Making Sure you didn’t have too Much Blood Going Around your Body
“Better out than in” goes the well-known saying, normally uttered when a friend is lurching violently from side to side after too much gin, and looks dangerously like performing the traditional multicoloured yawn. There may well be some medical sense in emptying the contents of your stomach under such circumstances, but bloodletting – which worked on a similar principle of ridding the body of its excesses, except with blood rather than vomit – certainly didn’t do any good. Despite that, for hundreds of years medical experts drained off gallon after gallon of blood in the hope of curing various ailments. The more blood the better. If the patient fainted, they figured it was working, but if the draining was over-enthusiastic, the patient would die. Whoops.
In 1517 surgeon Hans von Gersdorff listed the ideal points of the body for administering bloodletting in his book Field Book Of Wound Medicine, unaware, of course, that there are no ideal points for bloodletting – not even one. But barber surgeons (see Composing Riddles) enthusiastically embraced the practice, and set about vigorously wounding unhealthy people in a bloodthirsty manner. In 1628, William Harvey stumbled upon the secret of circulation and the function of the heart, effectively disproving the bloodletting theory – but it took at least two hundred more years for doctors to admit that siphoning off someone’s blood resulted in nothing more than a big bucket full of someone’s blood.
Letting your Teeth Rot Away as an Indicator of Social Standing
It’s hard for us, what with our clearly demarcated tradition of savoury main course followed by a sweet, to understand what it must have been like six hundred years ago when all dishes had an unbearably cloying sugariness running through them. Today, jars of fruity mincemeat go into mince pies at Christmas, but back then mincemeat did actually contain meat – something as alien to the modern palate as haddock in lemonade. Honey was once the universal sweetener, but when the Spanish started cultivating sugar cane in the West Indies and shipping it over to Britain, those who could afford it went mad for it. Potatoes and tomatoes, sure – but sugar, that’s what we really wanted to get our teeth into.
From then on it became a race to ingest as much sugar as possible, with the evidence of one’s sweet tooth simply being how black said tooth had become; those whose budgets couldn’t stretch to sucking raw sugar cane hastily turned to cosmetics to get their teeth blackened and thus elevate their social status. Strangely, while people knew that the blackened state of their teeth was directly related to all the sugar they’d ingested, no one seemed to care about the associated decay and hideously painful abscesses. Ironically, the poor (who were left to subsist on vegetables) had comparatively pearly white gnashers – an incredibly rare example of the socially deprived classes accidentally obtaining a minor health advantage.
Learning to Play the Recorder without Being Forced to by a Teacher
Outside certain music colleges with whole departments dedicated to the authentic recreation of the music of the Renaissance, you’ll be hard pushed to find anyone with many positive things to say about the recorder. These plastic tubes with precious little variation in dynamics or volume have ended up being manufactured in their millions, resulting in school assemblies resonating to a shrill, unrelenting noise wrapping itself around popular hymn tunes. Twenty-first-century parents are still putting up with this racket while wearing an unholy grimace, because they imagine it’s affording their offspring the chance of a career as an internationally acclaimed instrumentalist, destination Sydney Opera House.
But before the plastic tube with holes, there was a wooden tube with holes. And by all accounts it didn’t sound much better back then, either. To be fair to the recorder-makers of the time, no wind instruments were at a very advanced stage of development, and to the modern ear an ensemble of crumhorns, sackbuts, trumpets and recorders would have sounded like a disease-stricken farmyard. With the advent of the flute and clarinet in the 1700s, composers gratefully abandoned the recorder, where it languished in obscurity until it was embraced by enthusiastic modern-day music teachers, the fiends.
Encasing the Male Genitalia in a Codpiece
“What should I do with my genitals?” isn’t a question that modern men really have to ask, unless they’re posing for a nude life drawing class. But the evolution of below-the-waist fashion in the sixteenth century posed a tricky problem for gentlemen, as, while their legs were adequately covered by hose, their genitals required their own separate garment to avoid them waggling about in the open air. What was initially just a “small bag with a flap” evolved into an extraordinary celebration of the male member, with any individual’s inadequacies concealed behind constructions of awesome proportions.
