Fact Book

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.

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.

12826. History Facts
In the 1700s, people wore huge hairstyles made of a mixture of real hair and horse hair or other fibres. As they rarely cleaned them – keeping them in place for months on end – they carried sticks to knock vermin out of their hair-does.

12827. History Facts
Sailors in the olden days often had a single gold tooth, which could be pulled out and used to pay for their funeral if they died away from home.

12828. History Facts
The French actress Sarah Bernhardt took a coffin with her on all her travels. She learned her lines while lying in the coffin and even entertained her lovers in it.

12829. History Facts
An Egyptian mummy can have more than 20 layers of bandages, with glue between the layers. Every finger and toe was wrapped separately. It took 15 days to wrap a royal mummy.

12830. History Facts
Ancient Romans made hair dye from pigeon faeces.

12831. History Facts
Uruguay's rugby team was stranded in the Andes in South America after a plane crash in 1979. It took seventy days for them to be rescued, and they had to eat the other passengers who had died in the crash.

12832. History Facts
An Ancient Egyptian who was feeling a bit unwell might eat a mixture of mashed mouse and faeces. Mmmmmmm, bound to make you feel better!

12833. History Facts
In 1846, eighty-seven pioneers crossing the mountains of Nevada, USA, became trapped in bad weather. By the end of the winter, forty of them had been eaten by the others.

12834. History Facts
In the 1700s, European women had their gums pierced so that they could fit hooks to hold their false teeth in place.

12835. History Facts
King Pepi II of Egypt had himself surrounded by naked slaves smeared with honey so that any biting flies would be attracted to them and not bite him.

12836. History Facts
In the 1800s, flea circuses were popular – the fleas were glued into costumes and stuck to wires or each other to look as though they were performing tricks.

12837. History Facts
Ivan the Terrible blinded the two architects who designed his new church of Saint Basil's so that they could never make anything more beautiful.

12838. History Facts
The Russian ruler Peter the Great had his wife's lover decapitated and insisted that she keep his head in a jar of alcohol beside her bed as a reminder of her crime.

12839. History Facts
Mongolian leader Tamerlane played polo using the skulls of enemies killed in battle.

12840. History Facts
In the Middle Ages, people made washing powder from wood ash and urine.

12841. History Facts
In China in the 1500s, a common method of committing suicide was by eating a pound of salt.

12842. History Facts
The word ‘thug' comes from ‘Thuggees', who were an Indian cult – sometimes described as the world's first mafia – who used to trick and murder people as human sacrifices to their goddess Kali.

12843. History Facts
In the 1600s and later, Egyptian mummies were ground up to use in medicines around Europe.

12844. History Facts
Vlad the Impaler, ruler of Transylvania, had over 20,000 enemies impaled on spikes between 1456 and 1476.

12845. History Facts
British king James I's tongue was too large for his mouth so he slobbered all the time and was a very messy eater.

12846. History Facts
Charles I was executed by beheading, but had his head sewn back on so that his family could pay their respects to his body. His doctor stole a bone from his neck and had it made into a salt cellar.

12847. History Facts
A Bohemian army general was so devoted to his country that when he died he asked for his skin to be removed and made into a drum that could be beaten in defiance of Bohemia's enemies. It was used nearly 200 years later at the start of the Thirty Years War in 1618.

12848. History Facts
In the 1700s, fashionable European women commonly shaved off their real eyebrows and stuck on false ones made from mouse fur.

12849. History Facts
London prisoners condemned to death used to go to chapel on the Sunday before their execution where they had to sit around a coffin while the priest told them how sinful they were.

12850. History Facts
In times of famine, Stone Age tribes would eat old women before dogs – they thought them less useful.

12851. History Facts
The body tag from the corpse of Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President John F. Kennedy, was sold for £3,600 at an auction.

12852. History Facts
James, Duke of Monmouth, was beheaded in 1685 but when it was discovered that there was no official portrait of him, his head was stitched back on and he posed for his portrait at last.

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