Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

One Kentish tenant held his land on condition of holding the king's head at sea. Among the book's list of "curious tenures," Solomon Attefield held land in Kent on the terms that whenever the king crossed the sea, Solomon and his heirs "ought to go along with him, to hold his head on the sea, if it was needful." A farm in Yorkshire meanwhile paid its rent as "a snow-ball at Midsummer, and a red rose at Christmas." Read it in the book →
Queen Elizabeth's dinner was laid by servants who knelt three times to the empty table. A German visitor, Hentzner, watched the ritual: a lady in white silk "prostrated herself three times in the most graceful manner" and "rubbed the plates with bread and salt, with as much care as if the queen had been present." Twenty-four dishes came in at a time, borne by "the tallest and stoutest men that could be found in all England," and "the lady-taster gave to each of the guards a mouthful" of the dish he carried, for fear of poison — while twelve trumpets and two kettle-drums made the hall ring for half an hour. Read it in the book →
After the Man in the Iron Mask died, his window glass was pounded to dust. So great was the fear he had left some clue to his identity that "the walls of his room were scraped, and the floor taken up," his plate was melted down, the window frames, doors and bedding burnt, and the glass ground to powder. One account claimed a bribed sexton dug up the body and "found a stone instead of the head." Read it in the book →
A Sussex jury once included Kill-sin Pimple, Fly-debate Robert and Stand-fast-on-high Stringer. Puritan naming in the Civil Wars was so scriptural that "the genealogy of our Saviour might be learned from the names in Cromwell's regiments." Praise-God Barebone had two brothers, Christ-came-into-the-world-to-save and If-Christ-had-not-died-thou-hadst-been-damned — and wags were said "to have omitted the former part of the latter name, and" to call him simply "Damned Barebone." Read it in the book →
A king threw a golden cup into the whirlpool of Charybdis to make a diver fetch it. Nicholas Pesce, "surnamed the Fish," stayed down "for three-quarters of an hour below, during which time the king and his attendants remained on shore," and surfaced holding the cup. He reported four terrors at the bottom, including "polypous fish, some of which appeared as large as a man," reaching out fibrous arms to entangle him. Read it in the book →
A dissenting minister believed God had annihilated his soul — and dedicated a book to the Queen on that basis. Simon Browne held that his rational soul had perished, leaving him mere animal life: "though he might appear rational to others, he knew no more what he said than a parrot," and prayer was pointless. He nonetheless wrote two defences of Christianity, offering one to Queen Caroline as the work of an author "who is the first being of the kind, and yet without a name." Read it in the book →
An Anglo-Saxon steward was paid in ale measured by his own finger joints. The king's steward could take "as much of every cask of plain ale, and as much of every cask of ale with spiceries, as he could reach with the second joint of the middle finger; and as much of every cask of mead, as he could reach with the first joint of the same finger." Read it in the book →
Two queens of England descended from a girl who carried out beer in tubs. Failing to find a servant's place in London, she "hired herself to carry out beer from a brewhouse, and was one of those called tub-women." The brewer married her and died rich; the lawyer engaged to settle his affairs — the future Earl of Clarendon — married the widow, and their daughter became the wife of James II and mother of Queens Mary and Anne. Read it in the book →
Playing cards were invented to amuse a melancholy king, and were painted by hand. Cards appear about 1390, "to divert Charles VI. then king of France, who was fallen into a melancholy disposition." The royal cofferer's book records payment for "a pack of painted leaves bought for the king's amusement, three livres" — printing not yet existing, which is why they cost so much. Read it in the book →
When the Duke of Savoy banned cards, he let ladies keep playing for pins. A severe edict against cards followed in France, and another from Emanuel of Savoy, "only permitting the ladies this pastime, pro spinulis" — for pins and needles. Read it in the book →
A queenless hive takes hours to notice, then erupts into delirium. Remove the queen and the bees carry on feeding the young as usual; but within a few hours "a singular humming is heard; the bees desert their young, and rush over the surface of the combs with a delirious impetuosity." Replace her, and "tranquillity is almost instantly restored." Read it in the book →
A substitute queen bee is murdered if she arrives too early, crowned if she arrives a day late. Introduced at once, the stranger is seized and surrounded "so that she is either suffocated, or perishes by hunger." But "If twenty-four hours have elapsed, the stranger will be well received from the first" — and the royal cells the bees had begun are instantly abandoned and their larvæ destroyed. Read it in the book →
Worker bees will starve an unwanted queen rather than sting her. Bees crowd and confine a rival queen until she dies, but the book notes it "is very remarkable, that the workers are never known to attack a queen bee with their stings." Read it in the book →
Deprived of their sovereign, bees manufacture a new one from an ordinary grub. Following Schirach's discovery, Huber confirmed that queenless bees "have the power of selecting one or two grubs of workers, and of converting them into queens." The same pages report the then-startling conclusion that the "neuter" working bees "are really of the female sex." Read it in the book →
