Featured Expensive - yep, it cost an arm and a leg

Here's a little teaser for all you out there.

Many of us, particularly in UK, use this phrase a lot but few know where it originates.

Back in the days of Henry VIII, having your portrait painted by a good artist was a great status symbol. However, as today, there were wealthy people and then super wealthy people. Having a portrait painted at all was hugely expensive so most people just had their head and shoulders in the portrait. But, if you were seriously rich you could have your whole figure immortalised in oil, as Henry famously did.

So, the saying, it costs an arm and a leg harps back to the time when to have those limbs included in a painting massively increased the cost.

Just a little bit of antique trivia.

 

It's amazing how the internet has made these wive's tales full blown factoids

 

I love this kind of stuff!

 

they "Didn’t have a pot to Piss in"

My version carries on 'or a window to throw it out of' referring to the habit of emptying chamber pots into the street, and the shout of 'gardez loo' (from the French, watch out for water) to warn passers by of the impending down pour.

 

hmmmm....google has a different reason for the cost an arm and a leg saying.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/arm-and-a-leg.html

A portion of the article.

It is in fact an American phrase, coined sometime after WWII. The earliest citation I can find is from The Long Beach Independent, December 1949:

Food Editor Beulah Karney has more than 10 ideas for the homemaker who wants to say "Merry Christmas" and not have it cost her an arm and a leg.

 

I've seen this one circulate Facebook, and as a SERIOUSLY HARDCORE history-nut, I can tell you that not all of these are true.

For one thing, eating pork (or bacon, ham whatever) was more common than most people think. You couldn't keep pigs over winter (at least, not profitably) so it was common to butcher them in the colder months.

The REAL luxury meats were beef, lamb, chicken and venison. The first three because cows, sheep and chickens were more valuable alive than dead, and the last because you needed the hunting-rights to get it.

While it is true that piss was collected on a pretty epic scale back in the old days, it wasn't necessarily because of leather. Piss was used as laundry-soap, metal-polish, mouthwash and even in the manufacture of gunpowder.

That said - if you didn't own your own pisspot - you could use a public one. They did exist. They used to sit them outside pubs and taverns for the penile-gifted of a given community to make regular donations to.

Thatch rooves are more leakproof than you might think. There's a reason why people have used them for centuries.

People washed a lot more regularly than we generally give them credit for. In Roman and even Medieval times, it was common to frequent bathhouses.

Washing started dying out not because it was hard to get, or even heat the water, it died out because soap was taxed to the bloody hilt. It was so expensive to get that most people would try and make a single block last for weeks, and hence bathed only when absolutely necessary - and in the most efficient ways possible. It was only after the soap-tax was lifted in the 1800s that bathing became a daily thing.

Before that, soap was taxed in England from 1712-1853. Other interesting things that were taxed were candles, and male servants.

 

Windows were also taxed as glass was extremely expensive so if you had lots of windows you were obviously rich. It is why it is still possible to see lots of large old houses where the windows are bricked up, to avoid the tax. Income tax was first brought in to fund the Napoleonic War and levied at 6d in the pound (there were 240 pennies to the pound in those days). It proved to be such a lucrative tax that the British government kept it after the war had ended.

 

The window tax sounds like a joke, but it was actually real. It makes me laugh every time I hear about it. Was it specifically a tax on GLASS or just the number of windows?

 

The window tax still exists, just the name was changed, to domestic rates, and then to community charge. The number of windows roughly equates to the number of rooms and is a fair way of estimating the size of a house and hence its value, and has nothing really to do with the price of glass, which was not remarkably expensive at the time of the tax.
Nowadays someone goes around and values all the houses into a price bracket, and the 'community charge' is levied as a percentage of the estimated price. It used to be levied on a percentage of the estimated annual rental value of a house.
Nowadays it is supposed to cover the expense of local services like rubbish removal and road maintainance.
But it's still the old window tax under another name.

Bricking up of windows in old houses could be a tax avoidance measure, it could equally mean a re-configuration of rooms in an old house. The tax saving was probably relatively trivial comparted to the loss of amenity.

However, it is far easier to attribute these old bricked up windows to the window tax than to find out exactly why it was done, and it is hard not to wonder why, when the specific tax was repealed, the owners did not simply knock out all the bricks and re-install a window.

 

The number of windows

 

Much like the width of a building in Amsterdam it seems.

 

Is that where the phrase being "head and shoulder above the rest" originated too, I wonder?

 

Love Amsterdam, such a beautiful and interesting place.