1,000 years ago, creepy things people did were considered just another day at the castle.
Whether it was cleaning your clothes in pee, or buying groceries with eels, there was no
end to the weirdness.
Here are some creepy things that were considered normal 1,000 years ago.
We like to imagine that human sacrifice was something that mostly happened in the unimaginably
distant past, before people started to get an inkling that maybe the gods just aren't
that into blood and severed heads.
But just a thousand years ago, people in cultures all over the world were still practicing human
sacrifice.
Some South American people like the Toltecs were still doing it, but also — surprise!
— the Vikings.
The Viking "blot" sacrifices were a pretty regular thing right up until Christianity
started to get a foothold around 1,000 AD.
Vikings would sacrifice people in exchange for stuff.
You would have a blot sacrifice if you needed good weather for your crops, to do well in
a raid, or maybe if your History Channel series was suffering from declining ratings.
India had its own human sacrifice practice, which was popular from about 550 through the
18th century.
Called "sati," it was the expectation that if a widowed woman did not have any surviving
children, she should throw herself onto her husband's funeral pyre and burn to death,
you know, so as not to become a burden to anyone.
In the early years of this horrific practice, sati was something a woman did willingly,
but at its peak it was a requirement.
Sati was eventually outlawed, though occasionally there are reports of it happening even today.
A thousand years ago, if you needed surgery you didn't go to a physician, you went to
a barber.
Because, you know, scissors?
Evidently people thought that a person who was skilled at cutting hair would also be
skilled at cutting human flesh.
Physicians were exclusively reserved for the upper-class, and a proper physician was way
too educated to touch blood or, god forbid, the broken limbs of a dirty peasant.
The barber, on the other hand, would handle the care of regular people.
It was his job to set broken bones, lance infected wounds, treat injuries, and if he
was skilled enough, saw people's limbs off.
And perhaps give them a nice pompadour while he was at it.
The really freaky thing about all of this is that physicians were properly educated
and accredited at a university and did practically nothing except advise.
Meanwhile the folks who did the hands-on stuff that could kill you if it went wrong basically
learned it all on the job.
Modern medicine may have its problems, but yikes!
Today, we believe very strongly that pee belongs in a toilet, but 1,000 years ago, people actually
thought pee was good for other stuff too.
This belief dates at least as far back as Roman times, when people would wash their
clothes in pee.
So good news, if your cat pees in your clean laundry, by ancient Roman standards, that
makes it cleaner!
No really, pee was considered so vital to the proper care of clothing that cities would
set up barrels on the street for people to pee into, and then they would collect the
pee and take it to the public laundry to be put to good use.
This is obviously disgusting, but it's not as crazy as you might think.
Urine contains ammonia, and ammonia is still commonly used as a cleaning agent.
In fact, even after people invented soap, they still liked to use pee for the laundry
because the ammonia was better at loosening up tough stains.
It was also great at helping dye stick to cloth, so it became indispensable to the textile
industry.
As late as the 16th century, people were still collecting pee specifically as a "mordant,"
or a treatment that cloth makers could apply to fabric to ensure bright, long-lasting color.
Sadly, no one seems to know how they eventually got the smell out.
Because cat pee is forever.
Ask most people if corpses can solve their own murder, and the answer will be, of course
not.
Ask a modern forensic scientist and the answer will probably be "kind of," since clues found
on a corpse quite frequently lead to a suspect.
But, 1,000 years ago, people did actually think that corpses could speak, in a sense.
The practice was known as "Cruentation."
It was what people did because they didn't know about DNA.
And frankly, they were pretty hopeless at things like gathering evidence, interviewing
witnesses, or even caring whether or not they found the actual perpetrator.
It was more important to execute some person than it was to make sure you were executing
the right person.
In those days, people believed that dead people weren't like, completely, utterly dead.
Which means that Miracle Max from Princess Bride was historically accurate.
"Well it just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead.
There's a big difference mostly dead and all dead."
Early crime investigators thought that if you put a corpse into the presence of its
killer, the body would start to bleed.
Now, this makes for really dramatic forensics, but the problem was that corpses don't really
bleed much after death.
So this technique probably didn't lead to a guilty verdict very often.
But never mind, there was always a lake they could throw the accused into instead, since
buoyant people are clearly more guilty than the ones who sink.
Bartering isn't really a thing anymore, at least not in America.
1,000 years ago though, currency wasn't something everyone had, so if you needed food or goods
you had to find other things you could use for money.
You know, like eels.
Yes, people in England actually used eels for currency.
In fact, by the Middle Ages there were distinct rules about how to count eels.
If you had 25 eels, that was a "stick," and if you had 10 sticks, that was a "bind."
The importance of eels to the economy of England dates all the way back to the 8th century,
and eels even have a prominent place in 11th century record books.
They actually seem to suggest that people paid their rent with eels more often than
they did with coins.
So why eels?
Well, monasteries were big landholders in those days, and collecting rent in eels meant
that the monks would never go hungry.
