by Bill Bryson
Often this private room had a small cell or alcove off it, generally known as the privy but also called, among other things, jakes, latrine, draughts, place of easement, necessarium, garderobe, house of office, or gong. Whatever it was called, this room contained a bench with a hole in it, strategically positioned over a long drop into a moat or deep shaft. It is often supposed and sometimes written that, in a similar fashion to cabinet, the privy gave its name to the appurtenances of government in England, notably the Privy Seal and the Privy Council. In fact, those terms came to England with the Normans nearly two centuries before privy took on its lavatorial sense. It is true, however, that the person in charge of the royal privy was known as the groom of the stool, or stole, and over time advanced from being a cleaner of toilets to being the monarch’s trusted adviser.
The same process occurred with many other words. Wardrobe originally signified a room for storing apparel. Then it became successively a dressing room, a sleeping room, a privy, and finally a piece of furniture. Along the way it also collected the meaning of one’s full set of clothes.
To accommodate all the new room types, houses grew outward as well as upward. An entirely new type of house, known as the prodigy house, began to sprout and proliferate all over the countryside. Such houses were almost never less than three stories high and sometimes four, and they were often staggeringly immense. The most enormous of all was Knole in Kent, which grew and grew until it covered nearly four acres and incorporated 7 courtyards (one for each day of the week), 52 staircases (one for each week of the year), and 365 rooms (one for each day of the year), or so it has long been said.
Looking at these houses now you can sometimes see, in the most startling way, how the builders were learning as they went. A striking example is Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, which was built for the Countess of Shrewsbury—Bess of Hardwick, as she is always called—in 1591. Hardwick Hall was the marvel of its age and instantly became famous for its great expanses of windows, prompting the much quoted epigram “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.” To modern eyes, the windows are of a size and distribution that seem pretty close to normal, but they were such a dazzling novelty in 1591 that the architect (who is thought to have been Robert Smythson) didn’t actually know how to fit them all in. Some of the windows are in fact blanks hiding chimneys. Others are shared by rooms on separate floors. Some big rooms don’t have nearly enough windows, and some tiny rooms have little else. Only intermittently do the windows and the spaces they light actually match.
Bess filled the house with the finest array of silver, tapestries, paintings, and the like of any private house in England, yet the most striking thing to modern eyes is how bare and modest is the overall effect. The floors were covered in simple rush mats. The great gallery was 166 feet long but contained only three tables, a few straight-backed chairs and benches, and two mirrors (which in Elizabethan England were exceedingly precious treasures, more valuable than any paintings).
People didn’t just build enormous houses, they built lots of enormous houses. Part of what makes Hardwick Hall so remarkable is that there was already a perfectly good existing Hardwick Hall (which became known as Hardwick Old Hall), just across the grounds. Today it is a ruin, but it remained in use in Bess’s day and for another 150 years beyond.
Traditionally, the great house builders (and house accumulators) were monarchs. At the time of his death Henry VIII had no fewer than forty-two palaces. But his daughter Elizabeth cannily saw that it was much cheaper to visit others and let them absorb the costs of her travels, so she resurrected in a big way the venerable practice of making annual royal progresses. The queen was not in truth a great traveler—she never left England or even ventured very far within it—but she was a terrific visitor. Her annual progresses lasted eight to twelve weeks and took in about two dozen houses.
Royal progresses were nearly always greeted with a mixture of excitement and dread by those on whom the monarch called. On the one hand they provided unrivaled opportunities for preferment and social advancement, but on the other they were stupefyingly expensive. The royal household numbered up to about 1,500 people, and a good many of these—150 or so in the case of Elizabeth I—traveled with the royal personage on her annual pilgrimages. Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage, as well as some less salubrious surprises. After the court of Charles II departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors had left “their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars.”
Since a successful royal visit could pay big dividends, most hosts labored inventively and painstakingly to please the royal guest. Owners learned to provide elaborate masques and pageants as a very minimum, but many built boating lakes, added wings, or reconstructed whole landscapes in the hope of eliciting a small cry of pleasure from the royal lips. Gifts were lavished freely. A hapless courtier named Sir John Puckering gave Elizabeth a diamond-festooned silk fan, several loose jewels, a gown of rare splendor, and a pair of exceptionally fine virginals, then watched at their first dinner as Her Majesty admired the silver cutlery and a salt cellar and, without a word, dropped them into the royal handbag.
Even her most long-standing ministers learned to be hypersensitive to the queen’s pleasures. When Elizabeth complained of the distance to his country house in Lincolnshire, Lord Burghley bought and extended another at Waltham Cross, in London’s Home Counties. Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth’s lord chancellor, built a mighty edifice called Holdenby House expressly for receiving the queen. In the event, she never came, and Hatton died £18,000 in debt—a crushing burden, equivalent to about £9 million today.
