Queens in the Age of Chivalry | HistoryExtra - "In 1347, for the Six Burghers of Calais, Edward had besieged Calais for a year. The citizes had offered to surrender and he said yes as long as you send me Six Burghers with halters around their necks as if they were going to their execution and they went there with keys of the town and he ordered that they be beheaded. And Philippa had just arrived at his camp there. She famously knelt at his feet and begged and pleaded with him. He was in a towering rage and he said I wish you were anywhere else but here, but I cannot deny you. And he let her have their lives. Of course, it could all have been stage managed. It could have been arranged beforehand, but it enabled him to concede without loss of face"
Victorian visions of the future | HistoryExtra - "Everything else is different, but the humans are the same. They're all dressed in late 19th century middle class fashion. So it's literally, it's them in the future. That's what's being portrayed in these sorts of images. And that's how the Victorians I think imagined the future. It's going to be a future that was technologically different and exciting and innovative in all sorts of ways, but it was going to be people like them in it"
World Cup history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "In Amsterdam... there's 2 matches take place. There's a replay that happened quite often, the second match between Uruguay and Argentina. Apparently something like a quarter of the male population of the Netherlands applied for tickets...
There were some conflicts over definitions of amateurism, and the British Football Associations stepped outside FIFA and weren't interested in the Olympic tournaments, because they thought lots of the teams that were competing were kind of professionals, and so FiFA just decided let's just create our own tournament which is independent of the Olympics"
Spiritualism, fairies, and Arthur Conan-Doyle | HistoryExtra - "'Conan Doyle I think is remembered by most people as the creator of literature's most rational figure, which doesn't seem intially to tally with the idea of the supernatural and contacting the dead. How did he reconcile these two ideas on his life?'
'Sherlock Holmes is a rational searcher of evidence, one might say. But to a certain extent, so was Arthur Conan Doyle when it came to spiritualism. He left his Christian faith because he didn't feel that it presented tangible evidence in any way, shape or form. Whereas, to him, over the course of his later life, spiritualism did. You can track tangible evidence in tables that tilt, or slates that are written on by unseen hands and by ectoplasm later in the century. So to him, it was very much a case of there is evidence here, just as Holmes might look for evidence'"
The Crimean War: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "Florence Nightingale ends up inventing the modern nursing profession... but she's not doing that in the Crimea. Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War is a hosptial manager. She understands the principles of what's being done, and she's able to oversee the work on the wards, but much of the work is being done by male orderies as had always been the case: bandsmen, bugelrs, people like that who are non-combatants but are part of the regimental strength. Women of her class would not have dreamt of putting their hands on the dirty, damaged bodies of working class men. That simply was a no-no. So any female nursing that was done was not done by her or her immediate circle, it was done by women of lower status, many of them coming through Holy Orders, so there're quite a lot of Catholic nuns involved. Florence Nightingale's great feat really is to take command of a fairly disparate group of organisations that are sending out nursing people into the theatre and to stop it becoming chaos. She imposes chaos and gets control of the funds and the story and she's able to use that to shape a process which was much more effective than it would've been. So it's her managerial skills that really matter. Her ability to connect with government and to get government support that's absolutely important. She's in the Crimea very briefly and falls very ill while she's there, so she's not front line Crimea, she's in a hospital on the other side of the Bosphorus from Istanbul where the casualty rates are no different from the other hospitals... which led her to have an obsession with sanitation, which feeds into a Victorian obsession with sanitation...
