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Lead cups were used to drink ale, and the combination would sometimes knock the drinker out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait to see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of ‘holding a wake’
England is old and small and when they started running out of burial plots, they would dig up the old coffin, take their bones and re-use the grave. In re-opening these coffins one out of twenty-five coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside lid and they then realised they had been buried alive. An idea was formed to tie a piece of string on their wrist and lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would sit beside the grave all night and listen for the bell. This is where the expressions ‘graveyard shift’ and that someone was ‘saved by the bell’ or he was a ‘dead ringer’.
Many large houses in England had some of their windows bricked up to avoid paying window tax.
Most people got married in June due to the annual
- Type:
- Cultural & History