On the post regarding Anne Hathaway and the 16th Century: 1. Anne Hathaway married Shakespeare at 26, but if I correctly recall my literature classes Anne had been married and widowed before. The average age of marriage for English girls at this time was about 17, not 11 or 12. The infant marriages you read about took place only among the rich and powerful for dynastic reasons. They were almost never consumated before the partners reached their mid to late teens. While folks in warmer climates (Earlier onset of menstruation) married earlier, it wasn't 11 or 12. More like 14 or 15. 2. Beds were custom made and varied in size. They didn't have "Queen sized" beds. I doubt very seriously that the brothers shared a bedroom with 30 field workers. Likely the field workers on a farm big enough to need them (This would be one heck of a big, prosperous farm!) lived in small cottages of their own. The brothers did likely share a bed, and this maybe included a servant or two. 3. 16th Century English bathed more than yearly. Commonly they would bathe monthly in good weather. Wealthy folks with servants to heat and carry bath water might bathe even more frequently. Most people washed daily. This idea that Europeans before the 19th century were filthy and smelly is a myth. (Medieval Scandanavians often bathed and/or saunaed daily.) The famous quote about Elizabeth I bathing "...once a month whether she needed it or not" was recorded because people were surprised she bathed so seldom and found the quote funny in her own time. While bath water was shared (continually freshened with more hot water), you wouldn't see dozens of people using the same bathwater. Lice were omnipresent, but had more to do with the lack of any good permanent means to kill nits than they did with bodily hygiene. (Think about the horrible chemicals we use to get rid of them when our children bring them home.) 4. People married in June because it was a time when the planting was done, the weather was good, and they had some months to spend together before harvest time. Brides carried flowers for the same reasons modern brides do, and further a bride would usually bathe on her wedding day, as would her groom. 5. Thatched roofs are still used today, as they are an excellent and beautiful form of roofing. Today thatching is very expensive, and it is a status symbol in Britain. While colonies of various rodents might set up housekeeping in a thatched roof, most houses in Anne Hathaway's day also had ceilings. The idea that such roofs contained virtual zoos that fell into houses is nonsense. The reason for "tester" or four-posted, canopied beds was simple: warmth and privacy. Period. 6. While the very poor might have hardpacked dirt floors, most people in Anne's day had wood or stone floors, including middle class folks. The rushes on dirt floors were totally replaced every two to three months. Houses had glass windows, too. 7. Kitchen fires were kept going all the time, even in poor households. The general diet was not all that bad. True, the poor got little beef and pork, except at butchering time, but the diet included a lot of fish and dairy in addition to grains and vegetables. Tomatoes were not eaten by europeans from their discovery in America because they were believed to be poisonous; not because of any interaction with pewter. Pewter and ceramic were the materials of middle class table wear. Wealthy people had silver, gold and fine porcelain. The wooden trencher was more commonly used much earlier. Tableware was washed after use. Worms were more a product of disease and eating partly spoiled meats. 8. I seriously doubt the truth of the stories on the origins of "wake" and "dead ringer". The latter term doesn't appear in anything I have read dating earlier than the late 19th century, and then only in American writings till much later. I have been told that the former comes from a Gaelic word, and know that the Irish "wake" has more to do with celebrating the life of the deceased than "waking" him up. In general, the English of Anne Hathaway's time lived more or less as comfortably as our American ancestors of the last century. Depending on their means they lived in houses about as nice, and ate, drank, dressed, slept and bathed with about the same frequency and quality. Their life expectancy wasn't much different, either until near the turn of the 20th century. There are a lot of myths around about daily life in other times, and because of this the truth is sometimes surprising and actually more interesting.