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.

12821. History Facts

A dead body found in the Alps in 1991 was at first thought to be a climber who had died. Investigators discovered it was a man who had been mummified naturally in the ice after dying 5,300 years ago.They named him Otzi.

12822. History Facts

So many people associated with the discovery of Otzi have died young that some believe the mummy is cursed.

12823. History Facts

The Incas of South America used to mummify their dead kings and leave them sitting on their thrones.

12824. History Facts

During a famine and drought in Jamestown, America, in 1609, one settler was executed for eating his dead wife.

12825. History Facts

Queen Christina of Sweden, who reigned from 1640 to 1654, had a miniature cannon and crossbow for executing fleas.

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