At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

I had walked across a good part of this view with a friend named Brian Ayers. Brian had just retired as the county archaeologist, and may know more about the history and landscape of Norfolk than anyone alive. He had never been to our village church, and was eager to have a look. It is a handsome and ancient building, older than Notre Dame in Paris and about the same vintage as Chartres and Salisbury cathedrals. But Norfolk is full of medieval churches—it has 659 of them, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world—so any one is easily overlooked. “Have you ever noticed,” Brian asked as we stepped into the churchyard, “how country churches nearly always seem to be sinking into the ground?” He pointed out how this one stood in a slight depression, like a weight placed on a cushion. The church foundations were about three feet below the churchyard around it. “Do you know why that is?” I allowed, as I often do when following Brian around, that I had no idea. “Well, it isn’t because the church is sinking,” Brian said, smiling. “It’s because the churchyard has risen. How many people do you suppose are buried here?”

“Think about it. A country parish like this has an average of 250 people in it, which translates into roughly a thousand adult deaths per century, plus a few thousand more poor souls that didn’t make it to maturity. Multiply that by the number of centuries that the church has been there and you can see that what you have here is not eighty or a hundred burials, but probably something more on the order of, say, twenty thousand.” This was, bear in mind, just steps from my front door. “Twenty thousand?” I said.

“From here you can see into perhaps ten or twelve other parishes, so you are probably looking at roughly a quarter of a million burials right here in the immediate landscape—all in a place that has never been anything but quiet and rural, where nothing much has ever happened.” All this was Brian’s way of explaining how a bucolic, lightly populated county like Norfolk could produce twenty-seven thousand archaeological finds a year, more than any other county in England. “People have been dropping things here for a long time—since long before England was England.” He showed me a map of all the known archaeological finds in our parish. Nearly every field had yielded something—Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, Bronze Age graves, Viking farmsteads. Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant. To me that was, and remains, an amazement: the idea of a man in a toga, standing on what is now the edge of my land, patting himself all over, and realizing with consternation that he has lost his treasured keepsake, which then lay in the soil for seventeen or eighteen centuries—through endless generations of human activity; through the comings and goings of Saxons, Vikings, and Normans; through the rise of the English language, the birth of the English nation, the development of continuous monarchy and all the rest—before finally being picked up by a late-twentieth-century farm...

that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

Looking around my house, I was startled and somewhat appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, playing idly with the salt and pepper shakers, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea why, out of all the spices in the world, we have such an abiding attachment to those two. Why not pepper and cardamom, say, or salt and cinnamon? And why do forks have four tines and not three or five? There must be reasons for these things. Dressing, I wondered why all my suit jackets have a row of pointless buttons on every sleeve. I heard a reference on the radio to someone paying for room and board, and realized that when people talk about room and board, I have no idea what the board is that they are talking about. Suddenly the house seemed a place of mystery to me.

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. In fact, achieving these things took forever, and then they mostly came in a rush.

It had taken just five months to build. It was a miracle that it was built at all. Less than a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea. The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history’s attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card (as a way of encouraging people to use the new penny post).

It was a patently unachievable ambition, and for the next several months they patently failed to achieve it. In an open competition, 245 designs for the exhibition hall were submitted. All were rejected as unworkable. Facing disaster, the committee did what committees in desperate circumstances sometimes do: it commissioned another committee with a better title.

he invited Paxton to be head gardener at Chatsworth. Paxton accepted. He was twenty-two years old. It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He designed and installed the famous Emperor Fountain, which could send a jet of water 290 feet into the air—a feat of hydraulic engineering that has since been exceeded only once in Europe; built the largest rockery in the country; designed a new estate village; became the world’s leading expert on the dahlia; won prizes for producing the country’s finest melons, figs, peaches, and nectarines; and created an enormous tropical hothouse, known as the Great Stove, which covered an acre of ground and was so roomy within that Queen Victoria, on a visit in 1843, was able to tour it in a horse-drawn carriage. Through improved estate management, Paxton eliminated £1 million from the duke’s debts. With the duke’s blessing, he launched and ran two gardening magazines and a national daily newspaper, the Daily News, which was briefly edited by Charles Dickens.

Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes: the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing that people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of many period buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like windows. (It is sometimes rather a shame that they aren’t still.) The tax, sorely resented as “a tax on air and light,” meant that many servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live in airless rooms.

