If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  If Walls Could Talk

  An Intimate History of the Home

  LUCY WORSLEY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One – An Intimate History of the Bedroom

  1 A History of the Bed

  2 Being Born

  3 Was Breast Always Best?

  4 Knickers

  5 Praying, Reading and Keeping Secrets

  6 Sick

  7 Sex

  8 Conception

  9 Deviant Sex and Masturbation

  10 Venereal Disease

  11 What to Wear in Bed

  12 Sleeping with the King

  13 A History of Sleep

  14 Murdered in Our Beds

  Part Two – An Intimate History of the Bathroom

  15 The Fall of Bathing …

  16 … and Its Resurrection

  17 The Bathroom is Born

  18 Don’t Forget to Brush Your Teeth

  19 An Apology for Beards

  20 War Paint

  21 The Whole World Is a Toilet

  22 The Wonders of Sewers

  23 A History of Toilet Paper

  24 Menstruation

  Part Three – An Intimate History of the Living Room

  25 Sitting Comfortably

  26 A History of Clutter

  27 Heat and Light

  28 ‘Speaking’ to the Servants

  29 So Who Vacuums Your Living Room?

  30 Sitting Up Straight

  31 A Bright, Polite Smile

  32 Kissing and Courtship

  33 Dying (and Attending Your Own Funeral)

  Part Four – An Intimate History of the Kitchen

  34 Why Men Used to Do the Cooking

  35 The Kitchen Comes in from the Cold

  36 The Pungent Power of Pongs

  37 Stirring and Scrubbing and Breaking Your Back

  38 Cool

  39 Peckish

  40 Trying New Foods (and Drinks, and Drugs)

  41 Chewing, Swallowing, Burping and Farting

  42 Raising Your Elbow

  43 The Political Consequences of Sauces

  44 Were They All Drunk All the Time?

  45 The Wretched Washing-Up

  Conclusion: What We Can Learn from the Past

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Bibliography

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

  H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, 1909

  Introduction

  Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why did strangers share their beds? And why did rich people fear fruit? These are the kinds of question I want to address in this intimate history of home life.

  Moving through the four main rooms of a house – bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen – I’ve explored what people actually did in bed, in the bath, at the table and at the stove. This has taken me from sauce-stirring to breastfeeding, teeth-cleaning to masturbation, getting dressed to getting married.

  Along my way, I was intrigued to discover that bedrooms in the past were rather crowded, semi-public places, and that only in the nineteenth century did they become reserved purely for sleep and sex. The bathroom didn’t even exist as a separate room until late in the Victorian age, and it surprised me that people’s attitudes towards personal hygiene, rather than technological innovation, determined the pace of its development. The living room emerged once people had the leisure time and spare money to spend in and on it, and I’ve learned to think of it as a sort of stage-set where homeowners acted out an idealised version of their lives for the benefit of guests. Meanwhile, the story of the kitchen is also the story of food safety, transport, technology and gender relations. Once I realised this, I saw my own kitchen in an entirely new light.

  There are lots of tiny, quirky and seemingly trivial details in this book, but through them I think we can chart great, overarching, revolutionary changes in society. A person’s home makes an excellent starting point for assessing their time, place and life. ‘I’ve a great respect for things!’ says Madame Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). ‘We’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances … one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps – these things are all expressive.’ ‘Look around this room of yours and what do you see?’ asked John Ruskin in 1853. The answer, of course, is the same even today: you see yourself. That’s why, now as then, people lavish so much time, effort and money on their houses.

  What else have I learned from writing this history of domestic life? It’s been brought home to me that biology has always been destiny. Many major social upheavals come back, in the end, to little changes in the way that people think about and look after their bodies. I also think it’s interesting and instructive to find that the put-upon and down-and-out in the past weren’t always worse off than they are today. Industrialisation was a Bad Thing for many people; to be rich placed certain social obligations upon a person in the past that are now far from familiar. But this is a very old-fashioned history book in that generally, over the centuries, we see living conditions improve. Seemingly iron laws about behaviour eventually relax; amazing inventions remove problems at a stroke; there is hope for the future. My conclusion is that we have some distance yet to travel on this journey towards the good life, but that history can help to show us the way.

  Most agreeably of all, I feel that I’ve encountered some real people from the past, from all ranks in society, peasants to kings. If we reach out a hand across the centuries, we find that our ancestors are very much like us in the ways they lived, loved and died. ‘Of all histories’, wrote John Beadle in 1656, ‘the history of men’s lives is the most pleasant: such history … can call back times, and give life to those that are dead.’

