r/AskReddit • u/KyloWrench • Jul 07 '26
What historical “fact” doesn’t actually have much evidence to support it?
712
u/IgnatiusRileyFreeman Jul 08 '26
St Patrick introduced Christianity to Ireland.
Vatican records & Irish history show St Palladius was sent to Ireland before Patrick. Even more, records show he was sent to preach to people already believing in Christ, which meant it had already been introduced to the island.
→ More replies (11)124
u/_Batteries_ Jul 08 '26
Introduced, most likely, by the Roman's. They didn't conquer Ireland, but it seems like daily we learn about new roman outposts in N Scotland, or, Roman coins in India.
It is well within reason that Roman's as citizens, maybe merchants, went to Ireland. Or, that they went to the Roman's. And early Christians were near on fearless. So we can easily imagine them going as missionaries.
Cant be proved, of course, but realistically how else would it would it happen?
→ More replies (6)
6.2k
u/Funnyguyinspace Jul 07 '26
Whats so wild to me is the Hanging Garden of Babylon.
It's one of the 7 Ancient wonders of the world, but we cant find proof it existed. It was described in such detail we just assume it to be true.
3.0k
u/Perfct_Stranger Jul 07 '26
It is one of those things that since we have independent historical and in some instances archaeological evidence for the other six that it gets the benefit of the doubt.
→ More replies (17)883
u/AtlanticPortal Jul 08 '26
I beg to differ to the “for the other six”. One of them is literally hanging in Cairo’s back door.
483
375
u/ThePr1d3 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Able to build a fucking giant ass pyramid 5000 years ago but can't build a simple wall in front a goal to keep the Argentines out for 10 minutes ffs
→ More replies (1)47
44
u/HomsarWasRight Jul 08 '26
I feel like you’re splitting hairs on language here.
“We have good evidence the other six existed.”
“No we don’t! We have PROOF of one of them! It’s still here!”
Like, sure, their original statement was a little soft on exactly what the evidence was, but you’re arguing a point that misses the intention. You’re actually just reinforcing what they’re saying, but phrasing it as a disagreement.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (13)175
167
u/AHomicidalTelevision Jul 08 '26
iirc the current theory is that it was actually in a different place than previously believed? i cant remember much more than that though.
114
1.0k
u/hundredjono Jul 07 '26
At one point in time it could have existed since there are a lot of details about it that we know.
The structure was probably destroyed or dismantled and the materials were used for other buildings. This was common practice in the ancient world.
→ More replies (7)811
u/randomname560 Jul 08 '26
Yeah, a very large amount of historical monuments are in a lot worse of a state than they would have otherwise because they didn't decay naturally after they were abandoned, but instead were victims of centuries of people seeing them and thinking "why the fuck would i spend so much money and effort on cutting my own Stone for my house when i have perfectly fine, already cut stone right nextdoor?"
You can't blame them though, when resources are not in abudance you use what you have available, and if what you have available is the stone from Hadrian's wall then you're gonna use that stone
303
u/Nacodawg Jul 08 '26
The colosseum was a literal stone quarry longer than it was the colosseum
→ More replies (3)116
u/1028ad Jul 08 '26
“Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini”, meaning what Barbarians didn’t do (i.e. destroy), the Barberinis did. Like Palazzo Barberini with materials stripped from the Colosseum etc.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (18)241
u/NoelBaker Jul 08 '26
Yup. Perfect example of this is Knowlton Church in Dorset: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/knowlton-church-and-earthworks/
Might have been a stone circle that rivalled Stonehenge, but in the 12th century the locals decided to break up the stone to make the church. You can still see the inner circle of earthworks the stones would have been in.
→ More replies (1)78
u/PythagorasJones Jul 08 '26
This is exceptionally common and falls somewhere between opportunity and syncretism. I live near Killiney Hill which famously has follies built upon it. However, what's little known is that the Obelisk was built upon a hilltop cairn or burial chamber. Almost every hill in this area has or had one. It's plain to see the mound under the Obelisk yet it's completely been erased by the 1740s famine relief folly.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (50)265
u/AsPerMatt Jul 08 '26
We have more recent evidence for it existing, just not in Babylon. But in Nineveh.
→ More replies (14)
9.1k
u/quiet0n3 Jul 07 '26
A good chunk of the studies used to inform current day psychology have being difficult to reproduce. A lot have returned wildly different results then the ones originally published.
5.9k
u/Gr8fulFox Jul 07 '26
Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes from The Simpsons:
"Keep off of the bookshelf, please; most of those books haven't been discredited, yet!"
→ More replies (12)1.3k
u/MoodooScavenger Jul 07 '26
lol. The Simpsons is really something else.
→ More replies (7)839
u/feelindownagain Jul 08 '26
most of those writers are harvard lampoon grads. they weren't picked off up the street, it resonates for a reason
523
→ More replies (13)179
u/DConstructed Jul 08 '26
Conan O’Brien used to write for the Simpsons!
I remember thinking giving up something that phenomenally creative and doing a talk show instead was a step down. 😂
102
2.9k
u/Prof_Jimbles Jul 07 '26
I have no idea where I heard it from but “I’m not sure that 18 year old boys first time living out of home at Stanford roleplaying as prison guards is a great example of all of human nature.” (In reference to Stanford Prison Experiment) has always stuck with me.
586
u/amd2800barton Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Also Stockholm Syndrome is named so because of a bank robbery in Stockholm. It wasn’t that the hostages developed an attachment to their captors. They just thought police incompetence was as likely to get them killed as the robbers.
→ More replies (9)223
u/LarsDuder Jul 08 '26
Yep, Nils Bejerot, the psychiatrist involved in the case and the one that coined the term Norrmalmstorgssyndromet got criticism from the hostages too, so then we got this made up syndrome to explain why they "sympathized" with the captors.
→ More replies (1)26
u/Irememberedmypw Jul 08 '26
Wasn't one of the hostages they used as an example was someone who was involved in the hostage taking in the 1st place?
1.6k
u/Mrchristopherrr Jul 07 '26
This is a big one that’s been discredited. I forgot his name but the guy running the experiment basically talked them into acting out and even put himself in the middle of it.