Crimea isn't ethnically Russian until Stalin removes all the Crimean tartars after the Second World War. And it becomes Ukrainian when Khruschev hands it over because his mother is Ukrainian, so there's a way in which the Russians see the world and this war fits the pattern. This is a war in which the bad guys attack Russia. They always forget the bit where the Russians start it, they just remember the sad bit at the end when they lose. The Russians started this war, they attacked first, they crossed the Turkish borer, they seized Turkish territory, they refused to back down when given ample opportunity, and then they complain about losing the war. You can't have it both ways guys. Either you were the innocent victims or you started the war and you lost, and the second one is true. So it does matter to Russia but the Russians don't tell the story of the war in quite the way that we ought to. The problem is we have told as a story in Britain of our own failure and we've completely fogotten the role of everybody else. Who knows what the Russians are doing in the Crimean War? Nobody. We know the Charge of the Light Brigade inside out. Does anybody know who's in charge of the Russians that day? We don't know any of these things. We've forgotten who our allies were, the Turks and the Second Empire. We've forgotten that there was fighting in the Baltic which is usually important. We've forgotten economic war that destroyed the Russian economy. We've forgotten all of that and as a result we have this cardboard cutout version. And the best way of approaching that is through that great 1960s film, the Charge of the Light Brigade which absolutely tells all of those stories which are either not true or not significant. So we've confused the window dressing with strategic power'"
The Irish across the globe | HistoryExtra - "What you think of as the traditional Irish identity, Catholic, Nationalist, Working Class, has been eroded. But what's also taken place has been the rise of a new type of Irishness, which is marketed as an international brand. And most specacularly in the institution of the Irish Pub, which is now pretty much ubiquitous. It can be found in major cities all over the world... Irishness has been redefined as a brand to be marketed. Now why has that happened? A lot I think to do with the English language. If we're looking at the post-war world there is a growing hunger for what people think of as more authentic folk cultures and a reaction against bland consumerism, and if you're looking for that, the perfect place to deliver it. Because it delivers a, a colourful history, it delivers cultural forms which are distinctive but not too distinctive, not too different, it's accessible and of course it's all available through the English language. And the paradox is that the Irishness that is now marketed as an international commodity is massively differently to the Irishness of the actual diaspora. If you were to look at the Irish population scattered throughout the world in 1900, it was socially conservative, mainly Catholic and certainly the bits that were insistent on their Irishness were mainly Catholic. Whereas what's now marketed as Irishness is a sort of genial, convivial, gregarious sort of hedonism. If you had told the founders of the Irish state... that the symbol of the island that they were trying to create was going to be a pub, they would have been horrified. And that is emblematic of the distance between International Irishness and the real world of the diaspora. It's an astonishing process of reinvention'"
British spies in WW2: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "The exploding rat. And this was actually made for SOE, so the Special Operations Executive, and they would actually get a dead rat... and they would hollow, just the carcass, and that would be filled with plastic explosives, and the rats would be put near boilers, and explode and cause more damage. But unfortunately, the Germans found the first shipment of this stuff. And you might think that was a failure, but do you know what it actually did? And I think this is why it was so clever and part of the deception. The Germans thereafter thought we were going to keep sending these dead rats in with explosives and as a result they spent more of the war looking for these dead rats which we had stopped putting together. And so intelligence services deemed that to be quite a success because it was wasting German resources. They weren't fighting us. They were busy looking for dead rats"
Tattoos: a 5,000 year history | HistoryExtra - "I had a tattooist tell me this years ago, you know, stop telling people like aristocrats were tattooed, because I make my living tattooing 18 year olds who think it's edgy"
Royal rivals? Medieval England and France’s tempestuous relationship | HistoryExtra - "Henry gets this letter from France purporting to be from Philip I the King of France, saying my son Louis is with you and by the way could you imprison him and keep him imprisoned for the rest of his life, becauseI don't want him back. Which is a really, a slightly surprising way for a relationship between two dynasties to start. As it turns out, the letter didn't come from the King of France at all. It came from his wife, who was Louis's stepmother, who wanted her own sons to succeed to the throne...
We've got Henry III on the throne in England and Louis IX in France, they got on absolutely brilliantly. They loved each other. They were married to two sisters, which made them brothers in law which actually helped. But there was an awful lot of this, oh well, why don't you come over to Paris and we'll have a lovely family gathering sort of thing...
There were an awful lot of intermarriages between the two dynasties, and I think at one point, I was looking and going, well, alright, Edward I and Philip III are first cousins to each other, because their mothers were sisters, but they're also second cousins to each other because of their fathers both being descended from somebody else and they're also both descended from Henry I and both descended from Louis VI. And you start, I mean, please, I didn't try and draw family tree at the beginning of this book...
There were an awful lot of marriages because if you'd been at war with somebody and then you sealed a peace treaty. It was very very common to seal that peace treaty, to seal the deal by arranging a marriage. And sometimes it might have been the King himself or sometimes it might have been the King's son or the King's daughter. And just marrying each other. And so there were so many intermarriages that even though we count them as two separate dynasties, they were very very interlaced... How a King got on with his in-laws could have a great influence on millions of people lower down the scale because it might have a great influence on whether he went to war or whether there was peace...
