Historical Misconceptions

“Ye” Was Never Part of Old English

Kirsten Reach. “This Post is Brought to Ye by the Letter Thorn.” Kenyon Review.

“Style Guide: A Reference for Reading Historic Documents.” State Archives of North Carolina.

Thomas L. Crowell, Jr. “Ye Olde Englysshe ‘Ye’.” Duke University Press.

Lauren Davis. ‘Ye Olde’ Is Fake Old English (And You're Mispronouncing It Anyway).” Gizmodo.

Throughout the United States and United Kingdom, you can find storefronts and pubs named “ye olde” this and “ye olde” that. Many people think this goes back to Old English, but the real origins are much more recent. First of all, it’s very unlikely you could even read Old English; here’s Beowulf as an example. Pause if you’d like to give it a try. It also seems that the phrase “Ye Olde” didn’t come about until the 1800s when shopkeepers were trying to make their enterprises seem antique and well-established. Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, the word “ye” in this context is actually supposed to be pronounced “the.” You see, English used to have a letter called “thorn,” which looks like this and makes the sound “th” or “the.” As writing progressed, it became less and less defined until we replaced the character altogether with a “y.” So by the time that shopkeepers were starting the “ye olde” trend in the 1800s, they would have seen “the” rendered as “ye” in reprintings of older texts. They just didn’t know (or maybe didn’t care) that the word was supposed to be “the.” So there you have it - another series of useless facts to bring up next time you go to “Ye Olde Gift Shoppe.”

Every Map is Wrong

Keith Hodgkinson. “Standing the World on its Head: A Review of Eurocentrism in Humanities Maps and Atlases. Teaching History (1991).

“Map Projections.” United States Geological Survey.

“Maps Have ‘North’ at the Top, But It Could've Been Different.” British Broadcasting Corporation.

What if I told you that every map you’ve ever seen was wrong? Now, that’s not necessarily true of globes (Except this one. This one’s outdated.) But I’m talking about maps, like the flat maps you've been seeing your whole life - even if they're on a phone. The problem is that you just can’t take a sphere, like earth, and flatten it without causing serious distortion. Mapmakers have several ways of handling these problems, but most maps are going to be either cylindrical, conic, or planar projections, each named for the pattern used to stretch out the 3 dimensional globe. This might seem like stupid trivia, but it seriously shapes the way people view the world - it’s why many people have no understanding of countries’ and continents’ sizes. Some map-makers and other academics say the harm goes further than that. One of the most commonly used maps, the mercator projection, makes the countries of northern Europe seem much larger, thus more significant, than they actually are. Others criticize the direction of maps, saying that a “north at the top” approach contributes to the idea that South America and Africa are being lesser than. There are a lot of new map designs which try to address these problems, but right now they’re mostly being used as visual aids. If you want to see how maps have distorted your global perspective, check out the sources in the comments.

George Washington Never Said "I Cannot Tell a Lie"

Keith Hodgkinson. “Standing the World on its Head: A Review of Eurocentrism in Humanities Maps and Atlases. Teaching History (1991).

“Map Projections.” United States Geological Survey.

“Maps Have ‘North’ at the Top, But It Could've Been Different.” British Broadcasting Corporation.

What if I told you that every map you’ve ever seen was wrong? Now, that’s not necessarily true of globes (Except this one. This one’s outdated.) But I’m talking about maps, like the flat maps you've been seeing your whole life - even if they're on a phone. The problem is that you just can’t take a sphere, like earth, and flatten it without causing serious distortion. Mapmakers have several ways of handling these problems, but most maps are going to be either cylindrical, conic, or planar projections, each named for the pattern used to stretch out the 3 dimensional globe. This might seem like stupid trivia, but it seriously shapes the way people view the world - it’s why many people have no understanding of countries’ and continents’ sizes. Some map-makers and other academics say the harm goes further than that. One of the most commonly used maps, the Mercator projection, makes the countries of northern Europe seem much larger, thus more significant, than they actually are. Others criticize the direction of maps, saying that a “north at the top” approach contributes to the idea that South America and Africa are being lesser than. There are a lot of new map designs which try to address these problems, but right now they’re mostly being used as visual aids. If you want to see how maps have distorted your global perspective, check out the sources in the comments.

