If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  The television would change eating habits, bringing them firmly out of the dining room and into the living room. Sofas from the 1950s often had plastic trays clipped onto their arms to hold food or drinks, biscuit manufacturers brought out ‘television assortment’ tins, and people began to consume their ‘TV dinners’ in the front room with only forks in their hands, the knives left behind in the drawer.

  The television appears to be a supremely modern device, but in fact it takes on the role of the community storyteller or minstrel. Sitting down after the day’s work to hear the news, a song sung or a story told is something we have in common with the users of a medieval great hall. Computer games are often blamed for individuals becoming isolated or withdrawn, but multiplayer games are the modern equivalent of the Victorian ‘laughing chorus’ or the rhyming games which promoted mental agility in the living rooms of the seventeenth century.

  Entertaining guests is not necessarily about fun. But without the preparation, trepidation and strain we wouldn’t have the most basic social bond of all outside the family: that created by hospitality. First and foremost, it’s forged in the living room.

  32 – Kissing and Courtship

  ‘Did you ever kiss a boy?’

  ‘You mean really kiss? On the lips?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Nancy said impatiently. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Not really,’ I admitted.

  Nancy breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Neither did I.’

  Judy Blume, Are You There God?

  It’s Me, Margaret, 1978

  To kiss is not necessarily a romantic act. In medieval times, men exchanged kisses of great portent: of peace, fealty or ceremony. Likewise, a more modern monarch had his or her hand kissed incessantly by supplicants or people accepting honours, right up to the twentieth century. But everyone knew that a medieval man caught kissing a woman who was not his wife had something quite different in mind.

  Living rooms from the grand medieval solar to the humble Edwardian boarding-house parlour formed the backdrops to tense but semi-public moments in a person’s life. Until the First World War, many young females were not mistresses of their own destiny but had to wait, tense and expectant, while their prospective suitors asked a father’s permission before making a proposal. Before that stage was reached, the living room was often the stage for the display of female accomplishments advertising their suitability as potential wives: singing, playing and needlework.

  There have always been tales in literature of star-crossed lovers who would have married for love but were parted by fate or society. Even the much-married Henry VIII himself was on an endless, disappointing quest for the one perfect woman with whom he would achieve a blissfully happy ever after. He idolised Anne Boleyn for seven long years before he got her to commit, and was fond of telling people that ‘he loved true where he did marry’.

  Having said that, though, the king was in a position to make a choice, and most other people were not. The idea that love is the best reason for marriage is quite a modern idea, and one quite specific to the Western world. Historically, in Europe and America (and even today in many cultures elsewhere) marriage usually began as a property arrangement, in its middle part was mostly about raising children, and ended up with love. John Boswell, a historian of homosexuality, notes that on the contrary, marriage in the West today is the other way around. It begins with love, moves on to children, and often ends in disputes about the ownership of property.

  Until the Enlightenment, people were supposed to place religious duties above marital ones. A neighbour was worried, Mehitable Parkman told her husband in Salem, New England, in 1683, because ‘she fears I love you more than God’. Wellborn young ladies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were certainly not allowed the luxury of feelings. Like puppets in a play, they waited placidly while dynastic marriages were sewn up for them by their parents. Elizabeth Spencer, on the other hand, seems unusually proactive and mercenary in outlining her requirements to her fiancé in 1594:

  I must have two footmen … I would have twenty gowns of apparel … I would have to put in my purse £2000 and £200, and so, you to pay my debts. Also I would have £6000 to buy me jewels.

  Edmund Harrold, the diary-keeping wig-maker of Manchester, left only nine months between his first wife’s death and second marriage, and began courting his third wife only three months after the second wife died. He felt obliged to marry quickly, having been advised to do so by his doctor, by a sermon he heard in church and by his consciousness of his own weaknesses: ‘It is every [Chris]tian’s duty to mortify their unruly passions and lusts to which ye are most prone. I’m now beginning to be uneasy with myself, and begin to think of women again.’ To marry was everyone’s duty, except for the aged: ‘Of all the passions the old man should avoid a foolish passion for women,’ wrote Dr Hill in The Old Man’s Guide to Health and Longer Life (1764).

  Sometimes the occasional heiress took independent action, ran off and entered into a clandestine marriage. The brilliant and scandalous Georgian Lady Mary Wortley Montagu took matters into her own hands like this: ‘I tremble for what we are doing. Are you sure you will love me forever? Shall we never repent? I fear, and I hope.’ But that was behaviour for the back door and garden gate, by night, not the living room. Her suitor was taken for a highwayman because of his suspicious lurking about outside the house. Given Lady Mary’s tremendous and praiseworthy zest for life, it’s disappointing to report that her secret marriage did not work out well.