They were constantly being asked to be intercessors. They would be told that they needed to marry as part of a peace treaty and then 5 years later, their father and their husband would be at war with each other, and they got stuck in the middle. This couple of hundred years did offer plenty of opportunities for women. It's important to remember, they had to exercise power differently to men. The rules of the game, if you like, were different for them. But that doesn't mean they weren't playing that game. They were playing it differently...
It's a common kind of misconception actually that because women or young girls didn't generally have much say in the choice of whom they would marry, particularly for their first marriage, that they were completely powerless. But they weren't. The job was, you were given your husband almost by fate. You were given your husband the same way you were given rank in life. The job of that woman was to see what she could make of her position after that had happened. So these women were not powerless just because they were being told who they had to marry. They were just going about exerting power in a different way to men...
I could make quite a good case that Eleanor of Aquitaine only became the Queen of England because a teenager was killed by a pig in the streets of Paris. Louis VI, the King of France, had several sons. His oldest son was called Philip, his second son was called Louis. This is a really bad habit of French kings by the way. Every single French King is called either Louis or Philip and I just wish they would stop it. Philip is the oldest. He's been trained and brought up since his earliest youth that he is gonna be the next king, and he frankly is a bit of a lad actually. And second son Louis has been told his whole life that he's gonna be the helpmeet and the support and that probably he's going to enter the Church. Now when Philip was 16, he was riding his horse through the streets of Paris with some of his friends when a pig suddenly shot out of an alleyway in front of him, frightened his horse, his horse threw him and then fell on top of him, and he was crushed and he died of his injuries the same day, which is just horrific and tragic and shocking. But in terms of the succession to the French throne, it was not as much of a disaster as the White Ship had been in England because Louis VI had several other sons. So what happens is his second son Louis gets told, right, now you're the heir to the throne now, you're gonna be the King. Now, 5 years later, Louis, who then about 17, gets sent south to marry Eleanor of Aquitaine. Right, now I think we're fairly familiar with what happened next. He was married to Elanor of Aquitaine for some well. They had 2 daughters, he divorced her, or technically it was annulled, but he divorced her. She went on to marry Henry II of England, became Queen of England. My hypothesis here is that if Philip had not been killed by that pig, one of two things would've happened. Either Eleanor would still have married Louis, who would've been a second son, because then Louis would be the Duke of Aquitaine and even though they didn't have any sons, he would not have been allowed to divorce her, because it would've meant the French crown would have lost Aquitaine, so she would've stayed Duchess of Aquitaine, never married Henry II. If Philip had not been killed, it's possible that Eleanor might have married Philip, the eldest son and as we know, the problems that Louis and Eleanor had in conceiving children and in bearing sons were not Eleanor's problem. Because we know that because she went on to have loads of children with her second husband. And Philip, being the sort of lad that he was, rather than a shy boy brought up to the Church, possibly wouldn't have so much squeamishness about marital relations as Louis did and he and Eleanor might have had a load of children.'"
The Holocaust: a 21st-century view | HistoryExtra - "'As we lose the last direct eyewitnesses to the Holocaust we will lose and gain at the same time. As Richard said there is an enormous existing collection of firsthand survivor and oral history and memoir material and some of it um, you know, it's been it's been recorded over a very long period of time, it changes over time in historical context as the world around survivors changes. We can dip back into that now taking that bird's eye view, taking a critical view that is sometimes hard when you've got the living person in front of you, digging around in the past to see what could be said in 1980 that could not be said in 2022 and vice versa and putting that all together I think actually in some ways might serve to give us a richer picture certainly both of the individual life and of the collective experience'...
'Children who survived the Holocaust who ended up spending the rest of their childhoods in an orphanage often felt they had had a better experience than children returned to a surviving parent. Now actually it's not that hard to understand why that would be the case. The parents who survived the Holocaust, we see them in 1945 46 47, destitute, often homeless, without any sort of social network to to help them get back on their feet, traumatized. Not in a very good position to be a good parent and we can fully understand then why they might have felt that their children would be better off in an orphanage and indeed we see many many children in orphanages in that period who had a surviving parent who didn't feel capable of looking after them. But this is challenging to accept because we in our 21st century position have a certain perspective on the family'"
So much for the primacy of personal experience
Who were the Celts? | HistoryExtra - "'People complained... I hadn't dealt with the Celts. I then investigated the matter further, being half-Celt myself, although that word is a word I object to very strongly, and realised the Celts never existed, they don't exist as a group, it is a nonsense, it's a mythical legend, not a historical reality... it's actually a damaging concept to leave in general circulation... since the 1960s, people have challenged it... there was no such people, there was no such land, there was no such language really. There was a Celtic series of languages. There was nothing that united the Celts at all... it's now politically highly charged in this country, what are the Celts or what were the Celts and what was their relatonship with the Anglo-Saxons, who also never existed...
