At Home

by Bill Bryson

  • CHAPTER III •

  THE HALL

  I

  No room has fallen further in history than the hall. Now a place to wipe feet and hang hats, once it was the most important room in the house. Indeed, for a long time it was the house. How it came to this curious pass is a story that goes back to the very beginnings of England and a time, sixteen hundred years ago, when boatloads of people from mainland Europe came ashore and began, in an entirely mysterious way, to take over. We know remarkably little about who these people were, and the little we do know often makes no sense, but it was with them that the history of England and the modern house begins.

  As conventionally related, events were straightforward: in AD 410, their empire collapsing, the Romans withdrew from Britain in haste and confusion, and Germanic tribes—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes of a thousand schoolbooks—swarmed in to take their place. It seems, however, that much of that may not be so.

  First, the invaders didn’t necessarily swarm. By one estimate, perhaps as few as ten thousand outsiders moved into Britain in the century after the Romans left—an average of only one hundred people a year. Most historians think that is much too small a figure, though none can put a more certain number in its place. Nor, come to that, can anyone say how many native Britons were there to receive or oppose the invaders. The number is variously put at between 1.5 million and 5 million—in itself a vivid demonstration of just how comprehensively vague a period we are dealing with here—but what seems nearly certain is that the invaders were very considerably outnumbered by those they conquered.

  Why the vanquished Britons couldn’t find the means or spirit to resist more effectively is a deep mystery. They were, after all, giving up a great deal. For almost four centuries they had been part of the mightiest civilization on Earth and had enjoyed benefits—running water, central heating, good communications, orderly governments, hot baths—with which their rough conquerors were uncomfortable or unacquainted. It is difficult to conceive the sense of indignity that the natives must have felt at finding themselves overrun by illiterate, unwashed pagans from the wooded fringes of Europe. Under the new regime they would give up nearly all their material advantages and not return to many of them for a thousand years.

  This was a period of Völkerwanderung, “the wandering of peoples,” when groups all across the ancient world—Huns, Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Magyars, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Alamanni, and more—developed a strange, seemingly unquenchable restlessness, and Britain’s invaders were clearly part of that. The only written account we have of what happened is that left by the monk known as the Venerable Bede, who was writing three centuries after the fact. It is Bede who tells us that the invading force was made up of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, but who they were exactly and how they related to one another is unknown.

  The Jutes are completely mysterious. They are usually presumed to have come from Denmark because of the presence there of the province called Jutland. But a problem pointed out by the historian F. M. Stenton is that Jutland got its name long after any Jutes had departed, and naming a territory after people who are no longer there would be an act unusual to the point of uniqueness. In any case, Jótar, the Scandinavian word from which Jutland is derived, doesn’t necessarily, or even plausibly, have anything to do with any group or race. Bede’s reference is in fact the only mention of Jutes anywhere, and he never cites them again. Some scholars think that the reference is an interlineation added by a later hand anyway and has nothing to do with Bede at all.

  The Angles are only a little less obscure. They do get mentioned from time to time in European texts, so at least we can be confident that they really existed, but nothing about them suggests any importance. If they were feared or admired, it was within very small circles. So it is more than slightly ironic that it was their name that came, more or less accidentally, to be attached to a country that they may only lightly have helped form.

  That leaves only the Saxons, who were unquestionably a presence on the continent—the existence in modern Germany of various Saxonys, Saxe-Coburgs, and the like attests to that—though not a particularly mighty one either, it seems. The best Stenton can say for them is that they were “the least obscure” of the three. Compared with the Goths sacking Rome or the Vandals sweeping over Spain, these were pretty marginal people. Britain, it seems, was conquered by farmers, not warriors.

  The invaders brought almost nothing that was new—just a language and their own DNA. No aspect of their technology or mode of living offered even a moderate improvement over what existed already. They can’t have been well liked. They don’t seem to have been very impressive. Yet somehow they made such a profound impact that their culture remains with us, more than a millennium and a half later, in the most extraordinary and fundamental ways. We may know nothing of their beliefs, but we still pay homage to three of their gods—Tiw, Woden, and Thor—in the names of our three middle weekdays, and eternally commemorate Woden’s wife, Frig, every Friday. That’s quite a line of attachment.

  They simply obliterated the existing culture. The Romans had been in Britain for 367 years and the Celts for at least a thousand, yet now it was as if they had never been. Nothing like this happened elsewhere. When the Romans left Gaul and Spain, life went on much as before. The inhabitants continued to speak their own versions of Latin, which were already evolving into modern French and Spanish. Government continued. Business thrived. Coins circulated. Society’s structures were maintained. In Britain, however, the Romans left barely five words and the Celts no more than twenty, mostly geographical terms to describe features specific to the British landscape. Crag, for instance, is a Celtic word, and so is torr, meaning a rocky outcrop.

