The Making of Home Read online

  Communal quilting-bees, too, if not entirely a myth, are nevertheless an elaboration of reality. The bulk of the work for any quilt – the cutting of the squares, their stitching, the lining, preparing the batting – was done at home alone, or by several family members working independently on different elements. Only the quilting, the final stage, was a joint effort. A quilting frame was enormous and in use took over a great proportion of a room: it was generally stored in an outbuilding, or shared among several families or a community. The purpose of the bee was to get the job done as quickly as possible so that the frame could be returned to its storage place and daily life resumed in the main room. A few contemporary drawings depict a frame raised to the ceiling on ropes, but this is more likely to have been a temporary expedient so that family life could continue during the time it took to finish a quilt, not a permanent location. Although there was certainly a party element to the event – food was provided, and for those who lived in sparsely populated districts, any sort of companionship was festive – sociability was not the motivating factor. And later writings that describe quilting-bees with music and dancing are frequently fictitious. If the frame took up almost all of one room, and people lived in one or two rooms, where did the dancing take place?

  These are myths of national origin. Britain has comparable myths, of a fixed, rural population where everyone lived their entire lives in the same village, knowing their neighbours and handing down relationships and resentments through generations. In reality, to take one representative example, a seventeenth-century Nottinghamshire village saw more than 60 per cent of its population move in only twelve years. The upper classes were just as mobile, with great houses regularly changing hands: one Northamptonshire village recorded that three families had owned the village’s manor house in a single decade. And as the squires came and went, so too did their servants. These were not the faithful family retainers beloved of novels and television period dramas. In the same village, only one of the area’s twenty-six servants was still working there ten years later, and in the interim she too had lived in another village before returning and being employed in a number of different households. Half of those who employed a servant were obliged to find a new one each year.

  But the most influential and widespread myth, the one that continues to be prevalent today, is that there was, at some point, a golden age of family, and the family home. This myth recurs like a refrain from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and urbanization, and it is protean, changing and taking on new forms as troubling new elements of present-day life arise. Today’s version of the myth appears as the frequently expressed proposition that the modern family is in decline from a past ideal, stating as fact what is, in truth, a feeling. The idea that there was a period when extended families lived in multi-generational harmony persists, even as we know that nuclear-family living arrangements have been the norm across northwestern Europe for half a millennium, and possibly much longer. Similarly, social commentators who decry the effects of divorce, worrying that the modern family’s ‘unprecedented’ fracturing will have unknown (but always deleterious) effects should be asked to reflect for a moment on the realities of life expectancy before the twentieth century. Before the eighteenth century, typically around 40 per cent of children in England had lost at least one parent, well above the proportion of today’s population affected by divorce. (Currently approximately 30 per cent of marriages end in divorce, although of course not all involve children.) And the death of a parent fractured a family in a much more permanent manner. In the eighteenth century in the Netherlands, it was so routine for children to be brought up by extended family members – grandparents, uncles and aunts or more distant relations – that many sources do not trouble even to mention the reasons. After the population devastation caused by the Black Death, and then the later plague outbreaks, life expectancy began to improve, only to decline again in the nineteenth century as a consequence of industrialization and urbanization. With it, the number of children with at least one deceased parent increased. While life expectancy was substantially higher in rural communities, even there the typical family for most of the century was a ‘broken’ family: up to two-thirds of all children in the American south had lost one parent before the age of twenty-one.

  In 1860, the London Morning Chronicle warned its readers that Christmas, the traditional ‘grand opportunity of reuniting the love of families’, was endangered by rampant commercialism and a newly mobile population. Yet the population had long been mobile, while Christmas had only been celebrated as a family occasion for a matter of decades. Furthermore, until paid holidays arrived in the late nineteenth century, only the wealthiest had ever contemplated a seasonal family gathering. Other private family occasions that are today thought to be ‘traditional’ – marriages, christenings, funerals – were previously community events, participated in, and taking place, outside the home. Not even the tradition of a Sunday church service survives examination of the evidence. In London, in the middle of the nineteenth century, all the churches combined had enough seating for less than half the city’s residents, and even so the pews were barely half-filled every Sunday. A special census was conducted one Sunday in 1851 to enumerate not those who said they went to church regularly, but those who were actually present. Of England and Wales’s population of 18 million, just 6 million attended church on census Sunday, two-thirds of the population being otherwise occupied.