there were no Celts, there was no Saxon invasion. All these things are now quite common in specialist academic circles. I still find the British Museum holding exhibitons of The Celts. The BBC runs series on The Celts. They come up all the time as the Celtic Fringe. They infuse themselves into British politics. So the Celtic politics is distinct from the Saxon politics... there's never anything in common between the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh. Let's face it... there's never been anything in common between the Scots the Irish and the Welsh. Let's face it they've never banded together, they've never been one nation, they've never formed one football team, they don't speak one language. What is it they got in common? The word Celtic, and it doesn't exist...
[Neither did the Anglo-Saxons.] It is now becoming apparent that and there's this great conundrum in British history: what did the English speak when the Romans landed? Did they all speak Celtic? Britonic Celtic which is a version of Welsh? The general view, not the general view but a widespread view now is either that we simply don't know or that they probably spoke an early form of Germanic which became English and and the theory that they were invaded and massacred in the fifth century by invading Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, people from from Central Europe is just not the case and that's now been comprehensively debunked… I'm not the only person to say that I have to say...
The theory that they all spoke Celtic and then they all in a matter of 100 years spoke a completely different language, no trace of which has, there’s very little Celtic in English. It's it's almost unknown to find a Celtic word cropping up in English now… there must have been a preceding language on the east coast of England… the normal surviving linguistic marker is geographical. Places, mountains, rivers, lands and so on, they're very few Celtic geographic markers down east side of Britain... it's highly possible that the east side of Britain spoke a Germanic language way back in history... the Celtic languages and they're plural they're not singular uh it's like romance I mean there's not a romance language. It's not even a Germanic language...
No one has ever said I am a Celt. I ask I ask I ask Welsh people and Irish people and Scottish people, say do you say you're a Celt? There's always a silence… the Celts never themselves call themselves one people. They never did. They never have. They are the creation of academics, of of scholars, of antiquarians, of Druids and goodness knows who since the 19th century'"
Russia’s national past: unpicking history from propaganda | HistoryExtra - "The idea of of the of the the Tsar being effectively or the ruler being effectively not just a sacred figure in the Byzantine sentence so the representative of God on Earth but also more than that a human God whose cult venerates his power as something sacralized that's a very strong tradition in Russia. Then the other element of of of this mythology which has come into play uh um throughout Russian history I think would be the idea of Russia a rational autocracy is patrimonial in nature. So in other words the Tsar doesn't just rule over a state, he is the literal owner of Russia. Indeed Nicholas back in the last saw in the National census, the first Russian census of 1897 registered himself as literally the owner of Russia… Hideous palace that he's built at vast expense, um this isn't his own own palace but it's his insofar as he is equated with Russia and can use whatever Russian resources he likes just like the patrimonial ruler of medieval times. So the sacralization of power, this patrimonial nature of power, these are are just two of the of the many sort of ideas and indeed institutions of Russian history I've tried to trace through the book and they're they're still very much alive today"
The end of Roman Britain | 3. a militarised state? | History Extra podcast on Acast - "‘We're so used to thinking of Britain as one unit or maybe we think of it as the United Kingdom, in the combination of Scotland and Wales Northern Ireland and England. Um, but for Roman Britain it's it's not actually a province anymore in the Roman government and the structure of Roman government. It's a diocese um you know it's it's kind of one entity but at the next level up from province there's actually four and maybe even five provinces that make up Roman Britain. And each province has its own Governor, um has its own Governor's offices, its own tax collectors, you know, um, its own separate government and so you you can't really think of Roman Britain as one unit. It's it's at least four different political units and on top that you then have this really interesting situation where the late Roman Empire has separated it's civilian or Civic offices of Governors for example or or town counselors, from its military uh branch. You know, from the generals in the Army. And if you embark on a military career path you will not fulfill a civilian governmental career path and vice versa. If you're in the civil government then you won't be part of the army and it's it's actually meant to be a separation of powers in that sense"
The CIA: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "The one that really stands out in my view if you're looking for strangeness is the plot to make his beard fall out on the premise that in Latin America machismo counts for a great deal and strongly associated with machismo especially in those days was having a large bushy beard and if Castro's beard were to fall out then he would lose his appeal, the Cuban people would turn against him and democracy would be well, not restored because Cuba never was a democracy but America would have its way in Cuba... The CIA had a um an organization called the Health Alteration Bureau. And they were developing various um potions. And one of them was a thallium concoction which to be, was to be placed in the sandals of Fido Castro, making its way into his bloodstream and making his hair fall out. Well, like many of the plots associated with either killing Castro or altering his health it failed. But I think it gets top marks for strangeness."