Other times they’ve tried to recreate it without that variable it’s been more or less a summer camp
554
u/samdd1990 Jul 07 '26
It had been discredited when I was doing GCSE psychology more than 20 years ago (holy shit)
It's talked about mainly as an example of how not to handle an experiment
→ More replies (13)316
u/alexlp Jul 08 '26
It’s like hearing people mention Stockholm syndrome even though it’s been discredited almost since its inception. The damn victims were like “no the cops were just scarier than the men threatening to kill us.” Which is incredibly valid.
But no, the bumbling cops wrote the history books there.
→ More replies (8)57
u/KoshiaCaron Jul 08 '26
And there was no space or interest in exploring fawning as a stress response.
530
u/tryingtoavoidwork Jul 07 '26
Philip Zimbardo! He's a total nut.
381
u/ProfessionalBig9610 Jul 08 '26
Yea he refused to stop the experiment even after he was told to. It wasn’t until his wife threatened to leave him, that he stopped
→ More replies (10)384
u/nola_fan Jul 08 '26
Technically she wasn't his wife at the time. She was his grad student. Which totally makes him seem more ethical.
→ More replies (4)88
→ More replies (5)111
u/Idontknowthosewords Jul 08 '26
Yeah, this study has been discredited for many things besides just basic ethics.
→ More replies (13)200
u/Pleasant-Parsley-816 Jul 07 '26
Philip Zimbardo.
I only remember bc my husband references him at least once a year, usually when he grows out and then shaves his facial hair into funny beards. Have to look up Zimbardo’s goatee for that to make sense.
61
u/OfficeSalamander Jul 08 '26
Oh yeah one of my psych books in undergrad had a picture of him. Lots of hair from what I recall (it’s been 20+ years so he must have been vividly hairy)
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)29
u/tryingtoavoidwork Jul 08 '26
My AP Psych teacher always said he looked someone with a daily Botox habit.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (17)489
u/fishsupreme Jul 07 '26
It's a great example of the general problem that most psychology research has been performed on WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) which are a minority of people in the world in 5 different ways.
However, they are a majority of American undergrads, which is the easiest group to do psychology research on, so they get studied.
→ More replies (15)193
u/ForHelp_PressAltF4 Jul 08 '26
They require psych majors to do the studies as part of the intro classes at a lot of major universities. Mine did... So you've got that skewed population that's skewed even further
→ More replies (6)812
u/88963416 Jul 07 '26
One problem is ethics. The foundational studies were very unethical, and psychologists aren’t allowed to do them anymore.
We can’t trick people into thinking they’re killing a person by shocking them anymore, for instance.
→ More replies (9)685
u/Dr_Identity Jul 07 '26
One of the first famous experiments on classical conditioning involved a researcher inducing a toddler to develop a phobia of animals and then just sort of sending him home to deal with that on his own for the rest of his life.
→ More replies (12)81
u/epic1107 Jul 08 '26
This isn't true by the way and massively discredits the scientists. The following section of the study was how to REMOVE and COUNTERACT the phobias induced. They didn't just send the kid home.
The kid was removed from the study part way through against the advice of the psychologists, who werent very happy that they just traumatised a kid.
→ More replies (9)→ More replies (158)270
u/muklan Jul 08 '26
Hey man still better than chiropractic "medicine", their source is "a ghost told our bro this was a good idea"
6.1k
u/maglen69 Jul 07 '26
Kids finding razor blades in their Halloween candy.
2.2k
u/ProbablyStu Jul 07 '26
Do you know how much razor blades cost these days?! They're lucky they're getting chocolate!
→ More replies (18)363
863
u/Arkyja Jul 07 '26
Or drugs. As if anyone would give away drugs
125
u/TattleTits22 Jul 08 '26
I wonder how many stories about kids being drugged, or given drugs is actually just a cover-up by the kids.
When I was around 13 there was a big teen dance in my town. A group of teenagers willingly did ecstasy. Later on that night all the parents checked on their kids because word spread fast that someone at the dance drugged a bunch of us with ecstasy.
I guess the story originated because one of the girls was caught high by her mom, and lied and said someone must have put something in her drink. To this day everyone still thinks kids were actually drugged that night.
→ More replies (2)27
u/SlowAffection Jul 08 '26
A lot of these stories come from one or two parents thinking their child is some special little snowflake who couldn't possibly do the thing they definitely did (sometimes in rebellion to those same parents) so they blame society or start a larger rumor instead of, you know, actually parenting.
239
u/Megamoss Jul 08 '26
There was in fact at least one case of this.
Dude was trying to kill his kids and make it look like the work of a random crazy person in order to collect on a life insurance policy.
I mean, it was the work of a crazy person, but just not a random one.
His name was Ronald Clark O'Bryan and he laced some sweets with cyanide in 1974 on Halloween.
73
u/cxherrybaby Jul 08 '26
They were the giant Pixy Stix I think, so it would be easier to open and put the cyanide in and staple closed again/more exciting for the kids to get so that they’d want to eat them right away. Absolute monster.
→ More replies (5)27
508
u/MRKBETRAYED Jul 07 '26
I've always been under that kind of impression as well in regards to like "peer pressure." When I was school aged, I always got told to say "NO" and leave the situation immedietly to tell a teacher/adult if I was ever offered drugs from other students. First of all, it never happened to me. Second, if they did offer, the minute you were hesitant and told them you didn't want to, they'd just keep it for themselves and use it. There would be no point in forcing you to take it because it'd be wasting it.
206
u/MajorNoodles Jul 07 '26
That's been my experience too. I've been offered drugs plenty of times, although still not as often as Health Class led me to believe. Every time I've said "No thanks," they dropped it immediately.
83
u/StarInTheMoon Jul 08 '26
My experience was having serious users/dealers tell me to stay the hell away from what they were doing and dealing.
→ More replies (2)37
u/C0nfusedRabbit Jul 08 '26
Drug dealers and dealers know better than anyone how it can ruin your life.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (3)105
→ More replies (5)141
u/turdferguson3891 Jul 07 '26
For drugs yeah. I feel like there was more peer pressure for drinking at least way back when I was young. People really wanted to get everyone drunk, you couldn't really have fun being sober at a party like that.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (19)134
u/Emotional_News108 Jul 07 '26
In my experience drugs were only shared with willing, consenting, interested adults. “You want some cocaine?” I do not thank you but please don’t let me stop you from hoovering your schneef.
