beetles secrete the blistery substance at the joints between their leg segments to deter predators. According to May Berenbaum’s Bugs in the System, males transfer the cantharidin to females when mating, so it actually may act as an aphrodisiac at the insect level.

Cantharidins derived from various species of blister beetle have long been used as medicine, often as topical irritants. When you read about doctors from days of yore using a “blister poultice” on their patients, you can be pretty sure these poultices were made from ground up blister beetles.

The ancient Greeks used blister beetles medicinally, as did the Chinese, for ailments that included tuberculosis, rabies, cancer, dropsy, lice, earaches, leprosy, and ulcers. But as I mentioned, the most famous use of Spanish fly has been as an aphrodisiac, most notoriously by the Marquis de Sade, who poisoned several women (see my prior blog).

Cantharidin is extremely toxic, even at low dosages. Poor George Washington, who was suffering from a sore throat and respiratory infection, was forced by his well-meaning but misguided physicians to ingest a poisonous compound of mercury. They also bled out more than five pints (almost half) of his blood. In addition, blister poultices were slathered on his body, so cantharidin poison no doubt hastened his death.

But actually, the use of cantharidin isn’t all quackery. According to this article from the American Medical Association, the FDA will soon be including it on its “Bulk Substances List,” which will allow physicians to administer a cantharidin compound to patients in their offices, for warts and other viral skin infections.