Roman women: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'In marriage, Roman women, for the period of the Roman empire, women actually had more power in many ways than women in England or the US did in the 19th century. Women, even though they couldn't vote, they had property, they had legal independence from their husbands. They weren't just subsumed into the household of their husbands in the way that you see in 19th century novels. So in that sense there is an independence that Roman women of property had in controlling their property'... ‘I think our stereotype of Roman women focuses on the idea that they should be pure and chaste, that they should cultivate modesty and a sense of untouchability uh particularly uh sort of sexual purity for example and that certainly was a crucial ideal in the Roman world but I think if you were going to pick one value it would be the value of Honor understood not only in the sense of of modesty and Purity but also in the sense of of strength and strength of character so in that sense I think we aren't looking at a society that asked women to be wallflowers. The critical thing that is different between ancient Rome and a modern society is almost certainly the centrality of bearing children in Roman ideas and ideals and that is something that was valued very highly. It was seen as literally the the sort of starting point of the whole system, because Rome was a society that was struggling to grow demographically'"
Berlin’s turbulent 20th century | HistoryExtra - "‘The wall itself wasn't always completely unchanging there's kind of fascinatings of architectural quirk about it. They were continually kind of rebuilding it in various different styles with different sorts of improved concrete or different ways of making it incredibly difficult for people to scramble over the top. And there’s a brilliant account from a man who was a guard on the East Berlin side, basically to ensure that no one got across the death strip. It was a famous you know the famous image is of uh this terrible zone in between walls where people tried to get across and they're shot and that it's it's it's it's basically a zone of death. There was one East German guard who watched the the rebuilding of the wall in the 1970s that they they were giving it a new architectural style which meant that not only could people not get across but people couldn’t ram it with cars or sort of or go at it with heavy vehicles and that. And he looked at it and he looked at it and suddenly he realized, his world turned upside down. He realized that that this wall wasn't keeping the rapacious Americans out. This was keeping him in. And the reason he knew this was because he knew that on the other side or the western side on the free side, people could walk up to the wall and touch it but he knew it on his side if anyone did that uh there would be in terrible danger and suddenly he, the the way he looked at the wall completely flipped on its head'"
The Bank of England: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘To understand why the bank of England is feminized though we have to go back a little bit. So Britannia is the symbol of the Bank of England and has been the symbol of the Bank of England uh right from the start. And she ties in nicely with other feminized symbols of the financial system uh in the late 17th and early 18th century. So we have Lady Credit who represents credit. And she's Lady Credit because credit is fickle. Um you know when there are times when she'll sort of dance around you and she'll flirt with you and she will, you know, she will be your your friend. And and there were times when she will she will cast you away. The South Sea Company was also feminized particularly in the wake of the South Sea Bubble and she was feminized in quite problematic ways. So she was characterized as a whore. Um you know as as a fallen woman after the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. She’d behaved badly. She had deliberately sold her virtue for money. The Bank of England's Britannia tends to avoid all of those connotations, the Bank of England's Britannia kind of stays pure throughout the 18th century and becomes very much embedded in its image.’"
Clash of cultures: how interpreters bridged the gap between Britain and China | HistoryExtra - "‘These messages could be warped if that's the right way of putting it?’...
