The Making of Home

by Judith Flanders

  The stereotypical classically proportioned, white, Greek-style plantation mansions of the south did not appear until the middle of the nineteenth century.* Instead small temporary houses, as in the north, were the pattern here too. One Virginia plantation was settled as early as 1619, and in the first two decades it saw as many as ten temporary houses built serially on the site. The 1630s house was just a single room with a cellar, 4.8 by 6 metres in size. Even towards the end of the seventeenth century, when some well-to-do planters began to amass land, their hall-and-parlour houses were frequently unplastered inside, with wood rather than brick chimneys, and few windows, which were generally unglazed. At this stage there was very limited slave housing, in the north or the south. Slaves and indentured servants still worked together, and lived in their owners’ houses, until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when both indentured servants and slaves began to be moved out of the main houses and into purpose-built quarters.

  Although the Great Rebuilding arrived later in the colonies than in England, when it did, it came pell-mell. Even so, inadequate working-class housing in the USA was not dissimilar to inadequate working-class housing in England: tiny, two-room, poorly constructed houses, or larger houses split up into single-room or shared lodgings. Average occupation in Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth century was seven people per room, while even when things improved somewhat, forty years later, 253 people were recorded living in thirty houses, without a single privy.

  By this time, among the better-off, many New England houses had begun to resemble what we today think of as traditional colonial style: a timber building with a centred front door, often with a one-storey L-shaped annexe beside the two storeys of the main building. The simplest form, without the extension, became known as the I-house (its popularity spread outwards from Indiana, Illinois and Iowa). In the south, one-and-a-half-storey houses, with a smaller upper floor built into the pitched roof, were more usual. Instead of the front door opening directly into the main living space, these houses now had a central hall. The room on one side of the hall was then divided into two, front and back, forming a dining room and a more private family space. In the eighteenth century, kitchens in bigger houses in the south tended to be moved away from the main house entirely, in part to keep the ‘big house’ cool, and also as a way of indicating that the races were now to be kept entirely apart whenever possible. In both north and south, the front rooms typically were considered the public side of the house, while the more private areas, for family or family and close friends, were behind.

  And also behind the big house, in the south, came the slave quarters. These varied in size and style across the slave-holding regions. Very few eighteenth-century slave houses survive, and the ones that do, as with pre-Great Rebuilding houses, were almost all upgraded in the nineteenth century. Most of the houses were built of logs, with beaten-earth floors, a single window, and sometimes a root-cellar covered by boards.* In the Chesapeake, as late as the start of the nineteenth century, log houses did not necessarily indicate lack of money or status. Many small landowners lived in log houses. But as successful plantation-owners rebuilt their houses in fashionable styles, gradually log houses became the marker of poverty, if not slavery. If the slave housing had more than one room, they were partitioned by boards, and an unfinished loft space reached by ladder might provide an extra sleeping area. The most common arrangement was two rooms, with a fireplace and chimney in between, in what was known as a saddlebag arrangement. Each room housed a family, and had its own front door. A double-pen house had another storey above; sometimes the two downstairs rooms served as a kitchen and sitting room, with two upstairs bedrooms, but more often the kitchen was in an outbuilding and one family lived in each of the four rooms, with numbers per house varying by plantation, but running up to a dozen people per room.

  These slave houses were situated at a distance from the big house, or were located among the service buildings – kitchens, dairy, smokehouse, laundry, stabling. When they were out of sight, more freedom was given to layout and construction methods, and then African cultural practices might be observed, as in the Chesapeake, where the west and central African custom of a swept dirt yard around the house flourished, a layout not used elsewhere in eighteenth-century Anglo-American building practices.

  Almost everyone in the colonies, from slaves and indentured servants to the wealthy, lived in houses of two rooms, in the northern colonies averaging six or seven people, when lodgers, servants and other unrelated residents were included. This was not the hardship of the new world, but simply a fact of life worldwide that the destruction of most small housing has occluded. In the seventeenth century in Paris, Henri IV’s architect, a man at the top of his trade, lived with his wife, his seven children and an unknown number of servants in two rooms. By the early eighteenth century in Britain, records show that four to seven people commonly occupied between three and seven rooms. This figure, however, is based on inventories, which by definition do not include the bulk of the working poor, who had no goods to inventory. The housing of the rural poor especially had become notably poorer. Enclosures swallowed up much of the land of small freeholders, while landowners, following new agricultural practices, increased their arable acres at the expense of their labourers, whose rented cottages and huts on what had previously been wasteland were now demolished. In addition, after 1795 the new Poor Laws compelled local parishes to bear the costs of maintaining the indigent; they therefore often demolished any unoccupied cottages to prevent impoverished incomers from settling. So four to seven people living in houses of just one to three rooms might be more accurate as an estimate for the entire population.

  This type of close living continued in the USA, and in the early nineteenth century, free Americans lived in households averaging six people (slaves were not enumerated with the families, so in the south there were more in each house, but how many more is unknown). In Europe, by contrast, household numbers began to decline by the end of the eighteenth century. By 1801 households were already smaller, at about five per household. (As a comparison, in 2012 the European average was 2.4 residents per household.) Many families continued to share houses, and sharing was expected more generally: visitors in taverns or inns expected to share their rooms, and also the beds in them, with strangers.