The famous poison tree of Java was a hoax by a Dutch surgeon. The 1780 account of the Bohan Upas, which had Europe believing in a tree that killed everything for miles, is dismissed as "celebrated forgery": of its author Foersch, the writer concludes that "literary abilities were as mean, as his contempt of truth was consummate." A genuinely poisonous tree does exist there, hence the plausibility. Read it in the book →
A sea captain swore his cannonball bounced off a sea serpent. Captain Joseph Woodward of the schooner Adamant fired a ball and musket bullets at the creature's head: "my crew and myself distinctly heard the ball and bullets strike against the body, from which they rebounded, as if they had struck against a rock." It then lay alongside for five hours, head on one side of the vessel and tail on the other. Read it in the book →
A Roman army besieged a serpent with battering engines as though it were a tower. Regulus's men could not pierce its scales, so "recourse was had to battering engines, with which the animal was attacked in the manner of a fortified tower." Only an immense stone that broke its back finished it, and the soldiers "confessed they would rather attack Carthage itself, than such another monster." Read it in the book →
Two survivors of the wreck of the Grosvenor turned down rescue. Sought out by a colonial official years after the ship was lost off the coast of Caffraria, the two Englishwomen were living "in the interior of a country uninhabited by Europeans," dressed and painted as the women around them. They refused repeated offers of passage home, saying that with husbands, children and grandchildren "their attachments were bounded by their actual enjoyments." Read it in the book →
Every peer entering Oakham had to surrender a shoe from his horse. By ancient custom each peer of the realm, on first coming within the precincts, "forfeits a shoe from his horse to the lord of the manor and castle, unless he agreen to redeem it with money." The redemption shoes — some giant, some gilt, some stamped with the donor's name — were nailed to the castle hall door. Read it in the book →
North Holland houses had a door used only for weddings and corpses. Every house had a second, raised door opened on just two occasions: "the bride and bridegroom enter the house by this door," and the dead are carried out by it. Afterwards it was fastened up, "never to turn on its hinges again, till some new event of a similar nature demands its services." Read it in the book →
The Queen of the Sandwich Islands was still married to a Russian blacksmith. The book reports as "a curious circumstance" that the reigning queen had been — "or rather is at this time" — the wife of a Russian smith, an English officer having "become enamoured of the fair spouse of a son of Vulcan." Read it in the book →
Sheriffs counted horseshoes at the Exchequer because of a forge built in 1234. The ceremony was not a meaningless antiquity: the Exchequer rolls show Walter le Brun, farrier of the Strand, rendering "six horse-shoes, to have a certain place in the parish of St. Clement's, to build a forge there." Centuries later the shoes and nails were still being solemnly counted. Read it in the book →
Yarmouth owed the king a hundred herrings baked into twenty-four pies. By charter the town sent the "sheriffs of Norwich a hundred herrings, which are to be baked in twenty-four pies or patties," to be forwarded by the lord of East Carlton to the king. At James II's coronation a claimant offered to hold both basin and ewer and the towel — "but the claim was allowed only as to the towel." Read it in the book →
A French poet was crippled for life by a carnival costume. In 1638 Paul Scarron dressed as a savage; pursued through the town by curious children, he hid in a marsh, and the cold and wet left him paralysed — he "lost the use of those legs which had danced so gracefully." He asked the queen only for the title of Valetudinarian to her majesty; she smiled, and he took the smile as his commission. Read it in the book →
Scarron lost a pension by dedicating a poem to a cardinal who sniffed at it. Mazarin "gave him a pension of 500 crowns; but that minister having received disdainfully the dedication of his Typhon, the poet immediately wrote a Mazarinade, and the pension was withdrawn." He later married the young woman who became Madame de Maintenon. Read it in the book →
Whitsuntide was once a truce in which no blood might be shed and villages crowned mock kings. Consecrated to Hertha, goddess of peace and fertility, it was a season when "quarrels might be maintained, no blood shed, during this truce of the goddess." Each village elected a king who chose his queen — he in an oaken wreath, she in hawthorn — for "the May-pole, then, was the English tree of liberty." Read it in the book →
A lecturer issued medals instead of tickets — and lured shoemakers with a fraudulent trade secret. John Henley struck medals showing a star rising to the meridian, motto "Ad Summa," for his subscribers. He once packed the room with shoemakers by promising a speedy new method, "which proved only to be, the making of shoes from ready-made boots." Read it in the book →
In the whispering gallery of St Paul's, a watch could be heard ticking across the dome. The book names it the chief of England's whispering places, "where the ticking of a watch may be heard from side to side, and a very easy whisper be sent all round the dome." At Gloucester Cathedral two whisperers heard each other across twenty-five yards of a five-angled gallery. Read it in the book →
"Whig" and "Tory" began as insults borrowed from robbers and sour milk. Toland reckoned the words "but late nicknames," noting that "Tories in Ireland, and Whigs in Scotland, being what we in England call highwaymen." Elsewhere the book glosses Whig as "sour milk," a jab formerly aimed at Scottish presbyterians and rigid covenanters. Read it in the book →