by Lucy Worsley
Conclusion: What We Can Learn from the Past
The palsy increases on my hand so that I am forced to leave off my diary – my phrase now is farewell for ever.
Last written words of Lady Sarah Cowper, 1716
This is the end of one story, but the beginning of another.
Today’s homes are warmer, more comfortable and easier to clean than ever before. But I believe that the next step in their evolutionary journey will be a strangely backward-seeming one, and that we still have much to learn from our ancestors’ houses. In a world where oil supplies are running out, the future of the home will be guided by lessons from the low-technology, pre-industrial past.
In Britain today, the current ‘Lifetime Homes’ legislation governing the design of new houses is curiously medieval in tone. It insists that, once again, rooms should be able to multitask. The living room must have space for a double bed in case its owner becomes incapacitated and can’t climb upstairs to bed. There must be room downstairs to install a lift to reach the bathroom if necessary. The age of specialised rooms, which reached its height in the nineteenth century, is long since over, and adaptability is returning to prominence.
When the oil runs out, we’ll see a return of the chimney (plate 41). The only truly sustainable sources of energy are the wind (hard to harness in urban areas), the sun and wood. Forests, if carefully cherished, could provide us with fuel for ever. ‘Biomass’, or wood-burning, stoves are already making a welcome return, and will grow increasingly popular as sources of domestic heat. The sun is also becoming more important in house design. Once upon a time, people selected sites with good ‘air’; now, well-thought-out houses are situated to minimise solar gain in summer, and to maximise it in winter. Most houses will need to face south, to accommodate heat-buffering conservatories and solar panels on sloping roofs, a change that will destroy our now-conventional street arrangements.
The return of the chimney serves another purpose as well, and examples can now be found even in modern buildings without fireplaces. It allows natural ventilation. It lifts stale air out of the house, just like the funnel does on a ship. Mechanical air conditioning uses valuable energy and will soon become simply unaffordable, but a simple chimney containing a heat-recovery unit allows fresh air in while retaining the heat from stale air going out.
Upon the medieval model, walls are getting thicker, for insulation – to keep warmth in – and, increasingly importantly, to keep heat out in a warming world. Windows will grow smaller once again, and houses will contain much less glass: not only because of the intrinsically high energy cost of the glass itself, but because it’s such a thermally inefficient material. I myself live in a tall glass tower, built in 1998, and must agree with Francis Bacon, who condemned the great glass-filled palaces of the Jacobean age. In a house ‘full of Glass’, he wrote, ‘one cannot tell where to become to be out of the Sun or Cold’.
We’ll also experience the return of the shutter: it’s the best way of keeping heat out of a house. Along with a hotter climate, we’ll also experience water shortages. Many homes have been put onto meters already, but the daily water consumption per person still runs in Britain today at an average of 160 litres. The government expects us to get down to eighty litres – the contents of just one deep bath – by the end of the decade, and that amount is to include toilet-flushing, cooking and cleaning, as well as washing the body. The simple earth or midden toilet has already been revived in the form of the ecologically sound composting loo. The reuse of ‘grey water’ (slightly dirty water) for jobs like flushing toilets will become standard, and water will become a much more valuable resource, just as it once was when you had to carry every drop into your house by hand. We’ll be growing as water-thrifty as the Victorians were with their average use of twenty litres a day.
There has already been a revival in the natural building materials of the past, breathable substances with low environmental footprints, like wood, wool insulation and lime mortar. In the last ten years, timber-framed houses have once again started to sprout up across Britain. We’ll likewise become more medieval in reusing, adapting and making additions to our houses. On an island short of space, it’s been calculated that we need to build 200,000 new homes each year to cope with population growth and family breakdown, and that’s not even taking possible net immigration into account. According to the Empty Homes Agency, there are currently 700,000 homes standing unused. One simple, indeed obvious, course of action would be to bring them up to date and get them back into occupation, just as people did in the past when resources were scarcer. Buildings today are seen almost as disposable and are not built to last. In the future much more importance will rightly be attached to the materials and energy invested in them.