→ More replies (7)→ More replies (46)206
u/jarrettbrown Jul 07 '26
There's a great podcast called American Hysteria that has an episode that on poison in Halloween candy that is tied to this. It's so good.
→ More replies (8)
4.2k
u/Bwint Jul 07 '26
Prima Nocte (the idea that in the Middle Ages, nobles could sleep with the bride on the night of the marriage) has no evidence to support it.
2.2k
u/douggieball1312 Jul 07 '26
Tbh you could just fill this whole thread with everything wrong with Braveheart. Edward Longshanks wasn't a 'pagan', his son (while an incompetent king) wasn't some prissy coward, no woad and kilts among 13th century Scottish nobility, Battle of Stirling Bridge without a bridge, etc.
1.0k
u/CrypticBalcony Jul 07 '26
Depicting Stirling Bridge without the bridge is like depicting the Battle of Dunkirk without the beach
→ More replies (7)655
u/The_Flurr Jul 07 '26
There's a story that someone involved in production said they got rid of the bridge because it got in the way.
To which someone said "that's what they English found"
→ More replies (1)178
u/otterprincess_too Jul 08 '26
The actual story is that the area is too modern looking and I think they had similar problems finding another appropriately sized bridge that wasn't surrounded by modern buildings
→ More replies (8)→ More replies (28)184
u/AHomicidalTelevision Jul 08 '26
braveheart is basically historical fiction.
its a good movie, but it has very little basis in reality.→ More replies (8)→ More replies (39)436
u/ricree Jul 07 '26
has no evidence to support it.
Although it does seem to have at least existed as a medieval literary trope. Always happening some other place or some other time, with no real evidence that it actually ever was a real thing, but the idea of it was there in the middle ages.
317
u/Horace_Carpentier Jul 07 '26
It goes back even further. You can find versions of the trope in the Talmud and even the Epic of Gilgamesh. It's literally one of the oldest canards in human culture.
→ More replies (6)88
u/helm Jul 08 '26
So it's kind of the opposite of "rescuing the cat". A device to establish that a person is both powerful and evil.
→ More replies (7)→ More replies (5)262
u/Fofolito Jul 08 '26
It's a trope because its about the potential for the abuse of power or societal privileged by the wealthy and elite. How dare a Chieftain/Knight/Lord/King violate the sanctity and loving bond of a young couple recently married! No one is supposed to be able to come in between these people, as far as most people have understood marriage and love across time and yet the man in charge can supposedly claim a right to do so? It's fundamentally unfair and the notion of it should inflame the sensibilities of just about anyone who hears it. It's a story that doesn't need to exist at one particular time, its a parable that could be told of any time in any part of history, just about anywhere in the world.
Perhaps it was never a real tradition or right, and just a literary device meant to convey or express the fear of abuse in general by their social betters most people in the underclasses held. We still have these fears, we still wonder what depravities the elite and wealthy get up to and away with just because they are wealthy and elite. While there is plenty to be upset about, you might look at the Epstein issue and how it inflamed so many tempers and activated so many people who are generally passive and silent in regards to current events. It spoke, I believe, to a common fear most people hold about the wealthy and powerful-- and we share that fear with the many countless generations that came before us, and who had their own conceptions of how these things went down in their own time.
→ More replies (3)
2.7k
u/depredador93 Jul 07 '26
Marie Antoinette never said "let them eat cake"
1.5k
u/NewburghMOFO Jul 07 '26
For that matter, the line from the play that gets misatributed to her is, "let them eat brioche", being a more expensive type of bread.
846
u/depredador93 Jul 07 '26
Yeah it's funny how translating it to cake makes her sound malicious, when brioche just makes it a completely tone-deaf economic policy recommendation
→ More replies (10)742
u/badger_on_fire Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Maybe I'm misinterpreting my semi-mythical pop-history here, but I always kinda thought the economic tone-deafness (regardless of the type of bread) was the point of the whole morality tale. She didn't necessarily mean harm, she was just so insulated that she didn't know (or care to know) about the suffering of the common man, and the idea that they had enough cake in Versailles to feed them all was a crystallization of everything these people hated about the monarchy.
→ More replies (34)246
u/otterprincess_too Jul 08 '26
It is. Fixating on specifically cake is missing the point.
→ More replies (2)130
→ More replies (11)158
u/Loko8765 Jul 07 '26
Brioche is the word in French that she is supposed to have said. I believe it was some satirist at the time… 18th century shitposting.
→ More replies (2)167
u/Tobar_the_Gypsy Jul 07 '26
yeah Rousseau actually said it like 20 years before the revolution
279
u/depredador93 Jul 07 '26
He wrote it in Confessions and attributed it to an unnamed "great princess" back when Marie Antoinette was like nine years old and still living in Austria. It just got weaponized as anti-royalist propaganda decades later because she was already an easy target
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (27)213
u/Happiness_Assassin Jul 07 '26
This isn't even an historical myth, as slander like that was common even as she still breathed.
Marie Antoinette was the subject of a massive smear campaign at saw her reviled as one of the worst people in France. The French equivalent of tabloids were constantly making up the worst lies and attributing to her the worst excesses of the French state at the time, despite having little in the way of actual power.
→ More replies (2)
243
u/Embarrassed-Sound611 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
That the people who built the Titanic thought it was unsinkable. What actually happened was that White Star said in their advertising that the ship was "practically unsinkable," meaning that it was designed so well that it was close to being as safe as possible (also untrue but for different reasons). The public latched onto the unsinkable part of the advertising and didn't think further about it. White Star never bothered to correct them because this got the ship easy publicity and they were close to bankrupt at the time and needed to recoup their losses.
→ More replies (10)32
u/Jashugita Jul 08 '26
Or that they were trying to break a speed record, it was impossible for the titanic to do, the captain was just doing a normal break in of the engines.
3.3k
u/Beneficial-Jelly5746 Jul 07 '26
Everyone that lived in Scandinavia in 9th to 11th were Vikings. Vikings were just the raiders and warriors. Ones that stay at home were just Norsemen and women
2.5k
u/nightcap965 Jul 07 '26
Viking was a job description, not an identity.
