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- Anne Hathaway was the
wife of William Shakespeare. She
married at the age of 26. This is
really unusual for the time. Most people
married young, like at the
age of 11 or 12. Life was not as romantic as
we may picture it. Here
are some examples:
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- 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 lengthwise but all laid on the bed crosswise. At least they had
a bed. The other bedroom was shared by her 6 brothers and 30 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 were also small people, the men only
grew to be about
5'6" and the women were 4'8." So in their
little house they
had 27 people living.
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- Most people got married in
June. Why? They took their
yearly bath in May, so they were till
smelling pretty good by June, although
they were starting to smell, so
the brides would carry a bouquet of flowers
to hide their body oder. (
THIS ONE IS HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE!)
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- Like I said, they took their
yearly bath in May, but
it was just a 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.
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- I'll describe their houses a little. You've heard of
thatch
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,"
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- 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 would make beds
with big posts and hang a sheet over
the top it would prevent that problem.
That's where those beautiful
big four poster beds with canopies came from.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- Sometimes they could
get a hold on 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."
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- 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.
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- The bread was divided according to status. The workers
would
get the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family would get the middle
and
guests would get the top, or the "upper crust."
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- They also had lead
cups, and when they would drink their
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
knocked out 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, sometimes the person would wake up, 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.
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- Since England is so old and
small they started running
out of places to bury people. So they
started digging up some coffins
and would take their bones to a house
and reuse the grave. They started
opening these coffins and found some
had scratch marks on the inside-they
realized they had still 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
to listen for the bell. That is how the saying
"graveyard
shift" was made. If the bell would ring they would
know that
someone was "saved by the bell" or he was a "dead
ringer."
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