Sometimes the builders of these houses didn’t have a great deal of choice. James I ordered the loyal but inconsequential Sir Francis Fane to rebuild Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire on a colossal scale so that he and the Duke of Buckingham, his lover, would have some rooms of suitable grandeur to saunter through en route to the bedroom.
The worst imposition of all was to be instructed to take on some costly, long-standing obligation to the crown. Such was the fate of Bess of Hardwick’s husband, the sixth Lord Shrewsbury. For sixteen years he was required to act as jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, which in effect meant maintaining the court of a small, fantastically disloyal state in his own home. We can only imagine his sinking heart as he saw a line of eighty horse-drawn wagons—enough to make a procession a third of a mile long—coming up his drive bearing the Scottish queen, fifty servants and secretaries, and all their possessions. In addition to housing and feeding this force of people, Shrewsbury had to maintain a private army to provide security. The costs and emotional strain ensured that his marriage to Bess was never a happy one—though it was probably never going to be a happy one anyway. Bess rather devoured men; Shrewsbury was her fourth husband, and her marriage to him was more of a business merger than a twining of hearts. Eventually, she accused him of conducting an affair with the Scottish queen—a dangerous charge whether or not a true one—and they separated. It was then that Bess began building one of the great houses of the age.
As life withdrew deeper and deeper into ever-larger houses, the hall lost its original purpose and became a mere entrance lobby with a staircase—a room to be received in and pass through on the way to more important spaces. Such was the case at Hardwick Hall (its name notwithstanding), where all the important rooms were upstairs. Never again would the hall be a room of any real significance. As early as 1663, the word was being used to describe any modest space, particularly an entrance or associated passageway. Perversely, at the same time its original sense was preserved and indeed extended to describe large, important spaces, particularly public ones: Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, town hall, study hall, and hall of fame, among many others.
Domestically, however,
the hall became and remains the most semantically demoted room in the home. At the Old Rectory, as in most homes these days, it is a shrunken vestibule, a small utilitarian square with cupboards and hooks, where we take off boots and hang jackets—a clear preliminary to the house itself. Most of us unconsciously acknowledge this fact by inviting arriving guests into our houses twice: once at the door when they are brought in from outside, and then again, after they have been divested of coats and hats, into the house proper with a hearty, more emphatic double cry of “Come in! Come in!”
And on that note, we can drop our outerwear here and step into the room where the house truly begins.
* The low doors of so many old European houses, on which those of us who are absent-minded tend to crack our heads, are low not because people were shorter and required less headroom in former times, as is commonly supposed. People in the distant past were not in fact all that small. Doors were small for the same reason windows were small: they were expensive.
• CHAPTER IV •
THE KITCHEN
I
In the summer of 1662, Samuel Pepys, then a rising young figure in the British Navy Office, invited his boss, Naval Commissioner Peter Pett, to dinner at his home on Seething Lane, near the Tower of London. Pepys was twenty-nine years old and presumably hoped to impress his superior. Instead, to his horror and dismay, he discovered that when his plate of sturgeon was set before him it had within it “many little worms creeping.”
Finding one’s food in an advanced state of animation was not a commonplace event even in Pepys’s day—he was truly mortified—but being at least a little uncertain about the freshness and integrity of food was a fairly usual condition. If it wasn’t rapidly decomposing from inadequate preservation, there was every chance that it was colored or bulked out with some dangerous and unappealing substances.
Almost nothing, it seems, escaped the devious wiles of food adulterers. Sugar and other expensive ingredients were often stretched with gypsum, plaster of paris, sand, dust, and other forms of daft, as such additives were collectively known. Butter reportedly was bulked out with tallow and lard. A tea drinker, according to various authorities, might unwittingly take in anything from sawdust to powdered sheep’s dung. One closely inspected shipment, Judith Flanders reports in The Victorian House, proved to be only slightly more than half tea; the rest was made up of sand and dirt. Sulphuric acid was added to vinegar for extra sharpness, chalk to milk, turpentine to gin. Arsenite of copper was used to make vegetables greener or to make jellies glisten. Lead chromate gave bakery products a golden glow and brought radiance to mustard. Lead acetate was added to drinks as a sweetener, and red lead somehow made Gloucester cheese lovelier to behold, if not safer to eat.
There was hardly a foodstuff, it seems, that couldn’t be improved or made more economical to the retailer through a little deceptive manipulation. Even cherries, Tobias Smollett reported, could be made to glisten afresh by being gently rolled around in the vendor’s mouth before being put on display. How many unsuspecting ladies of quality, he wondered, had enjoyed a plate of luscious cherries that had been “rolled and moistened between the filthy and, perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St Giles’s huckster”?