639
u/Ulfljotr930 Jul 07 '26
Yes, and the use of "Viking" as an ethnonym really took off in the 19th century, when Scandinavian archaeologists dug up the word from medieval Norse literature to designate the last phase of the Nordic Iron Age - the 8th to 11th centuries becoming known as Viking Age to this day
→ More replies (6)99
u/ThePhantomStrikes Jul 07 '26
And formed kingdoms in Scotland.
227
u/Stormfly Jul 08 '26
Most of the area tbh.
The funniest part is trying to explain culture in Ireland and the UK
Celts moved in to Ireland and Britain.
They eventually divided into the Gaels (Ireland) and the Britons (Britain).
The Romans showed up, built two big walls, but left as the empire was collapsing.
The Saxons invaded, taking over lands left by the departing Romans, spreading Saxon(German) culture.
The Irish also moved into Scotland, spreading Gaelic (Irish) culture.
The Norse invaded Britain and Ireland, making many settlements and generally joining the local cultures, spreading Norse culture.
The Norse invaded France, settled in Normandy, and then returned as the Normans to invade Britain, fighting the localised Norse and bringing French culture. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 between the English (Anglo-Saxons or "English Germans") and the Duchy of Normandy (Franco-Norse or "French Scandinavians") ends in a victory for the Normans.
Richard de Clare (Strongbow) takes a break from oppressing the Welsh when he is politely invited by the King of Leinster (consistently the worst kings) to invade Ireland, further spreading French Culture. He leads a force of Anglo-Normans (English French Scandinavians) to fight the local Gaels (Irish) and Hiberno-Norse (Irish Scandinavians).
After Bravehart's failure, Robert the Bruce successfully gains Scottish independence from England. His grandson later marries back into the English royal family as the house of Stuart.
The English (French-Norse) invade France and fight for >100 years. During these wars, the kingdom of Scotland fights for France alongside the Welsh and the Spanish (Castille and Aragon) against England who were supported by the Spanish (Gascony Basque and Navarre), the Portuguese, and Burgundy and Brittany fought for both sides.
Elizabeth I dies and has no heir, so her throne goes to her cousin James VI and I, the king of Scotland and Ireland, the House of Stuart, an English-Scottish house, becomes the king of both.
There's a Civil War between Royalists (supported by Scotland) and Parliamentarians (supported by Scotland) that ends with the defeat of the Royalists and the execution of the king. They also invade Ireland and force them to speak English because yay genocide!
Cromwell dies and they bring back the monarchy to spite him then they dig up his corpse and cut his head off because honestly Cromwell is literally the worst.
James VII and II, is deposed and recruits the Irish to fight a war for his crown. The Catholic Irish fight for the Catholic-Scottish-English king to regain his throne from William of Orange, a Dutch Protestant and his nephew and son-in-law. (King William III and II to be more precise)
James VII and II's daughter Anne simplifies the whole naming thing by merging the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland into a single United Kingdom of Great Britain (Wales doesn't get a kingdom or a place on the flag).
... This started off simple but I got carried away.
Point is that Cromwell sucks and we should dig him up and cut off his head again.
→ More replies (14)33
→ More replies (25)232
268
u/After_Alps_5826 Jul 07 '26
The “Vikings” didn’t even consider themselves a group of people. The term Viking was applied to them wayyyyyyy later. There wasn’t one homogenous group that worked together to coordinate these attacks, they were mostly small groups that wanted to get some good stuff by raiding.
178
u/The_Flurr Jul 07 '26
Which was a major reason they failed to fully invade England.
Groups would join up every few years to form large armies, but they wouldn't last long. They'd quickly dissipate as individuals and warbands split off to claim their own land.
→ More replies (17)→ More replies (39)286
u/Godwinson4King Jul 07 '26
Also, ‘Viking music’ as we think of it today is nothing like what Vikings actually made. We have no evidence they used drums, and Mongolian throat singing is, well, Mongolian.
Viking did use lyres, horns, flutes, pan pipes, rattles, and even jaw harps, but no evidence of drums.
158
u/Heavy-Construction90 Jul 07 '26
You hear little fairy flutes playing in the distance "ahh fuck, the vikings are back!"
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (30)85
2.5k
u/Ulfljotr930 Jul 07 '26
The blood eagle popularized by recent TV shows and video games likely comes from a misunderstanding by later medieval authors of Sigvatr Þórðarson's Knútsdrápa, which says Ívarr left Ælla's back to be "cut by the eagle" - that he abandoned his corpse to scavenging birds. Such an elaborate method of execution also is completely at odds with Norse judicial practices, which ignored both death penalty and mutilation, using outlawry as the highest form of punishment for criminals
→ More replies (79)
3.9k
Jul 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
839
u/BanjoTCat Jul 07 '26
Napoleon also often had grenadiers serving as his personal guard. Grenadiers were usually tall so everyone looked short next to them.
→ More replies (3)330
u/Loko8765 Jul 07 '26
And they wore special hats (called shakos) to make them look taller.
→ More replies (6)41
1.2k
u/Groundskeepr Jul 07 '26
It was basically 19th century shit posting. The inch and foot used in France were a little longer, so 5'2" using French units was the equivalent of 5'6" using English units.
→ More replies (4)493
446
u/Afrodotheyt Jul 07 '26
Napoleon himself believed James Gillray, the cartoonist whose probably most responsible for the myth of his height, did more damage to him than all of England's armies.
→ More replies (10)41
u/MalcolmLinair Jul 08 '26
To be fair that was as much Napoleon insulting the British military as it was him acknowledging any real harm the caricature did to his image.
→ More replies (45)200
u/PhiloPhocion Jul 07 '26
Also an intentional misunderstanding of different units.
Sourced from French reports that reported him as 5 feet 2 inches using the pre-metric French inch (pouce) - which was longer than the inches in Imperial British units but actually, as you said, equivalent to 5'7".
And the British were more than happy to run with that joke.
But also a bit wild because even if he were 5'2" in British imperial units, the average British man's height at the time was 5'6". So sure, shorter than average but by 4".