Outside the rock star fraternity, few modern men feel the need to make their genitals bulge fearsomely in their trousers, for fear of alienating their fellow office workers or just being arrested for gross indecency. No such problem during the reign of Henry VIII, who positively encouraged men to have their codpieces “puffed and slashed”, and even “ornamented with jewelled pins,” for goodness sake. In extreme cases, the protuberance at the front of the codpiece was decorated with a face as if it was some kind of massive, inquisitive tortoise, which presumably impressed women of the day, although it’s hard to know why. When Elizabeth I came to the throne, she attempted to rein in some of this rampant masculinity by frowning upon the codpiece, and her disapproval led to it virtually disappearing by the turn of the seventeenth century, to be replaced by garments that thankfully signposted the penis a little less flamboyantly.
Wearing Ruffs so Big that Especially Long Spoons had to be Produced
Ruffs take their rightful place in a long line of impractical fashions, including the toga, the kynodesme (see The Hiring of Professional Mourners to Wail at the Graveside), the stiletto heel and the miniskirt (see Wearing Miniskirts Because there was no Other Option). When they came into fashion in the sixteenth century, it was almost inevitable that people would succumb to the mistaken belief that bigger is better, and before long the ruff around the Elizabethan neck had expanded to as much as eighteen inches in diameter, making the wearer look – in the words of a popular British sitcom – as if they’d “swallowed a plate”. A Puritan writer by the name of Philip Stubbes made his feelings plain about the fashion in 1583, noting firstly that they’d been “invented by the devil” (distinctly possible) before going on to describe how they would “flip flap in the winde”. No matter how much starch had been applied to these gigantic ruffs to make them stand proud, a light shower could also quickly convert them into an inadequate shoulder concealer. To combat this, a wire frame was invented to offer support to the ruff in all weathers, when a more sensible solution might have been to abandon it altogether. The Dutch valiantly continued the fashion well into the seventeenth century, by which time everyone else had switched to the wing collar, which offered the twin benefits of not requiring heavy starching, and not making you look like an idiot.
Propping up the Ailing British Cap Industry
These days, we almost exclusively rely on foreign nations to clothe us. If we burned everything in our wardrobe that was manufactured outside the country we live in, we’d probably be walking around town wearing only a scarf knitted by our mum and a pair of gloves knitted by our aunt. Which wouldn’t only be a bit chilly, but probably illegal, too. The importing of clothing in Elizabethan times, however, had become a menace to society. Concerned by the quantity of cash that was leaving the country to purchase foreign silks and other “vain devices”, and indeed the huge debts run up by vainglorious citizens who were desperate to get their hands on the latest fashions, Elizabeth I introduced reinforcements to the “sumptuary laws” that had been around since the time of Edward III. These rules governing who could wear what, and when, were intended to stop poorer people passing themselves off as wealthier than they were, while also encouraging the production of domestic textiles – and Elizabeth’s 1571 Statute of Caps for s
ome reason attempted to reverse the marked decline in the woollen cap industry.
People just weren’t wearing woollen caps any more (probably because they preferred wearing a nice hat instead) but rather than encourage the cappers to produce a product that people actually wanted to buy and wear, Elizabeth pronounced that everyone over the age of six – except nobility, naturally – had to wear a knitted woollen cap on Sundays, or be fined ten groats. Fortunately, these kind of dictatorial policies were abandoned well before the twentieth century, and we were never required by law to wear shell suits to church (see Making yourself Appear much Heavier by Wearing a Shell Suit).
Make-up whose use is no longer sanctioned by the British Skin Foundation
Tarting ourselves up to look nice is something we’ve done ever since the existence of rival lovers; however much we adore our partner, we’re depressingly likely to have our attention distracted by someone who is smiling in our direction and who has gone to the trouble of making their eyelashes look longer, or their complexion healthier, or their underarms smoother or more fragrant. The idea of what constitutes beauty has obviously varied over the centuries, but the aim of applying make-up has always been the same: to look sexy. Or, at the very least, to look slightly less unsexy.
