54 The New York Review
Bed, Bench & Beyond
Fara Dabhoiwala
A Day at Home in
Early Modern England:
Material Culture and
Domestic Life, 1500–1700
by Tara Hamling and
Catherine Richardson.
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies
in British Art/Yale University Press,
311 pp., $75.00
To visit another person’s house is al-
ways to be reminded of two contradic-
tory truths. On the one hand, domestic
arrangements vary endlessly, between
families and across cultures. Your
kitchen is a gleaming high-tech palace
of equipment; mine, a bare nook with a
microwave. In Japan, people like to bed
down close to the floor; in America,
they prefer to climb atop mountainously
tall mattresses. Growing up in Hol-
land, land of the brisk shower, I found
that most of my peers regarded the
idea of a leisurely bath with suspicion
and distaste: Why would anyone want
to wallow in their own dirty water? In
England, meanwhile, home of the car-
peted bathroom, mixer taps and bidets
are, even today, widely viewed as unde-
sirable foreign oddities. The design of
our homes exemplifies the social and
cultural differences between us.
On the other hand, there are obvi-
ous similarities, across time and place,
in how humans display their domestic
goods. That proud driver revving her new
Tesla down the road is engaging in much
the same kind of status- affirming pea-
cockery as Samuel Pepys, in December
1668, showing off his new coach and
horses on the streets of London. Con-
sciously and unconsciously, how we
furnish our lives is a statement about
who we are: most of our possessions
are as symbolic as they are functional.
The universal impulse to custom-
ize everyday space can be seen even
in cave dwellings, prison cells, and
office cubicles. It’s always been espe-
cially visible among wealthier social
groups and in societies with a devel-
oped market for consumer goods: the
more choice and the more disposable
income, the greater the potential for
differentiation. And throughout his-
tory no object of personal use has
attracted more emotional and finan-
cial investment than the home itself.
Yet most of us live in dwellings de-
signed by other people. All of which
raises a perennial question: How far do
we shape our domestic environment,
and how far does it shape us?
When the Elizabethan clergyman
William Harrison sat down in 1576 to
write his brief Description of England,
he included a chapter on houses. Until
very recently, he mused, most of his com-
patriots had lived in “homely cottages”
and “coarse cabins.” But within living
memory, things had changed dramati-
cally. The old men of his village in Essex
had told him of “three things... marvel-
lously altered in En gland” within their
own lifetimes. The first was “the multi-
tude of chimneys lately erected”: in their
youth, most houses had made do with a
single open hearth that vented through
a hole in the roof. The second transfor-
mation was in sleeping arrangements:
For, said they, our fathers, yea and
we ourselves also, have lain full oftupon straw pallets, on rough mats
covered only with a sheet, under
coverlets made of dagswain or
hopharlots (I use their own terms),
and a good round log under their
heads instead of a bolster or pillow.
If it were so that our fathers or the
good man of the house had within
seven years after his marriage pur-
chased a mattress or flock bed, and
thereto a stack of chaff to rest his
head upon, he thought himself to
be as well lodged as the lord of the
town, that peradventure lay seldom
in a bed of down or whole feathers,
so well were they content, and withsuch base kind of furniture.... Pil-
lows (said they) were thought meet
only for women in childbed. As
for servants, if they had any sheet
above them, it was well, for seldom
had they any under their bodies
to keep them from the pricking
straws that ran oft through the
canvas of the pallet and razed their
hardened hides.Finally, there had been a great increase
in domestic furnishings. Instead of
wooden platters and spoons, even quite
ordinary households now possessed
great quantities of pewter, as well as,
typically, “three or four feather beds,
so many coverlids and carpets of tapes-
try, a silver salt, a bowl for wine (if not
a whole nest), and a dozen of spoons to
furnish up the suit.” “In times past,”
noted Harrison, such luxury had been
the preserve of the nobility, gentry, and
rich merchants only, but nowadays “it
is descended yet lower, even unto the
inferior artificers and many farmers.”
This was no exaggeration. In a pio-
neering essay of 1953, the historian
W. G. Hoskins drew on plenty of other
corroborative evidence to propose that
the period between 1570 and 1640 had
seen a revolution in English housing.
During this “Great Rebuilding,” he ar-
gued, the interiors of houses across the
country were transformed and their
furnishings greatly increased. The me-
dieval single-floored plan, dominated
by a large hall with a central, open fire,
smoking up to a simple gap in the roof,
was heavily modified. The hearth was
moved to a side wall, under an enclosedchimney.^1 The installation of a ceiling
and internal staircase created an upper
story; further partitions produced new
rooms, with increasingly specialized
uses. Windows were glazed for the
first time, and fireplaces multiplied.
