Here are some facts about the 1500s:

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery....... if you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor". But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot........... they "didn't have a pot to piss in" and were the lowest of the low

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May,and they still smelled pretty good by June.

However, since they were starting to smell ...brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

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!"

Houses had thatched roofs: thick straw, piled high, with no ceiling underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, 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."

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 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.

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 (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)

In those old days, 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 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.

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.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

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 the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers 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.

England is old and small and the local folks 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, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, 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 (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer...

And that's the truth...Now, whoever said History was boring?? ! !

So ... get out there and educate someone!

The Reconquista of Espania completed, led to the Jewish expulsion as fed the Ottoman war machine as to knock on the gates of, Vienna.

I especially like the Reformation and Counter Reformation skirmishes.

<Aahh!> :p Christians killing Christians for Christ's sake.

Of course there were the New World aborigines but they never counted.

I guess one might have looked forward to the future, "The Enlightenment",

if one knew it was coming.

Moi

Wife told me they dug up Gogol, the Russky Edgar Allen Poe and found

scratch marks inside the coffin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Gogol

Not quite the same story, here. And not 1500's :-\

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 13, 2010 4:22 pm Here are some facts about the 1500s:

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery....... if you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor". But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot........... they "didn't have a pot to piss in" and were the lowest of the low

Tanning is done with tannin, a substance found in the bark of fir trees or oak, which is why O Tannenbaum is a song about a fir tree; other methods of preserving skins are tawing, using brains of an animal or alum to rub into the skin before drying. If you heat urine gently, the albumin will coagulate and trap bacteria and dead blood cells and settle to the bottom; most of urine consists of salt and urea. Upon heating urea breaks down into carbon monoxide and ammonia. Passing the gas through water dissolves the ammonia giving you ammonia water (ammonium hydroxide) and the carbon monoxide goes nto the atmosphere where it unites with oxygen to become carbon dioxide. The ammonium hydroxide could be used for cleaning, but not for tanning.

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 13, 2010 4:22 pm The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.

Threshold is from Old English þrescold or þrexold, Anglian forms of West Saxon þresc-weald, the first element of which is the stem of þrescan 'thresh', a verb meaning 'to separate grain from the chaff or straw'. The original meaning of the word was 'step on, trample' which is how grain was threshed in early times. The weald part is 'power, aid', the threshold being the aid to stepping into the house. Those of you who have stepped on straw know that dry straw is excessively slippery and no one would purposefully put it where people would step. The covering for floors were rushes, what Americans call 'cattails'.

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 13, 2010 4:22 pm Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Tomatoes are a New World plant, not known until after the settlement of the the New World. The first record of tomato in English is in the eighteenth century, more that 200 years after 1500. When they first arrived in Europe, botanists recognized that tomatoes like their Peruvian companions potatoes were members of the Solanum family, deadly nightshade. They keep the family characteristics with poisonous leaves and flowers. Sprouting potatoes generate solanine, which is responsible for many cases of food poisoning each year. While the fruit of the tomato is not as toxic as that of deadly nightshade, the potato, or the Jerusalem cherry, more people are allergic to tomatoes than are allergic to strawberries. It was the toxicology of the tomato not plumbism that accounted for European aversion to tomatoes. Wine and vinegar (French for 'sour wine') are more acidic than tomato juice and will combine with lead to produce lead acetate (sugar of lead); as the name implies, it is a sweet substance that was deliberately introduced into Roman wines to make them more palatable. Plumbism is a slow, progressive disease and doesn't kill instantly. Since the Romans never caught on to the fact that their lead-spiked wine was causing madness and sterility (these symptoms show up much sooner than death), it is doubtful that tomato juice would have tipped anyone off.

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 13, 2010 4:22 pm England is old and small and the local folks 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, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, 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 (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer...

Concerns over premature burial are a particularly Victorian obsession, when many devices for releasing supposedly dead people from the grave were patente

moi621 (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 13, 2010 5:31 pm d. Embalming became popular at

the same time and was marketed as preventing premature burial, which it would because after you drained the body of blood and filled it with radiator fluid, no one was going to come back to life. The scratch marks inside the coffins were left by small furry creatures who come in to grab a quick meal that people have so kindly deposited for them.

And that's the truth...