There are two reasons why make-up trends fall out of fashion. The first is simply a realization that all the effort has actually left you looking a bit worse than before you started. At some point, the fashion in Ancient Egypt of dying the palms of hands red with henna was deemed utterly pointless, and similarly, the urge Victorian women had to bleach their hands to make them look as white as possible hasn’t stayed with us – if anything, we now viciously rail against the idea with an arsenal of fake-tanning products. The battle against facial wrinkles and spots has been fought for centuries: get this anti-pimple recipe from the Medicamina Faciei Femineae by Ovid:
Make haste and bake pale lupins and windy beans. Of these take six pounds each and grind the whole in the mill. Add thereto white lead and the scum of ruddy nitre and Illyrian iris, which must be kneaded by young and sturdy arms.
Today we’re sold creams containing “silky-peptimines” or “plumpy-hydrides” that haven’t required us to knead anything with young and sturdy arms – but in Renaissance times women favoured egg white to conceal skin blemishes and fine lines. This would give an unusual shiny glaze to the skin, the sort you might see on an apple pie – but in order to look less like a pie, women would attempt to draw veins on top of the glaze, thus ending up looking like a pie with veins. Gorgeous.
But it seems unfair to scoff at make-up habits that are five hundred years old when we’ve employed equally unappealing strategies within living memory. For all Princess Diana’s radiant beauty, her application of navy blue eyeliner did her no favours, nor indeed anyone else who attempted to copy her. Overplucking eyebrows will always leave people with a permanent look of bewilderment and surprise on their face. The hours that women spent in the 1980s attempting to “sculpt” their faces by shading them only ever worked in the particular light the make-up was applied in; leave the building and they immediately looked as if they’d tried to colour themselves in. And applying a fake mole to the upper lip (à la Madonna) was as bizarre as wearing spectacles when you didn’t need to (see Pretending to be Short-sighted); five hundred years earlier and such behaviour would have seen such women burnt at the stake.
But the most misconceived make-up was the stuff that simply made you unwell. The classic face-whitener of Elizabethan times was a mixture of lead and vinegar, which at best would leave you with a rapidly receding hairline, and at worst would lead to muscle paralysis and death. Today, some make-up products might make your lips “plump up” by irritating them slightly with chemicals, but that’s safer than red lipstick containing mercuric sulphide, which left nineteenth-century women with tremors and missing teeth. Dropping deadly nightshade into the eyes might well make them “sparkle”, but it could also make you a bit delirious and unsteady. And as recently as the 1930s, women were rendered blind in the USA by applying a thoroughly toxic product called “Lash Lure”. We’re fortunate today that the worst injury one can sustain while applying make-up is to poke oneself in the eye with a mascara brush.
Holding Festivals on Frozen Rivers
However tempting it might be to gingerly step out onto a frozen stretch of water with the aim of emulating either Jayne Torvill or Christopher Dean, the dangers will still be lurking there in the back of your mind. The reason you’re stepping gingerly is because a few days earlier it had been liquid rather than solid. And in a few days, or maybe only minutes time, it’ll be liquid once again, it won’t support your weight, and you’ll suddenly be submerged in water that’s barely above freezing point. But during the seventeenth century there were a handful of occasions when London’s River Thames was frozen solid; Queen Elizabeth I had already been for a speculative walk on the ice back in 1564, but 1608 saw the first frost fair, when businesses opened up on this new expanse of reclaimed land, and Londoners frolicked merrily between its stalls, eating, drinking and sliding about.
One writer described this as “Great Britain’s Wonder” and “London’s Admiration” – but while the only surviving reports tell of the fun that was had at the frost fairs, they were a health and safety hazard that must have claimed the odd victim. The danger was exacerbated by people who seemed keen to push the ice to its limits by a) roasting a whole boar thereon, forgetting that heat is the one thing guaranteed to compromise the tensile strength of ice, and b) showing off by hauling a several-ton printing press across it. Some people say that the nanny state unnecessarily wraps us in cotton wool, but if there’s one thing we’ve learnt over the years, it’s that having a party on an icy river is inadvisable unless you’re all wearing inflatable thermal clothing and connected together with lengths of rope.