  Today’s symbol of family togetherness is not Sunday church, but the nuclear family gathered around a dinner table. Evidence of family breakdown is adduced from the millions of people who eat alone, often in front of the television. A survey reported in the New York Times in 1992 noted that 80 per cent of respondents with children claimed that their family had eaten dinner together the previous evening, even as observational studies indicated that the figure was closer to 30 per cent. The power of the myth can be seen, not merely in the desire of the respondents to imagine – or present themselves – as a cohesive family unit through their eating habits, but also in the beliefs of the researchers, who concluded, in the same sentence, that family dinner-time was in decline even as they acknowledged that no comparative figures from earlier decades were available. Had the researchers been historians rather than psychiatrists, they would have known that their image of a family of the past gathered together around a dinner table was a novelty of modernity, and of plenty, not least because, historically, few sat around the family dining table for the simple reason that, as we have seen, most households did not have tables, or enough chairs.

  For families, and homes, have always been in flux, evolving to meet the needs and circumstances of each era. The only permanency has been our belief that there is one unchanging reality, perhaps the strongest and most comforting myth of all.

  Part Two

  6

  Hearth and Home

  Heat and light, the two essentials of the technology of home. For much of history, both were provided by fire. Fire was the essence of home, the centre of the house. The Romance languages, languages with no separate word for home, often use some derivation from the Latin for hearth, focus, as a synonym for home: il focolare domestico, le foyer familial, el hogar. (And the centrality of the hearth survives in ‘focus’ in English, the centre of attention.) The hearth was so fundamental that legally it frequently represented the household: various places imposed hearth taxes, from the Byzantine Empire, through France in the fourteenth century, to England at the Restoration and Ireland until the nineteenth century.* These taxes were levied not on the building, nor the number of its residents, but on the quantities of chimneys and hearths each possessed. Church courts also used the hearth as a metonym for the household, permitting some couples legal separation a mensa et thoro, ‘from table and hearth’. In parts of Italy, the basic rental space was a camino, meaning fireplace. The hearth might even embody citizenship: Britain and Ireland both had ‘potwalloper’ boroughs, where voting eligibility was extended to anyone
with a hearth where a pot walloped, or boiled.

  The hearth’s centrality was also expressed in folk sayings and proverbs – ‘a home must have a wife and a fire’, or ‘a hearth of one’s own is worth gold’ – and it long continued to symbolize the family gathered around it. The nineteenth-century MP and journalist William Cobbett thought servants should always have their own fire. Sharing the family’s fire, he said, was ‘downright bigamy’: the family was, in effect, married to its hearth.

  Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, hearths had been not merely figuratively central, but literally so: when the hall was the main, or only, room of the house, at the centre of that room was the open hearth. In the absence of chimneys or flues, smoke rose through the rafters of the unceilinged room, or through shuttered smoke-holes, or louvres, aided by drafts from carefully positioned doors and windows. The smoke, far from being considered a nuisance, was valued. Meat and cheese, fruit and grain were stored under the roof, preserved by the smoke as it rose; when the roof was thatched, the smoke also served to fumigate it and control insect-life. Below, around the fire, all daily and nightly activities transpired: the hall was the place of food preparation, of eating, sleeping, work and entertainment.

  The date of the creation of the first chimney is uncertain. The earliest fireplace we know of may have been one built into the side wall of a building in Venice in 1227; others think traces of fireplaces appear as early as the ninth century, when the monastery of St Gall, in Switzerland, was recorded as having what might have been something like a fireplace in its walls. Whenever it occurred, the arrival of this new method of fire-control shifted the fire from the centre of the room to its edge. By the thirteenth century, we know that chimneys had been constructed in some great houses in France, because they had complete second storeys, which was impossible as long as smoke from open fires needed to escape through the roof. Henry III of England had fireplaces built in his private chamber in the same century, but the custom was barely known: a royal fancy, not yet the commonplace of the populace. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, central halls, and central hearths, remained standard.

  It was in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, with the political stability brought by the end of the dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses, and the accession of Henry VII and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, that the function of the great halls in England began to change, enabling alterations to the architecture. No longer did nobles need to quarter soldiers in their halls to defend their lands. Wealth and status were no longer measured solely by the number of men one had under command; now a display of luxury goods, using the hall as the setting, performed a similar function. In the mid-sixteenth century, not merely the function, but the physical layout of these halls was modified, as the central hearths moved to the side of the room. The fire was not yet embedded into the fabric of the wall, but now flues were, and a great overhanging hood swept down and out into the room and over the fire to guide the smoke upwards.* Over the following half-century, in the houses of the great, and even many smaller houses of the lesser, fires were built into the walls of new houses, ventilated by flues, particularly in England, where the prevalence of brick as a building material encouraged the construction of what became standard, the brick chimney.