Also, feasts thrown by the king often featured eels, so the nobility needed large quantities
of them quite often.
One popular movie trope has folks circa 1,000 or so years ago tossing buckets of poop into
the street, usually from at least the second floor.
You know, so we can all laugh at the poor dude who happened to be walking by at exactly
the right moment.
Happily, this really is just a trope.
Fortunately, there's not much evidence that people actually did this.
It's not like simply being alive 1,000 years ago made you incapable of understanding that
poop is gross.
But that doesn't mean that people who lived 1,000 years ago knew much about the potential
of feces to transmit awful diseases, especially if it gets into a major water source, like
the Thames for example.
City dwellers who lived in England 1,000 years ago did have to get rid of their poop, and
like many modern humans they ascribed to the dubious policy "out of sight, out of mind."
It means they were totally cool with just dumping all of their waste into a nearby river,
where it would be washed downstream and become someone else's problem, at least in theory.
Of course, since everyone was doing it, it eventually became everyone's problem, but
it still took a rather disgustingly long time for people to realize that maybe the Thames
wasn't the best place to dump raw sewage.
Ancient people knew where babies come from, of course.
But figuring out contraception was a bit trickier.
Unfortunately, the stuff that people tried to do to prevent pregnancy 1,000 years ago
was mostly borderline gross, or sometimes flat-out gross.
Here's one that's not super awful but still highly ill-advised: Using a lemon as a cervical
cap, which is a practice that dates all the way back to the second century and was still
in use during the days of the infamous swinger Casanova.
There were also condoms, which sound pretty refreshingly normal compared to lemons, but
they were made out of animal guts because rubber and latex weren't actual things 1,000
years ago.
And as a bonus, though, animal gut condoms were reusable.
If you were put off by any of these things, don't worry, you could also drink a lead infused
potion — which probably was actually pretty good at making you infertile.
Lead makeup was all the rage
Speaking of lead, Queen Elizabeth I sort of popularized the close-to-death look, but she
didn't invent it.
Lead-based makeup was a thing from ancient Egypt all the way through the 18th century.
It lasted until people finally figured out that the reason they looked so crappy in old
age was because their makeup made their skin a permanently bizarre color.
And it was probably also responsible for their hair and teeth falling out.
Lead makeup was popular with wealthy women because they believed pasty-white was a youthful
look.
And who doesn't want to look like a sickly child who was raised in a basement?
Anyway, the lead-based makeup Elizabeth used was basically the same as Roman women used.
Before that, the Egyptians used lead-based powders as eyeliner, which is what you see
when you look at ancient portraits of pharaohs and other important people.
Weirdly, Egyptian eye makeup did work to prevent eye infections, which was cool because most
Egyptians didn't live past their 30s anyway.
So they didn't have time to develop eye cancer or whatever other horrible diseases may have
followed a lifetime of getting lead in your eyes.
We like to imagine that the people of the distant past were not super romantically adventurous.
They were polite, and chivalrous, and everything they did in the bedroom was within the bounds
of matrimony and 100 percent approved by the church.
But actually, kinkiness is as old as time, and for as long as there have been eels to
pay the tab there have been ladies of the evening willing to indulge customers' weird
fantasies.
And one of those weird fantasies was common enough that it persisted for centuries.
Sex workers who hung around in cemeteries usually did a pretty brisk business.
Why?
Well, in the Middle Ages, cemeteries were kind of like party central.
Townspeople would set up graveyard markets and if you wanted to drink and gamble, you
could settle down on your loved-one's grave for a beer and a game of dice and no one would
think that was weird at all.
But even before that, from the Roman times onward, ladies of the evening, so to speak,
found they could do dual business in cemeteries: Mourners-for-hire by day, and other stuff
at night.
Their customers were grave-diggers, widowers, and people who had some pretty weird graveyard
fetishes.
And this wasn't just a passing fad either.
This quirk continued to be a thing for centuries, reaching its peak in 14th century England
when the Black Death was killing a lot of people and totally messing with everyone's
boundaries.
Today we really could not imagine undergoing a surgical procedure without the use of anesthesia.
Not just because it would be awful for the person going under the knife, but also because
it would be impossible for the surgeon who would somehow have to perform precise maneuvers
around vulnerable blood vessels and organs while the patient was writhing like a beheaded
snake.
But it took a long time to develop anesthesia.
People recognized the need for surgical procedures thousands of years ago, before anyone could
even guess that it might be possible to make surgery pain-free.
So if you were unfortunate enough to need an operation you had a couple of choices:
Die, or have surgery while wide awake and totally lucid.
The Greeks, Chinese, and other ancient people did have some form of rudimentary anesthesia,
but in Europe there were few reports of real attempts at pain relief until the early 13th
century.
That’s when surgeons started to experiment with stuff like opium and mandrake.
Up until then, if you needed a procedure or god forbid you had to have your arm sawed
off, you basically got a bottle of whisky and a piece of wood to bite down on.
Then you prayed that you would pass out from the pain before it got super awful.
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