For the younger sons of peers and gentry, going into the church became one of the two default career moves (the other was joining the military), so often they brought family wealth to the position as well. Many livings also carried substantial income through rents of glebe lands, or farmland, that came with the appointment. Even the least privileged incumbents were generally well off. Jane Austen grew up in what she considered to be an embarrassingly deficient rectory at Steventon in Hampshire, but it had a drawing room, a kitchen, a parlor, a study, library, and seven bedrooms—hardly a hardship posting.

The role of country clergy was a remarkably loose one. Piety was not necessarily a requirement, or even an expectation. Ordination in the Church of England required a university degree, but most ministers read classics and didn’t study divinity at all, and so had no training in how to preach, provide inspiration or solace, or otherwise offer meaningful Christian support. Many didn’t even bother composing sermons but just bought a big book of prepared sermons and read one out once a week. Though no one intended it, the effect was to create a class of well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their hands. In consequence many of them began, quite spontaneously, to do remarkable things. Never before in history had a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.

Perhaps the most extraordinary clergyman of all was the Reverend Thomas Bayes, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, who lived from about 1701 to 1761. Bayes was by all accounts a shy and hopeless preacher, but a singularly gifted mathematician. He devised the mathematical equation that has come to be known as Bayes’s theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes’s theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions—or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called. It is a way of arriving at statistically reliable probabilities based on partial information. The most remarkable feature of Bayes’s theorem is that it had no practical applications without computers to do the necessary calculations, so in Bayes’s own day it was an interesting but fundamentally pointless exercise. Bayes evidently thought so little of his theorem that he didn’t bother to make it public. In 1763, two years after Bayes’s death, a friend sent it to the Royal Society in London, where it was published in the society’s Philosophical Transactions with the modest title of “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances.” In fact, it was a milestone in the history of mathematics. Today Bayes’s theorem is used in modeling climate change, predicting the behavior of stock markets, fixing radiocarbon dates, interpreting cosmological events, and doing much else where the interpretation of probabilities is an issue—and all because of the thoughtful jo...

A great many other clergymen didn’t produce great works but rather great children. John Dryden, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Thomas Hobbes, Oliver Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Horatio Nelson, the Brontë sisters, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Cecil Rhodes, and Lewis Carroll (who was himself ordained, though he never practiced) were all the offspring of parsons. Something of the disproportionate influence of the clergy can be found by doing a word search of the electronic version of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Enter rector and you get nearly 4,600 promptings; vicar yields 3,300 more. This compares with a decidedly more modest 338 for physicist, 492 for economist, 639 for inventor, and 741 for scientist. (Interestingly, these are not greatly larger than the number of entries called forth by entering the words philanderer, murderer, or insane, and are considerably outdistanced by eccentric, with 1,010 entries.)

Robert Marsham, was the inventor of phenology, the science (if it is not too much to call it that) of the relation between climate and periodic biological events—the first buds on trees, the first cuckoo of spring, and so on. You might think that that was something people would keep track of anyway, but in fact no one had, at least not systematically, and under Marsham’s influence it became a wildly popular and highly regarded pastime around the world. In America, Thomas Jefferson was a devoted follower. Even as president he found time to note the first and last appearances of thirty-seven types of fruit and vegetables in Washington markets, and had his agent at Monticello make similar observations there to see if the dates betrayed any significant climatological differences between the two places. When modern climatologists say that apple blossoms of spring are appearing three weeks earlier than formerly, and that sort of thing, often it is Robert Marsham’s records they are using as source material.

on the Orkney Islands of Scotland, the storm raged for two days. At a place called the Bay o’ Skaill the gale stripped the grassy covering off a large irregular knoll, of a type known locally as a howie, which had stood as a landmark for as long as anyone had known it. When at last the storm cleared and the islanders came upon their newly reconfigured beach, they were astounded to find that where the howie had stood were now revealed the remains of a compact, ancient stone village, roofless but otherwise marvelously intact. 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. Thanks to its completeness and preservation, Skara Brae offers a scene of intimate, almost eerie domesticity. Nowhere is it possible to get a more potent sense of household life in the Stone Age. As everyone remarks, it is as if the inhabitants have only just left.