  And yet love and emotion need not be entirely absent from our picture of upper-class drawing rooms. Even the macho James Boswell admits that a Georgian male lover may sigh, cry or whimper without shame: ‘it is peculiar to the passion of Love, that it supports with an exemption from disgrace, those weaknesses in a man which upon any other occasion would render him utterly contemptible’. Such sighing and crying, though, would be quite inappropriate after a marriage. While he might well be ‘supple enough’ to kneel and beg for a woman’s hand, a proper Englishman would bluster that he could ‘never get the muscles of [his] knees to give way afterwards’.

  The nineteenth century saw love entering the equation more often, even for the highest in society: Queen Victoria famously proposed to Prince Albert, having made her uncle (who’d proposed the union years before) wait until she was good and ready. Theirs was framed as a love match, and after Albert’s death Victoria mourned him for the rest of her life.

  Society’s lower ranks had the freedom to indulge in a more companionate idea of marriage, and until the seventeenth century weddings were rather informal. They only required a fairly hazy verbal agreement between the two parties to be reached in front of witnesses, followed by sexual consummation. Civil marriage was one of the new and revolutionary practices introduced by the English Commonwealth in the seventeenth century (previously ecclesiastical law had trumped the common law concerning marital relationships). The Puritans of New England were likewise enthusiastic proponents of the idea that marriage was a contract between two people, not a sacrament, and their court records show that women, not men, were more likely to sue for divorce on the grounds of adultery, neglect and cruelty. It seems that the state was a better protector of their rights than the church had been.

  By 1694, the English state had decided to make money out of marriage, and a tax was introduced. Clandestine marriage, a ceremony performed in secret so that anyone objecting to the union was given no chance to speak, was gradually stamped out. The Marriage Act of 1753 tightened things up further, with weddings allowed only between 8 a.m. and midday, as part of the Sunday service. This explains why a wedding meal is still known as a ‘breakfast’: for centuries it took place in the morning.

  Although he lived in the age when love was supposed to play a part, Charles Darwin took a scientific and pragmatic view of a marriage proposal. Despite the annoyance of losing the ‘freedom to go where one liked’ and the ‘conversation of clever men at clubs’, and of having ‘less money for books &c’
, he decided that ‘a nice soft wife on a sofa with a good fire’ would be good for his health. So, he concluded, ‘Marry Q.E.D.’

  33 – Dying (and Attending Your Own Funeral)

  My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day

  Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay

  One hour longer: so that we might either

  Sit up, or go to bed together?

  Lady Catherine Dyer’s epitaph for

  her husband William, 1641

  These last chapters have described how people’s homes intersected with the great wide world outside. That relationship between public and private life continues even after a person’s death.

  The age at which people can expect to die has been gradually creeping upwards since Norman times. The median age of everyone in Britain today is thirty-eight, whereas in fourteenth-century society it was just twenty-one. Only 5 per cent of fourteenth-century individuals made it to the advanced age of sixty-five. People in the past therefore were considered to have reached maturity much more quickly. Boys as young as seven were expected to work, and could from that age be hanged for stealing. Youthful societies tend to be more violent, more brutal – but maybe, also, more vigorous and more creative.

  But there are also some surprising continuities between today and the past. Even in the Tudor and Stuart periods old age began at fifty or sixty, probably a greater age than one might expect given that children became adults much sooner. We’ve been misled by the figures for average life expectancy into thinking that everyone expected to die at about forty. They didn’t. While people were used to their fellows dying at a young age, this was considered unfortunate. ‘Threescore years and ten’ was the perceived ‘natural’ length of a life. Even then the elderly were a significant consumer group, and purchasers of a variety of age-related paraphernalia. Henry VIII had ‘gazings’, or spectacles, with lenses of rock crystal from Venice, and also a couple of wheelchairs (‘chairs called trams’).

  The sufferings of old people sound similar throughout the centuries, while the complaints about them sound ever thoughtless. The Jacobean Thomas Overbury ranted about the ‘putrified breath’ of old men, their annoying habit of coughing after each sentence, and of ‘wiping their drivelled beards’. ‘Elderly gentlewomen are useful persons to make tea, and take snuff, and play low whist,’ and not much else, complained the magazine John Bull in 1821.

  Old age was clearly not only a physical problem but a social one too. Lady Sarah Cowper in the early 1700s sounds remarkably modern when she complains: ‘I seem to be laid by with all imaginable contempt as if I were superannuate at 57 past conversation.’ Yet she was also (inconsistently) contemptuous about her contemporaries who sought to look younger than their years. One acquaintance

  affects the follies and airs of youth, displays her breasts and ears, adorns both with sparkling gems while her eyes look dead, skin shrivell’d, cheeks sunk, shaking head, trembling hands, and all things bid shut up shop.