‘Quite often people have thought about it in terms of mistakes but I think that's probably not not quite right I think. The more I think about it and the more you understand it you see that basically you always you've always got to make choices. So for example the Chinese had the word for foreigners and this is the word yi. And this term yi is a term which has been translated subsequently as Barbarian. And when the British found they were being described as Barbarian, they were furious. However that word yi is used up in North China for the Mongols who are very much, and the Mongols are part of the Qing Empire, they're one of its major peoples, their culture is respected, it's widely used. And I think to translate this word yi as Barbarian is to try and fit a Roman, a set of ideas from the Roman Empire onto China that just don't quite fit and there's a similar issue with tribute. So the Chinese term gong um which means a gift that is given to someone, usually someone above you, and that got translated into English um at the time of the Opium Wars as tribute. And the British said they were refused to pay tribute to the um Chinese emperor. However that word does also just mean a gift. And although it has a slight directional tone to it, that it's generally a gift upwards, uh it's not always a gift upwards. It can sometimes be a presentation by someone downwards… When Li Zhibiao translated, because he was Chinese and he was, what he wanted was a good outcome for the negotiations, he used those relatively positive. So he was translating actually into Latin or Italian… later on as the British Empire becomes very active in China, when people become quite aggressive, they don't want to use those terms. They use these very strong terms which are very angering to, if they want to to motivate the British to engage in warfare they will use these much stronger terms to translate'...
‘If you were immersed in two cultures how you were never entirely trusted by both’...
‘So this is something that people in translation studies talk a lot about. The the translator is a traitor. In order to to really know a language well enough to interpret you have to be very deeply immersed and you have to have friends’"
The Knights Templar: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'Quite a few people during the trial of the Templars indicated that they had a relative in the order already who encouraged them to join. And that probably helps you get past the initial getting in level because they will speak up for you and say I know my nephew, he's a very good person. The regulation that says don't think you're necessarily going to get sent to Jerusalem, you could get sent anywhere suggests that some people actually wanted to travel and see the holy places. There do seem to be a lot of pious brothers in the order. They joined, they joined to serve God and if you can serve god with your sword you can still be a knight but you can still serve God. You don't have to go into a monastery and pray. This is all to the good. And so yes you can go off and become God's knight. And you might be able to come home sometime and impress your family. Other reasons to join might be because one of your friends is joining and you're joining with them and of course if your employer is joining you probably be very very well fired you have to join, you're not given any choice of the matter… if you had a religious vocation, you wanted to serve God in any order and Templars happen to be your closest order, you might just go and knock on the door and say can I join you here and if you were going to stay wherever you were you might decide that actually it didn't matter you weren't going to go to Jerusalem because you just have the same religious life there as you would have in any other order. The Templars didn't take members from the Crusader States, generally there are a few people who join the order who were as it were from their locality in the Kingdom of Jerusalem but generally they're recruiting from the West. Maybe that some people joined because it was a way for to get social status because if you had nothing, if you came from a very poor family and you joined a military order they will provide everything you needed. So the bishop of Acre was complaining… some people who'd never had a pillow in real life, in normal life joined the Templars and now they expect to have a pillow all the time and one Brother whose pillow was taken away from him because a pillowcase was being washed spent the whole night complaining and kept everyone else awake'"
Surgical history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "One of the most famous blood transfusions in 1667 was between a lamb and a madman, and the idea was that you would transfuse blood, but not to replace lost blood, rather to transplant what was inside of the blood into the person. So a lamb is known for being calm and pure and full of you know, the purity of God, Christ, all of that sort of symbolism and it was thought, or certain transfusion pioneers thought that you can transfuse a lamb's blood into a madman and make the madman automatically calmer, which you'd think would be a hindrance because it's quite dangerous to transfuse animal blood into humans but it looked liked it was helping. Because you can take a little bit of blood that's not compatible with your body and live. And what would happen is you'd get very very tired, you'd have a fit, a massive fever, but it'd look like you weren't mad anymore. So it looked like it helps but it actually hinders because that ends up wearing off and you need a topup and you end up dying eventually. But it's relative what help and hindrance mean historically...
Back then, people all over the world, they thought that toothache was down to a little worm called a toothworm, and when I say all over the world, I mean all over the world. So there are references to this little worm in Madagascar, in Ancient Egypt, in Borneo, in Babylonia, in Medieval Germany and Early Modern France, there're these little lockets you can find every now and then with depictions of these worms from Early Modern France. The Cherokee, even they have a toothworm. And all kinds of folk remedies promised to get rid of them. So my favourite is that you have to kiss a donkey... Another one is that you had to spit salt on a fresh grave"
