Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > If Walls Could Talk > Status Update

‘The alcohol consumption of people in the past often seems prodigious. For a start, everyone drank ale or beer in preference to water. The amounts consumed are impressive. The household of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, for example consumed more than forty thousand gallons annually, while the monks of Fountains Abbey had a malthouse capable of producing sixty barrels... every ten days.’

‘And TV was much slower to catch on than radio had been. It was the Coronation of 1953 that brought the set into many living rooms, as many people bought theirs especially for the occasion. People rushed round to their neighbours’ houses (and those who had attempted to keep up with the Joneses by installing an aerial on their roofs to suggest that they too had TV were caught out).’

‘This craze to possess had in fact started long before the nineteenth century. The late-seventeenth-century invention of shops and shopping by an urban middle class who lived by trade was mirrored by the growth of a new type of domestic space. What might be termed the ‘middle-class’ living room was full of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use yet cheap and not truly beautiful’

‘The book of poems by Charles, Duc d’Orléans, written while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London after his capture at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, contains an excellent illustration of a medieval living room. The duc sits in the best place, before the fire, while his retainers await his orders (his chaplain in red). The floor of the room is beautifully tiled; its walls have been hung with the tapestries’

‘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’

‘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’

‘The word ‘medieval’ is often - and wrongly - used to mean something primitive, dirty and uncomfortable. This is really unfair to the people of the Middle Ages, where art, beauty, comfort and cleanliness were widely available (at least for those at the top of society). Washing their bodies was an important part of life for prosperous people, and from medieval towns there are numerous records of communal bathing’

‘Men were never criminalised in the same way for becoming parents outside marriage... In 1593, the House of Commons considered plans to punish men as well as women for having illegitimate children, but, as one member baldly put it, it wouldn’t work. The requirement to undergo a whipping ‘might chance upon gentlemen or men of quality, whom it were not fit to put to such a shame’.’

‘With the Enlightenment, though, the bedchamber began to lose its role as an operating theatre. Those in need began to turn to the professionals. There were physicians who would still perform you at home for a fee, but also surgeons who could perform operations in their own shops, and apothecaries and chemists who could sell you herbal remedies and drugs from commercial premises.’

‘With the slimmer, looser, less cumbersome fashions of the Jane Austen or Regency period, though, women began to adopt the male fashion for wearing protective drawers beneath their lighter, diaphanous and potentially more revealing skirts. The earliest knickers had long legs, but even so were considered terribly racy.’