Life in the good old 1500's: A Source of Many Modern Expressions and Customs

Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. She married at the age of 26. This was very unusual for the time; most people married in their early teens, some as early as age of 11 or 12.

Not that life was more romantic then. On the contrary, there were very practical reasons for marrying early, like gaining a little elbow room. Anne Hathaway’s childhood home was a three-bedroom house with a kitchen. There was a small parlor but it was only used for company. There was, of course, no bathroom. Mother and Father shared a bedroom. Anne slept in a queen-sized bed, but not alone. She shared it with two sisters and six servant girls. (This is before she married.) You might wonder how so many could fit in one bed. Because people were smaller—men averaged about 5'6" and women were around 4'8"—they slept crosswise on a bed, not lengthwise as we do.

At least Anne and the other young women had a bed. The other bedroom was shared by her six brothers and 30 field workers who wrapped up in their blankets and slept on the floor. That wasn’t all bad: since the house had no heating, the extra bodies supplied welcome warmth. The thought of thirty-six guys sleeping in one room brings us to another subject: odor. Know how the tradition of June weddings became established? Back in the day of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, folks took an annual bath in mid-May, meaning they were relatively innocuous through June. Also, by June, brides could carry a big bouquet of fragrant flowers to camouflage their emerging fetor. The “luxury” of the annual bath was a Spartan affair. A big tub was filled with fresh hot water. The man of the house automatically had first dibs on the nice clean water. When he was finished, the brothers had their turn, then all the other men. The women soaked in the gray water when all the men had finished. Then the children. Babies were last.

By the time the babies got their turn, the water was fairly black and thick. Thus, the saying: "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water" is actually a humorous reference to bath water so thick and dirty you could lose the baby in it. In Will Shakespeare’s day, they used a lot of thatch roofing. A thatch roof is simply straw, piled high in overlapping bundles. There was no wood sheathing underneath, just layers of straw. Eventually the straw went bad and was replaced.

As you might imagine, a straw pile makes an ideal place for small animals—dogs, cats, mice, rats, bugs—to keep warm. So the little critters all lived in and on the roof. Straw thatches are slippery when wet; the animals sometimes slid off the roof. Hence, to describe a torrential downpour, we say “it's raining cats and dogs.”

Animals did not always fall off the roof. Since there was no sheathing beneath the thatch, animals sometimes fell through the roof. And, even when they managed to stay aloft, the scurrying insects and animals kept a constant flurry of debris falling into the house. Sweeping and wiping things off several times a day was a normal part of housekeeping. Keeping a clean bed was especially difficult. Straw, bugs, and animal droppings could thwart the most diligent housekeeper. They found, however, if they made beds with big posts and draped a sheet over the top, they could just take the drape out and shake it and the bed stayed clean. That's where the idea for our beautiful modern four poster canopy beds came from. In the 1500s, only the wealthy had floors other than dirt. This is where get the expression “dirt poor.” The slate floors favored by the wealthy were a mixed blessing. In the summer they were cool and pleasant. In the winter, though, they were slippery whenever they got wet. So people with slate floors began spreading thresh on the floor to help with traction. As the winter wore on, they kept adding new thresh over old. Eventually, the thresh floor grew so thick that opening the door let it slide out the door onto the ground. To prevent this, people with slate floors added a piece of wood—a “threshold”—at the entry to hold in the thresh. There wasn’t much in the way of heating back then. They often had a fireplace in the kitchen-parlor but it was seldom used. Some homes had a fireplace in the master bedroom. Folks cooked over a fire and that helped heat the house. “Cooking” usually meant adding more solids to a big stewing kettle that hung over the fire in perpetuity. Every morning, after the fire was lit, they added things to the pot—usually fresh vegetables to replace the ones that had liquified from repeated reheating. Once in awhile, they had some meat to add. They would eat the stew for dinner then leave the leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start all over again the next day. Unless they just happened to finish off a pot and had to start fresh, the stew might contain food that had been reheated from room temperature for a month! Thus, the rhyme: “Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.”Meat was a rich man’s food. For common folks, meat was acquired for celebrations and other special occasions. Pork was real treat. If there was bacon in the house when company came over, it was displayed on a special rack in the parlor. Being able to acquire pork was a sign of wealth or, at least, influence. A man who “could really bring home the bacon” was to be admired. The host would cut off a little and share it with guests, who would sit around and merrily “chew the fat.”

Pewter plates were another sign of wealth. Unfortunately, some of their ingredients were highly acidic and leached lead into the food. When they noticed it happened frequently with tomatoes, rather than give up pewter place settings, no one ate tomatoes for the next 400 years. Ordinary folks didn't have pewter plates though; they had trenchers: pieces of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. They never washed these boards (bowls) and worms often took up residence. After eating off the worm-infested trencher, people often got “trench mouth.” For this reason, if you were traveling and wanted to stay at an inn the innkeeper usually provided the bed but not the board. Hence the term, “bed and board” or, alternatively, “room and board.”

Even a slice of bread could be a class distinction back then. Workers were served the bottom of the loaf, which was often charred; family members got the middle; and special guests got the top, or the “upper crust.”

Special guests were served their ale or whiskey in fancy lead cups and the combination of alcohol and lead intoxication would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. When they were found alongside the road, they were sometimes taken for dead. Sometimes too, an overly eager undertaker would hurriedly get them ready for burial (washing down the body and sometimes applying makeup) realizing if they were too slow about it, the person might wake up. For this reason and because of honest mistakes, folks began to lay their loved ones out on the kitchen table for a couple of days, just in case. The family would gather around the body, eat and drink and tell stories, waiting to see if the “corpse” might wake up. That is where the custom of holding a “wake” originated.

England is an old and a small country. With periodic wars and plagues and what not, the country began to run short places to bury people. So they started digging up coffins and moving the bones to a house so they could re-use the grave. Before long they discovered that some of these coffins, some say one in 25 of them, had scratch marks on the inside. Even with wake precautions, they still had been burying people alive. So they decided to start tying a string to the corpse’s wrist and let the string trail out the coffin and up through the ground. There it was tied to a bell. Someone sat out in the graveyard all night listening for the bell and was said to work “the graveyard shift.” If the bell rang, they knew they had a “dead ringer” who, hopefully, would be “saved by the bell.”