Bread seems to have been particularly a target. In his popular novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Smollett characterized London bread as a poisonous compound of “chalk, alum and bone-ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution,” but such charges were in fact already a commonplace by then and probably had been for a very long time, as evidenced by the line in “Jack and the Beanstalk”: “I’ll crush his bones to make my bread.” The earliest formal allegation of widespread bread adulteration yet found came in a book called Poison Detected: Or Frightful Truths, written anonymously in 1757 by “My Friend, a Physician,” who revealed on “very credible authority” that “sacks of old bones are not infrequently used by some of the Bakers” and that “the charnel houses of the dead, are raked to add filthiness to the food of the living.” Almost at the same time another, very similar book came out: The Nature of Bread, Honestly and Dishonestly Made, by Joseph Manning, M.D., who reported that it was common for bakers to add bean meal, chalk, white lead, slaked lime, and bone ash to every loaf they made.
These assertions are routinely reported as fact, even though it was demonstrated pretty conclusively over seventy years ago by Frederick A. Filby, in his classic work Food Adulteration (1934), that the claims could not possibly be true. Filby took the interesting and obvious step of baking loaves of bread using the accused adulterants in the manner and proportions described. In every case but one the bread was either as hard as concrete or failed to set at all, and nearly all the loaves smelled or tasted disgusting. Several needed more baking time than conventional loaves and so were actually more expensive to produce. Not one of the adulterated loaves was edible.
The fact of the matter is that bread is sensitive stuff: if you put foreign products into it in almost any quantity, people will notice. But then this could be said about most foodstuffs. It is hard to believe that anyone could drink a cup of tea and not notice that it was 50 percent iron filings. Although some adulteration doubtless did happen, particularly when it enhanced color or lent an appearance of freshness, most cases of claimed adulteration are likely to be either exceptional or untrue, and this is certainly the case with all the things said to be put into bread (with the single notable exception of alum, about which more in a moment).
It is hard to overemphasize just how important bread was to the English diet through the nineteenth century. For many people bread wasn’t just an important accompaniment to a meal, it was the meal. Up to 80 percent of all household expenditure, according to the bread historian Christian Petersen, was spent on food, and up to 80 percent of that went on bread. Even middle-class people spent as much as two-thirds of their income on food (compared with about one quarter today), of which a fairly high and sensitive portion was bread. For a poorer family, nearly every history tells us, the daily diet was likely to consist of a few ounces of tea and sugar, some vegetables, a slice or two of cheese, and just occasionally a very little meat. All the rest was bread.
Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra—the famous baker’s dozen.
Alum, however, is another matter. Alum is a chemical compound—technically a double sulfate—used as a fixative for dyes. (The formal term is a mordant.) It was also used as a clarifying agent in all kinds of industrial processes and for dressing leather. It provides excellent whitening for flour, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For a start, a very little alum goes a long way. Just three or four spoonfuls can whiten a 280-pound sack of flour, and such a dilute amount would harm no one. In fact, alum is added to foods and medicines even now. It is a regular constituent in baking powder and vaccines, and sometimes it is added to drinking water because of its clarifying properties. It actually made inferior grades of flour—flour that was perfectly good nutritionally but just not very attractive—acceptable to the masses and therefore allowed bakers to make more efficient use of their wheat. It was also added to flour for perfectly legitimate reasons as a drying agent.
It wasn’t always that foreign substances were introduced with the intention of bulking things up. Sometimes they just fell in. A parliamentary investigation of bakeries in 1862 found many of them filled “with masses of cobwebs, weighed down with flour dust that had accumulated upon them, and hanging in strips” ready to drop into any passing pot or tray. Insects and vermin scurried along walls and countertops. A sample of ice cream sold in
London in 1881 was found to contain human hair, cat hair, insects, cotton fibers, and several other insalubrious constituents, but this probably reflected a lack of hygiene rather than the fraudulent addition of bulking agents. In the same period, a London confectioner was fined “for colouring his sweets yellow with surplus pigment left over from painting his cart.” However, the very fact that these matters attracted the attention of newspapers indicates they were exceptional events rather than routine ones.
Humphry Clinker, a sprawling novel written in the form of a series of letters, paints such a vivid picture of life in eighteenth-century England that it is much quoted even now and almost certainly therefore has a lot to answer for. In one of its more colorful passages Smollett describes how milk was carried through the streets of London in open pails, into which plopped “spittle, snot and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, over-flowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s-sake, the spewings of infants … and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture.” What is easily overlooked is that the book was intended as satire, not as documentary. Smollett wasn’t even in England when he wrote it; he was slowly dying in Italy. (He died three months after its publication.)
All this isn’t to say that there wasn’t bad food about. There most certainly was. Infected and rotten meat was a particular problem. The filth of London’s Smithfield Market, the city’s principal meat exchange, was celebrated. One witness to a parliamentary investigation of 1828 said he saw “a cow’s carcass that was so rancid, the fat was no more than dripping yellow slime.” Animals driven in on the hoof from distant parts often arrived exhausted and sick, and didn’t get any better while there. Sheep reportedly were sometimes skinned while still alive. Many animals were covered with sores. Smithfield vendors, in fact, had a private name for bad meat: cag-mag, an abbreviation of two slang words, meaning “cheap crap.”