March 26, 2020 55
ingful separation between domestic life
and what we now tend to think of as
the “public sphere.” In sixteenth- and
seventeenth- century England, it was
not the individual but the household
family that formed the most basic unit
of economic, social, and political life.
Both in theory and practice, what hap-
pened in the home was meant to be a
model of what happened in the world.
Medieval English houses had been
so dominated by a single hall in which
people slept, cooked, ate, and worked
that the very words “house” and “hall”
were still used interchangeably well
into the seventeenth century. Even
in middling homes, a traditional hall
would have at its far end the “high
table,” lit by the best windows, where
the master of the household presided
over common meals, with chairs or
benches for the other diners according
to their status; and the service areas at
its other end—more or less the same
kind of configuration that still sur-
vives in the communal dining halls of
Oxford and Cambridge colleges.
Hamling and Richardson chart the
gradual rise of separate kitchens and
dining rooms, the proliferation of ceil-
ings, upper stories, and bedchambers,
and the arrival of the parlor as a new,
more intimate space for entertainment
and relaxation. (Leisure time was it-
self a mark of status: common parlor
pastimes like cards, backgammon, and
dice were legally forbidden to servants,
laborers, and lowly artisans.) Yet they
also stress the limits of the shift to-
ward spatial specialization. In many
humbler middling houses, like the one
Shakespeare grew up in, the hall re-
mained “the only or main room.” Even
in larger dwellings, most cooking still
took place there, and despite the mul-
tiplication of chambers, people contin-
ued to sleep all over the place. It was
not uncommon for an average property
with six or seven rooms to contain the
same number of beds.
Enclosed chimney flues remained a
novel and somewhat precarious technol-
ogy. When, in 1626, the London wood-
turner Nehemiah Wallington tried to
improve his kitchen by installing one,
the entire gable end of his house col-
lapsed, and all three chimneys fell in.
This was one reason why heated cham-
bers remained a rare luxury. Another
was probably the perpetual danger of
fire, especially at night. Being able to
light the house after dark was a sign of
middling status, but unguarded candles
were a constant concern. On the eve-
ning of July 4, 1629, Wallington’s ap-
prentice Obadiah Seeley disobeyed the
house rules and took a candlestick up
to his room. Awaking after midnight to
find their bed, mattress, and bedclothes
in flames, he and his fellow apprentice
“did start up and pissed out the fier as
well as they could.” On another occa-
sion, in bed with his wife and newborn
daughter, Wallington himself woke up
to find his hair on fire from a candle
that had burned through its wire frame
and fallen onto him.
Although masters and servants in-
creasingly slept in different chambers,
this was not a society in which privacy
was yet a well-developed or valued con-
cept. Instead, Hamling and Richardson
see the middling house as reflecting
an essentially “outward-looking con-
cern with visibility and recognition in
the community.” In newly built town-
houses, the best chamber was usually
deliberately positioned overlooking the
street, with extra-large windows and
decorative plasterwork that was meant
to be admired from outside as well as
within. Often this was also where the
master and mistress chose to sleep.
To be near the sights, sounds, and
smells of their neighbors provided
people with a comforting sense of be-
longing within their community. One
Sunday morning between 3 and 4 AM,
Wallington was disturbed to hear a
street vendor “cry Mackarell in the
street and it did so grive and trouble
my heart” that he retreated to an-
other room—but his distress was only
because hawking goods on the Lord’s
Day was a breach of the Fourth Com-
mandment. It was not until the later
eighteenth century that townspeople
began to regard street noise as an un-
desirable nuisance.The closest thing to a private space in
the early modern house was probably
the inside of a curtained bed. That was
where, at the end of a long day, the mas-
ter and mistress of the household could
finally be intimate with each other. But
drapery could conceal only so much.
Drawn curtains were no barrier to the
eyes of God, warned the poet George
Herbert, even if “they are of cloth, /
Where never yet came moth.” When
two citizens of Kidderminster tried to
conduct a secret affair in the winter of
1625, their next-door neighbors were
soon alerted by the noise. “He hath her
upp agaynst the bed, and made the bed
crakel and the Curtins gingle,” Elinor
Taylor reported from the other side
of the wall. Another, younger couple,
without a chamber of their own, crept
into a smith’s downstairs shop late one
night. The house’s other inhabitants
stayed asleep. But walking past the
building, an older neighbor “heard a
great bustlinge and puffinge and blow-
einge.” When the young man “had
donne what he could, he asked her
how shee liked it, and [she] answeared
‘well ynoughe.’” Within the house and
around it, people heard most things,
and expected to.A Day at Home is especially infor-
mative about beds, bedchambers, and
their furnishings. The newly fashion-
able canopied bedstead, belonging
to the head of household, was usually
the grandest item of furniture in any
dwelling. Children and servants, by
contrast, routinely slept together and
in less comfort, though students andapprentices from better-off families
sometimes took their own beds with
them to university or into service. In
middling wills, bedsteads and bedding
were the objects most commonly given
as particular bequests. This was not
just because of their value and status
connotations, but also their emotional
charge: after all, the bed was the locus
of birth, of marriage, and of death, the
final sleep.