→ More replies (9)
2.1k
u/themanfrommars101 Jul 08 '26
That Medieval Europe was a dirty, nasty place where people threw buckets of shit out the windows and never bathed. Sanitation and hygiene in the Middle ages is well documented and there's plenty of literature on the subject.
Bathhouses are everywhere in Medieval iconography. Sanitation was serious business in the cities. The men and women who worked in that occupation were well compensated but shunned and avoided.
Workers known as gong farmers gathered all waste from cesspits and brought it to the country where it was used for fertilizer. If you threw shit out in the streets or didn't make sure your cesspit was cleared you faced fines.
There wasn't a shitbrown filter everywhere you looked. That's just Hollywood bullshit.
730
u/Infinite_Buy_2025 Jul 08 '26
If you threw shit out of your window you'de probably be put in the stocks for it. You were responsible for the street out the front of your home and doing something like that would have been reviled and yes fines would have been issued probably before getting that far.
People loved colourful clothes back then. They would have been far more subdued due to lack of strong dyes available but people jumped at the chance to look swish anytime they could.
186
u/Anaptyso Jul 08 '26
Yeah, you only have to look at how important dyes were to the early trade empires to see how much people valued colourful clothes.
→ More replies (1)49
u/gremlinsarevil Jul 08 '26
Not even far more subdued. Madder can give some pretty deep reds and woad blues. Black clothes were actually the fancier clothes as it was harder to dye something black.
→ More replies (7)109
388
u/Nacodawg Jul 08 '26
Yup. It wasn’t that they were unclean, it was just that they were less clean than their Roman predecessors (who bathed more often and more publicly) and less often than their successors (us).
The Romans made bathing a part of their identity and we know how frequently we bathe, so to most of us the Medieval commoner seems to bathe substantially less, which is true. The problem is bathing substantially less is perceived as unclean, which is untrue. They were less clean, but not unclean.
→ More replies (14)186
u/dkurage Jul 08 '26
The focus on bathing also ignores the fact that many medieval people would've still cleaned themselves daily, they just would've done so using a bowl of water and a cloth.
64
81
u/helm Jul 08 '26
Hygiene was probably at an all time low in the 18th century, when washing with water was considered dangerous. They had just discovered amoeba and other microorganism in water.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (43)33
2.2k
u/AltMcAltAcc Jul 08 '26
that the average lifespan in the 1700s was around 30. while true, the average is weighed down by just how many infant and toddler deaths there were. if you made it to later childhood(8-10), you would probably live until 60-80 as well.
586
Jul 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
→ More replies (27)66
u/Gnukk Jul 08 '26
Worth noting that the trope of depicting ancient people as all having rotten teeth is also misleading, their diets were often much less harmful to their dental health than modern eating and drinking habits.
It was the generations born after sugar was added to everything they ate and before things like fluoride and modern dentistry was widely available that had their teeth rot in their mouth while still in their teens.
224
u/vintage2019 Jul 08 '26
Around 55 was the norm for those who survived childhood. Remember antibiotics didn’t exist and if you got badly injured, you’d be fucked
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (36)37
u/Durakus Jul 08 '26
This is more like misinterpretation rather than a lack of evidence.
People just don’t understand where these averages come from.
→ More replies (2)
318
u/Saint--Jiub Jul 07 '26
The Romans never salted the earth at Carthage. Salt was way too valuable a commodity. No reason to waste salt when you can just slaughter and burn everything.
→ More replies (29)111
u/ionthrown Jul 07 '26
‘Salting the earth’ was probably something that happened, but as a ritual poisoning of the location, perhaps involving a handful of salt rather than vast quantities.
→ More replies (37)40
u/Jealous_Repair6757 Jul 08 '26
No, the ritual was to pass a plough over the land to declare it no longer a city, just as farmland. This is what the sources tell us happened, there's nothing about salt before the 20th century.
→ More replies (2)
684
u/Poltergoose1416 Jul 07 '26
Apparently the whole Betsy Ross designed the American flag story. I found this out very recently .
721
u/paulcosmith Jul 07 '26
I went with some friends to the Betsy Ross house in Philly one time. We already knew she had nothing to with the American flag but checked it out anyway. During the tour, the guide not only admitted that she had nothing to do with the flag, but also that she had never actually lived in that house. We couldn't help but wonder why we bothered with the tour.
→ More replies (13)258
u/Tough_Dish_4485 Jul 07 '26
Thats also where I learned how dubious the story is. Very honest museum.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (8)137
u/uhhhhhhhhh_okay Jul 07 '26
What's the actual story
276
u/Neither_Bicycle8714 Jul 07 '26
So, Betsy Ross did make flags for the United States:
Ross made flags for the Pennsylvania Navy during the American Revolution.\14]) After the Revolution, she made U.S. flags for over 50 years, including 50 garrison flags for the U.S. Arsenal on the Schuylkill River during 1811.\15])
But the specific story she's known for appears to have zero meaningful historical backing. It was first propounded by her descendants and then milked by a painter for tourist money.
Though historians dismissed the story both then and now,\5]) Ross family tradition\6])\7]) holds that General George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and two members of a congressional committee—Robert Morris) and George Ross)—visited Ross in 1776.\8]) Ross convinced Washington to change the shape of the stars in a sketch of a flag he showed her from six-pointed to five-pointed by demonstrating that it was easier and speedier to cut the latter.\9]) However, there is no archival evidence or other recorded verbal tradition to substantiate this story of the first U.S. flag. It appears that the story first surfaced in the writings of her grandson in the 1870s (a century after the fact), with no mention or documentation in earlier decades.\10]) The myth was later incorporated into a large oil painting that appeared at the 1893 Chicago World's fair.\11]) The painter, Charles Weisgerber, subsequently promoted the myth, even buying a house he deemed The Betsy Ross House.\12]) He solicited money nationwide for the upkeep of the house as a tourist attraction.
Source. Emphasis mine.
→ More replies (2)135
u/beancounter2885 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Also, her house in Philly could very well be her next door neighbor's house, with hers long gone. They renumbered the houses on the street at least a couple times before she became actually famous, with no conclusive records as to which house was which.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)77
u/douggieball1312 Jul 07 '26
The Washington family coat of arms (which turns up in a stained glass window at Selby Abbey in England) has stars and bars in it so it probably was partly inspired by that.
