I ask because I often watch old movies and read old novels and although I know what year a film or novel dates from I still need to know when, for example, someone demands a £1,000 ransom, how much that would have represented in terms of a week's wages at the time.

So, is there a website that tracks the average wage through history that someone can point me to?

British politicians all seem like idiots. Which world leaders are regarded as the best in the world?
I can only think of dead ones. Which world leaders today would qualify for adding to your list of leaders who really have their hearts in the right place and who know what they are doing?

Thank you Duff. So the Smithsonian Institute reckons nobody knows if Shakespeare had a Syphilis or not? Well I am not going to argue with with the mighty Smithsonian over a dose of the clap!

But here's an interesting little bit of trivia..I started wondering how come such a nasty disease got such an exotic almost romantic name?

Seems like medieval kinky Pig Lovers could be part of the reason!

I got this from The Etymology Online website which says that a clever chap called Girolamo Fracastoro who lived from about 1476 to 1553 (and who was as we all know a brainiac Italian physician, poet, and swotty boffin in mathematics, geography and astronomy) is credited with being the very first person to chose to use the name Syphilis for the disease - and why he even chose it is not clearly known.

There's a theory that he chose Syphilus because it is the Latinised name meaning a "Pig-lover"!

However, there are also less juicy theories such as that Syphilus was named after a popular tale at the time of a shepherd called Syphilus, who was supposed to be the first sufferer from the disease.

And then there is another contender because there was a chap called Sipylus (without the 'h') who was the son of Niobe, according to Ovid.

As always with Shakespeare, it seems nothing is certain so you can basically make up any theory you think fits.

I still think the idea of CIS Stratford-upon-Avon exhuming the bard's bones and running a few gene tests would make a blockbuster TV series.

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=syphilis

The answer is that there ARE more sheep than people in Scotland, over a million more sheep than people. 

At the last count Scotland had a population of 5,424,800 people outnumbered by 6,701,376 sheep. Bring on the mint sauce, Jimmy!!

www.nationalsheep.org.uk/know-your-sheep/sheep-facts/   

PS  I noticed that here are a staggering three times as many sheep as people in Wales. So it's true then about sheep and the Welsh?

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I have this feeling that newspapers are a dying breed, being slowly knocked out by the Internet.
So, the question is...How many real, printed newspapers are there in Britain?