  After the Romans withdrew, some Celts fled to France and founded Brittany. Some no doubt fought and were slain or enslaved. But the greater number seem simply to have accepted the invasion as an unhappy fact and adjusted their lives accordingly. “It didn’t have to involve a lot of slaughter or bloodshed,” my friend Brian Ayers, the former county archaeologist for Norfolk, told me one time as we stood looking at the field beyond my house. “Probably one day you would just look out in your field and see there were twenty people camped there, and gradually it would dawn on you that they weren’t about to go away, that they were taking your land from you. There were no doubt some bloody clashes here and there, but on the whole I think it was just a matter of the existing people learning to adjust to dramatically changed circumstances.”

  There are various accounts of battles—one at Crecgan Ford (a place of uncertain locale) was said to have left four thousand Britons dead—and legend has of course left us tales of the valiant resistance of King Arthur and his men, but legend is all there is. Nothing in the archaeological record indicates wholesale slaughter or populations fleeing as if before a storm. Not only were the invaders not mighty warriors, they weren’t even very good hunters, as far as can be told. All the archaeological evidence shows that from the moment of arrival they lived off domesticated animals and did virtually no hunting. Farming appears to have continued without interruption, too. From what the record shows, the transition seems to have been as smooth as a change of shift in a factory. That can’t have been the case surely, but what really happened we will never know. This became a time without history. Britain was no longer just at the end of the known world; now it was beyond it.

  Even what we can know, from archaeology, is often hard to fathom. For one thing, the newcomers declined to live in Roman houses even though the Roman houses were soundly built, superior to anything they had had at home, and there for the taking. Instead they erected far more basic structures, often right alongside abandoned Roman villas. They didn’t use Roman towns either. For three hundred years, London stood mostly empty.

  On the continent the Germanic peoples had commonly lived in longhouses—the “classic” peasant dwelling in which humans live at one end and livestock at the other—but the incomers abandoned those, too, f
or the next six hundred years. No one knows why. Instead they dotted the landscape with strange little structures known as grubenhäuser—literally “pit houses”—though there are sound reasons to doubt that they were houses at all. A grubenhaus consisted simply of a sloping pit, about a foot and a half deep, over which a small building was erected. For the first two centuries of Anglo-Saxon occupation, these were the most numerous and seemingly important new structures in the country. Many archaeologists think that a floor was laid across the pit, making it into a shallow cellar, though for what purpose is hard to say. The two most common theories are that the pits were for storage, the thought being that the cool air below would better preserve perishables, or that they were designed to improve air circulation and keep the floorboards from rotting. But the effort of excavating the holes—some were hewn straight out of bedrock—seems patently disproportionate to any possible benefits to air flow, and anyway it’s thought exceedingly unlikely that better air circulation would have brought either of the theorized results.

  The first grubenhaus wasn’t found until 1921—remarkably late considering how numerous these structures are now known to be—during an excavation at Sutton Courtenay (now in Oxfordshire, then in Berkshire). The discoverer was Edward Thurlow Leeds of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and frankly he didn’t like what he saw at all. People who lived in them had led “a semi-troglodytic existence” so squalid that “it inspires disbelief in modern minds,” Professor Leeds all but sputtered in a monograph of 1936. The occupants, he continued, lived “amid a filthy litter of broken bones, of food and shattered pottery … in almost as primitive a condition as can be imagined. They had no regard for cleanliness, and were content to throw the remains of a meal into the furthest corner of the hut and leave it there.” Leeds seems to have seen grubenhäuser almost as a betrayal of civilization.

  For nearly thirty years this view held sway, but gradually authorities began to question whether people really had lived in these odd little structures. For one thing, they were awfully small—only about seven feet by ten, typically—which would make a very snug house even for the meanest peasants, particularly with a fire burning. One grubenhaus had a floor area that was nine feet across, of which just over seven feet was occupied by a hearth, leaving no room at all for people. So perhaps they weren’t habitations at all, but workshops or storage sheds, though why they required a subterranean aspect may well permanently remain a mystery.

  Fortunately, the newcomers—the English, as we may as well call them from now on—brought a second kind of building with them, much less numerous but ultimately far more important. These buildings were much larger than grubenhäuser, but that was about as much as could be said for them. They were simply large barnlike spaces with an open hearth in the middle. The word for this kind of structure was already old in 410, and it now became one of the first words in English: hall.

  Practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together—“a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,” as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.