  Houses in the past not only had fewer rooms on average than houses from the twentieth century, but, as importantly, the rooms they had were used differently than ours are today. In the Middle Ages, great families kept open house, with the lord and his family habitually spending their time in the hall together with their servants, their tenants and any other dependants. Gradually, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, depending on location, the family and particularly valued guests removed themselves from the hubbub of the hall to eat and be entertained in a separate chamber. Privacy was a withdrawal, the privation of the presence of the master of the household. Privacy and the home were entwined. Der Geheime in German from the fifteenth century meant an advisor, a confidant, and swiftly came to refer to what in English courts were called privy counsellors. As ‘privy’ in English indicated the link to privacy, so der Geheime in German indicated the link to home, deriving as it did from the root Heim: someone who advised privately was a home-advisor.

  It took centuries for this idea to unfurl fully. For most of recorded history, even the wealthy performed many actions in public, as a matter of course, that today we regard as private. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, courtesy books, the precursors to the housewives’ guides of the nineteenth century, became popular among the elite. These books were written by men for men (or boys) as instruction manuals for elevated living: they described the comportment of the perfect aristocrat, the man whose acquired refinement and social grace – his high birth was a given – made him a leader of society. The rules laid down in previous times are useful for historians, for by telling us what should not be done, they actually reveal what was commonly being done: no
one repeats rules for behaviour that never, or rarely, occurs. Although the books were primarily guides to morality, they concerned themselves with physical behaviour as well: a gentleman did not scratch in public, or touch his nose or ears at the table, or gobble his food, or pick his teeth with his knife, or spit. That these prohibitions were printed again and again suggests that many gentlemen did in fact do all of these things. And if we trace the changes to the precepts in these books over the years, we can see how first attitudes changed, and then after a time behaviour followed. The books dating from the sixteenth century openly discuss bodily functions – urinating, defecating, breaking wind. Erasmus, in On Civility in Children (1530), for example, tells young gentlemen how to behave when (not if) they come upon a friend urinating. By the early eighteenth century, many books still mention bodily functions, but there is no longer any suggestion that one gentleman might see another performing any of them. They have become private acts. And by the end of that century, they have become so private that the updated editions of the same books don’t mention them at all. Physical separation – bodily privacy – had not previously been valued. Now having spaces for these acts which had come to be considered private was not only of value, it was considered strange not to want them.

  The idea of privacy came slowly, and to different segments of each population at different times, in both house and home countries. It was in the seventeenth century, in France, that concepts of privacy around lavatories first appear. The French kings had performed their lavatorial functions in public, as they had every other aspect of their daily life, until 1684, when Louis XIV had a curtain put around his close-stool. Yet even now the notion that this was a private act was still incomplete. A few decades later one of the sons of Mme de Montespan, the king’s mistress, proposed moving a water-closet into a separate building entirely. The king’s response was terse: ‘Worthless idea … useless.’ Yet even a curtain had created more privacy than the bulk of the population, living five or six in one or two rooms, could ever imagine. The relatively new urban middle-class housing in the Netherlands sometimes had a small area of one room closed off to form a cupboard that contained a bench with a hole in it over a cesspool; more often the Dutch used portable close-stools, which were located throughout the house, or sat next to the bed, as they did in England.

  Other areas of the house that are today considered private were historically no less public. In 1665, when Pepys paid a call on the wife of Sir William Batten, his superior at the Navy Board, he ‘found a great many women with her in her chamber, merry … where my Lady Pen flung me down upon the bed, and herself and others, one after another, upon me, and very merry we were’. Pepys in his working life was often at odds with Batten, and was a social inferior to these ladies. Yet the bedroom was a perfectly ordinary place for him to be received, and the bed just a place to sit. The upper reaches of merchant society in the Netherlands displayed their expensive four-poster beds, heavily hung with equally expensive fabrics, in their reception rooms, as in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434; see plate section, no. 8). The opening up of trade routes and the consequent greater availability of fine textiles for some time further increased the public display of beds, making it possible for the rich too to show off a house’s wealth as previously only royalty and the aristocracy had done.

  This was not simply a consequence of living in small spaces: it was a state of mind. Royalty had long expected the elite to attend their levees, literally their rising from bed. Less formal moments were still public by modern standards. Mme de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV, undressed and slept in the room where the king and his ministers were meeting. The aristocracy’s ceremonial occasions were no less public. In 1710, the Duc de Luynes and his wife as a matter of course received the formal visits paid to congratulate them on their marriage from their bed. The beds of the great were part of the architectural presentation of their houses. Ham House, on the outskirts of London, was one of England’s most forward-looking architectural and decorative projects. In the 1650s, the main withdrawing-room, where guests congregated after dinner, held a large bed, and a suite of furniture, two armchairs and ten folding chairs to match the bed’s embroidered hangings. The bed was thus decoratively as much a part of the room as the chairs the guests sat on. In aristocratic households in both France and Italy until the middle of the eighteenth century, a parade bedroom was a reception room that had an alcove with a bed separated from the rest of the room by a railing. The area on the reception-room side of the railing was called the ruelle or corsello, the ‘little street’, indicating that that was the side where visitors were received.

