At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives—to being clean, warm, and well fed—that we forget how recent most of that is.

Britain also had its decennial census, which put the national population at a confidently precise 20,959,477. This was just 1.6 percent of the world total, but it is safe to say that nowhere was there a more rich and productive fraction. The 1.6 percent of people who were British produced half the world’s coal and iron, controlled nearly two-thirds of its shipping, and engaged in one-third of all trade.

London’s banks had more money on deposit than all the other financial centers of the world combined.

Britain led the world in virtually every measurable category. It was the richest, most innovative, most accomplished nation of the age—

Consisting of nine houses, all still holding many of their original contents, the village dates from five thousand years ago. It is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, older than all but a handful of built structures on Earth. It is immensely rare and important. It is known as Skara Brae.

Paleolithic (or Old Stone Age), which ran from 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago; the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), covering the period of transition from hunter-gathering lifestyles to the widespread emergence of agriculture, from 10,000 to 6,000 years ago; and the Neolithic (New Stone Age), which covers the closing but extremely productive 2,000 years or so of prehistory, up to the Bronze Age.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

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.

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.

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

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.

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 add...

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.

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.

Fish days were abandoned after the break with Rome, but were restored by Elizabeth in the interests of supporting the British fishing fleet.

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.

Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas.

One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only a small evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk—a sadly appropriate word here—of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn’t do us any good at all. The Ruskins, it turns out, were right.

The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit, or other nonleafy part.