The Iron Maiden Wasn't Real

Anna Marks. “Victorian Con Men Faked the Middle Ages' Darkest Devices.” Vice.

Peter Konieczny. “Why Medieval Torture Devices are Not Medieval.”

Chris Bishop. “The ‘Pear of Anguish’: Truth, Torture and Dark Medievalism.” International Journal of Cultural Studies.

The Iron Maiden is one of the most famous medieval torture devices. It was exhibited at the World’s Fair, inspired the name of a band, and showed up in my Saturday cartoons. The only problem? It was probably never used in medieval times. Although some spikey contraptions existed in the past, we have no evidence of an Iron Maiden being used throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, there are no written records of Iron Maidens until the 1790s - long after the Middle Ages had come to an end. But what about all the Iron Maidens in museums? Even the most famous were made in the nineteenth century - hundreds of years after their alleged peak of use. And since their creation, they have been… *mostly* decoration.

People In The Past Didn't All Die At 30

Woods, Robert. “Ancient and Early Modern Mortality: Experience and Understanding.” The Economic History Review.

Ruggeri, Amanda. “Do We Really Live Longer than Our Ancestors?” British Broadcasting Corporation.

Murray C. J.. “The Infant Mortality Rate, Life Expectancy at Birth, and a Linear Index of […]” International Journal of Epidemiology.

Griffin J. P.. “Changing Life Expectancy Throughout History.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

A lot of the time when I’m teaching, students will say some version of, “well back then people only lived to, like, 30.” They say this about Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, the 18th century United States, and Britain in the Industrial Revolution. But even in Ancient Rome, many people who made it to adulthood lived to their 60s or 70s! The problem is that many people in the past just didn’t make it to adulthood, with some estimates stating that as much as ⅓ of all Roman infants died before their first birthday. And all of these childhood deaths drag down the *average life expectancy. For example, if you were a European living from 1200 CE to 1745 CE and you made it to 21 years old, you probably wouldn’t die until your 60s! (Assuming you weren’t poisoned, bludgeoned, or pushed over the edge of a parapet.) The same was true of the smog-breathing overworked laborers of the British Industrial Revolution. If you could make it to five years old, you could probably make it to 75.

Spices Don't Save Rotten Meat

Myers, Daniel. "Drummond's Rotten Meat: When Good Sources Go Bad." Medieval Cookery. Accessed August 21, 2021. http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf.

Billing, Jennifer, and Paul W. Sherman. “Antimicrobial Functions of Spices: Why Some Like It Hot.” The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 73, no. 1, Mar. 1998, pp. 3–49. journals.uchicago.edu (Atypon), doi:10.1086/420058.

Szallasi, Arpad. “Some Like It Hot (Ever More so in the Tropics): A Puzzle with No Solution.” Temperature: Multidisciplinary Biomedical Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 2016, pp. 54–55. PubMed Central, doi:10.1080/23328940.2016.1139964

Freedman, Paul. Out of the East : Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven. Yale University Press, 2008.

Scully, Terence. 1995. The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press.

Snell, Melissa. "Medieval Food Preservation." ThoughtCo. Accessed August 21, 2021. https://www.thoughtco.com/medieval-food-preservation-1788842

In a recent video I made about spices, several people commented that spices in the Middle Ages were used to hide the smell or taste of rotting meat - which is something I used to believe. It’s a commonly held belief that has many forms: that the poor spiced their rotten food, that only the rich could afford to spice their rotten food, or in more ~aggressive~ cases, relating the trend to race or ethnicity. But no matter the way it’s presented, it’s simply not true. Historians and scientists have debunked the idea, pointing out that using spices to cover up the stench of rotting meat would cost more than buying fresh meat in the first place - and the meat would still make you sick. Even though some spices kill dangerous bacteria, a 2016 study found that you would have to use extreme amounts of spice, much more than anyone historically used, to kill the source of potential sickness in tainted meat. Lastly, and perhaps most simply, there were many other ways to actually preserve meat, including salting, smoking, pickling, and potting, among others. So it just wouldn’t make sense to cover up rot with spices when there are so many safe ways to store meat.