At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Seven hundred miles to the north, 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.

As everyone remarks, it is as if the inhabitants have only just left. What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. 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.

Skara Brae offered some oddities, too. One dwelling, standing slightly apart from the others, could be bolted only from the outside, indicating that anyone within was being confined, which rather mars the impression of a society of universal serenity.

We don’t know anything at all about these people—where they came from, what language they spoke, what led them to settle on such a lonesome outpost on the treeless edge of Europe—but from all the evidence it appears that Skara Brae enjoyed six hundred years of uninterrupted comfort and tranquillity. Then one day in about 2500 BC the occupants vanished—quite suddenly, it seems. In the passageway outside one dwelling ornamental beads, almost certainly precious to the owner, were found scattered, suggesting that a necklace had broken and the owner had been too panicked or harried to retrieve them. Why Skara Brae’s happy idyll came to a sudden end is, like so much else, impossible to say.

The human past is traditionally divided into three very unequal epochs—the 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. Within each of these periods are many further subperiods—Olduwan, Mousterian, Gravettian, and so on—that are mostly of concern to specialists and needn’t distract us here.

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. As one historian has put it: “When Cortés landed in Mexico he found roads, canals, cities, palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, temples, peasants, artisans, armies, astronomers, merchants, sports, theatre, art, music, and books”—all invented quite independently of similar developments on other continents. And some of it is a little uncanny, to be sure. Dogs, for instance, were domesticated at much the same time in places as far apart as England, Siberia, and North America.

It is tempting to think of this as a kind of global lightbulb moment, but that is really stretching things. Most of the developments actually involved vast periods of trial, error, and adjustment, often over the course of thousands of years. 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.

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. Take wheat. Wheat is useless as a food until made into something much more complex and ambitious like bread, and that takes a great deal of effort. Somebody must first separate out the grain and grind it into meal, then convert the meal into flour, then mix that with other components like yeast and salt to make dough. Then the dough must be kneaded to a particular consistency, and finally the resulting lump must be baked with precision and care. The scope for failure in the last step alone is so great that in every society in which bread has featured, baking has been turned over to professionals from the earliest stages.

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.

Scientists are now pretty sure, however, that corn was first domesticated on the plains of western Mexico, and are in no doubt, thanks to the persuasive wonders of genetics, that somehow it was coaxed into being from teosinte, but how it was done remains as much of a mystery as it ever did.

However they did it, the Mesoamericans created the world’s first fully engineered plant—a plant so thoroughly manipulated that it is now wholly dependent on us for its survival. Corn kernels do not spontaneously disengage from their cobs, so unless they are deliberately stripped and planted, no corn will grow. Had people not been tending it continuously for these thousands of years, corn would be extinct. The inventors of corn not only created a new kind of plant, they also created—conceived from nothing really—a new type of ecosystem that existed nowhere in their world. In Mesopotamia natural meadows grew everywhere already, so cultivation was largely a matter of transforming natural grain fields into superior managed ones. In the arid scrubs of Central America, however, fields were unknown. They had to be created from scratch by people who had never seen such a thing before. It was like someone in a desert imagining lawns.

The worry is that as crops are engineered to a state of uniform genetic perfection, they will lose their protective variability. When you drive past a field of corn today, every stalk in it is identical to every other—not just extremely similar, but eerily, molecularly identical.

Potatoes, the other great food crop of the New World, present an almost equally intriguing batch of mysteries. Potatoes are from the nightshade family, which is of course notoriously toxic, and in their wild state they are full of poisonous glycoalkaloids—the same stuff, at lower doses, that puts the zip in caffeine and nicotine. Making any wild potatoes safe to eat required reducing the glycoalkaloid content to between one-fifteenth and one-twentieth of its normal level. This raises a lot of questions, beginning most obviously with: How did they do it? And while they were doing it, how did they know they were doing it? How do you tell that the poison content has been reduced by, say, 20 percent or 35 percent or some other intermediate figure? How do you assess progress in such a process? Above all, how did they know that the whole exercise was worth the effort and that they would get a safe and nutritious foodstuff in the end?