The houses of farmers and artisans,
and even of some laborers, came to be
larger, warmer, lighter, and more luxu-
riously equipped.Scholars no longer take seriously
Hoskins’s hypothesis that these changes
were driven by a new demand for per-
sonal privacy among the mass of thepopulation (still less his suggestion
that the period’s striking population
increase was directly attributable to
the invention of the upstairs bedroom).
But a wealth of subsequent research
over the past six decades has confirmed
his general trajectory of architectural
and material development.
In A Day at Home in Early Modern
England, Tara Hamling and Catherine
Richardson explore what it was like to
live in early modern houses during the
decades of the Great Rebuilding. Like
Harrison, their focus is on what histo-
rians today like to call “the middling
sort”: those artisans, professionals,
merchants, and yeoman farmers just
below the ranks of the gentry. How,
they ask, did such men and women
shape their physical surroundings to
reflect their sense of social, religious,
and political identity; conversely,
how did the changing form of theirhouses affect their mind-set and daily
behavior?
Hamling is primarily a historian of
domestic furnishings, Richardson a
scholar of sixteeth- and seventeenth-
century texts. Their interdisciplinary
partnership makes for a genuinely in-
novative and illuminating book. In
order to address its ambitious task,
it draws on an impressive range of
sources. As well as material objects,
didactic and fictional texts, and legal
and personal documents, the authors
have assiduously tracked down many
fragments of interior decoration in
the surviving buildings of the period
(whose often bathetic repurposing as
twenty-first-century coffee shops, pubs,
sofa showrooms, and pizzerias is illus-
trated in several of the book’s plentiful
color pictures).
They don’t always make things easy
for the lay reader. If you can’t recall
what a bressumer is, or are unfamiliar
with pipkins, gallipots, posnets, and
firkins, expect no help from them. Nor
are Hamling and Richardson entirely
averse to academic jargon. They’re
concerned with “the connections be-
tween ecological psychology and phe-
nomenology,” regard shopping as “an
inherently identity-forming activity,”
and prefer to speak of “haptic experi-
ences” instead of the sense of touch.
But the clever structure and engag-
ing enthusiasm of the book nonethe-
less give it an immediately accessible
shape and an unflaggingly enjoyable
pace. The chapters take us chronologi-
cally through a typical day in the life of
the early modern middling household,
from daybreak to bedtime, conveying
the different hourly rhythms of life for
men and women, servants and masters,
shoppers and retailers.
The authors’ overriding aspiration is
to reconstruct the “lived experience”
of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
household life. Like many historians
today, they are only secondarily con-
cerned with establishing objective
facts. To them, what past houses and
their furnishings looked like, how such
things were produced, or what they
cost are all less important than teasing
out the subjective thoughts and sensory
feelings that these material possessions
could evoke in individuals. To this end,
they switch continually between large-
scale overviews of household design
and tiny, vivid micro histories that bring
to life what it might have felt like, say,
to awake in a curtained bedstead, or
for a shopkeeper to do his accounts in
his study, or for his wife to spend her
morning simultaneously overseeing
her servants’ activities, the daily prepa-
ration of dinner, the weekly laundry,
and the longer-term provisioning of the
household.
A Day at Home is thus primarily a
history of material objects as sites of
emotion. But its focus on the piece-
meal minutiae of daily existence also
provides some deeply political insights.
For in this society, as in every other,
it was precisely through the quotidian
repetition of domestic routines that
patriarchy, gender roles, social hierar-
chies, religious identities, and political
order were most fundamentally cre-
ated and perpetuated—hour by hour,
day by day. Nor was there any mean-John Theobald Marshall: Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, circa 1871Shakespeare Birthplace Trust(^1) Channeling and discharging smoke
through a self-contained flue was such
an innovation, even in grand buildings,
that the poet John Leland, who had
traveled extensively on the continent
as well as in England, was amazed to
see it when he visited Bolton Castle in
Yorkshire in the 1540s: “One thinge I
muche notyd in the haulle of Bolton,
how chimeneys were conveyed by tun-
nells made on the syds of the wauls...
and by this meanes, and by no lovers
[i.e., louvres, holes in the roof], is the
smoke of the harthe in the hawle won-
der strangly convayed [away].” The
Itinerary of John Leland, edited by
Lucy Toulmin Smith, five volumes
( London, 1907–1910), volume 5, p. 139.