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Today your bedroom is the backstage area where you prepare for your performance in the theatre of the world.
The idea that you might sleep by yourself, in your own bed, in your own separate room, is really rather modern.
In the twentieth century, even the last two left the bedroom behind and went off to the hospital.
Lacking their own word for the concept, the Japanese have adopted an English one, ‘praibashii’.
Society was structured so that one’s position in the hierarchy was obvious and explicit.
so was time free from getting and making food.
medieval artists usually ran into difficulties with the proportion or the scale.
Pictures of pre-modern people in bed often show them in a curious half-sitting position.
no wonder, as fifty pounds of feathers had to be saved from the plucking of numerous geese.
Five minutes with Venus may mean a lifetime with Mercury.’)
He might have been a ghost performing the customary function of a hundred years ago.’
Wigs worn over a shaven head became the staple headgear of gentlemen:
The Tudors literally didn’t know what they looked like.
And it’s always been true that the conditions in which you relieve yourself reveal a huge amount about your social and economic status.
Oddly, the modern open-plan house represents a return to medieval times, when houses had a central, flexible and spacious hall. The difference lies in the absence of people: today a quarter of American households consist of just one person, and a further 50 per cent of them consist of couples living without children.
A staggering 31,968 people attended the funeral of the Bishop of London in 1303; many were paid to turn up.
Making these funerary figures was the origin of Madame Tussaud’s business.
For centuries people went to great lengths to avoid eating raw fruit or vegetables.
The notion that those in charge have the best seats is so powerful
Throughout the previous centuries it wasn’t just fear of fire that kept the kitchen so remote for so long. It was also a dread of smell.
People in the past could be shocked or transformed by a smell, something that rarely even registers in our sanitised world.
In lean, mean times no one found any type of food disgusting.
There’s no question that kitchens smelled bad in the past.
After eating, it was wiped clean on bread and then put away in a tie-on pocket or sheaf hung from the belt.
But forks did eventually catch on, and with their adoption the position of the diner’s napkin changed as well.
Water glasses were used not just for drinking but also for washing the fingers or teeth, and Tobias Smollett in 1766 complained how even polite people followed the ‘beastly’ custom of using their glasses to ‘spit, squirt and spew the filthy scouring of their gums’.
A dinner party for ten in Edwardian times, the heyday of dining à la Russe, might easily have involved five hundred separate pieces of cutlery and crockery.
The same creatures appear on the table with the French names used by the Norman masters who ate them: beef, mutton, pork, bacon and venison.
Kraut’ and ‘Boche’, two derogatory terms for Germans, both come from cabbages which Germans are supposed to love.)
The volumes consumed are impressive: each member of the garrison of Dover Castle, for example, was given a quart of wine a day in the fourteenth century.