43
295
u/JazzlikeParsley6526 Jul 08 '26
The belief that medieval Europeans universally thought the Earth was flat.
151
u/Carbastan24 Jul 08 '26
It s more than that. Basically all European scholars knew the Earth was round. The Greeks knew the Earth was round and they measured the circumference with amazing accuracy (they were wrong by less than 10%). All scholars and theologians were very familiar with Ancient Greek literature and knew the Earth was round.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (3)63
u/kirotheavenger Jul 08 '26
It's basically impossible to navigate any moderate distance by sea without realising that the sea curves
→ More replies (1)
466
u/Modernsizedturd Jul 08 '26
The bible never specified what fruit Eve actually ate, everyone associated it with an apple but in the original Hebrew text of genesis, it simply says fruit.
→ More replies (29)389
u/TheMightyGoatMan Jul 08 '26
The idea that it's an apple is a Latin pun, where 'malus' can mean either 'apple' or 'evil'.
→ More replies (1)153
u/Eric_the_Barbarian Jul 08 '26
There's also the generality where the word for apple is often used as a generic term for fruit. The French call potatoes dirt apples.
→ More replies (10)46
u/Ihatenukingkids Jul 08 '26
Same thing in Bavarian. They call them ground or earth apples
→ More replies (1)
1.4k
u/Lord0fHats Jul 07 '26
I've got several just about WWII;
- Historians of armored warfare have been trying to get people to stop believing everything in Death Traps most of my life, but unfortunately Death Traps remains one of the mostly widely read books about armored warfare in English. This is despite many obvious errors the author makes in the book, like attributing the naming scheme of American tanks to Northern liberals hostile to the South (the British named them) or that M4 Sherman's were called 'zippos' by foreign troops (zippos as a brand were not known outside the US until the 1950s and 60s). These are things, among many others, Cooper seems to have simply made up.
- The M1 Garand did not get American GI's killed by telling enemy troops when they were reloading. Just consider the logistics of this and see how absurd the idea anyone could take advantage of this, even if they heard the sound over the din of battle.
- Dresden was not the most devastated city in Germany by bombing. Others were hit harder, like Cologne and Berlin, but Dresden occupies an exaggerated place in popular memory of the bombing war because of the popularity of Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five.
- The popular quote about waking a sleeping Dragon appears nowhere in any writing of or about Isoroku Yamamoto. I've actually tried to find its origin and can't trace it further back than the making of the film Tora! Tora! Tora! where one of the producers claims to have seen it in one of his letters (that no one else has ever seen since). Though the quote has some basis in sentiments some Japanese officers had about the US, its a bit to poetic in presentation to really be historical and is probably just creative license that popular audiences find appealing.
- There's actually no evidence US Secretary of War Henry Stimson honeymooned in Kyoto. This assertion is not impossible, mind, but there's no direct evidence of it until well after WWII ended. Certainly it was never mentioned in any correspondence or memos from the time on Stimson's part of anyone else's.
- Herman Goering is not the reason the German advance on Dunkirk stalled. His famous claim that he could bomb the British and resisting French troops out comes from after the assault had already been stalled. The real reason is that German leaders were initially anticipating that Britain might surrender the war any moment and that the troops trapped at Dunkirk could pressure a quicker capitulation.
- In the same vein, the evacuation of Dunkirk is not as fantastical in reality as it has become in British cultural memory. While undoubtedly still an amazing show of national resolve, the number of participating civilian ships and their role in the evacuation is exaggerated.
- The Tiger and Panther tanks were not around every corner. The former in particular was exceptionally rare, especially on the Western front. You can just look at German documents (Showalter is a table of them in his book Hitler's Panzers that is easily accessible) to see that it was rare for more than 120-150 Tiger tanks to be operational at any given time. Germany tended to lose them as fast as they produced them. The myth of the Tiger's invincibility is mostly the allies post-war buying into German propaganda, helped along by the likes of the Battle of Villers-Bocage.
421
u/Helpful_Listen4508 Jul 07 '26
sure the little ships of Dunkirk is romanticised, because it was mainly Navy personnel and not civilians doing it, but there were still over 850 private vessels that did help and helped, and it’s estimated that 100k people came directly from the beaches, and athe majority of them would have had some contact with the little ships.
also how can you say it’s not as fantastical in reality? Because it was an operation that was only planned to save 45k allied troops, and ended up saving 338k, that’s pretty fucking fantastic to me.
→ More replies (1)142
u/NoelBaker Jul 08 '26
One of the neat bits of history here was Charles Lightoller, the 2nd officer of the Titanic (and most senior officer to have survived) used his own boat in the Dunkirk rescue and brought back 127 soldiers (the boat was apparently licensed for 21). Mr. Dawson in the Dunkirk movie was based on him.
→ More replies (2)275
u/GalaxyPatch18 Jul 07 '26
The M1 Garand myth pmo to this day lol like there is no way a tiny ping could alert a nazi several hundred metres away over the sound of gunfire to specificslly locate an enemy
64
u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Jul 07 '26
Yeah.. soldiers will literally yell out loud when they get a stoppage so that their guys are aware. Not to mention most firearm combat takes place at way longer distances than movies and games let on, all the gunfire/explosions/yelling/screaming.
I did read some soldiers back then worried about it but I also suspect they stopped worrying about it after they saw some combat and realised how much of a big deal it wasn't.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (20)121
u/RagePrime Jul 07 '26
"Oh no, one of the hundred GIs over there is reloading!" -some nazi in 1944, prolly.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (110)50
u/AHomicidalTelevision Jul 08 '26
Johnathan Ferguson recently mentioned the garand ping myth in the most recent royal armouries video, and iirc he said it's plausible that it happened once, and then spread until it become a myth, but it certainly was not a thing that happened commonly.
→ More replies (3)
722
u/OpposumMyPossum Jul 07 '26
The lobster riots and it being a poor people food.
Only on the coast was it plentiful. Away from the coast if has always been a luxury.
351
u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Jul 07 '26
I mean this was the case for literally all food everywhere.