Among the devout, it was common
to decorate one’s bedchamber with
memento mori inscriptions and im-
ages: flowers, hourglasses, skulls, and
“pikters of Death.” Wallington kept a
“little black coffin” with a skeleton on
his bedside table. The Puritan Philip
Stubbes even composed an appro-
priate prayer for anyone troubled by
bedbugs: “as these flees and gnats do
bite and gnaw my skinne, so shall the
wormes, eat and consume the frame of
my bodie, in the dust of the earth, when
the Lord doth please.”
Hamling and Richardson likewise
devote fitting amounts of space to the
household production and retail of
goods, and to the practical and sym-
bolic importance of food. Growing,
preparing, processing, preserving, stor-
ing, cooking, and serving it took up
an immense and increasing amount of
time, especially for the female mem-
bers of the household. This was the pe-
riod in which the in-house production
of food and drink reached its peak, and
domestic cooking attained an unprec-
edented degree of complexity, requir-
ing new recipes, skills, implements, and
tableware. In any household of sub-
stance, the midday dinner was an im-
portant social and symbolic ritual, the
main collective experience of the day.
This was another sphere for the godly
to demonstrate their righteousness.
Some families went in for psalm sing-
ing and Bible reading around the table,
whereas the Suffolk clergyman John
Carter took the silent, humblebragging
approach, displaying his piety through
an ostentatious disdain for the fashion-
able luxury goods of his age:He never used Plate in his house,
but Vessels of Wood, and Earth...
[and] used constantly at his Table
a little wooden Salt [cellar], which
with age was growne to be of a
duskish black, which was much
taken notice of by all comers.On all these topics, the book brims
with useful information and insights.
On other subjects, it is regrettably si-
lent. We learn next to nothing about
how people clothed, washed, and re-
lieved themselves, even though in this
period sewers were nonexistent and
large quantities of human excrement
were collected for use as crop manure.
Gardens and orchards remain largely
offstage; pets and domestic animals are
completely invisible, despite their ubiq-
uity in both rural and urban life.
It also focuses disproportionately
on the ideals and practices of the very
religious, who furnished their houses
with pious inscriptions and punctuated
their hours with uplifting prayers. For
such people, the rhythm of the day was
always as much spiritual as practical.
Yet after a while, one longs to be intro-
duced to some of their more frivolous
neighbors, such as the seventeenth-
century Oblomovs who “spend all the
morning in lying a bed and dressing
themselves,” as the preacher WilliamGouge chided in 1622. It is perhaps
telling that Hamling and Richard-
son wholly ignore the rich evidence of
Samuel Pepys’s diary, though in many
respects he fits their profile of a typical
middling householder: the upwardly
mobile son of a tailor and grandson
of a butcher, brought up with strongly
Puritan influences, acutely aware of
his rising status and its manifestation
through worldly possessions. But Pepys
rarely prayed: usually only on Sunday
evenings, to set a good example to his
servants, and sometimes not even then,
if he was too tipsy or if it was “cold, and
tomorrow washing-day.”Throughout this learned and beauti-
fully produced book, the geographic
focus remains resolutely local. We
learn in minute detail about differences
between Southampton and Stratford-
upon-Avon, but nothing about how
English houses compared to those in
the Low Countries, Germany, France,
or farther afield. In some respects,
their decor must have been similar.
In Italian Renaissance homes, bed-
steads were just as prominent, and
specialized kitchens and dining rooms
equally rare. Their interiors witnessed
the same phenomenal multiplication of
material goods over the course of the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centu-
ries.^2 Moreover, the growing wealth of
furnishings in English houses was in-
creasingly manufactured abroad. Such
was the new demand for stoneware that
around ten million such items were im-
ported into England in the first few de-
cades of the seventeenth century alone.
After 1600, the pottery and porcelain
used in middling houses likewise came
mainly from France, Germany, Italy,
and even Ming China.
Yet it also seems undeniable that
by contrast with the homes of equiva-
lently devout and wealthy households
elsewhere in Europe at this time, most
En glish interiors would have looked
pretty plain. Hamling and Richardson
make a strong case for the importance
of decorative wall paintings, painted
cloths, woodcarvings, and plasterwork.
All the same, there were strikingly few
p i c t u re s i n E n g l i s h ho m e s , eve n a l low i n g
for the Protestant suspicion of religious
imagery. In early-seventeenth-century
Delft, a typical householder would
have owned about ten canvases; in
Amsterdam, the average was around
twenty-five. One Leiden cloth dyer by
1643 had amassed a collection of sixty-
four paintings. Middling Italian homes
were equally stuffed with images.
In England, the lack of skilled art-
ists and the absence of a commercial
art market made this kind of interior
inconceivable. In other words, it was
not just individual wealth, social aspi-
ration, and degrees of piety that deter-
mined what English homes looked like,
but also more deeply rooted economic
and cultural constraints. It’s remark-
able how strikingly the character of
domestic decor could differ between
neighboring societies, even four hun-
dred years ago. The interiors of our
houses, it seems, have always revealed
as much about our national values as
they do about our personal tastes. QA headboard from a Welsh farmhouse
engraved with protective symbols,
a figure of death, and the death date
of one of its owners, circa 1658National Museum of Wales(^2) As is beautifully surveyed in Abigail
Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary
Laven, The Sacred Home in Renais-
sance Italy (Oxford University Press,
2018).