It is remarkable to think that people thought of striped fabrics before they thought of doors and windows.

Why the vanquished Britons couldn’t find the means or spirit to resist more effectively is a deep mystery. They were, after all, giving up a great deal. For almost four centuries they had been part of the mightiest civilization on Earth and had enjoyed benefits—running water, central heating, good communications, orderly governments, hot baths—with which their rough conquerors were uncomfortable or unacquainted. It is difficult to conceive the sense of indignity that the natives must have felt at finding themselves overrun by illiterate, unwashed pagans from the wooded fringes of Europe. Under the new regime they would give up nearly all their material advantages and not return to many of them for a thousand years.

The Jutes are completely mysterious. They are usually presumed to have come from Denmark because of the presence there of the province called Jutland. But a problem pointed out by the historian F. M. Stenton is that Jutland got its name long after any Jutes had departed, and naming a territory after people who are no longer there would be an act unusual to the point of uniqueness. In any case, Jótar, the Scandinavian word from which Jutland is derived, doesn’t necessarily, or even plausibly, have anything to do with any group or race. Bede’s reference is in fact the only mention of Jutes anywhere, and he never cites them again. Some scholars think that the reference is an interlineation added by a later hand anyway and has nothing to do with Bede at all.

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.

There are various accounts of battles—one at Crecgan Ford (a place of uncertain locale) was said to have left four thousand Britons dead—and legend has of course left us tales of the valiant resistance of King Arthur and his men, but legend is all there is.

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 first grubenhaus wasn’t found until 1921—remarkably late considering how numerous these structures are now known to be—during an excavation at Sutton Courtenay (now in Oxfordshire, then in Berkshire). The discoverer was Edward Thurlow Leeds of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and frankly he didn’t like what he saw at all. People who lived in them had led “a semi-troglodytic existence” so squalid that “it inspires disbelief in modern minds,” Professor Leeds all but sputtered in a monograph of 1936. The occupants, he continued, lived “amid a filthy litter of broken bones, of food and shattered pottery … in almost as primitive a condition as can be imagined. They had no regard for cleanliness, and were content to throw the remains of a meal into the furthest corner of the hut and leave it there.” Leeds seems to have seen grubenhäuser almost as a betrayal of civilization.

Fortunately, the newcomers—the English, as we may as well call them from now on—brought a second kind of building with them, much less numerous but ultimately far more important. These buildings were much larger than grubenhäuser, but that was about as much as could be said for them. They were simply large barnlike spaces with an open hearth in the middle. The word for this kind of structure was already old in 410, and it now became one of the first words in English: hall.

Practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together—“a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,” as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.

Every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family—they were literally fa...

In the most commanding (and usually least drafty) position in the hall was a raised platform called a dais, where the owner and his family ate—a practice recalled by the high tables still found in colleges and boarding schools that have ...

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. Onl...

Solar sounds sunny and light, but in fact the name was merely an adaptation of solive, the French word for floor joist or beam. Solars were simply rooms perched on joists, and for a long time they were the only upstairs room that most houses afforded. Often they were barely more than storerooms. So little did people think of rooms in the modern sense that the word room, with the meaning of an enclosed chamber or distinct space, isn’t recorded in English until the time of the Tudors.

Society consisted principally of freemen, serfs, and slaves. Upon the death of a serf the lord was entitled to take a small personal possession, such as an article of clothing, as a kind of death duty. Often peasants only owned one main item of apparel, a type of loose gown known as a cotta (which eventually evolved into the modern coat). The fact that that was the best that a peasant had to offer, and that the lord of the manor would want it, tells you about all you need to know about the quality of medieval life at many levels.

Slaves, often rivals captured in wartime, were pretty numerous—one estate listed in the Domesday Book (the land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086) had more than seventy of them. However, slavery from the ninth to eleventh centuries in England was not quite the kind of dehumanizing bondage we think of from more modern times, as in the American South, for instance. Although slaves were property and could be sold—and for quite a lot: a healthy male slave was worth eight oxen—slaves were able to own property, marry, and move about freely within the community. The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids—to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted out to get at things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time—till the 1600s—before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers.

