Opinion

How the house became a home

Bedroom

Bedroom (
)

Living room (
)

Bathroom. (
)

If Walls Could Talk

An Intimate History of the Home

By Lucy Worsley

Walker & Company

In the Middle Ages, humans’ homes consisted of one room. One space for all of life’s myriad activities: from sleeping to eating, from partying to peeing.

Life wasn’t necessarily much prettier when other rooms were added: beds crowded with strangers, kitchens reeking of putrid meat, bathrooms without toilets, living rooms playing host to the bodies of dead family members.

Though it doesn’t sound like progress, through these idiosyncracies of home life we can “chart great overarching revolutionary change in society,” says Lucy Worsley, in her history of the abode, “If Walls Could Talk.”

Through the bedroom, we can chart our need for privacy; through the kitchen, our advancements in heating, cooling and safety; through the bathroom, the growing importance of hygiene; and through the living room, our overall love for conspicuous consumption.

Worsley, who works as the chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces in the UK (among them the famous Hampton Court) as her day job, decided to turn her interest on the everyman.

What better way to tackle that than by highlighting the place he lives?

What she finds is a combination of fascinating and hilarious. She writes about little sausage dogs bred to turn meat on a spit and “birthing parties” that gay men performed at male brothels, inspired by the close-knit nature of women’s birth at home.

While writing the book, she worked with the BBC on a 12-part documentary companion to the book, which will air in the States sometime this year.

She used what is called “experiential anthropology,” and in the process slept upright in a four-post Tudor bed, used urine to remove stains from her bedsheets and applied salt to her teeth. (Salt was once believed to be a suitable toothpaste. “It wasn’t,” she says.)

Here are some of The Post’s favorite of Worsley’s home anecdotes:

Kitchen

Before the invention of the refrigerator in 1864, the kitchen stank to high heaven. Cooks added charcoal to tainted meat and grated horseradish in spoiled milk —though it did little to stop the stench.

Since medieval houses were made up of one room, the hearth, which burned on for years, if not decades, was its center. Kitchens were so vital that early censuses counted hearths instead of people.

Though in common houses, women were the cooks, in those of royals and kings, the kitchen was a man’s realm. Cooking was dominated by men who had the “vital and difficult” task of feeding kings and royalty without a fridge or stove. Cooks enjoyed an elevated status until it became a female occupation in the 17th century.

The ceremony of eating had a hierarchy. Kings could not eat with anyone other than royals — and they all needed to be seated in ranking order.

Even in poor people’s homes, the master of household was seated at the head of the table (a board) at a chair with arms while everyone else sat on stools (thus, “the Chairman of the Board”). The salt was placed halfway down the table and those “above the salt” were considered of higher important than those “below the salt.” Even breaking bread had a chain of command: The master and his guests would eat the “upper crust,”while everyone else was given the remainder.

There were even people hired for the sole purpose of turning the spit over a fire, called “spit jacks.” That is, until the Brits developed a type of dog (a sort of dachshund) to run on little treadmills engineered to cogs that would turn the spit.

Bathroom

People in the “Dark Ages” were actually much cleaner than many of their enlightened counterparts.

Though they did their “business” in outdoor pits, they loved to bathe and did so often at communal bathhouses, modeled after the Romans. The heat for the baths was provided by nearby bakers’ ovens and its water scented with cinnamon, cumin and mint.

But strangely, bathing fell out of favor by the turn of the 16th century, when the houses became synonymous with prostitution. In fact, trips to bathhouses were often cited in medieval divorce proceedings.

As bathing lost its allure, along came the “two dirty centuries” (1500 to 1700). Bathing was seen as “weird, sexually arousing or dangerous,” and a harbor of disease.

Instead, the dirty Tudors fixated on keeping their clothes clean—a white collar was a sign of rank and purity of mind—and would even use urine to make their whites whiter. (Worsley tried this method out, cheekily concluding: “We had a nasty stained sheet, and it came out as clean as a whistle.”)

Yet, it was out of the “dirty centuries” that the toilet bowl originated. The first “flushing” toilet bowl was built in the late 1500s (it was made of a cistern, seat and stool pit with a device that caused the water to rush down to the pit).