  This in turn encouraged the Great Rebuilding, that period of widespread construction. Houses, no longer constrained by the physical limitations imposed by central fires, gained second storeys; windows, freed of the need to act as ventilation controls for smoke, were enlarged, re-sited and more frequently glazed; and in wealthy houses in the south, the number of rooms rose from an average of three per house to six or seven. All this was dramatic enough that, although the term Great Rebuilding is a coinage of the twentieth century, contemporaries were vividly aware of the novel landscape around them: towards the end of the sixteenth century, ‘old men’ were said to have remarked on ‘the multitude of chimneys lately erected, whereas in their young days there were not above two or three, if so many’. It is notable that for this speaker, chimneys were a defining feature of the house. The new central, or just off-centre, placement of chimneys was guided by pragmatism – it allowed hall and parlour to have a fire in each room from a shared central chimney – but its position swiftly made it symbolic too, a sign of prosperous and comfortable living.

  In the seventeenth century, some of the less well-off were also able to join this rage for rebuilding, acquiring the new luxuries of light, warmth and privacy. In the American colonies, even the first one-room huts often had chimneys: their builders had grown up during the Great Rebuilding, and took chimneys for granted as an integral part of any house, albeit constructed from clay-covered logs rather than brick. For those on the frontier, however, well into the eighteenth century, methods of heating were a step back into the past. These houses frequently lacked both fireplace and even a hearth, householders laying their fire on a collection of stones, the smoke once more exiting, as it had habitually for centuries, through a hole in the roof.

  Most home countries developed their own heating methods, based on considerations of climate, fuel availability and local technologies and industries. By the sixteenth century, many countries in northern Europe had replaced open fires with the superior technology and convenience of closed stoves, whether made of stone, brick or, later, tile. The two most common methods, stove and fireplace, unusually, were not distributed evenly between home and house countries: the British Isles, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Portugal and Norway favoured fireplaces; the Scandinavian countries, much of central and eastern Europe, Switzerland and Germany preferred stoves, while Spain went its own way with braziers.

  Stoves were usually set into a wall that separated two rooms, surrounded by benches or other sleeping furniture. In the seventeenth century, cast iron became the material of choice, and stoves became widespread. The new technology did not necessarily mean that smoke vanished from the house. On the contrary, as in the medieval halls, smoke was useful. The layout of many German houses featured a Küche, or hall, which contained an open, chimneyless fire, from which the smoke rose to the room above, the Rauchkammer, or smoke-room, where food was stored. The Stube, or main room, was heated by a stove fuelled from the Küche next door, and thus the high-status public room remained smoke-free. Although stoves were more efficient than fireplaces, houses were still very cold. Wooden walls were infilled with wattle-and-daub, or clay-daubed straw, for insulation, but despite this the Stube, with its stove, was often sited next to the stables, the animal heat being a welcome addition.

  The newly built Dutch city houses of the time were little warmer. The voorhuis, the room that opened on to the street, had no fireplace, although the inner rooms might, depending on the prosperity of the family. These fireplaces projected into the room, with an overhanging hood supported by columns and open on three sides. The hood was, as mantelpieces later became, a status symbol, and in the richest households they might measure as much as 2 metres wide and 2 metres high. While the fire surrounds could be imposingly large, the fires they contained were not always of equivalent size, or even heat. The largely unforested Netherlands was forced to rely primarily on peat, a fuel that burns poorly, needing careful ventilation just to stay alight. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch used metal firepots set inside their hearths, in which stacks of peat were piled in thin, round pillars. Even with these specialized items, the houses, rich as well as poor, the most modern as well as the most basic, were cold, and households therefore contained a number of items to ameliorate the impact of this indoor frost. Footwarmers, pierced metal boxes that held burning peat, were common, as were the zoldertjes, wooden platforms designed to create a buffer between the sitter and the chill of the floor.* (A zolder is a loft, the insulating space between the roof and the rooms below. The diminutive ‘je’ ending makes a zoldertje a ‘little attic’, a little insulating space.)

  In the British Isles, regions without plentiful timber also used peat, or an
imal fuels – dried dung – or, failing these, even dried gorse. In urban areas, timber was the main fuel until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although improved transportation saw coal become steadily more common. When the coal tax was repealed in 1793, many switched to that fuel. But by modern standards, houses remained cold, for most rooms in all houses were entirely unheated. Even among the wealthy, it appears that heat was considered a luxury rather than a necessity. In seventeenth-century Cambridgeshire, even in large houses of up to six rooms, houses that had recently been rebuilt and had owners worth a substantial £200, even here, half these houses had a single fireplace. By the end of the century in Norwich, a flourishing urban centre at the time, houses with up to six rooms still averaged only two fireplaces, and in the early eighteenth century, half the parlours – the best room, the showpiece – had no fireplace at all. The greatest residences were little warmer. As the eighteenth century began, the wine on the king’s dinner table at Versailles was reported to have frozen. And it was often the case that poorer households, with their smaller rooms and fewer and smaller windows, were warmer. A house of twenty rooms might average four fireplaces, while a two-room lodging might have one.