by Bill Bryson
Prince Albert died ten years after the Great Exhibition, and the great Gothic spaceship known as the Albert Memorial was built just west of where the Crystal Palace had stood, at a whopping cost of £120,000, or about half as much again as the Crystal Palace itself had cost. There today Albert sits enthroned under an enormous gilded canopy. On his lap he holds a book: the catalog of the Great Exhibition. All that remains of the original Crystal Palace itself is a pair of large decorative wrought-iron gates that once guarded the ticket checkpoint at the entrance to Paxton’s exhibition hall and now, unnoticed, mark a small stretch of boundary between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.
The golden age of the country clergy ended abruptly, too. The 1870s saw the onset of a savage agricultural depression, which hit landowners and all on whom their prosperity depended. In six years, one hundred thousand farmers and farmworkers left the land. In our parish the population fell by almost half in fifteen years. By the mid-1880s, the ratable value of the entire parish was just £1,713—barely £100 more than it had cost Thomas Marsham to build his rectory three decades earlier.
By the end of the century the average English clergyman’s income was less than half what it had been fifty years before. Adjusted for purchasing power, it was an even more miserable pittance. A country parish ceased being an attractive sinecure. Many clergymen could no longer afford to marry. Those who had brains and opportunity took their talents elsewhere. By the turn of the century, writes David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, “the best minds of a generation were outside the church rather than within.”
In 1899, the Marsham family estate was broken up and sold, and that ended the family’s benign and dominant relationship with the county. Curiously, it was something unexpected that happened in the kitchen that was in large part responsible for the devastating agricultural depression of the 1870s and beyond. We’ll get to that story presently, but before we enter the house and begin our tour, we might perhaps take a few pages to consider the unexpectedly pertinent question of why people live in houses at all.
* Comparing values of 1851 with those of today is not straightforward because those values can be calculated using many different measures, and things that might be expensive now (farmland, live-in servants) were often comparatively cheap then and vice versa. So, depending on which method of comparison is used, Mr. Marsham's £500 of 1851 would be worth anything from £40,000 (about $60,000), using retail price indexes as the basis for calculation, to well over £1 million ($1.6 million), using a measure of gross domestic product. An average of the six most common measures gives a figure of about £200,000 ($320,000). Per capita income in Britain in 1851 was just slightly over £20.
* The ship was called the Resurgam, meaning “I shall rise again,” which proved to be a slightly unfortunate name, as the ship sank in a storm in the Irish Sea three months after it was launched in 1878 and never did rise again. Neither, come to that, did Garrett. Discouraged by his experiences, he gave up preaching and inventing, and moved to Florida, where he took up farming. That, too, proved a disaster, and he finished his disappointing and relentlessly downhill life as a foot soldier in the American army during the Spanish-American War before dying of tuberculosis, impoverished and forgotten, in New York City in 1902.
* The Koh-i-Noor had become one of the crown jewels two years earlier, after being liberated (or looted, depending on your perspective) by the British army during its conquest of the Punjab in India. Most people found the Koh-i-Noor a letdown. Although huge at nearly 200 carats, it had been poorly cut and was disappointingly deficient in luster. After the Great Exhibition, it was boldly trimmed to a more sparkly 109 carats and set into the royal crown.
* Rotten boroughs were those where a member of Parliament could be elected by a small number of people, as at Bute in Scotland, where just one resident out of fourteen thousand had the right to vote and so obviously could elect himself. Pocket boroughs were constituencies that had no inhabitants at all but that retained a seat in Parliament, which could be sold or given away (to an unemployable son, say) by the person who controlled it. The most celebrated pocket borough was Dunwich, a coastal town in Suffolk that had once been a great port—the third biggest in England—but was washed into the sea during a storm in 1286. Despite its conspicuous nonexistence, it was represented in Parliament until 1832 by a succession of privileged nonentities.
• CHAPTER II •
THE SETTING
I
If we were somehow to bring the Reverend Thomas Marsham back to life and restore him to his rectory, what would probably most surprise him—apart from being here at all, of course—would be to find that the house has become, as it were, invisible. Today it stands in a dense private woodland that gives it a determinedly secluded air, but in 1851, when it was brand-new, it would have stood starkly in open countryside, a pile of red bricks in a bare field.
In most other respects, however, and allowing for a little aging and the introduction of some electrical wires and a television aerial, it remains largely unchanged from 1851. It is now, as it was then, manifestly a house. It looks the way a house should look. It has a homely air.
So it is perhaps slightly surprising to reflect that nothing about this house, or any house, is inevitable. Everything had to be thought of—doors, windows, chimneys, stairs—and a good deal of that, as we are about to see, took far more time and experimentation than you might ever have thought.
Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it. This aura of homeliness is, it turns out, extremely ancient, and the first hint of that remarkable fact was uncovered by chance just at the time the Old Rectory was being built, in the winter of 1850, when a mighty storm blew into Britain.
