by Bill Bryson
Seating was on plain benches—in French, bancs, from which comes banquet. Until the 1600s, chairs were rare—the word chair itself dates only from about 1300—and were designed not to be comfortable but to impute authority. Even now, of course, the person in charge of a meeting chairs it, and a person in charge of a company is the chairman of the board—a term that additionally, and a little oddly, recalls the dining habits of medieval peasants.
Medieval banquets show people eating all kinds of foods that are no longer eaten. Birds especially featured. Eagles, herons, peacocks, sparrows, larks, finches, swans, and almost all other feathered creatures were widely consumed. This wasn’t so much because swans and other birds were fantastically delicious—they weren’t; that’s why we don’t eat them now—but rather because other, better meats weren’t available. Beef, mutton, and lamb were hardly eaten at all for a thousand years because the animals they came from were needed for their fleeces, manure, or muscle power and thus were much too valuable to kill.
A medieval banquet (photo credit 3.1)
Even had meat been freely available, it was forbidden much of the time. Medieval diners had to accommodate three fish days a week, plus forty days of Lent and many other religious days when land-based flesh was forbidden. The total number of days of dietary restriction varied over time, but at its peak nearly half the days of the year were “lean” days, as they were known. There was hardly a fish or other swimming thing that wasn’t consumed. The kitchen accounts for the Bishop of Hereford show his household eating herring, cod, haddock, salmon, pike, bream, mackerel, barr, ling, hake, roach, eels, lampreys, stockfish, tench, trout, minnows, gudgeon, gurnet, and a few others—more than two dozen types altogether. Also widely eaten were barbel, dograves, dace, and even porpoise. For much of the medieval period the largest source of animal protein for most people was smoked herring. Until the time of Henry VIII, failing to observe fish days was punishable by death, at least in theory. Fish days were abandoned after the break with Rome, but were restored by Elizabeth in the interests of supporting the British fishing fleet. The church was keen to keep the fish days, too, not so much because of any religious conviction as because it had developed a lucrative sideline in selling dispensations.
After an evening meal, the inhabitants of the medieval hall had no bedrooms in which to retire. We “make a bed” today because in the Middle Ages that is essentially what you did—you rolled out a cloth sleeping pallet or heaped a pile of straw, found a cloak or blanket and fashioned whatever comfort you could. Sleeping arrangements appear to have remained relaxed for a long time. The plot of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales hinges on the miller’s daughter getting into the wrong bed in her own home, something she could hardly do if she slept in the same place every night. Until well into the seventeenth century, bed meant only the mattress and what it was stuffed with; for the frame and its contents there was the separate word bedstead.
Household inventories into the Elizabethan period show that people placed great attachment to beds and bedding, with kitchen equipment following behind. Only then did general household furniture make it onto inventories, and then generally in vague terms like “a few tables and some benches.” People, it seems, simply were not that attached to their furniture, in much the way that we are not emotionally attached to our appliances. We wouldn’t want to be without them, of course, but they are not treasured heirlooms. One other thing people recorded with care was, somewhat surprisingly, window glass. Other than in churches and a few wealthy homes, window glass was a rarity well into the 1600s. Eleanor Godfrey, in The Development of English Glassmaking, 1560–1640, notes how in 1590 an alderman in Doncaster left his house to his wife but the windows to his son. The owners of Alnwick Castle from the same period always had their windows taken out and stored when they were away to minimize the risk of breakage.
Even in the largest houses generally only the windows in the most important rooms had glass in them. All the others were covered with shutters. Lower down the economic scale, windows remained rare until quite late. Even glaziers rarely had glass windows in their own homes at the time William Shakespeare was born, in 1564; by the time of his death half a century later, that had changed somewhat, though not completely. Most middle-class homes had glass in about half the rooms by then.
In even the best homes comfort was in short supply. It really is extraordinary how long it took people to achieve even the most elemental levels of comfort. There was one good reason for it: life was tough. Throughout the Middle Ages, a good deal of every life was devoted simply to surviving. Famine was common. The medieval world was a world without reserves; when harvests were poor, as they were about one year in four on average, hunger was immediate. When crops failed altogether, starvation inevitably followed. England suffered especially catastrophic harvests in 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292, and 1311, and then an unrelievedly murderous stretch from 1315 to 1319. And this was of course on top of plagues and other illnesses that swept away millions. People condemned to short lives and chronic hardship are perhaps unlikely to worry overmuch about decor. But even allowing for all that, there was just a great, strange slowness to strive for even modest levels of comfort. Roof holes, for instance, let smoke escape, but they also let in rain and drafts until somebody finally, belatedly invented a lantern structure with louvered slats that allowed smoke to escape but kept out rain, birds, and wind. It was a marvelous invention, but by the time it was thought of, in the fourteenth century, chimneys were already coming in and louvered caps were not needed.