  Over the centuries small gestures towards privacy had been made. In Renaissance Italy, the new urban palazzi still had beds in the great reception rooms, but by the fifteenth century those beds were frequently for show purposes, and a second, more withdrawn room had another bed for actually sleeping in. Yet even here, bedrooms were used by the women of the household for daytime socializing and for meals. It was in the eighteenth century, in the home countries, that ideas began to change, and beds began to be relocated to more private sleeping spaces. And as this move was made, the beds themselves began to alter in appearance. Great beds for reception rooms had had headboards but no footboards, so the occupants could be seen by as many people as possible when they received in public. North of the Alps, cupboard or wall beds, which had long been in use by the less wealthy, blocked draughts by having only one (curtained) side open, the remaining three being inset into the walls. Freestanding beds now had footboards added, and they were turned lengthways against the wall, to give more protection from draughts than curtains on all three sides did, as well as creating an increased sense of privacy. (Thomas Jefferson saw these new beds when he served as the US minister to France between 1785 and 1789, and was so taken with them that he ordered no fewer than nine to go home with him to Virginia.)

  In house countries, bedrooms as reception rooms survived. In 1813, a watercolour of the bedroom of the Duchesse de Montebello shows her receiving the Empress Marie-Louise and Bonaparte’s doctor – he is carrying his hat and stick, so is apparently paying a formal call, not treating her. In much smaller, more bourgeois spaces, too, this continued. A (probably) Austrian interior of the 1850s shows a bed with curtains, which could be drawn across one end of the room, while the rest of the room is furnished as a boudoir, with a desk, a canterbury for sheet music, a chaise-longue, cabinet, four armchairs and a sofa, plus an easel displaying a painting: a stage-set for the lady of the house to receive her visitors.

  In Britain, such an arrangement had already become unimaginable in the previous century. Bedrooms were now both entirely private spaces and also gendered ones, creating a sense of mutual incomprehension across the Channel. A Frenchman reported to his compatriots that in England, ‘The lady’s bedchamber is a sanctuary which no stranger is permitted to enter. It would be an act of the greatest possible indecorum to go into it, unless the visitor were upon a very familiar footing’, while Horace Walpole related how, on his sister’s visit to France, when she asked ‘for the Lord knows what utensil [possibly a chamber-pot], the footman of the house came and showed it her himself’. The French servants, a scandalized Walpole continued, had even come ‘into her bedchamber in person’ instead of handing the items to her own servants, as would have been the case in England, to maintain that buffer-zone of privacy.

  Walpole’s sense that the bedroom was an inviolable private space was now a general expectation among the upper classes to which he and his sister, the children of Robert Walpole, often referred to as Britain’s first prime minister, belonged. Eighteenth-century French architects designed houses for their equivalently high-born clients to reinforce perceptions of status and hierarchy: the layout and the decoration were announcements of their owners’ importance to the rooms’ visitors. While the English and Scottish clients of their contemporaries, Robert Adam and his brother John, also expected to have their position in society reinf
orced in their architecture, what dominated these architects’ discussion was very different from that of their French colleagues. Unlike them, the brothers spoke neither of status nor of society in their writings, concentrating instead on function, on convenience, enjoyment and the habits of daily life. What would a household’s residents do in each room, they inquired, and how might the room best be arranged to facilitate those activities? The Adams brothers’ clients were at the pinnacle of society, but a handbook written by a Norwich stonemason, to advise the provincial middle classes who were building their own new houses, was little different in attitude, if not in resources: ‘Every Man has some favourite Aim in view, be it Study, Business, or Pleasure’, and therefore ‘the internal Parts [of a house should] be made to suit the Temper, Genius, and Convenience of the Inhabitant’.

  The major conceptual leap that had been made was not a matter of the number of rooms in a house. It was rather one of living in a new fashion, one where daily activities were separated by function – eating and sleeping, or cooking and washing – or by gender – boys and girls – or quality – masters and servants – or generation – parents and children – and each separate function, or gender, or quality, or generation, was given its own special space. This idea is now seen as so normal it is hard to remember things were ever organized differently, but it was the fifteenth century before even a small gesture was made towards this idea in some parts of the world. In Renaissance Italy some of the new city-states saw city palazzi built around courtyards, in which rooms were situated together by use: dining and public reception rooms on one side, private reception rooms, a gallery and library facing them, with, in the linking wings, more private family rooms facing a service wing. In the first half of the sixteenth century, further isolated examples among the great appeared sporadically. The Château de Chambord, on the Loire, was designed by an Italian architect with four self-contained apartments of four rooms each – one large room for receiving, two smaller ones for more private times, and a closet for the most private. (This became a common French domestic arrangement until the nineteenth century.)