If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home

by Lucy Worsley

Once upon a time, life’s great questions were: would you be warm tonight and would you get something to eat? Under these circumstances, the central great hall of a medieval house was a wonderful place to be: safe, even if smoky, stinking and crowded.

Medieval lives were much more communal than those of today, but that’s not to say that they contained no notion of privacy at all.

Because it was so easy to annoy or inconvenience your bedfellows, custom and etiquette developed about how to take your position in a communal bed.

The lord and lady’s chamber was a multifunctional place: home office, library, living room and bedroom combined. But it almost certainly contained a proper wooden bed.

Pictures of pre-modern people in bed often show them in a curious half-sitting position. Propped up against pillows and bolsters, they look rather uncomfortable, and one wonders if they actually slept like that.

When the daughter of Lady Anne Clifford was nearly three, her maturity was measured with three changes in her daily life: she was put into a whalebone bodice, left free to walk without leading strings, and allowed to sleep in her mother’s bed. Sharing a bed was the action of a grown-up, not (as now) of a child.

The next step, in larger houses, would be the corridor: its appearance at the very end of the seventeenth century allowed every bedroom to become completely independent and private.

For the Victorian upper classes, it would be unthinkable for a husband and wife with a large house to share a bedroom.

In 1826, coiled metal springs began to replace the old rope bed strings. Now too the wool and linen of earlier beds were replaced with a new wonder product whose profits powered Britain into the industrial age. The nineteenth century was an age of cotton:

The simplicity of most modern beds – just one mattress, just one covering – takes us back in a strange kind of circle to the medieval period, when a sack full of straw and a cloak were all one needed.

Only a very few ladies of ‘courage and resolution’ nursed their own children, it was said in the seventeenth century, and a nursing mother ‘is become as unfashionable and ungenteel as a gentleman that will not drink, swear and be profane’.

(Syphilis, known in England as ‘the French disease’, was called ‘the English disease’ in France. The other conditions thought abroad to be peculiarly English were flagellation, suicide and bronchitis.)

Next time you’re suffering from insomnia, just tell yourself that you’re experiencing a medieval sleep pattern and maybe you’ll relax enough to drop off.

As an engineering achievement, the New River ranks with the Channel Tunnel and the Great Western Railway. The feat of seventeenth-century surveying involved in getting the waterway to follow the correct contours is quite staggering.

One strange byway through the history of dentistry was a short-lived craze for live tooth transplantation, which took place in the comfort of your own home. The surgeon John Hunter (1728–93) was a pioneer of the new art of transplanting live organs from one body to another, and this included the teeth. A rich patient requiring teeth would buy from a pauper, and the transplantation from mouth to mouth would be carried out as quickly as possible with pliers and alcohol.

And it’s always been true that the conditions in which you relieve yourself reveal a huge amount about your social and economic status.

The little closets called garderobes were also literally places to ‘guard robes’ (keep clothes), because hanging your robe in an ammonia-rich environment like over the loo would kill the fleas.

Stoke-on-Trent, with its good local supplies of coal for firing the kilns, was becoming the toilet capital of the world.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the verb ‘to crap’ was in use long before Crapper’s company became widely known. ‘Crap’ was an old English word for rubbish, taken by the Pilgrim Fathers to America and used over there as a slang expression for ‘faeces’.

Victorian living rooms contained more stuff than ever before. Some of this clutter was familiar from living rooms of the past, reborn into modern form.

In 1712, wallpaper became popular enough to attract a special tax.

Wallpaper could even be hazardous to health: some inks contained arsenic, and when people went on holiday to the seaside, they felt better simply because they were no longer breathing in poisonous fumes from their drawing-room walls each day.

the celebrated dictum that your house should contain nothing ‘which you do not know to be useful or think to be beautiful’ (a phrase which Wilde himself had cribbed from the designer William Morris, 1834–96).

Changes to the banding of window tax helps to explain the mysteriously bricked-up windows in some Georgian city streets.

In fact, dust and cinders originally formed the main business of the dustman’s life before he branched out into collecting other forms of refuse too. Even today old dustbins might be found marked with the words ‘no hot ashes’.

The television appears to be a supremely modern device, but in fact it takes on the role of the community storyteller or minstrel. Sitting down after the day’s work to hear the news, a song sung or a story told is something we have in common with the users of a medieval great hall.

The idea that love is the best reason for marriage is quite a modern idea, and one quite specific to the Western world.

Unpleasant tastes were not remarked upon nearly so often as unpleasant smells or sights, and the word ‘disgust’ (literally ‘unpleasant to the taste’) only entered the English lexicon in the early seventeenth century.

The idea that the smells of cooking should be eliminated from the home remained in place throughout the nineteenth century, and only in the twentieth century did it begin to break down.

One amusing technological dead end, quickly abandoned, was the dog-turned spit, in which a specially bred ‘turnspit’ dog from Pembrokeshire was employed. Bred to have long bodies and short legs, these turnspit dogs looked a little like sausage dogs

The times for feeling peckish have shifted over the centuries. The main meal of the day has gradually migrated from mid-morning to mid-evening, while breakfast and tea are relative newcomers.

Higher up in society, though, the peculiar tradition persisted that an aristocrat somehow didn’t need a breakfast. It was considered a middle-class meal, necessary only to wage slaves, and males made light of it by refusing to sit down while eating it.

Medieval and Tudor people had spoons for their soup, knives for cutting their meat, but no forks. Each possessed his or her own knife.

In the eighteenth century, this curious custom of watching the royal family eat was still occasionally performed at Hampton Court.

The English had twenty religions and only one sauce. A French ambassador quoted by Launcelot Sturgeon, 1822

The clash of cultures between invader and invaded is clear even in eleventh-century food bills, in which living animals are named in the Anglo-Saxon language of the servants who reared them: cow, sheep, swine, boar and deer. 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.

So the possession of a set of saucepans became the goal of many a Georgian housewife. Indeed, a man’s gift of a pan to an unmarried woman suggested that matrimony was imminent.

Even the vigorous, religiously inspired teetotal movement of the nineteenth century failed to stamp out the demon drink: 1877 was the year in which more alcohol per head was drunk than before or since.

Before the dishwasher, any grand house – and indeed many modest dwellings too – had a special room for washing up.

Only when the people who’d formerly employed servants began to have to do their own washing up did they realise how bad their kitchens had been for their servants’ backs.

Today’s homes are warmer, more comfortable and easier to clean than ever before. But I believe that the next step in their evolutionary journey will be a strangely backward-seeming one, and that we still have much to learn from our ancestors’ houses. In a world where oil supplies are running out, the future of the home will be guided by lessons from the low-technology, pre-industrial past.

The age of specialised rooms, which reached its height in the nineteenth century, is long since over, and adaptability is returning to prominence.

This sounds conservative, but it’s radically so. Today we live lives of vastly varying levels of luxury without really being aware of the alternative experiences of those above and below us in terms of wealth.

The kitchen at the Carlyles’ house in Chelsea, both bedroom and workplace for their cook. Dank, dark and gas-lit, the Victorian kitchen crammed into the basement of a tall terraced house seemed worlds away from the airy drawing room above.

My house in Nottingham had a kitchen in the cellar. Modern kitchen was built as an extension on the back 😄