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There is History in all kinds of places that is interesting for the trivia buff.  
 
Here ya go....... you may find this interesting. I am not entirely sure that it is all-true, but it makes for good reading.  
 
 
According to The History Channel, during the Victorian age, people would only change a baby's diaper every four days.  
 
In the past, Inuit mothers did not make clothes for their baby. The nude child lived in the great fur hood of its mothers Caribou skin coat in direct contact with her body until he was able to run about. If the mother had a small baby she would wear an “amaut” which had a separate hood for the baby and the baby laid against the mothers back. This system leads to the baby having many warts.  
 
Here are some trivia facts about the 1500s:  
 
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were beginning to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.  
 
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice CLEAN HOT WATER FIRST, followed by all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all were the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."  
 
Houses had thatched roofs, thick straw piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained, it became slippery and sometimes the animals would fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs".  
 
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.  
 
The floor of a house 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 the 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 entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."  
 
(Getting quite an education, aren't you)  
 
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 a stew had the 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."  
 
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."  
 
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing death by lead poisoning. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for about the next 400 years, tomatoes were considered poisonous.  
 
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 "upper-crust."  
 
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 to see if they woke up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."  
 
London, 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, about 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 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."  
 
The story of “Beauty and the Beast” was told to young women, (mainly upper class) who were likely to be a participant in an “arranged marriage”. In France where these marriages were the norm, an arranged marriage, particularly to an older man, could easily seem like being married to a Beast by the young Bride. The Fairy Tale promoted that such marriages could be happy, and their “Bestial” husbands could turn out to be good men, given time. Or be transformed into good men from the beast by their new wives.  
 
Before the Napoleonic Wars there was a shortage of Sailors for the British Navy. To help with recruitment Press Gangs used to frequent Taverns and Bars to recruit or trick Sailors into the Royal Navy. The method they used was to slip a Kings Shilling into a Pewter Beer Mug and if the Sailor drank the beer and found the Shilling at the bottom he had accepted the offer to enlist. To prevent this form of conscription, glass bottoms were placed in the bottom of the mug so that the Sailor could see the Shilling and refuse the drink.  
 
Many of the names of families in England were based on their type of employment. For instance my name is Booth, and my family came from the midlands around Derbyshire. Here they kept a lot of cattle, and the cattle sheds were called Booth’s, therefore a cattle farmer was named Booth.  
 
From about 1340 until 1380, the Black Death killed over 25 million Europeans, and this lead to the development of the Beer Stein. The difference between a Mug and a Stein is a hinged lid with a thumb lift. During the summers of the late 1400’s Central Europe was invaded by millions of tiny flies, and so Germany passed laws stating that food containers must be covered to protect consumers from these dirty insects. Thus by way of this ingenious invention the beverage container named a Beer Stein could be used with only one hand.  
 
Jews in the time of the Bubonic Plague did not catch it. They of course boasted that it was their God that was protecting them, but the real reason was that the fleas carried by the Rats spread the Plague. Jews never had any Rats because in their Culture they used to bury their garbage, whereas in London the citizens threw the garbage out in the streets to rot.  
 
 
And that's the truth. Now, whoever said that History was boring!