But this didn’t catch on. Instead, the average Joe used a chamber pot, emptying it out from the house’s upper windows and into the street. The French saying “Gardez l’eau!” — a call for passersby to watch their steps — gives us the origin of “the loo.”

Meanwhile, the royal estates used a ranking relieving system. Nobles had a “close stool,” a padded, seatless chair over a chamber pot. Next, the courtiers had their own personal chamber pots. Finally, the lowly servants had communal toilets capable of seating 14 people at once, nicknamed “The Great House of Easement.”

This hierarchy of the bathroom continued on into the 1900s. A laundress described the shared bathing procedures of the staff in Derbyshire, England in 1920 who used one barrel to wash: “The head was first to get in, followed by her five helpers in order of seniority.”

It was bad news for the youngest member of the staff — but good news overall, as bathing had inched its way back into fashion the previous century and hit its height when the plumbed bathroom came into prominence in the 1860s.

The next big innovation for the bathroom was the American-designed shower. Though initially distrustful of the device (Europeans believed it was “rather treacherous” and could induce miscarriages), it became widely adopted in the mid-1900s.

Bedroom

The bed was once the most crowded place in the home. Sleeping solo was unheard of — and besides bedding down with a spouse and children, you were also expected to cuddle up with colleagues, traveling salesmen and even beggars (it was considered impolite to deny anyone who asked a place to sleep).

“You are an ill bedfellow” had literal meaning in medieval times and several centuries after. There were even rules for sleeping order. Families would lay down according to age and gender: Mother and father slept in the center (and did their business there as well), with daughters spread out next to mom, the oldest at the wall farthest from the door.Sons were arranged in age order next to dad, followed by visitors and then strangers.

This arrangement came in handy when a wife wasn’t in the mood. Worsley quotes Abigail Willey, a New Englander from the 1600s, who would stop her husband from “coming to hear” when she didn’t feel like it by positioning her children between her husband and herself.

If this wasn’t bad enough, “beds” were made out of hay or straw (hence the term “hitting the hay”) and pillows were believed to be effeminate. Men should, according to one commentator in the 1500s, be content with “a good round log under their heads.”

It wasn’t until the Tudor Age (from 15th to 17th centuries) that the “four-poster” bed emerged as an expensive and essential purchase after marriage. But the bed didn’t have a wood frame like today; instead, it was held up by rope and would sag over time in the middle, giving rise to the saying “Night, night, sleep tight,” as the rope often needed to be tightened.

Because of the hammock-like nature of the bed, people slept in half-seated poses.Worsley tested the roped bed in a British museum and found it was literally impossible to sleep fully reclined.

Even as new, perhaps more comfortable, beds gained popularity, people only stopped sharing their beds in the 19th century, during the Victorian era, when people became obsessed, almost prudish, about privacy. During this time, it was unheard of for well-to-do husbands and wives to even share a bedroom.

Living room

In medieval times, there was one room for everything, but as time went by that one room started losing its many functions: Sleep and sex went to the bedroom, eating and cooking went to the kitchen and washing and relieving went to the bathroom.

So what’s the use of a living room? “The living room tells a bigger story,” Worsley says. “It’s the site where people show off the best sides of themselves.”

In Tudor times, the living room was tucked away inside and decorated the most ornately of all rooms. only the most important guests would be given sanction to see the innermost and most expensively decorated room.

This may be also because the living room was used as a vigil for people when they were close to death. In the final weeks of a person’s life, they would be put on display in a living room and friends and family would visit. Sometimes, the corpse would remain on display in the living room for quite awhile after death (funerals were a costly production) and would begin to rot.

The Victorian era put living rooms at center stage for all types of visitors. They also became overly ornate, even “vulgar,” Worsley says.

As shops and shopping gained popularity in the 18th century, the idea of “taste” emerged—and the growing middle class was eager to flaunt its unique style. Paintings, knickknacks and other “superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use,” Worsley says. pictures of the Victorian living rooms nearly resemble hoarder houses of today.