12801. History Facts

During the time of Henry VIII of England, who reigned from 1508 to 1547, the punishment for poisoners was to be boiled alive.

12802. History Facts

To make violin strings, the gut of a sheep – which could be 30 metres long (over 98 feet) in length – was removed intact. The blood, flesh and fat were then scraped off the outside, the halfdigested grass was squeezed out and it was washed out carefully. The wider end was used as sausage skins, the rest for violin strings.

12803. History Facts

The Roman emperor Valerian was captured by visigoths (a barbaric tribe) invading Rome in 260 CE, who skinned him alive and then displayed the skin as a signal of their triumph.

12804. History Facts

Ancient Greeks used to blow up a pig's bladder like a balloon and use it as a ball.

12805. History Facts

An Anglo-Saxon cure for baldness was to rub the ash from burnt bees into the head.

12806. History Facts

Soldiers fighting in the trenches in World War I often suffered from trench foot (spending too long in cold, wet trenches made their feet rot). Some had to have their feet amputated because of it…

12807. History Facts

When Sir Walter Ralegh was executed in 1618, his wife had his head embalmed. She carried it around with her for 29 years, until her own death.

12808. History Facts

A French medieval torture involved trapping a person in the stocks – a wooden structure that held their ankles while they sat on the ground – pouring salt water over their bare feet and letting a goat lick it off.

12809. History Facts

The servants of a dead Egyptian pharaoh were often killed and buried with him or sealed alive in his pyramid.

12810. History Facts

The poet Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy in 1822. His body was washed up, half eaten by fish, and cremated on the beach by his friends. One of them cut his heart from the burnt body and gave it to Shelley's wife who kept it all her life.

12811. History Facts

The Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathori killed more than 600 young girls in the 1500s in order to drink and bathe in their blood.

12812. History Facts

A Saxon cure for madness was a beating with a whip made from the skin of a dolphin.

12813. History Facts

Ancient Egyptians sometimes brought a mummified body to banquets to remind diners that one day they would die.

12814. History Facts

Monks in Sicily, Italy, mummified dead bodies until 1920. A display of 6,000 can be seen in catacombs in Palermo, standing around or lying on shelves.

12815. History Facts

Hanging, drawing and quartering was a punishment for the worst crimes in England from 1241. The prisoner was nearly strangled by hanging, then cut open and had his innards removed and cooked in front of him, and finally chopped into four pieces. By the mid-1700s, prisoners were killed before the drawing and quartering.

12816. History Facts

Early Colonists in America used to clean their windows with rags dipped in urine.

12817. History Facts

In the Middle Ages, butchers often killed animals for meat in their shops, then threw the innards out into the street.

12818. History Facts

Romans who killed a relative would be executed by being tied in a sack with a live dog, cockerel, snake and monkey and thrown into a river.

12819. History Facts

Wool used to be softened by people trampling on it in a large vat of stale (two-week-old) urine and ground clay. The people who did this were called ‘fullers'.

12820. History Facts

Fashionable women in Japan and Vietnam stained their teeth black until the mid-1900s.

Fact
Meridian
Imaginary line joining north and south poles and cutting the equator at right angles.      .. More >>