They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & Sold to the tannery.......if you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor" But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot......they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low. The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be.
Here are some facts about the 1500s:
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . ...... . 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 water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all 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 slip and 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 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 thresh hold.
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. 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 lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, 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 the upper crust.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. 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.
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.
Most, if not all of these 'facts' are untrue, and it's quite bizarre that some of them are supposedly dated purely to the 16th Century.
To whisk through a couple of them, 'threshold' is a derivative of an Old English term, from which the verb 'to thresh' is also derived. The term does not however 'hold the thresh'. Wealthy houses would likely have rugs, and by the Tudor period wooden panelling was increasingly popular. Poorer households could have straw, but more likely reeds, which were cheap and abundant.
This post seemingly overlooks the overwhelmingly agrarian and rural nature of most of British, if not European, society in the 16th Century, which renders many of its points moot. Thatched rooves were extremely popular because their materials are cheap and plentiful, and they are extremely dry and well-insulating. Thatch does, however, have to be changed every few years to prevent the build-up of gasses leading to fires. A thatched roof that leaked on you, or was loosely packed enough to allow large infestations, was a thatched roof that would get replaced. And the idea of having dogs on the roof is just bizarre.
Bread, if not baked at home, was often baked in communal ovens within a village. While rents before the enclosure acts could often be paid in kind, the idea of slicing up an individual loaf to share around multiple households is again bizarre. Pigs are extremely common animals in medieval and early modern agricultural settings, and it was very common for households to own one. They could be purchased cheaply, fed on scraps throughout the year and then butchered, with any surplus sold to pay for a new piglet.
Parish rolls were kept throughout the Medieval and Early Modern period and keep a record of all marriages, births and deaths in a given parish. Marriages are far from limited to June. Also, records show that drowning while bathing in rivers or lakes was a commonplace, if not regular, cause of death, from which we can infer that in a rural, agrarian setting, hygiene was a regular activity.
Just to add to /u/BRIStoneman excellent answer:
That's a big set of what's called Folk Etymologies, the linguistics term for "stories people make up to explain the origins of words". They're very common (in particular, stories claiming words came from an acronym are almost always false)
While it's true that in some times and places, urine was collected and used for things like tanning (notably the Romans did, and famously taxed urine), in the term piss-poor, 'piss' is merely an intensifier, and that use of it dates from the 20th century. Similarly, 'dirt poor' is attested from 1937.
People did not take only one bath a year. Although they myth that they did is surprisingly resilient.
"Threshold" has nothing to do with holding anything. It's "Thresh-old" really. It's an old Germanic word, and was þrescold in Old English, obviously different from healdan (to hold). It's pure coincidence that the latter came to resemble the ending of the former. Cognate words like Swedish tröskel have no similarity to hålla (the cognate of 'hold'), but it has an analagous similarity to tröska (to thresh). 'Thresh' and 'threshold' are distantly related. 'Threshold' and 'hold' are not.
Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century, so if they were considered poisonous for 400 years, Italians and others would've only started eating them within living memory, which ought to be recognizably wrong. They've actually been eaten all along. Also, pewter that was used for food did not contain lead. Acute lead poisoning has a whole host of serious neurological effects, but knocking people out temporarily is not one of them. (yet by the same story, lead was causing immediate death in the case of tomatoes.. or were they 'dead ringers' then?)
Isn't "saved by the bell" an obvious boxing reference? Well, it is anyway, from 1914 and still used all the time in that context.