1. The Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue because they had no word for it.
2. Marriages were all arranged; everyone got married in their teens; romantic love was invented by 19th century poets.
3. Nobody washed, look at Queen Elizabeth I – she had a bath once a year "whether she needed it or no".
4. Nobody drank water, because it was contaminated; they drank alcohol instead and were drunk all the time.
5. Spices were popular – to disguise the taste of rotting meat. (At the same time food was unpalatably bland because only the very rich could afford spices. All spices were hot.)
6. Medieval theologians argued about how many angels could dance on the point of a pin.
7. Parents didn't love their children because infant mortality was so high. They treated them as mini-adults.
8. Everybody died aged 40.
9. People were much smaller – look at short beds, low-ceilinged cottages and tiny suits of armour.
10. Those suits of armour were so heavy that a medieval knight needed a pulley to hoist him on his horse, and if he fell off he was as helpless as a beetle on its back.
11. Apart from royals and aristocrats, everybody lived in a rustic cottage that resembled a stable inside with exposed beams, exposed stone and brick, and distressed wood.
12. Everyone was illiterate apart from priests and aristocrats. Paintings and sculpture were the books of the lower classes.
13. Nobody was fat. Obesity is an invention of the 21st century.
14. Only the rich had servants.
15. If buildings aren't "ritual", they're "designed to show off your wealth", or "only for the rich", or "built by slaves". (Any dubious sculptural decoration is "apotropaic" – designed to ward off evil.)
16. EVERYTHING NASTY was "invented by white colonialists".
17. No women worked outside the home until the 1920s.
18. Modern life was invented in the 1920s – short skirts, short hair, office jobs, jazz, cars, women get the vote.
19. The farther back in time you go, the drabber the clothes and the grubbier the faces. And the dimmer the lights.
20. The magnificent palace of Versailles had no toilets and courtiers peed in the fireplaces. An orange grove was planted to hide the smell of latrines.
21. Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers were "paid by the word". This is why they are so verbose.
1. According to Goethe, Nietzsche and W.E. Gladstone, the colour-blindness of the ancient Greeks is proved by the paucity of colour words in Homer, and the fact the Greeks called the sea “wine-dark”. The Greeks had two words for blue: “cyanos” for dark blue, and “aethrios” for light blue.
2. Abelard and Heloise, Lancelot and Guinevere, Dante and Beatrice were famous medieval lovers. And there is plenty of romantic love in ballads, folk songs and the Song of Songs (circa 500BCE). The average age for marriage in most of Europe has been 25 since Tudor times.
3. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) wrote himself a memo: “Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men.” Attempts to find a contemporary source for that quote about Elizabeth I have failed. Southwark was famous for its Turkish baths in the medieval period. Paintings of the goddess Diana bathing were popular, likewise Bathsheba and Susanna.
4. Our ancestors avoided dirty water and valued clean springs and rainwater, but didn’t know that diseases were water-borne. They blamed “bad air” until Dr John Snow halted an outbreak of cholera by removing a Soho pump handle in 1854. If nobody drank water, how could the polluted water from the pump cause cholera? And didn't they drink coffee, tea, chocolate, milk, lemonade, barley water? They also "took the waters" at holy wells and spas. In the medieval period wine was diluted – with water. Beer was between 1% and 3.5% alcohol. “The three best cooling drinks are apple water, goat’s whey and spring water,” says a medieval Welsh medical manuscript. 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys records that on a hot day he and his wife went to a dairy to drink whey (skimmed milk), but it ran out and they drank water. Charles II banned coffeehouses, and forbade people to sell coffee, chocolate, sherbet or tea from any shop or house. (Another version of this myth states that wine was added to water to disinfect it – but any alcohol strong enough to kill germs would kill a human. Others say that alcohol was drunk because tea was too expensive – tea, made with boiled water, was also safe. If our ancestors were wise to this fact, why didn't they just boil their drinking water?)
If nobody drank water, ever, why did they repeat proverbs like these:
Adam’s ale is the best brew. (Water is the best beer.)
Drinking water neither makes a man sick, nor in debt, nor his wife a widow.
And 18th century tea caddies constantly turn up on Flog It!.
6. Straightdope.com says the first mention of the angel debate is in a 17th century book. After the Reformation, and especially during the Enlightenment, scholars loved to poke fun at the superstitious Catholic past.
7. See heart-breaking poems on the death of children by Victor Hugo (1802-85), Robert Burns (1759-96); Egil Skallagrimson, (910–990); Po Chu-I (772-846); and many others.
8. Many are confused by reading that “in the 18th century the average life expectancy at birth was 40 years”. It’s an average, and infant mortality was high. If you made it past 5, your chances of living to 60 or 70 (the Biblical life-span) improved. And if it was average age of death, some would die sooner and some later than 40.
9. Research by Richard Steckel of Ohio State University shows that Early Medieval men were taller than men of the 17th-19th centuries. Cottage floors have risen, and tiny suits of armour were probably samples. Beds were shorter because people slept propped up on pillows.
10. Someone's made a film of a man in armour, a firefighter carrying full kit and a soldier ditto running an obstacle course.