  In researching this book, I’ve had two sources of extra help from beyond the walls of the library. Firstly, working at Historic Royal Palaces, as I do, I am surrounded by people whose job it is to bring the past back to life for our visitors. We talk about the topics covered here every day. Secondly, I’ve had the privilege of presenting a BBC TV series on the history of the home. For that project I tried out for myself many of the processes and rituals described here. I blackened a Victorian kitchen range, lugged the hot water to fill an unplumbed bathtub, ignited a gas streetlight, waded through nineteenth-century sewers, slept in a Tudor bed, drank a Georgian medicine made out of seawater, coaxed a dog into turning a roasting-spit, and even used urine as a stainremover. Each time we recreated some lost part of domestic life I learned something new about why and how houses developed.

  Many of these humdrum tasks were so familiar to people in the past that they were hardly worth thinking about. ‘I was talking about ideals, nobility, principles,’ cries one of the characters in Marilyn French’s classic feminist novel The Women’s Room (1978). ‘Why do you always have to bring us down to the level of the mundane, the ordinary, the stinking, f–ing refrigerator?’ But I would argue that every single object in your home has its own important story to tell. Your relationship with your refrigerator reveals a great deal about who you really are. Is it full or empty? Do you share it? Clean it yourself? Have someone to clean it for you? The answers to these questions define your place in the world. As Dr Johnson put it:

  Sir, there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

  PART ONE
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  An Intimate History of the Bedroom

  Nearly a third of history is missing. You very rarely hear about the hours when people were asleep, or on the borders of it, and it’s worth trying to fill that gap.

  Today your bedroom is the backstage area where you prepare for your performance in the theatre of the world. For us it’s a private place, and it’s rude to barge into someone else’s bedroom without knocking.

  But this is a relatively new phenomenon. Medieval people didn’t have special rooms for sleeping. They simply had a living space in which they happened to rest – or eat, or read, or party – and they used the same room for everything. The idea that you might sleep by yourself, in your own bed, in your own separate room, is really rather modern.

  The functions of bedroom and living room eventually became separate, yet the bedroom remained a social space for a surprisingly long time. Guests were received in bedrooms as a mark of favour, courtship and marriage were played out here, and even childbirth was for centuries a communal experience. Only in the nineteenth century did the bedroom become secluded, set aside for sleep, sex, birth and death. In the twentieth century, even the last two left the bedroom behind and went off to the hospital.

  Because the room in which you slept was so much more than just a place of rest, the history of the bedroom is a vital strand in the history of society itself.

  1 – A History of the Bed

  There are few nicer things than sitting up in bed, drinking strong tea, and reading.

  Alan Clark, 27 January 1977

  Once upon a time, life’s great questions were: would you be warm tonight and would you get something to eat? Under these circumstances, the central great hall of a medieval house was a wonderful place to be: safe, even if smoky, stinking and crowded. Perhaps its floor was made only of earth, but no one cared if the hall was full of company, warmth and food. Many people, then, were glad to doss down here. At night the medieval great hall became a bedroom.

  A medieval great household was rather like a boarding school in which most of the pupils were grown up. They came from humble homes to live and learn at a centre of culture and security for the surrounding area. They served their lord by day, and slept on his floor by night. If you had a particular job in the household, you perhaps slept in your daytime place of work: we hear of laundry-maids sleeping in the laundry, porters sleeping in their lodges, and kitchen staff bedding down near the fireplaces where they worked all day. A Tudor inventory made at Sutton Place in Surrey shows that the ‘lads’ of the kitchen slept in the same room as the household’s fool. The one place you didn’t sleep was a bedroom.

  So nearly everyone shared their sleeping space with numerous other people. You’ll often read that medieval people had no notion of privacy. Certainly it should not be assumed that it exists in every culture. In modern Japan, for example, privacy is much less important than in the West. Lacking their own word for the concept, the Japanese have adopted an English one, ‘praibashii’.

  Medieval lives were much more communal than those of today, but that’s not to say that they contained no notion of privacy at all. People still took the trouble to seek out private moments, such as the times when lord and lady lay curtained off in their four-poster bed, or when a courting couple walked out into the woods in merry Maytime, or when a person knelt in prayer in an oratory. The private book, the locked and private box containing personal treasures, or the private oratory were private places indeed, even if smaller or less accessible than a modern person might expect.

  On the other hand, there was, indeed, less ‘private life’. Society was structured so that one’s position in the hierarchy was obvious and explicit. There was a ‘Great Chain of Being’ extending down from God, through his angels, to the Archbishop of Canterbury and other notables such as dukes, before normal people got a look-in. But at least we lesser mortals could take comfort from being placed above the animals, the plants, and finally, the stones. Such a chain inevitably restricted people’s hopes of bettering their social position, but it also comforted them. Those higher up adopted airs of superiority, but they also had clear and pressing responsibilities towards those lower down.

  In this communal but strictly hierarchical world, literacy was rare; so, therefore, was diary-writing and introspection; so was time free from getting and making food. God, not the self, was the centre of the world. Understanding what it might have been like to inhabit such a mental world is the ultimate aim of historians’ efforts in researching and constructing medieval furniture and the rooms it stood in.

