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.  Alright, here’s what I found out about the origin of canopy beds from History Magazine: Canopy beds may have originated as a means of keeping out flying insects but if you think about it, people rich enough to afford a canopy bed — a huge investment in the 1500s — would also be living in homes with proper ceilings.

Also, from Ezinearticles: Early houses during the middle Ages had no insulation that could really provide warmth and protection. Houses during those days were made of wattle and daub with thatched roofs. The doors and windows provided niggling obstruction to the wind. They only filter the snow out of the wind as it passed through the house. It was so cold that even if you bundled up in bed with piles of blankets it was not very warm… Another reason for the creation of box bed was the falling objects from the roof. Thatched roofs were home to caterpillars and other insects that often fell down causing discomfort to the one sleeping below. For folks who can afford fabrics, posts were erected over the top to catch any stubborn pests. Indeed, canopy beds were a necessity during those times.

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 threshhold.  Here’s what I found from AnswerBag: Threshold is a very old word, dating to c.1000 and probably earlier. The word thresh originally meant to stamp on or trample and survives today in the verb to thresh (wheat) and in thrash. The hold portion is of unknown origin. The threshold is literally the first place in a building you step and has evolved to mean any gateway. The problem is that there is no such thing as thresh. Thresh is not and never has been a noun. The word “thresh” is a verb which, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, means “to separate seed” or “to strike repeatedly.” It is not, and never has been, a noun used to designate floor rushes. The word “threshold,” like “thresh,” is Old English in origin and dates to before the twelfth century. Both OE words appear to relate to the movement of one’s feet; thresh (OE threscan) meaning to stamp or trample³ and threshold (OE therscwold) being a place to step.

About.com: In castles, the ground floor might be beaten earth, stone or plaster, but upper stories almost invariably had wooden floors,² and the same pattern likely held true in town dwellings. Straw was not needed to keep people from slipping on wet slate, but it was used as a floor covering on all surfaces to provide a modicum of warmth and cushioning. Reeds or rushes were sometimes supplemented with aromatic herbs like lavender, and the entire floor would usually be swept clean and strewn with fresh straw and herbs on a regular basis. Old straw was not simply left down when fresh straw was added.

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.  According to History Magazine “According to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, this chant was not used before 1762.” rhyme are unknown. The name refers to a type of porridge made from peas, pease pudding, also known as pease pottage (in Middle English). (“Pease” was treated as a mass noun, similar to “oatmeal” and the singular “pea” and plural “peas” arose by back-formation.) The earliest recorded version of Pease Porridge Hot is a riddle found in John Newbery‘s Mother Goose’s Melody (c. 1760).” SO, it’s very possible that what is listed is true…but no one seems to know for sure.

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”.  Back to History Magazine “We couldn’t find a convincing explanation for chew the fat. One was that it was of US Civil War origin, another that it was from Cockney Rhyming Slang meaning “have a chat” — and rhyming slang came was not known until after WWI.” 

Then I found this explination from World Wide Words: “The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a book by J Brunlees Patterson published in 1885, Life in the Ranks of the British Army in India. He suggested it was a term for the kind of generalised grumbling, the bending of the ears of junior officers as a way of staving off boredom, that’s an immemorial part of army life. It also appears in the famous 1891 British compilation Slang and Its Analogues by John Farmer and William Henley; it is likewise said to be of military origin and mean grumbling. The next examples we have are from the US, dating from the early part of the twentieth century. It became more common over the next decade on both sides of the Atlantic and weakened until it just meant idle chat.”

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.  Back to History Magazine for some clarification: It is true that tomatoes were thought to be poisonous until about 1830 — however tomatoes were extremely rare in Europe in the 1500s and in any case are not acidic enough to affect pewter.

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.  There doesn’t seem to be anything to dispute this one…it’s very likely that it’s true.  “This one may be true; the term upper crust does predate the 1500s.” - History Magazine

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.  There’s a lot more written on About.com, but here’s the jist of what I found: “The custom of holding a “wake” goes back much further than the 1500s. In Britain it appears to have its origins in Celtic custom, and was a watch over the recently-deceased that may have been intended to protect his body from evil spirits. The Anglo-Saxons called it a “lich-wake” from the Old English lic, a corpse. When Christianity came to Britain, prayer was added to the vigil. – “wake” Encyclopædia Britannica [Accessed April 13, 2002].

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.   Per The Phrase Finder: The Graveyard Shift, or Graveyard Watch, was the name coined for the work shift of the early morning, typically midnight until 8am. The name originated in the USA at the latter end of the 1800s. There’s no evidence at all that it had anything directly to do with watching over graveyards, merely that the shifts took place in the middle of the night, when the ambience was quiet and lonely.

From World Wide Words: Saved by the bell is actually boxing slang, dating from the 1930s. A contestant being counted out might be saved by the ringing of the bell for the end of the round, giving him a minute to recover. Graveyard shift is an evocative term for the night shift between about midnight and eight in the morning, when — no matter how often you’ve worked it — your skin is clammy, there’s sand behind your eyeballs, and the world is creepily silent, like the graveyard (sailors similarly know the graveyard watch, the midnight to four a.m. stint). The phrase dates only from the early years of the twentieth century. The third phrase — dead ringer — dates from roughly the same period or perhaps a decade or two earlier.  Though the fear of premature burial was indeed intense and various inventions that included bells were really developed to reassure people, the expression has nothing to do with the matter. It’s just ringer with dead added to give the phrase greater emphasis. It’s known from the 1890s — my earliest example is from an Ohio newspaper in 1893: “Israel Williams wearing a wig would be no longer Israel Williams, but would be a dead ringer for Wellington just before the battle of Waterloo.”

I’m not even sure that I did this much digging for reports in my history classes….but when you throw-in a little mystery as to the truth, I just can’t resist a mystery. 
Have you seen these “facts” in your email too? 
So, what do you think?  Was this a  little more interesting than the typical history class?