Bathing Once or Maybe Twice a Month, Whether you Need it or not
The Elizabethan approach to personal hygiene, rather like that of the average seven-year-old boy, was based on what you could get away with rather than what might be required. Owing to some bizarre code of etiquette that must have left the average citizen exuding a rich odour, it was only deemed necessary to wash the parts of the body that were actually visible to the public – that is, the hands and the face. The rest of the body gently wallowed in its own filth, with particularly foul smells smothered by the application of perfume – but not even Giorgio Beverly Hills (see Applying Overwhelming Perfumes to your Wrists and Neck) would have been up to this Herculean task.
Strangely, this lackadaisical attitude towards cleanliness wasn’t extended to clothing; laundry duties were embraced far more enthusiastically than bathing because of the misguided theory of miasmas (see Covering up Foul Odours in the Hope it would Ward Off Disease) which stipulated that foul smells emanating from shirts and trousers might spread unpleasant diseases. Quite why the same theory wasn’t applied to the foul smells emanating from armpits and groins is anyone’s guess, but bathing was generally thought to allow “badness” to enter the body through the pores. It wasn’t until we began to embrace the more likely theory of germs as opposed to miasmas that everyone decided to take a much needed bath. Phew.
Desperate Attempts by Alchemists to Extract Gold from Urine
The bright yellow pigment of our urine is caused by chemical processes deep within the body whose details are, thankfully, beyond the scope of this content. But gold swishing around our digestive system is certainly not responsible. This may seem patently obvious to you or me, having flushed away thousands of gallons of the stuff knowing full well it has zero cash value – but alchemists of the Renaissance were absolutely certain that gold must be in there somewhere. Because it’s a goldish colour. A process of reasoning that probably saw them try to make emeralds out of moss, or diamonds out of saliva.
But try as they might, the secret of converting human waste into precious metal never revealed itself, and remains irritatingly elusive to this day, not tha
t anyone bothers looking any longer. However, it wasn’t all a completely pointless endeavour: Hennig Brand’s endless experiments on flasks brimming with fresh, warm urine did manage to yield up white phosphorus as a by-product of the quest for gold. But while white phosphorus has been deployed successfully and highly controversially in modern warfare, you can’t fashion it into trinkets or use it to become rich beyond your wildest dreams. Of course, if alchemists had turned urine into gold, it would have flooded the market, thus making gold as worthless as, well, urine. At which point they’d have had to start trying to turn earwax into amber, or faeces into topaz instead. Which they would have found equally tricky.
Pretending to be Poor in Order to Elicit Sympathy
We’ve reached a state in the Western world where, fortunately, working tends to be more worthwhile than begging. If someone does ask you for money on the street, you can reasonably assume that they don’t really want to be doing what they’re doing, and would much rather replace the long, lonely hours of humiliation and the limited cash rewards with a regular wage and a shred more dignity. But in the sixteenth century, pretending to be penniless was a pretty lucrative business. Whether this was because European citizens combined extreme gullibility with excessive generosity isn’t entirely clear, but it led to a huge increase in begging – to the point where it had to be made illegal in Britain in 1536.
Previously, you had to have a licence to beg, but the system was open to abuse. Accounts of the time describe how young rogues would wander the streets blubbing, pretending to be helpless orphans in order to “excite public sympathy”; others would pretend to be traders whose businesses had been ruined by fire, or by war or burglary; some would just feign injury with a pair of improvised crutches, or smear themselves with blood and do the old foaming-at-the-mouth-using-a-piece-of-soap trick. And, incredibly, it worked. The English Statute of Artificers stated in the 1560s that everyone was obliged to work and that begging was simply unnecessary: a controversial pronouncement – but by this time public opinion was swaying against beggars, who were now seen more as conniving tricksters than deserving causes. Before long, inflicting a wound to your head in the hope of making some money just wasn’t worth the pain.
The Next Big Thing Page 5