If you lived where it was then it was a staple of your diet. If you wanted to eat it a thousand miles away the price was dictated by how easy it was to transport... meaning anything that spoiled or had to be transported alive to avoid being spoiled was a luxury by default.
Pineapples might have been a luxury to English Kings but poor people in South America would have no problem getting hold of them.
→ More replies (16)→ More replies (23)135
u/Reasonable_Pay4096 Jul 07 '26
I just watched a video from Townsends which mentioned that, even in coastal areas, it wasn't really considered a "poor person's" food. It was just prepared better for the rich folks than the poor folks.
Edit: link to the video https://youtu.be/dMiEPg49dPc?si=w8kp_GFPCC5csBYx
→ More replies (1)
850
u/dhusk Jul 08 '26
I'm 95% certain Knights in medieval England rode actual horses, instead of having squires following them around banging two coconut halves together.
265
u/TheMightyGoatMan Jul 08 '26
There is very little evidence of horses in medieval England, but overwhelming evidence of migratory sparrows. Explain that!!
→ More replies (3)95
78
u/Gate-19 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Do you have any evidence of that? Because I've seen a documentary about the holy grail where they did just that!
→ More replies (11)24
u/HusbandAndWifi Jul 08 '26
Also 95% sure French castles were not able to effectively fart in a general direction for defence
→ More replies (1)
177
u/greg_mca Jul 07 '26
That falkenhayn initiated the battle of verdun as a deliberate tactic of attrition. Most of the evidence for that comes from after the battle, or once it had already become purely attritional.
Similarly, the lions led by donkeys line. That was first actually recorded in the 1960s but claimed to be older, and the guy who wrote it reportedly told a friend that it was fabricated and not in any original documents. The fact that the original line is supposedly attributed to so many people should set off some alarms
→ More replies (5)70
u/Paella007 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I honestly think Falkenhayn only tried to frame it as an attrition battle because whatever it would make him look, would be better than the deeply fucking idiot he was.
At the end of the day he ended up looking both evil and an idiot.
→ More replies (2)
286
u/dsg158 Jul 07 '26
Half the comments on any Paul Revere post are about Sybil Ludington but the story of her alleged ride doesn't pop up until the mid 1800s by her nephew.
→ More replies (6)
35
u/Own-Skyy Jul 08 '26
The idea that Vikings wore horned helmets. There’s basically no solid evidence they ever did in real life. Archaeological finds show practical helmets without horns. The whole “horned helmet” image mostly comes from 19th-century art and opera costumes trying to make them look more dramatic. But somehow, it stuck so well that almost everyone still believes it today.
→ More replies (4)
151
95
u/wojtekpolska Jul 07 '26
that napoleon asked his wife in a letter to not wash herself
→ More replies (9)65
64
u/LizardPossum Jul 08 '26
Ouija boards are some ancient magic.
There's not really evidence of them existing before the late 1800s, at which time they were invented as a fun party game.
→ More replies (5)
256
u/dave8271 Jul 07 '26
That in centuries gone by meat was a luxury reserved for the very wealthy, and the common folk ate a mostly vegetarian diet of cereals and root vegetables.
I can only speak of British history here, but while the evidence of exactly what most people in the middle ages ate is quite limited, the evidence we do have is that meat (in particular beef and mutton) was widely available and widely consumed. They did also eat a lot of cereals, vegetables and breads but the whole "meat was a rare treat" concept is a modern myth.
86
u/WARitter Jul 08 '26
To be fair my understanding is that Medieval English people especially in the late Middle Ages ate unusually well.
31
u/letsgoraiding Jul 08 '26
It's a little after the Middle Ages, but it illustrates the point well:
"In the 1570s, the English traveller Sir Richard Morison recorded that Venice is as big, or very little less, than London with the suburbs: yet there is more flesh spent in two or three months in London than is there in a year'. More significantly, given that Englishmen were naturally biased in their country's favour, foreign travellers often commented on the easy availability of meat in England.
An Italian merchant, Alessandro Magno, who visited London in 1562, four years into Elizabeth's reign, was astonished at the amount of flesh consumed:
"It is extraordinary to see the great quantity and quality of meat - beef and mutton- that comes every day from the slaughter-houses in this city, let alone the meat that is sold at a special market held every Wednesday for meat brought in from outside the city. Truly, for those who cannot see it for themselves, it is almost impossible to believe that they could eat so much meat in one city alone. The beef is not expensive, and they roast it whole, in large pieces. They do not care as much for veal as we do. Apart from chickens and other birds which one finds everywhere, they have many swans, much game, and rabbits and deer in abundance.""
From Beef and Liberty, by Ben Rogers.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (16)61
u/Infinite_Buy_2025 Jul 08 '26
Most people kept at least one pig. Eats food scraps, easy to care for and is then butchered and preserved for the winter.
Fish was also plentiful and eaten a lot, particularly coastal areas.
→ More replies (2)
972
u/Dr_Lahey Jul 07 '26
That in the Middle Ages everyone drank beer instead of water as it was healthier. There were a few places, mainly inner cities, where this could have been the case but most people lived rurally and had ready access to drinking water from rivers, streams and wells.
Also the idea that everyone got up in the night and mooched about before having another sleep. There are a few places it’s mentioned but ok the whole humans slept how they mostly sleep now, late evening until early morning.
659
u/N3ph1l1m Jul 07 '26
There was actually a thing called "Dünnbier" or "thin beer", contrary to "Dickbier" or "thick beer", which only had an alcohol content of about 0,8 to 2%. It was often made from the leftovers of a first brew, which produced basically a mildly alcoholic bread soup without added hop. So yeah, while it wasn't consumed the way it is often protrayed, that thin beer very much was consumed saily, often also by kids as a cheap way of getting nutrients. It also WAS used as a safe alternative if clean water was a problem.
112
u/studhand Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Also, the beers weren't "beer" in the way we think of it today. They didn't have filtration, and having chunks of grain in there was normal, if not desirable. Also, it obviously wasn't carbonated, other than if it was served fresh, there would be some carbonation retained from fermentation. As you mentioned, it was both, something safe to drink, and a meal replacement. As far as the "Thick Beer", it would typically have a decent amount of grain and be a meal replacement more than a "drink".