Inside these new – or indeed old – homes, more time and effort will be spent on getting and keeping them clean. When antibiotics finally become ineffective, as seems likely in the next few decades, minor and indeed major illnesses could once again become things to be tolerated rather than avoided, and we won’t be able to rely upon detergents to destroy dirt. Elbow grease will be more highly valued, the skills of growing and preparing food will have to be relearned, and old-fashioned housewifery like Mrs Panton’s will return to prominence. The Victorian cook was a terrific recycler and wasted nothing.
Today’s builders and town planners are also interested in the notion that people don’t just inhabit houses, they live in ‘places’. Tudor towns were perfect examples of what planners seek: densely populated, walkable communities, in which rich and poor live in close proximity. In their markets local, seasonal food was available, just as it is in the phenomenon of the farmer’s market today.
Many argue that the twentieth century’s council estates have had disastrous social consequences. People in poverty feel, and indeed actually grow, poorer if forced to live in a sink estate, while the middle classes flee to their own leafy ghettoes outside city centres. A successful ‘place’ mixes up the different groups in society, forcing them to mingle and to look out for each other. In this sense, a great mansion like Hardwick Hall was successful social housing: in it Bess of Hardwick lived within metres of the dozens of people under her care. It was a life of huge inequality, but people were part of a common endeavour.
This sounds conservative, but it’s radically so. Today we live lives of vastly varying levels of luxury without really being aware of the alternative experiences of those above and below us in terms of wealth. We’ve spent too long inside our own snug homes, looking smugly out through the window at the world. There’s a sense in which children are now prisoners of the home, kept indoors by distrustful parents. We don’t know enough about our neighbours, and the dwindling of the natural resources which have fuelled our way of life since the eighteenth century will force us to change and to share more fairly both the work and the reward.
But change should not be a frightening thing. Throughout all the periods of history, people have thought their own age wildly novel, deeply violent and to be sinking into the utmost depravity; likely, in short, to herald the end of the world. It’s comforting to think that the world has not yet ended, and that the pleasures of home life are perennial:
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.
(Dr Johnson)
Acknowledgements
Although my name is on the cover of this book, I’ve written it as a mere dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. Not only must I acknowledge the historians who have gone before me, but also the researchers on the accompanying BBC TV series and the many experts I had the privilege of interviewing. As the work is based so much upon secondary sources, it seemed wiser to free the text of footnotes, yet it would be wrong to omit mentioning the works of other people upon which I have drawn. I wholeheartedly recommend the following books, of which full details are given in the bibliography below.
For medieval England, Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide (2008) was incredibly handy; equally so for the T
udor period was Alison Weir’s Henry VIII: King and Court (2002). For early modern women’s lives in the seventeenth century, I relied heavily upon Laura Gowing’s Common Bodies (2003) and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Good Wives (1983). Lisa Picard’s various books on the early modern period were vital; Don Herzog’s Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders was revelatory for the eighteenth century, as was Amanda Vickery’s Behind Closed Doors; and Judith Flanders’s excellent The Victorian House was absolutely essential.
For servants across all periods, Jeremy Musson’s Up and Down Stairs (2009) is the place to go, and for the topics of beds, bathrooms and heating you need Lawrence Wright’s three books first published in the 1960s. Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub (2007) is full of enjoyably disgusting details on dirt, and Julie Peakman on sex is to be highly recommended (Lascivious Bodies, 2004).
For particular chapters, Amanda Carson Banks on Birth Chairs, Midwives and Medicine (1999) was just as useful as Valerie Fildes on Wet Nursing (1988). A. Roger Ekirch’s 2001 theory about sleep, published in the American Historical Review, was entirely new to me. Keith Thomas’s 1994 essay on cleanliness was essential, as was Mark Blackwell’s 2004 article on tooth transplantation. David Eveleigh’s was the most reliable book on toilets (Bogs, Baths and Basins, 2002). Of the many books I consulted, Sarah Paston-Williams’s The Art of Dining (1993) was perhaps the most useful on food, and James Nicholls’s article ‘Drink, the British Disease?’ (2010) deserves special mention. Details were provided by all the other books in the bibliography as well.
