A plea for attention from Ari...

Cheers, Liana, got loads from those sites! :)

I tried looking up the name of an undertakers stick the other day, both Google and Jeevse were clueless. Sooz xxx

An undertaker's stick? *curious* did you find it eventually? i want to know now...

Loads here: And I found this too.. hope you can get something from this lot... good luck Ari Posie Graham-Evans, who has made her life in film and television, has written a historical novel called ‘The Innocent’, a torrid tale of a young woman who comes to wicked London after an idyllic childhood in the country. She says medieval London would have been an assault on the senses - particularly smell. “They slaughtered animals in the streets, most of the major waterways were deeply polluted because the process of industry and there was no separation between where industry was clustered – for instance things like leather, tanneries, slaughteries, and the rest and living – it was all cheek by jowl.” Potties were hurled out of windows to the streets below with the call “gardie loo”, a term derived from French. But it wasn’t as primitive as we may think. “If you were part of the upper echelon you had a much better life than the peasants did because they had these little rooms called ‘garder robes’ which were long drop dunnies,” Ms Graham Evans said. “They were basically little rooms on the outside buttresses, which jutted out over a moat. Mary Queen of Scots even had an en suite while in captivity. “One bathroom in England – designed for Henry the Second - even had running water and taps and tiles. “It was great scandal at the time because if you washed the body that was deeply impure because you got to look at it in its naked state,” she said. Meals for the rich were enormous and eaten in the late morning and late afternoon. “They put everything down on the table at the same time – you would get sweet dishes, meat and pastries all at the same time. And course after course after course was placed in front of people. Ironically the peasants probably ate better because they didn’t eat much meat but a lot of vegetables" she said.