Fascinating History

Folks, don't try this at home! The ancient Romans used urine to get their white tunics clean and bleached. Of course, the ammonia contained in urine was what did the trick. Fullers collected urine for this purpose. Clothing was immersed in the repugnant liquid and bleached white. Needless to say, the smell of urine didn't just leave the clothes once washed out with water and one can only imagine how even the most wealthy and notable Romans smelt truly 'pissy'. Combine that with the charming smell of fish sauce (a favourite with the Romans) and the stench would be unbearable to the contemporary nose.

Alchemists believed that one substance could be canged into another. The Greek god Hermes was supposed to have started alchemy so it was called the Hermetic art and practised widely by the Greeks and Romans of the 3d century AD. When the Arabs conquered much of the East they developed the principles of alchemy even further and passed on to the medieval West via Spain. According to Roger Bacon, alchemy is "...a Science teaching how to transform any kind of metal in to another...". It is not surprising therefore to find out that the main focus for the alchemist was to transform any metal in to gold. Because alchemists believed that everything in the world can be perfected they were attracted to the idea of making everything as perfect as it was in the Garden of Eden. Clearly their beliefs were strongly influenced by Christian thinking. Because they saw gold as being the perfect metal, they felt that all metals must be slowly changing into gold. Their intervention was see

In Tudor times widows were allowed to run their husbands' businesses and even train apprentices. Not all widows ran the business permanently - some only doing so for a year or so, while others remained in charge for several years. Within the period 1553 - 1640 seventy widows were left with the running of their late husbands' print shops and only twenty of them held on to them after 4 years, the rest having sold the shops. At that time widows represented one tenth of the publishing business. Dionisia Holme from Beverley in Yorkshire, sustained her late husband's wool trading business for fifteen years and made a large profit out of it. Another, called Mrs Baynham, ran a business trading wool, wine and herrings as well as running a boarding house in Calais and acres of farmland.

Oscar Wilde as a young man Oscar Wilde's liberal / anarchical views shocked Victorian society. This was sadly to be his downfall. Here is what he had to say about marriage and love: "One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry." "In married life three is company and two none." "Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead." See link below for more quotes from Oscar. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/o/oscarwilde121811.html

"Captain Smith and Pocahontas, they had a very mad affair..." Most people know this famous line from the song "Fever". How many though know the true story of Pocahontas? Click on link below to find out. http://www.apva.org/history/pocahont.html

Elizabethan ladies underwear You can dress an Elizabethan lady with your mouse here http://www.historyonthenet.com/Tudors/dress_the_elizabethan.htm And details of her outfit, right down to her underclothes... http://costume.dm.net/

The very complicated hairstyles for women in ancient Rome, didn't really arrive until the era of the Flavian emperors, after AD 69. Until then the hairstyles were pretty simple, with the hair being parted in the middle, then pulled back and tied up into a bun. Small ornaments were sometimes placed in the hair, depending on the occasion. As most Roman women had dark Mediterranean looks, fair hair was widely admired and coveted and therefore substances to lighten the hair were extremely popular. The most commonly used of these were Batavian foam and soap tablets from Wiesbaden or Mainz - made of goat fat and beechwood ash. They also used henna.

Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer became one of the greatest figures in English medieval literature. He lived towards the end of the 14th Century and was Richard II's court poet. Satire was very much encouraged in Richard's court, so Chaucer was able to use his talent in order to talk of the corruption within the Church. He most famously wrote of a friar, who having been accompanied down to hell by an angel, commented with pleasure that he could not see any other friars there, assuming they were obviously all in heaven. The angel was very quick to correct him on that assumption and so he got hold of Satan and... 'Hold up thy tail thy Satanas' said he 'Show forth thine arse and let the friar see Where is the nest of friars in this place!' And ere that half a furlong way of space Right so as bees come swarming from the hive, Out of the devil's arse began to drive Twenty thousand friars in a route. And throughout hell they swarmed all about And came again as fast as the

Senatorial tunic In ancient Rome, your clothes not only showed your status in society but also pinpointed exactly which layer of it you were positioned in. An eques (knight) would be a man who was basicaly able to provide 400,000 sesterces to buy his way into this rank. To be an equastrian was to be next to the senatorial class, but not quite there, if you see what I mean. This man would wear a thick gold ring to indicate his status and his white tunic had a narrow garnet-coloured stripe on it, what the Romans called purple. This stripe was called the augustus clavus . The top rank was of course the senatorial one. The senator's tunic, also white, had a broad Roman purple stripe on it, the latus clavus. His shoes had a crescent on them. The magistrate, although also a senator, even though he too wore a crescent, had slighlty higher soles in order to be distinguished from the others. Another important indicator of status was the length of a man's tunic. The longer the tunic, th

Copper cooking pans Victorian food was notoriously adulterated. Probably the most widespread of these adulterations was the addition of chalk to bread, used to whiten it. As flour was expensive, many times the bread would have a fair amount of potato flour in it, as this was cheap. Alum would also be added. This enabled cheaper, inferior quality flour to be used in the process of breadmaking. Of course bakers were known for kneading the bread with their bare feet and considering the fact that in Victorian times people were said to have washed their feet only every two or even three weeks, I would say this qualifies as adulteration of food. In 1860 the Act for Preventing the Adulteration of Articles of Articles of Food and Drink was passed. However, this act was optional and it was up to the local authority to decide whether they wanted to comply with it or not. One can imagine this was not very effective. A contemporary account informs us that by 1869 nothing had come of it. Cooking wa