I must also thank everyone who provided interviews for the book or films, or shared their expertise in other ways: Amanda Vickery, Adrian Tinniswood, Judith Flanders, Jane Pettigrew, David Adshead, Sally Dixon-Smith, Leila Mauro, Issidora Petrovich, Professor David Morgan, Alison Sim, Lesley Parker, Hannah Tiplady, Cathy Flower Bond, Victoria Bradley, Phil Banner, Dr Lesley Hall, Deirdre Murphy, Ray Tye, Ann Lawton, Joanna Marschner, Beryl Evans, Kris Gough, Jean Alden, Val Sambrook, Joanne and Kevin Massey, Angela Lee, Dominic Sandbrook, Andrew Barber, Andy Swain, Patricia Whittington Farrell, Sebastian Edwards, David Milne, Richard Hewlings, Peter Yorke, Sparkle Moore, Jasia Boelhouwer, Ivan Day, Peter Brears, Reena Suleman, Dr John Goodall, Maureen Dillon, Clive Aslet, Alex Jones, Charlotte Woodman, Janet Bradshaw, Mick Ricketts, Simon McCormack, Helen Bratt-Wyton, Tom Betteridge and Katherine Ibbett.
At Silver River, I’m ever so grateful to Daisy Goodwin, Deborah O’Conner, Sam Lawrence and Beccy Green in the office, and then to the If Walls Could Talk team itself: Caterina Turroni, Eleanor Scoones, James Greig, Harry Garne, Brendan Easton, Adam Toy, Huw Martin, Simon Mitchell, Adam Jackson, Fred Hart, James Cooper, and above all, Emma Hindley and Hugo MacGregor, series producer and director respectively. At the BBC, Martin Davidson and Cassian Harrison saw us through stalwartly from start to finish. At Faber, Julian Loose (my much-valued three-time editor), Anne Owen, Rebecca Pearson and all their colleagues have done me proud.
At home, my dearest Mark’s expertise as an architect helped make this book better. Finally, I dedicate my work to Ned Worsley. Not only did she bring me up to be interested in history and houses, but she also did the picture research. Thanks, Mum.
PICTURE CREDITS
In-text Illustrations
Pages 9, 52, 60, 79, 81, 87, 108, 126, 143, 147, 155, 164, 197, 200, 223, 240, 244, 263, 265, 267, 288, 304, 319: Private collection; page 23: Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; reproduced with permission; pages 24, 30, 34: Wellcome Library, London; page 46: From English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, C. Willett Cunnington (1937), Faber and Faber, London; page 49: V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London; pages 61, 152: Weidenfeld archives; page 89: © The British Library Board (7743.d.29); page 118: © Historic Royal Palaces; page 120: By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum; page 134: Library of Congress; page 161: Museum of London; page 170: Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health; page 193: Ceredigion Museum, Aberystwyth; page 213: © The British Library Board (1607/1716); pages 237, 314: © The British Museum; page 309: The British Library Board (1509/1462).
Colour Plates
Plate 1: © NTPL/Dennis Gilbert; plates 2, 4, 6, 10, 14, 34: © Historic Royal Palaces; plate 3: Bibliothèque Nationale de France; plate 5: By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London; plates 7, 13, 30, 32, 38: Private collection; plate 8: Wellcome Library, London; plate 9: Tate, London, 2009; plates 11, 18: © NTPL/Robert Morris; plates 12, 15, 17, 24, 26, 39: Silver River Productions UK; plate 16: Tate, London, 2009; plate 19: Beamish Museum Limited, Photographic Library; plate 20: By kind permission of the Laramie Plains Museum, Wyoming, USA; plate 21: © The British Library Board (Royal 16 F.II, f. 73); plate 22: Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel, Graphische Sammlung; plate 23: Ref. 67944 © NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel; plate 25: Ref. 143462 © NTPL/Nadia Mackenzie; plate 27: Ref. 20869 © NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel; plate 28: Ref. 5597 © NTPL/Michael Boys; plate 29: Norfolk Record Office, ref. MC 2105/1/1, PH3; plate 31: Science and Society Picture Library; plate 33: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (MS Douce 383, fol. 17r); plate 35: Reproduced by permission of York Civic Trust, Fairfax House, York; plate 36: Abergavenny Museum; plate 37: Ref. 151480 © NTPL/Nadia Mackenzie; plate 40: Centre for Local Studies at Darlington Library; plate 41: www.bioregional.com
Picture Section
1. The superlative state bed at Kedleston Hall, intended for a visiting king. Disappointingly for Nathaniel Curzon, who commissioned it, his sovereign never actually came to stay.
