At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

For a very long time it was believed that medieval peasant houses were little more than primitive huts—the kind of frail, twiggy structures that get blown down by wolves in fairy tales. The feeling was that they were unlikely to have lasted more than a single generation. Grenville quotes one scholar who felt confident enough to assert that the houses of common people were “of uniformly poor quality throughout the whole of England” right up to the time of the Tudors—quite a sweeping statement, and a wrong one, it appears. The evidence now increasingly indicates that common people of the Middle Ages, and probably long before, could have good houses if they wanted them. One clue is the growth in the late Middle Ages of specialized trades, such as thatching, carpentry, and daubing. Doors increasingly had locks, too—a clear indication that buildings and their contents were valued.