Beyond that, we know practically nothing about household interiors before the middle of the Middle Ages. In fact, according to the furniture historian Edward Lucie-Smith, we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago. Almost no furniture survives from before 1300 or so, and illustrations in manuscripts or paintings are scarce and contradictory. Furniture historians are so starved of fact that they must even trawl through nursery rhymes. It is often written that a kind of medieval footstool was called a tuffet—a presumption based entirely on the venerable line “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet.” In fact, the only place the word appears in historic English is in the nursery rhyme itself. If tuffets ever actually existed, they are not otherwise recorded.
All this applies to the homes of the comparatively well-to-do, but two things need to be borne in mind: superior homes were not necessarily all that superior, and inferior homes were not necessarily all that bad. Grander homes, on the whole, weren’t more complex structures, they just had bigger halls.
About the houses themselves we often know even less because hardly anything survives aboveground from the earlier periods of settlement. Anglo-Saxons were extremely attached to timber as a construction material, so much so that timbran was their generic term for a building, but unfortunately it is in the nature of wood to rot and almost none of it remains. In the whole of Britain, as far as can be told, just one door survives from the Anglo-Saxon period—a battered oak door in an outer vestibule at Westminster Abbey, which escaped attention until the summer of 2005, when it was realized that it was 950 years old and thus the oldest known door in the country.
A question worth considering is how you can tell how old a door is anyway. The answer lies in dendrochronology—the scientific counting of tree rings. Tree rings give a very precise guide, each marking a year, and so all together form a kind of woody fingerprint. If you have a piece of timber whose age is certain, you can use the patterns of rings on it to match and date other pieces of wood from the same period. To get back centuries you simply find overlapping patterns. If you have a tree that lived from 1850 to 1910 and another that lived from 1890 to 1970, say, they should show overlapping patterns from 1890 to 1910, the period when they were both alive. By building up a library of ring sequences, you can go back a long way.
In Britain, it is lucky that so much was built from oak because that is the only British tree that provides clear, usable e
vidence. But even the best woods present problems. No two trees will ever have quite the same pattern. One may have narrower rings than another because it grew in shade or had more competition at ground level or a poorer water supply. In practice you need a huge supply of tree-ring sequences to provide a reliable database, and you must make many ingenious statistical adjustments to get an accurate reading—and for this you need the magical theorem of the Reverend Thomas Bayes, mentioned in Chapter I.
By taking a sample of wood about the thickness of a pencil and applying all the aforementioned tests, scientists worked out that the door at Westminster Abbey was made from the wood of a tree that was felled between 1032 and 1064, just before the Norman conquest, so at the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period. And that solitary door is very nearly all that has survived.*
With so little to go on, there is plenty of room for argument. Jane Grenville, in her scholarly and definitive work Medieval Housing, provides an arresting pair of illustrations showing how two archaeological teams, using the same information, envisioned the appearance of a longhouse at Wharram Percy, a lost medieval village in Yorkshire. One illustration shows a strikingly plain, basic dwelling, with walls made of mud or clunch (a composite of mud and dung) and a roof of grass or sod. The other shows a much sturdier and more sophisticated cruck-framed construction in which hefty beams have been fitted together with skill and care. The simple fact is that archaeological evidence shows mostly how buildings met the ground, not how they looked.
For a very long time it was believed that medieval peasant houses were little more than primitive huts—the kind of frail, twiggy structures that get blown down by wolves in fairy tales. The feeling was that they were unlikely to have lasted more than a single generation. Grenville quotes one scholar who felt confident enough to assert that the houses of common people were “of uniformly poor quality throughout the whole of England” right up to the time of the Tudors—quite a sweeping statement, and a wrong one, it appears. The evidence now increasingly indicates that common people of the Middle Ages, and probably long before, could have good houses if they wanted them. One clue is the growth in the late Middle Ages of specialized trades, such as thatching, carpentry, and daubing. Doors increasingly had locks, too—a clear indication that buildings and their contents were valued. Above all, cottages were evolving into a multiplicity of types—“full Wealden,” “half Wealden,” “double pile,” “rear outshut,” “H-shape,” “open hall,” “cross-passage with cow house,” “cross-passage without cow house,” and so on. The differences may seem trivial, but for the people who lived in them, they are what gave their houses character and distinction.
One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke. An open hearth had certain clear advantages—it radiated heat in all directions and allowed people to sit around it on all four sides—but it was also like having a permanent bonfire in the middle of one’s living room. Smoke went wherever passing drafts directed it—and with many people coming and going, and all the windows glassless, every passing gust must have brought somebody a faceful of smoke—or otherwise rose up to the ceiling and hung thickly until it leaked out a hole in the roof.