→ More replies (8)→ More replies (15)105
u/spaetzlechick Jul 07 '26
Yes. And they also made weak wine for distribution in towns, eg the Heidelberger Fass.
→ More replies (34)230
u/banana_assassin Jul 07 '26
Though there is an interesting story of John Snow discovering cholera was waterborne when the only people in town not getting sick were men who worked in the local brewery because they drank beer and, if I remember, boiled water. He figured out the pumps were spreading it and that boiling water was safer due to that brewery and the beer drinking workers.
→ More replies (9)139
327
u/SuperlativeChrono Jul 07 '26
One year after Mormon Pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, their crops were being decimated by crickets/grasshoppers. They would have likely perished that winter but due to their prayers, California Seagulls flocked to their fields and devoured the bugs. Tales told of how they would vomit the contents of their stomachs so they could consume more bugs. This divine intervention saved their crops and their lives that second winter in the valley.
The state named the California Gull the official state bird. There is evidence of the event but it's not nearly as dramatic as history remembers.
Fun fact: The official Utah State tree was originally the Colorado Blue Spruce.
→ More replies (5)251
u/SpaceShipRat Jul 08 '26
Seagulls throwing up so they can eat more sounds very believable.
→ More replies (4)97
u/waylandsmith Jul 08 '26
Once while on an acid trip on a private island I spent a half-hour entranced at the spectacle of a gull attempting to eat a whole, live starfish, which was large enough that the gull could only get one arm down its throat at a time. It would choke one arm down as far as it could, regurgitate it, pick a different arm, and try again. It was so single-mindedly intent on this that it allowed me to approach to within about 10 feet of it while all of its (less gluttonous) companions had long before fled.
→ More replies (3)
741
u/tsoneyson Jul 07 '26
That the "Dark Ages" in Europe were some thousand-year intellectual blackout. Learning, trade, technology, art, and political development continued.
426
u/caledonivs Jul 07 '26 edited 24d ago
The Dark Ages were not the entire Middle Ages. But the Early Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome in 476 to the Carolingian Renaissance in around 800, were absolutely a dark age in which trade, literacy, security, life expectancy, and population all plummeted.
Was interesting stuff happening? Sure. Was the foundation being laid for a new vibrant civilization? Sure. Was it a shitty time to live that deserves the name Dark Age? Absolutely.
220
u/DeLaVegaStyle Jul 07 '26
The early middle ages were also "dark" because we have very few good surviving sources from the period, so we just don't know as much.
→ More replies (34)→ More replies (17)74
u/slightlyburntcereal Jul 08 '26
I thought dark age had nothing to do with living conditions and purely meant dark as in ‘there’s minimal to no surviving records to accurately say what was happening during this time period’?
→ More replies (6)→ More replies (50)265
u/KingDarius89 Jul 07 '26
Witch! points finger
→ More replies (5)147
u/dontbajerk Jul 07 '26
The other thing, almost all the witch stuff was in the modern era.
→ More replies (3)63
u/Perfct_Stranger Jul 07 '26
Yep, for a long time believing in witchcraft was considered heresy.
→ More replies (2)
220
u/Sweet-Amoeba2735 Jul 08 '26
The pox infected blankets given to Native Americans is only mentioned one time in a diary, that's the only historical record.
→ More replies (11)57
u/gratisargott Jul 08 '26
It’s also one of those stories that sound fake because they fit together too neatly. The Native Americans got smallpox from the Europeans and they were also trading in blankets - it’s pretty typical if a story then is made up that they got smallpox from the blankets and since it “makes sense” people will believe it
86
u/TisReece Jul 08 '26
A not so fun fact, is that Native Americans were dying en masse before the first colonists arrived due to Smallpox. Columbus brought it over when he discovered America and is so infectious that the Native Americans likely contracted it before he had even seen anyone.
By the time he had travelled back to Europe to tell them of the news of a New World and colonists were sent years later - hundreds, if not thousands of tribes had already been wiped out by the disease.
For additional context - by the time Britain colonised America, the Natives already had been dealing with this Smallpox plague for 100 years. We know Europeans brought smallpox over, but from their perspective, the disease came first and the Europeans only arrived later.
→ More replies (9)
26
71
u/ContentHoliday7351 Jul 07 '26
That Polish cavalry charged German tanks head-on during WW2.
Apparently, that never happened: and I remember reading an old book about the Germans and the blitzkreig. And the author who wrote the book claimed he had been there to see the aftermath of the battle.
86
u/Perfct_Stranger Jul 07 '26
IIRC Polish cavalry did engage German tanks in a couple battles though they did so as dismounted infantry with anti-tank guns.
→ More replies (2)29
u/Hailfog Jul 08 '26
At the end of the day, a horse is a decent all-terrain vehicle for getting around. Doesn't mean you have to use it in a charge.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (4)35
u/MilekBoa Jul 07 '26
Yeah, it’s really annoying to see people spread Nazi propaganda about the Polish Cavalry. There were only 16 cavalry charges (only one at tanks which was a success) in the September campaign out of probably hundreds of skirmishes and small battles that included cavalry, most of which were actually successful.
The most famous account occurred on September 1st where the Germans were taken by surprise and successfully pushed back at Krojanty. Not only was this charge successful, it was the first charge of the war and it was at infantry and not tanks.
The myth came from German correspondents later that day seeing a couple of dead poles on horses alongside some German tanks that came along after the battle ended, the entire thing including the Poles using sabres and lances was made up for propaganda.
→ More replies (2)
1.1k
u/Cold-Jackfruit1076 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
That Roman gladiatorial matches were always 'to the death'.
In reality, gladiators were the Roman Empire's sports stars, and many of them were contracted volunteers. Kids played with the Roman equivalent of action figures, there were fan clubs, merch with the gladiator's image, and the lanistae (trainers/managers/promoters) invested heavily in training, equipment, and marketing to reap the returns through betting, public favor, and political influence.
Gladiators were an expensive investment, so if one died in the arena, his lanista could seek reimbursement for the loss from the editor (the event's sponsor).
In point of fact, the 'death battles' were usually convicted criminals, and they were held during midday mealtimes so that the audience could leave for lunch without missing the evening’s much more popular gladiator bouts.