These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry. The houses are all of one size and built to the same plan, suggesting a kind of genial commune rather than a conventional tribal hierarchy. Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area—dubbed “the marketplace” by early archaeologists—where tasks could be done in a social setting.

Nearly every written description of Childe dwells almost lovingly on his oddness of manner and peculiar looks. His colleague Max Mallowan (now best remembered, when remembered at all, as the second husband of Agatha Christie) said he had a face “so ugly that it was painful to look at.”

The important thought to hold on to is that for the first 99 percent of our history as beings we didn’t do much of anything but procreate and survive. Then people all over the world discovered farming, irrigation, writing, architecture, government, and the other refinements of being that collectively add up to what we fondly call civilization.

The interesting thing about the Neolithic Revolution is that it happened all over the Earth, among people who could have no idea that others in distant places were doing precisely the same things. Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Mexico, and West Africa. Cities likewise emerged in six places—China, Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, Central America, and the Andes. That all of these things happened all over, often without any possibility of shared contact, seems uncanny.

Agriculture started 11,500 years ago in the Levant, but 8,000 years ago in China and only a little over 5,000 years ago in most of the Americas. People had been living with domesticated animals for 4,000 years before it occurred to anyone to put the bigger of them to work pulling plows; Westerners used a clumsy, heavy, exceedingly inefficient straight-bladed plow for a further 2,000 years before someone introduced them to the simple curved plow the Chinese had been using since time immemorial. Mesopotamians invented and used the wheel, but neighboring Egypt waited 2,000 years before adopting it. In Central America, the Maya also independently invented the wheel but couldn’t think of any practical applications for it and so reserved it exclusively for children’s toys. The Incas didn’t have wheels at all, or money or iron or writing. The march of progress, in short, has been anything but predictable and rhythmic.

The Natufians built the first villages and founded Jericho, which became the world’s first true city. So they were very settled people. But they didn’t farm. This was most unexpected. However, other excavations across the Middle East showed that it was not uncommon for people to settle in permanent communities long before they took up farming—sometimes by as much as eight thousand years. So if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea—or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.

Making food out of plants is hard work. The conversion of wheat, rice, corn, millet, barley, and other grasses into staple foodstuffs is one of the great achievements of human history, but also one of the more unexpected ones. You have only to consider the lawn outside your window to realize that grass in its natural state is not an obvious foodstuff for nonruminants such as ourselves. For us, making grass edible is a challenge that can be solved only with a lot of careful manipulation and protracted ingenuity.

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well—and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies.

“Rice inhibits the activity of Vitamin A; wheat has a chemical that impedes the action of zinc and can lead to stunted growth; maize is deficient in essential amino acids and contains phytates, which prevent the absorption of iron.” The average height of people actually fell by almost six inches in the early days of farming in the Near East.

sedentism meant poorer diets, more illness, lots of toothache and gum disease, and earlier deaths. What is truly extraordinary is that these are all still factors in our lives today. 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.

Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

We are, in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age f...

Mesoamericans were the greatest cultivators in history, but of all their many horticultural innovations none was more lastingly important or unexpected than the creation of maize, or corn as it is known where I come from.* We still don’t have any idea how they did it. If you look at primitive forms of barley, rice, or wheat set beside their modern counterparts, you can see the affinities at once. But nothing in the wild remotely resembles modern corn. Genetically, its nearest relative is a wispy grass called teosinte, but beyond the level of chromosomes there is no discernible kinship. Corn grows into a hefty cob on a single stalk and its grains are encased in a stiff, protective husk. An ear of teosinte, in comparison, is less than an inch long, has no husk, and grows on a multiplicity of stems. Teosinte is almost valueless as a food; one kernel of corn is more nutritious than a whole ear of teosinte.

Vere Gordon Childe, father of the Neolithic Revolution, didn’t quite live long enough to learn about Çatalhöyük. Shortly before its discovery, he made his first visit home to Australia in thirty-five years. He had been away for well over half his lifetime. While walking in the Blue Mountains, he either fell to his death or jumped. In either case, he was found at the bottom of an eminence called Govett’s Leap. A thousand feet above, a passerby found his jacket carefully folded, with his glasses, compass, and pipe neatly arranged on top.

They could even produce stripes—not evidently an easy thing to do. Looking good was important to them. It is remarkable to think that people thought of striped fabrics before they thought of doors and windows.