11. Country dwellers plastered and whitewashed walls, and painted wood – usually in cream gloss. They concealed everything they could conceal. If they couldn't afford pictures, they pasted up pages from magazines.
12. Until recently it was thought that the majority of people were illiterate in the classical world, though recent work challenges this perception. Anthony DiRenzo asserts that Roman society was "a civilization based on the book and the register", and "no one, either free or slave, could afford to be illiterate". Similarly Dupont points out, "The written word was all around them, in both public and private life: laws, calendars, regulations at shrines, and funeral epitaphs were engraved in stone or bronze. The Republic amassed huge archives of reports on every aspect of public life." The imperial civilian administration produced masses of documentation used in judicial, fiscal and administrative matters as did the municipalities. The army kept extensive records relating to supply and duty rosters and submitted reports. Merchants, shippers, and landowners (and their personal staffs), especially of the larger enterprises, must have been literate. (Wikipedia)
13. See the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf, plus Sir John Falstaff, Friar Tuck, Henry VIII and the Tichbourne Claimant.
14. Servants were cheap, and most households had at least one maid – up to the Second World War and a few years afterwards, before labour-saving devices became available.
16. I've been told that foot-binding, bride-burning and the caste system were invented by white colonisers.
17. For most of human history, women have worked on the land, as servants, as seamstresses and milliners; as actors, singers, dancers and prostitutes; as writers and painters; down mines and in factories; as stone-breakers and herring-gutters. What were all those servants in Downton Abbey doing?
18. Most of these phenomena have earlier roots. Jazz was popular before the First World War, as were cars. Women "typewriters" worked in offices in the 1890s. Women over 30 got the vote in 1918.
19. In the medieval period people loved bright colours. There was a "dark age" in the 17th century when everybody wore black, especially the Dutch. In the mid-19th century aniline dyes were invented, and women went out dressed entirely in emerald, purple or scarlet. We relied on candles for lighting until oil lamps were reinvented circa 1800, thanks to the availability of whale oil. (Makers of A Spy Among Friends: we did not live in inspissated gloom in the 50s, though I admit overhead 40W bulbs were a bit trying. We even had Anglepoise lamps.)
20. Marie Antoinette had her own en suite. Once the Ancien Régime was toppled, later writers loved to make out their ancestors to be unhygienic and worse.
21. Dickens published his novels in parts in his own magazine. Sometimes he had to fill out the space, and don't remember "New readers start here".
And now a comprehensive summary from @histories_arch, whose bio reads "History
is an unending dialogue between present and the past, that's why few
pages of history give more insight than all the metaphysical volumes."
Between 1600-1700 AD, visitors to the Palace of Versailles in Paris were awed by its opulence—but they would have quickly noticed the absence of one essential feature: bathrooms. At the time, hygiene was rudimentary, and modern personal care products like toothbrushes, deodorants, and toilet paper did not exist. (The palace supplied latrines in the grounds, screened by an orange grove. Mum deodorant was invented in 1888. The Chinese were using toilet paper in the 5th century BCE. Wikipedia gives a long list of objects used for the purpose, such as leaves, grass, snow and pebbles. Teeth were cleaned with "tree twigs, bird feathers, animal bones, porcupine quills" and "chew sticks". )
In the absence of indoor plumbing, human waste was frequently thrown out of windows. (No.)
At banquets in over-heated rooms, servants waved fans, opines @histories_arch, to waft away the appalling body odour. The author stresses the contrast between "lavish royal banquets" and "nonexistent sanitation". (Probably to cool down the guests.)
Hygiene practices of the era influenced many social customs. The tradition of bridal bouquets, for instance, dates back to the Middle Ages when brides carried flowers to mask body odor. Weddings commonly took place in June, shortly after the year’s first bath in May. Bathing was infrequent, and entire families shared the same tub of water—used one after the other. By the time infants were bathed last, the water was so filthy that it posed serious health risks. (See above. Medieval people were keen on being clean.)
Domestic life was no cleaner. Wooden roof beams often housed animals like cats, dogs, and rats, contributing to unsanitary conditions. (Cats and rats, maybe. But the writer may be confused by some highly speculative theories that explain the phrase "raining cats and dogs". In a heavy rainstorm, some suggest, the cats and dogs who lived on the thatched roof, was washed through it and fell to the floor. In Welsh it's "raining old women and sticks". We used to say "stair-rods", too.)
Even among the wealthy, health risks abounded. Tin plates were popular, but when used with acidic foods like tomatoes, they could cause poisoning due to corrosion. Likewise, tin cups used for beer or whiskey sometimes rendered people unconscious—a phenomenon that helped inspire the tradition of holding a “wake” to ensure the person was truly dead. (This kind of wake derives from a word meaning "watch".)
In England, fear of premature burial led to another eerie precaution: tying a string to the deceased’s wrist, attached to a bell above ground. If the buried person awakened, they could ring the bell and alert the living—giving rise to the phrase “saved by the bell.” This chilling safeguard reflects just how uncertain life—and death—could be in a time when hygiene and medical knowledge were still in their infancy. (A boxer is "saved by the bell" at the end of a round. This expression has nothing to do with premature burial.)
More myths here, and links to the rest.
The whole set, on all topics, are collected in What You Know that Ain't So: A Dictionary of Received Ideas.
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