Forsooth, good lords and gentle ladies! ‘Tis the Elizabethan Era - hence, we say
things like “’tis” and wear extremely poofy clothes...It’s also the time of Shakespeare,
the empire and circumnavigating the world! Let’s purposefully rot our teeth,
dress in freaky beak masks, and make corpses testify in court?
Today on Nutty History, it’s the creepiest things that were normal in the Elizabethan era.
The Elizabethan Era was the period of English history in which Elizabeth the first reigned
as queen, from 1558 to 1603. It was considered a Golden Age for England - a time of relative peace,
prosperity, and artistic achievement. Queen Elizabeth managed to moderate the Catholic
versus Protestant divide that had been tearing England apart in the previous century, and her
fiscal policy led to financial prosperity. There was a reason she was known as “Good Queen Bess”,
just don’t look in her mouth. Elizabeth’s teeth, like the teeth of many of the rich and well-to-do,
were absolutely awful. Black and rotten. English high society frequently indulged in an expensive
luxury item shipped in from England’s colonies: sugar. They put sugar in fruits and vegetables,
and created elaborate sculptures out of moldable sugar pastes like marzipan.
Queen Elizabeth had a major sweet tooth and loved expensive sugary treats like rosewater sugar cubes
and gingerbread. But they didn’t just love eating it. In the Elizabethan era, they believed that
sugar had medicinal properties. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down but also
rots your teeth black. Ironically, they also would rub sugar on their teeth to prevent decay, which,
spoiler alert, didn’t work. The end result of this saccharine surge was that the richer you were,
the blacker and grosser your teeth tended to be. But fashion tends to follow the rich and powerful,
so the poorer classes who wanted to seem fancier would purposefully blacken their teeth with soot.
Man, everyone would think you were such a poser if you drank a glass of water
and your beautiful perfect pearly whites were exposed in front of the whole school.
Britney’s teeth were actually dying inside her mouth. Thanks very much.
Thinking that sugar made for good toothpaste was one sign of the state of Medical Science
at this time but we can’t bring up medicine in the Elizabethan era without mentioning those creepy,
beak-nosed plague doctors. See, disease was a major problem in the Elizabethan era.
The science of how germs transmit was not well understood, and most populated places had
terrible sanitation, that made perfect breeding ground for a disease known as the Bubonic Plague.
This really really awful disease is also known by the charming name of the Black Death, and killed
off more than a third of Europe in the 1300’s. The plague is transmitted by infected fleas,
but at the time they believed it was caused by “bad air.” This now debunked idea is known as
the miasmatic theory of disease, basically smells so gross, they make you sick. So to combat this
bad air, doctors would wear masks with long beaks stuffed full of sweet smelling herbs.
Needless to say, this did not work so well, and neither did the doctors’ various
attempts to treat the plague with things like bloodletting and bathing people in vinegar.
The admittedly metal-looking medical fashion fell out of use as we began to understand
more about how diseases transmit and how to treat them. The beaks, however, would go on
to have a fruitful career being worn by the arc villain of that one season of My Hero Academia.
But wacky scientific theories weren’t the only thing in vogue in the Elizabethan era.
It turns out they also had wacky legal theories too. You’ve probably heard of the crazy ways
they hunted for witches, like throwing them in the water to see if they float.
Naturally, if you weigh as much as a duck they must be made of wood…
Witches got blamed for almost anything bad that happened in Elizabethan England,
including the plague. Actually, just having a knowledge of herbs could mark you as a witch,
as it was believed that knowledge could only come from a pact with the devil.
But Queen Elizabeth was in a weird way fairer than others towards those accused of being witches.
Though she passed harsher anti-witch laws, torture was not allowed and witchcraft was
not defined as heresy, which kept the church from becoming involved in the trials. Also, despite the
American vogue of burning witches, in England they were generally hanged. Queen Liz’s mother,
Anne Boleyn, had a sixth finger and was accused of being a witch herself. Which might have led
to Elizabeth’s relatively merciful attitude. Still pretty messed up though, to be honest.
But it wasn’t just accused witches who had to deal with this legal nonsense. If you were suspected of
being a murderer, one of the things they might do is have you go up to the corpse of the person
you supposedly murdered and poke them. If the corpse starts to bleed spontaneously,
it meant the victim identified you as their killer! This method is known as cruentation,
and like the witch trial antics, it is a form of “trial by ordeal.” A trial by ordeal is where
basically the court expected God to intervene and help the innocent and punish the guilty.
Saving the courts and the police from having to do any actual work. The practice actually dates back
to before the middle ages, and was an accepted legal method for determining guilt or innocence.
It was believed that a corpse could still see and hear for some time after death, and would
bleed if their killer came too close. Nowadays, we know that corpses are gross and sometimes just…
ooze stuff. But the idea was well accepted at the time. Shakespeare mentions it in his play
Henry the sixth, “O! gentlemen; see, see! dead Henry’s wounds, Open their congeal’d mouths and
bleed afresh.” Gross! As scientific understanding increased, and the law became less cartoonishly
unfair, cruentation died out. England stopped use of the practice at the end of the 17th century.
The Elizabethan era was a time of extravagance and innovation, but also when old ideas ran headlong
into new things. It may be that things we consider normal today will seem creepy and strange to the
people of the future. As Shakespeare said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Also, black teeth are really hot.” We’re paraphrasing.