The Angles are only a little less obscure. They do get mentioned from time to time in European texts, so at least we can be confident that they really existed, but nothing about them suggests any importance. If they were feared or admired, it was within very small circles. So it is more than slightly ironic that it was their name that came, more or less accidentally, to be attached to a country that they may only lightly have helped form.

The invaders brought almost nothing that was new—just a language and their own DNA. No aspect of their technology or mode of living offered even a moderate improvement over what existed already. They can’t have been well liked. They don’t seem to have been very impressive. Yet somehow they made such a profound impact that their culture remains with us, more than a millennium and a half later, in the most extraordinary and fundamental ways. We may know nothing of their beliefs, 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. They simply obliterated the existing culture.

The Romans had been in Britain for 367 years and the Celts for at least a thousand, yet now it was as if they had never been. Nothing like this happened elsewhere. When the Romans left Gaul and Spain, life went on much as before. The inhabitants continued to speak their own versions of Latin, which were already evolving into modern French and Spanish. Government continued. Business thrived. Coins circulated. Society’s structures were maintained. In Britain, however, the Romans left barely five words and the Celts no more than twenty, mostly geographical terms to describe features specific to the British landscape. Crag, for instance, is a Celtic word, and so is torr, meaning a rocky outcrop.

Even what we can know, from archaeology, is often hard to fathom. For one thing, the newcomers declined to live in Roman houses even though the Roman houses were soundly built, superior to anything they had had at home, and there for the taking. Instead they erected far more basic structures, often right alongside abandoned Roman villas. They didn’t use Roman towns either. For three hundred years, London stood mostly empty.

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.

Even after wood or tile floors began to grow common in superior homes, at about the time of William Shakespeare, carpets were too precious to be placed underfoot. They were hung on the walls or laid over tables. Often, however, they were kept in chests and brought out only to impress special visitors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In January 1859, much of America followed eagerly as a ship laden with three hundred thousand juicy oranges raced under full sail from Puerto Rico to New England to show that it could be done. By the time it arrived, however, more than two-thirds of the cargo had rotted to a fragrant mush.

Argentinians raised massive herds of cattle on their endless and accommodating pampas, but they had no way to ship the meat. Most of their cows were therefore boiled down for their bones and tallow, and the meat was simply wasted.

The notion of shipping ice from New England to distant ports was considered completely mad—“the vagary of a disordered brain,” in the words of one of his contemporaries. The first shipment of ice to Britain so puzzled customs officials as to how to classify it that all three hundred tons of it melted away before it could be moved off the docks. Shipowners were highly reluctant to accept it as cargo. They didn’t relish the humiliation of arriving in a port with a holdful of useless water, but they were also wary of the very real danger of tons of shifting ice and sloshing meltwater making their ships unstable. These were men, after all, whose nautical instincts were based entirely on the idea of keeping water outside the ship, so they were loath to take on such an eccentric risk when there wasn’t even a certain market at the end of it all.

For several decades, ice was America’s second biggest crop, measured by weight. If securely insulated, ice could last a surprisingly long while. It could even survive the 16,000-mile, 130-day trip from Boston to Bombay—or at least about two-thirds of it could, enough to make the long trip profitable.

Lake Wenham was actually completely incidental to the ice business in America. It never produced more than about ten thousand tons of ice in a year, compared with almost a million tons lifted annually just from the Kennebec River in Maine. In England, Wenham ice was more talked about than used. A few businesses took regular deliveries, but hardly any households (other than the royal one) did. By the 1850s, most ice sold in Britain was not from Wenham or even from America. The Norwegians—not a people one normally associates with sharp practices—changed the name of Lake Oppegaard, near Oslo, to Lake Wenham so that they could tap into the lucrative market. By the 1850s most ice sold in Britain was in fact Norwegian, though it has to be said that ice never really caught on with the British. Even now, it is still often dispensed there as if it were on prescription. The real market, it turned out, was in America itself.

Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers, and to create a vast range of frozen treats. Ice cream became popular—and startlingly inventive, too. At Delmonico’s, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors. Manhattan alone consumed nearly 1 million tons of ice a year, while Brooklyn sucked down 334,000 tons, Boston 380,000, and Philadelphia 377,000.