It was one of the worst storms in decades and it caused widespread devastation. At the Goodwin Sands, off the Kent coast, five ships were dashed to pieces with the loss of all hands. Off Worthing, in Sussex, eleven men going to the aid of a distressed ship drowned when their lifeboat was upended by a giant wave. At a place called Kilkee, an Irish sailing ship named Edmund, bound for America, lost its steering, and passengers and crew watched helplessly as the ship drifted onto rocks and was smashed to splinters. Ninety-six people drowned, though a few managed to struggle ashore, including one elderly lady clinging to the back of the brave captain, whose name was Wilson and who was, the Illustrated London News noted with grim satisfaction, English. Altogether more than two hundred people lost their lives in waters around the British Isles that night.
In London at the half-built Crystal Palace rising in Hyde Park, newly installed glass panes lifted and banged but stayed in place, and the building itself withstood the battering winds with barely a groan, much to the relief of Joseph Paxton, who had promised that it was stormproof but appreciated the confirmation.
Seven hundred miles to the north, on the Orkney Islands of Scotland, the storm raged for two days. At a place called the Bay o’ Skaill the gale stripped the grassy covering off a large irregular knoll, of a type known locally as a howie, which had stood as a landmark for as long as anyone had known it. When at last the storm cleared and the islanders came upon their newly reconfigured beach, they were astounded to find that where the howie had stood were now revealed the remains of a compact, ancient stone village, roofless but otherwise marvelously intact. Consisting of nine houses, all still holding many of their original contents, the village dates from five thousand years ago. It is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, older than all but a handful of built structures on Earth. It is immensely rare and important. It is known as Skara Brae.
Thanks to its completeness and preservation, Skara Brae offers a scene of intimate, almost eerie domesticity. Nowhere is it possible to get a more potent sense of household life in the Stone Age. As everyone remarks, it is a
s if the inhabitants have only just left. What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry. The houses are all of one size and built to the same plan, suggesting a kind of genial commune rather than a conventional tribal hierarchy. Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area—dubbed “the marketplace” by early archaeologists—where tasks could be done in a social setting.
Life appears to have been pretty good for the Skara Brae residents. They had jewelry and pottery. They grew wheat and barley, and enjoyed bounteous harvests of shellfish and fish, including a codfish that weighed seventy-five pounds. They kept cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs. The one thing they lacked was wood. They burned seaweed for warmth, and seaweed makes a most reluctant fuel, but that chronic challenge for them was good news for us. Had they been able to build their houses of wood, nothing would remain of them and Skara Brae would have gone forever unimagined.
It is impossible to overstate Skara Brae’s rarity and value. Prehistoric Europe was a largely empty place. As few as two thousand people may have lived in the whole of the British Isles fifteen thousand years ago. By the time of Skara Brae, the number had risen to perhaps twenty thousand, but that is still just one person per three thousand acres, so to come across any sign of Neolithic life is always an excitement. It would have been pretty exciting even then.
Skara Brae offered some oddities, too. One dwelling, standing slightly apart from the others, could be bolted only from the outside, indicating that anyone within was being confined, which rather mars the impression of a society of universal serenity. Why it was necessary to detain someone in such a small community is obviously a question that cannot be answered over such a distance of time. Also slightly mystifying are the water-tight storage containers found in each dwelling. The common explanation is that these were used to hold limpets, a hard-shelled mollusk that abounds in the vicinity, but why anyone would want a stock of fresh limpets near at hand is a question not easy to answer even with the luxury of conjecture, for limpets are a terrible food, providing only about one calorie apiece and so rubbery as to be practically inedible anyway; they actually take more energy to chew than they return in the form of nutrition.
We don’t know anything at all about these people—where they came from, what language they spoke, what led them to settle on such a lonesome outpost on the treeless edge of Europe—but from all the evidence it appears that Skara Brae enjoyed six hundred years of uninterrupted comfort and tranquillity. Then one day in about 2500 BC the occupants vanished—quite suddenly, it seems. In the passageway outside one dwelling ornamental beads, almost certainly precious to the owner, were found scattered, suggesting that a necklace had broken and the owner had been too panicked or harried to retrieve them. Why Skara Brae’s happy idyll came to a sudden end is, like so much else, impossible to say.
Remarkably, after Skara Brae’s discovery more than three quarters of a century passed before anyone got around to having a good look at it. William Watt, from nearby Skaill House, salvaged a few items; more horrifyingly, a later house party, armed with spades and other implements, emerged from Skaill House and cheerfully plundered the site one weekend in 1913, taking away goodness knows what as souvenirs, but that was about all the attention Skara Brae attracted. Then in 1924 another storm swept a section of one of the houses into the sea, after which it was decided that the site should be formally examined and made secure. The job fell to an interestingly odd but brilliant Australian-born Marxist professor from the University of Edinburgh who loathed fieldwork and didn’t really like going outside at all if he could possibly help it. His name was Vere Gordon Childe.