In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strewn with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,” as the Dutch theologian and traveler Desiderius Erasmus rather crisply summarized in 1524. New layers of rushes were laid down twice a year normally, but the old accretions were seldom removed, so that, Erasmus added glumly, “the substratum may be unmolested for twenty years.” The floors were in effect a very large nest, much appreciated by insects and furtive rodents, and a perfect incubator for plague. Yet a deep pile of flooring was generally a sign of prestige. It was common among the French to say of a rich man that he was “waist deep in straw.”

In humbler dwellings, matters were generally about as simple as they could be. 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 additionally, and a little oddly, recalls the dining habits of medieval peasants.

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 beca...

Even had meat been freely available, it was forbidden much of the time. Medieval diners had to accommodate three fish days a week, plus forty days of Lent and many other religious days when land-based flesh was forbidden. 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.

There was hardly a fish or other swimming thing that wasn’t consumed. The kitchen accounts for the Bishop of Hereford show his household eating herring, cod, haddock, salmon, pike, bream, mackerel, barr, ling, hake, roach, eels, lampreys, stockfish, tench, trout, minnows, gudgeon, gurnet, and a few others—more than two dozen types altogether. Also widely eaten were barbel, dograves, dace, and even porpoise.

Fish days were abandoned after the break with Rome, but were restored by Elizabeth in the interests of supporting the British fishing fleet. The church was keen to keep the fish days, too, not so much because of any religious conviction as because it had developed a lucrative sideline in selling dispensations.

One other thing people recorded with care was, somewhat surprisingly, window glass. Other than in churches and a few wealthy homes, window glass was a rarity well into the 1600s. Eleanor Godfrey, in The Development of English Glassmaking, 1560–1640, notes how in 1590 an alderman in Doncaster left his house to his wife but the windows to his son. The owners of Alnwick Castle from the same period always had their windows taken out and stored when they were away to minimize the risk of breakage.

In even the best homes comfort was in short supply. It really is extraordinary how long it took people to achieve even the most elemental levels of comfort. There was one good reason for it: life was tough. Throughout the Middle Ages, a good deal of every life was devoted simply to surviving. Famine was common. The medieval world was a world without reserves; when harvests were poor, as they were about one year in four on average, hunger was immediate. When crops failed altogether, starvation inevitably followed. England suffered especially catastrophic harvests in 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292, and 1311, and then an unrelievedly murderous stretch from 1315 to 1319. And this was of course on top of plagues and other illnesses that swept away millions. People condemned to short lives and chronic hardship are perhaps unlikely to worry overmuch about decor. But even allowing for all that, there was just a great, strange slowness to strive for even modest levels of comfort.

Beyond that, we 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.

In the whole of Britain, as far as can be told, just 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.

By taking a sample of wood about the thickness of a pencil and applying all the aforementioned tests, scientists worked out that the door at Westminster Abbey was made from the wood of a tree that was felled between 1032 and 1064, just before the Norman conquest, so at the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period. And that solitary door is very nearly all that has survived.

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.

One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke. An open hearth had certain clear advantages—it radiated heat in all directions and allowed people to sit around it on all four sides—but it was also like having a permanent bonfire in the middle of one’s living room. Smoke went wherever passing drafts directed it—and with many people coming and going, and all the windows glassless, every passing gust must have brought somebody a faceful of smoke—or otherwise rose up to the ceiling and hung thickly until it leaked out a hole in the roof.

What made the difference eventually was the development of good bricks, which can deal with heat better over the long term than almost any rock can. Chimneys also permitted a change in fuel to coal—which was timely because Britain’s wood supplies were rapidly dwindling. Because coal smoke was acrid and poisonous, it needed to be contained within a fireplace—or chimneypiece, as they were first known (to distinguish them from open hearths, also known as fireplaces)—where fumes and smoke could be directed up a flue. This made for a cleaner house but a filthier world outside, and that, as we shall see, had very significant consequences for the look and design of homes.