  Medieval beds for most people consisted of hay or straw (‘hitting the hay’ had a literal meaning) stuffed into a sack. These sacks might be made out of ‘ticking’, the rough striped cloth still used to cover mattresses today. A mattress might also be known as a ‘palliasse’, from ‘paille’, the French word for straw. John Russell in c.1452 gives instructions for making a bed for several sleepers, 9 ft long by 7 ft wide. He says you should collect ‘litter’ (presumably leaves, not crisp packets) to ‘stuff’ the mattress. Then the stuffing should be distributed evenly to remove the worst lumps. Each simple mattress should be ‘craftily trod … with wisps drawn out at feet and side’.

  It sounds rather uncomfortable, but presumably it was softer than the floor.

  And snuggling up together in a big bed was normal, indeed desirable, for warmth and security. A French phrase book for use by medieval travellers included the following useful expressions: ‘you are an ill bedfellow’, ‘you pull all the bed clothes’ and ‘you do nothing but kick about’. The sixteenth-century poet Andrew Barclay describes the horrible sounds that could be expected in a roomful of sleepers:

  Some buck and some babble, some cometh drunk to bed,

  Some brawl and some jangle, when they be beastly fed;

  Some laugh and some cry, each man will have his will,

  Some spew and some piss, not one of them is still.

  Never be they still till middle of the night,

  And then some brawleth, and for their beds fight.

  Because it was so easy to annoy or inconvenience your bedfellows, custom and etiquette developed about how to take your position in a communal bed. An observer of life in early-nineteenth-century rural Ireland noted that families lay down ‘in order, the eldest daughter next the wall farthest from the door, then all the sisters according to their ages, next the mother, father and sons in succession, then the strangers, whether the travelling pedlar or tailor or beggar’. Thus the unmarried girls were wisely kept as far as possible from the unmarried men, while husband and wife lay together in the middle.

  William Harrison’s is the best-known description of servants’ beds in the Elizabethan age: ‘if they had any sheets above them, it was well, for seldom had they any under their bodies, to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas’. Yet his comments must be taken with a pinch of salt because Harrison actually thought that a bit of discomfort was good for you. Like conservative commentators in all periods, he was bemoaning the fact that Englishmen had turned into softies, wanting all kinds of unmanly luxuries. Pillows, he said, were formerly ‘thought meet only for women in childbed’; how times had changed when even men wanted pillows, instead of making do with ‘a good round log under their heads’.

  But sleeping in the great hall wasn’t good enough for the actual blood family who owned the medieval manor house. The lord and lady might retire from the company of hoi polloi into an upstairs room adjoining the hall. Often it was called simply ‘the chamber’, sometimes the ‘bower’ or ‘solar’. (The ‘chamber’ was overseen by a special servant called the ‘chamberlain’.) In the chamber at Penshurst Place in Kent, one of Britain’s most complete surviving medieval houses, a peephole or squint gives a view down into the hall below so that the boss could see what his employees were getting up to. He literally ‘looked down’ upon his servants.

  The lord and lady’s chamber was a multifunctional place: home office, library,
living room and bedroom combined. But it almost certainly contained a proper wooden bed. It’s quite hard to work out exactly what these beds looked like because medieval artists usually ran into difficulties with the proportion or the scale. When we made a reconstruction of Edward I’s bed for the Medieval Palace at the Tower of London, our evidence included documents recording payment for its green posts painted with stars, and for chains to link the various parts together (plate 2). The contemporary illustration showing ‘The Conception of Merlin’ (plate 3) gave us a good idea about how to proceed. The bed was demountable because Edward I was constantly travelling round the country. His servants took it apart in order to transport it from castle to castle, and the chains held the whole thing together when it was reerected.

  We have another glimpse of the colour and grandeur of a late-medieval bed from Geoffrey Chaucer, who, at one stage in his career, was ‘Yeoman Valet to the King’s Chamber’. In this position he was responsible for bed-making, so he knew what he was talking about when he described a luxurious gold-and-black bed:

  … of downe of pure dovis white

  I wol yeve him a fethir bed,

  Rayid with gold, and right well cled

  In fine black satin d’outremere [from overseas].

  Even towards the end of the medieval period, though, grand beds carved in wood were still few and far between. A ‘pallet bed’ was most people’s accustomed lot. It was essentially a wooden box, perhaps with short legs, that could be easily carried from room to room as the number of servants or guests requiring accommodation ebbed and flowed. Pallet beds were so simple and practical they endured for centuries. At the Elizabethan Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, an inventory from 1601 shows that a folding bed was kept on the landing of the stairs for some poor soul, and that there was a pallet even in the scullery. The memoirs of a valet who worked at an Irish country house in the 1860s record similar sleeping arrangements, though by then they must have been exceedingly old-fashioned: ‘There were three or four beds in a room. Many of the men had folding or press beds here and there in the pantry and the hall.’