  Every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family—they were literally familiar, to use the word in its original sense. In the most commanding (and usually least drafty) position in the hall was a raised platform called a dais, where the owner and his family ate—a practice recalled by the high tables still found in colleges and boarding schools that have (or sometimes simply wish to project) a sense of long tradition. The head of the household was the husband—a compound term meaning literally “householder” or “house owner.” His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner.

  Even the very grandest homes had only three or four interior spaces—the hall itself, a kitchen, and perhaps one or two side chambers, known variously as bowers, parlors, or chambers, where the head of the house could retire to conduct private business. By the ninth or tenth century, there was often a chapel, too, though this tended to be used as much for business as for worship. Sometimes these private rooms were built on two stories, with the upper—called a solar—reached by a ladder or very basic stairway. Solar sounds sunny and light, but in fact the name was merely an adaptation of solive, the French word for floor joist or beam. Solars were simply rooms perched on joists, and for a long time they were the only upstairs room that most houses afforded. Often they were barely more than storerooms. So little did people think of rooms in the modern sense that the word room, with the meaning of an enclosed chamber or distinct space, isn’t recorded in English until the time of the Tudors.

  Society consisted principally of freemen, serfs, and slaves. Upon the death of a serf the lord was entitled to take a small personal possession, such as an article of clothing, as a kind of death duty. Often peasants only owned one main item of apparel, a type of loose gown known as a cotta (which eventually evolved into the modern coat). The fact that that was the best that a peasant had to offer, and that the lord of the manor would want it, tells you about all you need to know about the quality of medieval life at many levels. Serfdom was a form of permanent bondage to a particular lord, and often it was offered as a religious declaration—an act that must have dismayed more than a few offspring, for serfdom, once declared, extended in perpetuity to all the declaring party’s descendants. The principal effect of serfdom was to remove the holder’s freedom to move elsewhere or marry outside the estate. But serfs could still become prosperous. In the late medieval period, one in twenty owned fifty acres or more—substantial holdings for the time. By contrast, freemen, known as ceorls, had freedom in principle but often were too poor to exercise it.

  Slaves, often rivals captured in wartime, were pretty numerous—one estate listed in the Domesday Book (the land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086) had more than seventy of them. However, slavery from the ninth to eleventh centuries in England was not quite the kind of dehumanizing bondage we think of from more modern times, as in the American South, for instance. Although slaves were property and could be sold—and for quite a lot: a healthy male slave was worth eight oxen—slaves were able to own property, marry, and move about freely within the community. The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

  Medieval estates were often highly fragmented. One eleventh-century thegn (or thane, that is, a free retainer) named Wulfric had seventy-two properties all over England, and even smaller estates tended to be scattered. Medieval households were, in consequence, forever on the move. They were also often very large. Royal households could easily have five hundred servants and retainers, and important peers and prelates were unlikely to have less than a hundred. With numbers so substantial, it was as easy to take the household to food as it was to bring food to the household, so motion was more or less constant, and everything was designed to be mobile (which is why, not incidentally, the French and Italian words for furniture are meubles and mobilia, respectively). So furniture tended to be sparing, portable, and starkly utilitarian, “treated more as equipment than as prized personal possessions,” to quote the architect and author Witold Rybczynski.

  Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids—to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted out to get at things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time—till the 1600s—before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into c
hests of drawers.

  In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strewn with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,” as the Dutch theologian and traveler Desiderius Erasmus rather crisply summarized in 1524. New layers of rushes were laid down twice a year normally, but the old accretions were seldom removed, so that, Erasmus added glumly, “the substratum may be unmolested for twenty years.” The floors were in effect a very large nest, much appreciated by insects and furtive rodents, and a perfect incubator for plague. Yet a deep pile of flooring was generally a sign of prestige. It was common among the French to say of a rich man that he was “waist deep in straw.”

  Bare earth floors remained the norm in much of rural Britain and Ireland until the twentieth century. “The ‘ground floor’ was justly named,” as the historian James Ayres has put it. Even after wood or tile floors began to grow common in superior homes, at about the time of William Shakespeare, carpets were too precious to be placed underfoot. They were hung on the walls or laid over tables. Often, however, they were kept in chests and brought out only to impress special visitors.

  Dining tables were simply boards laid across trestles, and cupboards were just what the name says—plain boards on which cups and other vessels could be arrayed. But there weren’t many of those. Glass vessels were rare, and diners were generally expected to share with a neighbor. Eventually cupboards were incorporated into rather more ornate dressers, which have nothing to do with clothing but rather with the preparation, or dressing, of food.

  In humbler dwellings, matters were generally about as simple as they could be. The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders and why an honest person—someone who keeps his hands visible at all times—is said to be aboveboard.