Childe wasn’t a trained archaeologist. Few people in the early 1920s were. He had read classics and philology at the University of Sydney, where he had also developed a deep and abiding attachment to communism, a passion that blinded him to the excesses of Joseph Stalin but colored his archaeology in interesting and surprisingly productive ways. In 1914, he came to the University of Oxford as a graduate student, and there he began the reading and thinking that led to his becoming the foremost authority of his day on the lives and movements of early peoples. In 1927, the University of Edinburgh appointed him to the brand-new post of Abercrombie Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology. This made him the only academic archaeologist in Scotland, so when something like Skara Brae needed investigating the call went out to him. Thus it was in the summer of 1927 that Childe traveled north by train and boat to Orkney.
Vere Gordon Childe at Skara Brae, 1930 (photo credit 2.1)
Nearly every written description of Childe dwells almost lovingly on his oddness of manner and peculiar looks. His colleague Max Mallowan (now best remembered, when remembered at all, as the second husband of Agatha Christie) said he had a face “so ugly that it was painful to look at.” Another colleague recalled Childe as “tall, ungainly and ugly, eccentric in dress and often abrupt in manner [with a] curious and often alarming persona.” The few surviving photographs of Childe certainly confirm that he was no beauty—he was skinny and chinless, with squinting eyes behind owlish spectacles, and a mustache that looked as if it might at any moment stir to life and crawl away—but whatever unkind things people might say about the outside of his head, the inside was a place of golden splendor. Childe had a magnificent, retentive mind and an exceptional facility for languages. He could read at least a dozen, living and dead, which allowed him to scour texts both ancient and modern on any subject that interested him, and there was hardly a subject that didn’t. The combination of weird looks, mumbling diffidence, physical awkwardness, and intensely overpowering intellect was more than many people could take. One student recalled how in a single ostensibly sociable evening Childe had addressed those present in half a dozen languages, demonstrated how to do long division in Roman numerals, expounded critically upon the chemical basis of Bronze Age datings, and quoted lengthily from memory from a range of literary classics. Most people simply found him exhausting.
He wasn’t a born excavator, to put it mildly. A colleague, Stuart Piggott, noted almost with awe Childe’s “inability to appreciate the nature of archaeological evidence in the field, and the processes involved in its recovery, recognition and interpretation.” Nearly all his many books were based on reading rather than personal experience. Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand. In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.
Whatever his shortcomings of appearance and manner, he was unquestionably a force for good in archaeology. Over the course of three and a half decades he produced six hundred articles and books, popular as well as academic, including the best sellers Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942), which many later archaeologists said inspired them to take up the profession. Above all he was an original thinker, and at just the time that he was excavating at Skara Brae he had what was perhaps the single biggest and most original idea of twentieth-century archaeology.
The human past is traditionally divided into three very unequal epochs—the Paleolithic (or Old Stone Age), which ran from 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago; the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), covering the period of transition from hunter-gathering lifestyles to the widespread emergence of agriculture, from 10,000 to 6,000 years ago; and the Neolithic (New Stone Age), which covers the closing but extremely productive 2,000 years or so of prehistory, up to
the Bronze Age. Within each of these periods are many further subperiods—Olduwan, Mousterian, Gravettian, and so on—that are mostly of concern to specialists and needn’t distract us here.
The important thought to hold on to is that for the first 99 percent of our history as beings we didn’t do much of anything but procreate and survive. Then people all over the world discovered farming, irrigation, writing, architecture, government, and the other refinements of being that collectively add up to what we fondly call civilization. This has been many times described as the most momentous transformation in human history, and the first person who fully recognized and conceptualized the whole complex process was Vere Gordon Childe. He called it the Neolithic Revolution.
It remains one of the great mysteries of human development. Even now scientists can tell you where it happened and when, but not why. Almost certainly (well, we think almost certainly), it had something to do with some big changes in the weather. About twelve thousand years ago, the Earth began to warm quite rapidly; then for reasons unknown it plunged back into bitter cold for a thousand years or so—a kind of last gasp of the ice ages. This period is known to scientists as the Younger Dryas. (It was named for an arctic plant, the dryas, which is one of the first to recolonize land after an ice sheet withdraws. There was an Older Dryas period, too, but it wasn’t important for human development.) After ten further centuries of biting cold, the world warmed rapidly again and has stayed comparatively warm ever since. Almost everything we have done as advanced beings has been done in this brief spell of climatological glory.
The interesting thing about the Neolithic Revolution is that it happened all over the Earth, among people who could have no idea that others in distant places were doing precisely the same things. Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Mexico, and West Africa. Cities likewise emerged in six places—China, Eygpt, India, Mesopotamia, Central America, and the Andes. That all of these things happened all over, often without any possibility of shared contact, seems uncanny. As one historian has put it: “When Cortés landed in Mexico he found roads, canals, cities, palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, temples, peasants, artisans, armies, astronomers, merchants, sports, theatre, art, music, and books”—all invented quite independently of similar developments on other continents. And some of it is a little uncanny, to be sure. Dogs, for instance, were domesticated at much the same time in places as far apart as England, Siberia, and North America.