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Many of our common sayings come from Anne Hathaway who was the wife of William Shakespeare. She married William at the ripe old age of 26, yes I said old. Most people married very young typically at the age of 11 or 12. I hate to say it but life was not as romantic as we may picture it. Here are some examples:

Anne Hathaway's home was a 3-bedroom house with a small parlor, which was seldom used (it was only for company), a kitchen, and no bathroom. Mother and Father shared a bedroom. Anne had a queen-sized bed, but did not sleep alone. She also had 2 other sisters and they all shared the bed with 6 servant girls. (This is before she married of course) They didn't sleep lengthwise like we do; they lay on the bed crosswise, and at least they had a bed. Her 6 brothers and 30 field workers shared the last bedroom. The men would wrap themselves up in their blankets and sleep on the floor. The house had no indoor heating so all the extra bodies was the only thing that kept them warm. So in this small farmhouse they had 46 people. As a side note they were also short, the men only grow to the astounding height of 5'6" and the women would top the chart at 4'8".

Most people got married in June. Why? Well they took their yearly bath in May, so they still smelled ok by June, although they were starting to smell, so the brides would carry a bouquet of flowers to hide their B.O. Like I said, they took their yearly bath in May, it was just a big tub that they would fill with hot water. The man of the house would get the privilege of the nice clean water. Then came the sons and the other men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all they would wash the babies. By then the water was pretty thick you could actually lose someone in it - thus the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Now I'll describe their houses a little. You've heard of thatch roofs, well that’s all they were, thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. This was also the only place for the non-farm animals to get warm. So all the dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, and bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. - Thus the saying, "It's raining cats and dogs." Since there was nothing to stop things from falling into the house the family would spend a great deal of their time cleaning up. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where the bugs and droppings from animals could really mess up your nice clean bed, so they found if they would make beds with big posts and hang a sheet over the top it would prevent that problem. That's where those beautiful big 4 poster beds with canopies came from.

When you came into a house in the 1500’s you would notice that most of the time that the floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt - which where the saying "Dirt poor" came from. The wealthy would have slate floors. Which worked great in the summer but in the winter they would become quite slippery when they got wet. So they started to spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on they would just keep adding and adding thresh until it was so high that when you opened the door the thresh would all start slipping outside. So they put a piece of wood at the entryway, a "Thresh hold".

In the kitchen they would cook over an open fire, they had a fireplace in the kitchen/parlor, that was seldom used and sometimes there would be one in the master bedroom. They had a big kettle that always hung over the fire and every day they would light the fire and start adding things to the pot. Mostly they ate vegetables for they didn't get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner then leave the leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew would have food in it that had been in there for a month! Thus the rhyme: "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old." Sometimes they could get hold of some pork. They really felt special when that happened, and when company came over they even had a rack in the parlor where they would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. That was a sign of wealth and that a man "Could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and they would all sit around and "Chew the fat."

If you had money your plates were made out of pewter. Sometimes some of their food had a high acid content and some of the lead would leach out into the food. They really noticed it happened with tomatoes. So they stopped eating tomatoes, for 400 years. Most people didn't have pewter plates though, they all had trenchers, that were pieces of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. They never washed their boards and a lot of times worms would get into the wood. After eating off the trencher with worms they would get "Trench mouth." If you were traveling and wanted to stay at an Inn they usually provided the bed but not the board. The bread was divided according to status. The workers would get the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family would get the middle and guests would get the top, or the "Upper crust". They also had lead cups, and when they would drink their ale or whiskey, the combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone would be walking along the road and there would be someone knocked out and they thought they were dead. So they would pick them up and take them home and get them ready to bury. They realized if they were slow about it, the person might wake up. You see, it was discovered that not all of the people they were burying were dead. So they would lay them out on the kitchen table for a couple of days. The family would gather around and eat and drink and wait to see if the loved one would wake up. That's where the custom of holding a "Wake" came from. Since England is so small they started running out of places to bury people. So they started digging up coffins and would take their bones to a house and re-use the grave. Sometimes upon opening these coffins and found some had scratch marks on the inside. One out of 25 coffin’s contained scratches and they realized they had still been burying people alive. So they started to tie a string on the wrist of the “corpses” and run it through the coffin, up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen for the bell. That is how the saying "Graveyard shift" came about. If the bell would ring they would know that someone was "Saved by the bell" or he was a "Dead ringer". Amazing!