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Victorian eccentric, Dr William Buckland, gained notoriety for his love of eating strange things. The dishes he digested included: elephants' trunks, bat's urine and the mummified heart of King Louis XIV!

The second Baron Rothschild also shared Buckland's taste for the eccentric and had a carriage drawn by four zebras, snakes twined round the banisters and had a dinner party with 12 dressed monkeys.

The Roman Emperor Caligula dug up Alexander the Great's grave so he could wear his armour. He also made his horse Incitatus a consul, and his oats were mixed with flakes of gold and he had 18 servants.

Queen Elizabeth I nicknamed Walter Raleigh "Water", because of his West Country accent. She also used to only have four baths a year!

Egyptian dentists used to suggest putting half a freshly-killed hot mouse in your mouth to cure bad breath.

William the Conqueror's stomach exploded at his funeral.

In the Middle Ages they believed that sitting in a sewer and shaving a live chicken's bottom and strapping it to your armpit were cures for the Black Death.

Hippocrates, the founder of medicine, used to believe that violently shaking someone up and down cured a cough and he used to taste samples of blood, earwax, phlegm and urine. To this day doctors still have to take the Hippocratic Oath.

Georgian women used to put balls of cork in their mouths to make them look chubby.

Egyptian pharaohs and kings had royal bottom wipers.

Soldiers in the First World War had to urinate on their boots to soften the leather.