2. A recreation of Edward I’s bed at the Tower of London (top). Demountable, it would have been carried with the king as he travelled. Most medieval furniture was similarly portable, hence the French word ‘mobiliers’ or ‘removables’.
3. A depiction of the conception of the wizard Merlin (centre). This manuscript illustration showing Merlin’s mother’s bed was one of the sources for reconstructing Edward I’s.
4. Edward I’s oratory at the Tower of London. The forerunner of the closet, his oratory was perhaps the only room in which the king could expect to be alone.
5. This is the bed associated with the story of the ‘warming pan’. It was put about that James II’s son was born dead, and an imposter smuggled in using a warming pan. It’s probably untrue, as there were at least 51 people present at the birth in 1688.
6. Thanks to Shakespeare, the ‘Princes of the Tower’ are perhaps the best known victims of being ‘murdered in their beds’. They’re shown here in Delaroche’s historical painting of 1831.
7. A medieval Caesarian takes place in a woman’s bedchamber (top left).
8. Pregnant Jacobean ladies often had their portraits painted just before giving birth. If they died, their husbands and children would at least have a souvenir of a lost wife or mother.
9. The ‘Man-Mid-Wife’, a caricature of 1793. To the left is the new, masculine face of the birthing profession; to the right, his female predecessor. Before its medicalisation, childbirth was one of the few areas of domestic life where women were totally in charge.
10. Queen Victoria’s split drawers. Ladies first began to wear knickers in the nineteenth century. Early drawers were often split like this to facilitate the use of a chamber pot.
11. A bedroom in a working family’s ‘back-to-back’ house in Birmingham. Perhaps eight or nine family members would have been packed top-to-toe into two beds.
12. ‘Slumberdowns’ or ‘continental quilts’ revolutionised bedding, ending centuries of sheets and blankets. This 1970s Habitat catalogue shows another novelty: children placed at the heart of family life.
13. A public bathhouse. These places of pleasure were immensely popular in medieval cities. Used by both sexes simultaneously, they developed rather a dubious reputation. By the eighteenth century, a ‘bagnio’ was basically a brothel.
14. Queen Caroline, interested in medical innovations, pioneered the habit of bathing when it returned to fashion in the 1700s after centuries of being con
sidered dangerous. This is her bathroom at Hampton Court Palace.
15. The fishing pavilion at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (top left). Its lower storey houses a plunge pool for a cold dip, intended to cure ‘weakness of Erection, and a general disorder of the whole Codpiece Economy’.
16. A lady’s maid from the 1730s soaping her mistress’s linen (top right). The laundry-maids were the servants least supervised in any household, and the most fun.
17. 18, Folgate Street, Spitalfields, London. Built in the 1720s, townhouses like this would dominate the next two centuries. Their bedrooms were starting to become private places.
18. An earth closet, an enduring form of toilet. Without the need for water or plumbing, they were always the poor person’s choice, and are returning to favour once again in the form of today’s sustainable composting toilets.
19. In most workers’ homes, the kitchen was the bathroom, and the whole family took turns to use the same tub. It was easier ‘to throw the baby out with the bathwater’ than you might think. Families bathed eldest to youngest, and the water grew dirty and dark towards the end.
20. Pregnant women were advised to avoid the shower bath, as it ‘gives too great a shock, and may induce miscarriage’. Charles Dickens possessed a model aptly named ‘The Demon’.
21. Charles, duc d’Orleans, as a prisoner in the Tower of London. He occupies a grand medieval living room, with tiled floor, hangings on the walls, his attendants all standing while the duke is seated.
22. A later living room, but still with very little furniture, and that very portable. Queen Elizabeth I is receiving ambassadors. Her chair has arms and is placed under a canopy as a mark of her royalty.
23. The Long Gallery at Hardwick Hall. Its use was three-fold: for displaying portraits of relatives, for exercise and for private conversation. Eavesdroppers could not creep up unobserved in such a big room.