And, in case River or anyone asks, "Yes, I was around in the 1500's"

I think you will find that ammonia was used in the tanning process to make skins white or whiter. I remember reading it in a book by Jean Auel, don't remember which one, either the Mammoth Hunters or Valley of the Horses, could be both.

The Land of Painted Caves will be out next year, her 6th and final book in the series. I can't wait.

River

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 13, 2010 9:22 pm I think you will find that ammonia was used in the tanning process to make skins white or whiter. I remember reading it in a book by Jean Auel, don't remember which one, either the Mammoth Hunters or Valley of the Horses, could be both.

[F New Roman][F Land of Painted Caves will be out next year, her 6th and final book in the series. I can't wait.

[/B]

River

[/FONT][/FONT]

I just finished reading the first three of that series (Clan of the Cave Bear, Valley of the Horses, and The Mammoth Hunters). It is still fresh in my memory, the urine for whitening leather was in "The Mammoth Hunters."

To help your memory of that part of the book... It was the older woman "Crozie" (from the "Stork Hearth") who taught Aila how to make white leather.

I think I will enjoy reading the rest of this series by Jean Auel.... but I do find there are a few... well I think she is not at the top of her game when she is writing. She is a well known best selling author, and I am not, so maybe it is not for me to criticize, but as just a plain old reader of books I must offer a few observations.

"Clan of the Cave Bear" was a damn good book, and a tough act to follow. In the second book, "Valley of the Horses," we are introduced to "Jondalar," and we see that Jean Auel is beginning to lose that edge that she wrote the first book with... She starts telling the same things over and over and over again, but she just says the same things over again in a different way, then reiterates the repetition by paraphrasing something we already read, then she says that all over again.... OK you get the point I know. For those of you who have read "Valley of the Horses," did you think that maybe you had to read one time too many that Jondalar was tall? Had blonde hair? Had a big penis? Oh, did I mention the blue eyes? Jean Auel mentioned these things at LEAST TWENTY TIMES, and somehow wove into every story how Jondalar had a big penis. She was just filling up pages with repetition of description of Jondalar.

In the third book, I really really really wished something bad would have happened to Jondalar, I am just sick of reading over and over and over... again the SAME THINGS. (I say here an "aside" to Jean Auel: OK! I get it already, Jondalar is a "tall, blue eyed, blonde haired Zelandoni, who has a really big penis.") It is clear that the author has fallen in love with this Jondalar character, the READERS are SICK OF HEARING HIM DESCRIBED over and over again. In this third book, the phrase which irritated me the most was "Jondalar's brow furrowed in pain." Again, I want to say to the author, "OK! We get it! Can't you come up with a different way to say this?" Here, I am not even a writer and I can tell you a few, "he felt his heart sink" or "he felt sick with dread at what he heard." OK? We (the readers) are sick and tired of reading about Jondalar's "furrowed brow" and his big penis.

DAMN, I would think that a big name hotshot writer like Jean Auel would have a few others helping her turn out better work... LIKE AN EDITOR? Was her editor taking a vacation? A proof reader maybe? Seriously, I think anyone could have told Jean Auel that she is very very obviously just filling pages, not telling a new and original story.

OH, excuse me, I just had to rant a bit. I liked most of the books, just that I was sooooo irritated at seeing some good writing get so polluted with the stupid page filling repetition that Jean Auel resorts to.

If the first three books upset you that bad, I am not sure I could recommend the next two, because he still has blue eyes and a big dick. On the other hand there is still enough of a new story line to keep you glued to the pages. As least it was that way for me. In Plans of Passage you will really find out what she thinks of big dicks, just wait tell you get to the Mammoths. If you cant get by the parts where she does repeat herself, wow, then I am not sure you should read further, me I can't wait. Most of us have been waiting years for this last book, I will have mine the first day it comes out.

River

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 13, 2010 9:22 pm I think you will find that ammonia was used in the tanning process to make skins white or whiter. I remember reading it in a book by Jean Auel, don't remember which one, either the Mammoth Hunters or Valley of the Horses, could be both.