What was needed was something that would seem, on the face of it, straightforward: a practical chimney. This took a long time to happen, however, not because of a lack of will, but because of the technical challenges. A roaring fire in a large fireplace generates a lot of heat and needs a sound flue and backstop (or reredos, to use the architectural term), and no one knew how to make good ones before about 1330 (when the word chimney is first recorded in English). Fireplaces had been brought to England by the Normans, but they weren’t impressive. They were made simply by scooping out part of the thick walls of Norman castles and poking a hole through the outer wall to let smoke escape. They weren’t greatly used outside castles because they drew air poorly and so didn’t make good fires or generate much heat. Also, they couldn’t be safely used in timber houses, which is what most houses were.
What made the difference eventually was the development of good bricks, which can deal with heat better over the long term than almost any rock can. Chimneys also permitted a change in fuel to coal—which was timely because Britain’s wood supplies were rapidly dwindling. Because coal smoke was acrid and poisonous, it needed to be contained within a fireplace—or chimneypiece, as they were first known (to distinguish them from open hearths, also known as fireplaces)—where fumes and smoke could be directed up a flue. This made for a cleaner house but a filthier world outside, and that, as we shall see, had very significant consequences for the look and design of homes.
Meanwhile, not everyone was happy with the loss of open hearths. Many people missed the drifting smoke and were convinced they had been healthier when kept “well kippered in wood smoke,” as one observer put it. As late as 1577, a William Harrison insisted that in the days of open fires “our heads did never ake.” Smoke in the roof space discouraged nesting birds and was believed to strengthen timbers. Above all, people complained that they weren’t nearly as warm as before, which was true. Because fireplaces were so inefficient, they were constantly enlarged. Some became so enormous that they were built with benches in them, letting people sit inside the fireplace, almost the only place in the house where they could be really warm.
Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.
II
The upward expansion of houses changed everything. Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves. The first step, generally, was to build a grand new room upstairs called the great chamber, where the lord and his family did all the things they had done in the hall before—eat, sleep, loll, and play—but without so many other people about, returning to the great hall below only for banquets and other special occasions. Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants.
The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.
As houses sprouted wings and spread, and domestic arrangements grew more complex, words were created or adapted to describe all the new room types: study, bedchamber, privy chamber, closet, oratory (for a place of prayer), parlor, withdrawing chamber, and library (in a domestic as opposed to institutional sense) all date from the fourteenth century or a little earlier. Others soon followed: gallery, long gallery, presence chamber, tiring (for attiring) chamber, salon or saloon, apartment, lodgings, suite, and estude. “How widely different is all this from the ancient custom of the whole household living by day and night in the great hall!” wrote J. Alfred Gotch in a moment of rare exuberance. One new type not mentioned by Gotch was boudoir, literally “a room to sulk in,” which from its earliest days was associated with sexual intrigue.
Even with the growth of comparative privacy, life remained much more communal and exposed than today. Toilets often had multiple seats, for ease of conversation, and paintings regularly showed couples in bed or bath in an attitude of casual friskiness while attendants waited on them and their friends sat amiably nearby, playing cards or conversing but comfortably within sight and earshot.
The uses to which all the new rooms in the house were put were not for a long time so rigorously segregated as now. All rooms were in some sense living rooms. Italian blueprints from the time of the Renaissance, and beyond, didn’t label rooms for type. People moved around the house looking for shade or sunlight and often took their furniture with them, so rooms, when they were labeled at all, were generally marked mattina (for morning use) or sera (for afternoon). Much the sam
e sort of informality obtained in England. A bedchamber was used not just for sleeping but also for taking private meals and entertaining favored visitors. In fact, the bedroom became so much a place of general resort that it was necessary to devise more private spaces beyond. (Bedroom was first used by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in about 1590, though he meant it only in the sense of space within a bed. As a word to describe a dedicated sleeping chamber, bedroom didn’t become common until the following century.)
The small rooms off the bedchamber were used for every sort of private purpose, from defecation to assignation, so the words for these rooms have come down to us in a curiously fractured fashion. Closet, Mark Girouard tells us in Life in the English Country House, had “a long and honourable history before descending to final ignominy as a large cupboard or a room for the housemaid’s sink and mops.” Originally, a closet was more like a study than a storeroom. Cabinet, originally a diminutive form of cabin, by the mid-1500s had come to signify a case where valuables were kept. Very soon after that—in only a decade or so—it had come to mean the room itself. The French, as so often, refined the original concept into a variety of room types, so that by the eighteenth century a large French château might have a cabinet de compagnie, a cabinet d’assemblée, a cabinet de proprieté, and a cabinet de toilette in addition to a plain cabinet.
In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers—the innermost sanctum where the most private meetings could take place. Then it made one of those bizarre leaps that words sometimes make and came to describe (by 1605) not just where the king met with his ministers, but the collective term for the ministers themselves. This explains why this one word now describes both the most intimate and exalted group of advisers in government and the shelved recess in the bathroom where we keep Ex-Lax and the like.