Auel was writing fiction, and many of the ideas she uses in her books are mistaken or outdated. I doubt that she has ever tanned a hide. Ammonia is not used for tanning which is a process by which the structure of water-soluble proteinaceous animal fibers are render stable by thickening the protein structures. The most common method is a series of weak astringent acids collectively known as tannins extracted from vegetable matter; the bark of the fir-tree (German Tannenbaum) contains about 11%, oaks have about 10% but chestnuts and other plants also have workable amounts. Alum also will alter the structure of the collagen fibers, but technically that process is called tawing not tanning; modern tanners use a variety of man-made organics, but these were not available until the twentieth century. In all cases, the chemicals bond to the protein molecules of the hide and change its structure from one which is permeable by water to a thicker, more durable structure. Because proteins are made up of strings of amino acids, they have amine chains on them with which the tannins connect. Because amine is basically an attached ammonium ion, it won't attach to another ammonium ion for the same reason that a screw can't go into another screw or that a north magnet won't adhere to another north magnet. You need a compatible not identical molecular docking site. The ammonia molecule NH3(OH) simply doesn't have the requisite chemical structure to do anything to skin.

However, ammonia will burn your hands if you don't take precautions. It is possible that Auel mistook another aspect of leather production for tanning. For the tanning process to work, the hide must be cleaned of muscle, blood and fat. The typical way in which a hide is defatted is by liming, soaking the hide in a solution of lime water whose mild alkaline nature converts the fatty stearic acids of the animal into glycerine and soap and so are washed away leaving the defatted hide. Ammonia is also an alkaline, and it is possible that ammonia solutions were used for dehairing and defatting hides before tanning, but I don't know of any records of ammonia's actually being used for such a purpose.

Well you popped my bubble, here I thought that Jean took so long writing her books because of all the research she did but I guess it was just all about Jondalar his blond hair his blue eyes and his big penis and I thought it was the story about Alia. Sigh. I am so disappointed and confused.

Ammonia is used by the leather industry as a curing agent, as a slime and mold preventative in tanning liquors and as a protective agent for leathers and furs in storage.

It was also used by dyers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye) in the Middle Ages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages) in the form of fermented urine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine) to alter the color of vegetable dyes.

spirit of hartshorn –noun Chemistry. a colorless, pungent, suffocating, aqueous solution of about 28.5 percent ammonia gas: used chiefly as a detergent, for removing stains and extracting certain vegetable coloring agents, and in the manufacture of ammonium salts.

But I am not nor do I know anything about Chemistry.

River

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Sun Aug 15, 2010 3:08 pm Well you popped my bubble, here I thought that Jean took so long writing her books because of all the research she did but I guess it was just all about Jondalar his blond hair his blue eyes and his big penis and I thought it was the story about Alia. Sigh. I am so disappointed and confused.

Ammonia is used by the leather industry as a curing agent, as a slime and mold preventative in tanning liquors and as a protective agent for leathers and furs in storage.

It was also used by dyers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye) in the Middle Ages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages) in the form of fermented urine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine) to alter the color of vegetable dyes.

spirit of hartshorn –noun Chemistry. a colorless, pungent, suffocating, aqueous solution of about 28.5 percent ammonia gas: used chiefly as a detergent, for removing stains and extracting certain vegetable coloring agents, and in the manufacture of ammonium salts.

But I am not nor do I know anything about Chemistry.

River

Yes, ammonium hydroxide is a detergent (lowers the surface tension of water and makes it "wetter" so it washes more dirt away; soap and sodium lauryl sulfate serve the same purpose) and it is a mordant, a chemical that binds to cloth fibers and allows the dye molecules to bind more securely to the cloth (alum also is used as a mordant and tin salts); ammonia will make the red of madder brighter and more resistant to washing out, but that is a different process from tanning.

Certainly ancients knew and used ammonia for many things; it just isn't used for tanning. The name spirits of hartshorn (an alcoholic solution of ammonium hydroxide and ammonium carbonate) comes from the practice of obtaining ammonia from the destructive distillation of deer antlers (harts' horn). Part of the nasty smell of burning hair is the ammonia released as the protein molecules burn, break down and release ammonia; the other way is distilling it from urine. And if you have a catalyst and a vessel that will withstand 200 atmospheres of pressure you can heat hydrogen and nitrogen to directly combine (at the rate of about 5%)into ammonia. Dissolving the 5% in water removes it from the system and the remaining 95% will convert another 4.75% to ammonia and ... you get the idea, but so few medieval villages had major industrial sites.