  Women have always been affected more by old age than men. A lifetime of heavy labour and poor diet would have made the effects of the menopause – decreased bone density, excess hair and the loss of teeth – even more exaggerated, so a Tudor woman would have quickly passed from youthful desirability to a witch-like appearance. The medical theory of the four humours worked against them too: once they were no longer producing milk or monthly blood, their bodies were thought to be ‘drier’ and therefore more like men’s. They were considered, ‘under the stopping of their monthly melancholic flux’, to have turned into second-class men, without men’s strength or reason.

  After your death your intimate history was still not quite over: you had to experience your own funeral. There was an average of seven days between death and burial, for example, for those buried in the eighteenth-century Christ Church in Spitalfields, London. That final week would be spent in your own living room, and family and friends would come to visit. The Stuart wig-maker, Edmund Harrold, described what happened after the sad death of his wife ‘in my arms, on pillows’. His community helped him to make heartbreaking small decisions about her clothing – ‘I have given her workday cloth[e]s to mother Bordman and Betty Cook our servant’ – and the big one about what to do with her body: ‘Now relations thinks best to bury her at [the] meetin[g] place in Plungeon Field, so I will.’

  The passing of a medieval earl required the turn-out and lineup of all his friends, servants, supporters, tenants and hangers-on. The remnants of that tradition could still be seen in play at the death of Andrew Cavendish, eleventh Duke of Devonshire, in 2004, when scores of servants lined up along the drive at Chatsworth House to salute his hearse. If you had no friends, your heirs could buy them for you. A staggering 31,968 people attended the funeral of the Bishop of London in 1303; many were paid to turn up. In remote Hertfordshire the ancient custom of ‘sin-eating’ endured in the 1680s. Poor people would be hired to attend and ‘to take upon them all the sins of the party deceased’.

  From 1660 it became illegal to be buried in anything other than a woollen shroud. The law was passed to support the British wool industry against the slave-serviced and aggressively expanding cotton industry. The profession of undertaker developed in the late seventeenth century to co-ordinate the activities of the coffin-maker, coach-hire company and upholsterer; previously all had been commissioned separately by the dead person’s family. The upholsterer was required to hang the living rooms of a house in mourning with black fabric; your heirs might also order a ‘funerary hatchment’ from the College of Arms (a painted diamond showing your family’s arms) to hang over the front door. The 1666 funeral directions for Sir Gervase Clifton, of Clifton Hall, Nottinghamshire, illustrate how his living rooms were decorated for the occasion:

  The trade card of one of the earliest professional undertakers. They undertook to co-ordinate the coach-hire firm, upholsterer and apothecary, all of whom had previously been commissioned separately

  The hall to be hanged with a breadth of black baize

  The passage into my lady’s bedchamber to be hanged with a breadth of baize

  The great dining room, where the better sort of mourners are to be, to be hanged with a breadth of baize.

  The body to be there.

  Undertakers obviously had an interest in encouraging people to put on a show, and eventually, as a super-successful Victorian profession, they became subject to ridicule for their pompous and overbearing attitudes.

  The display of the corpse of an important personage was a hugely important ritual. But sometimes grand funerals could take several weeks to arrange. The actual body would have rotted before then, so a wax or wooden image or ‘representation’ was used to stand in for it. The tail end of this custom can be seen in the display at Westminster Abbey of the curious waxworks representing Charles II, William III and Mary II, and Queen Anne. Making these funerary figures was the origin of Madame Tussaud’s business.

  The early embalming of bodies was a very inexact science, and if it went wrong the build-up and explosion of gases in the coffin could be spectacular and damaging. Charles the Bald, the Holy Roman Emperor, died away from home in 877. His attendants ‘opened him up’, ‘poured in such wine and aromatics as they had’ and began to carry his body back towards St Denis. But the stench of the putrefying corpse caused them to ‘put him in a barrel which they smeared with pitch’. When even this failed, they carried him no further and buried him at Lyons.

  Removing the internal organs was a wise precaution against putrefaction: this is why Jane Seymour’s viscera are buried at Hampton Court Palace (where she died) rather than at Windsor Castle (where she was officially buried). It was said that Henry VIII’s body exploded as it lay overnight in its coffin at Syon Abbey, a staging post on his final journey towards his own burial at Windsor, and that dogs licked up matter dripping onto the church floor. (We might add that dogs also licked up the blood of the biblical Ahab as a punishment for falling under the influence of his pagan wife Jezebel. So perhaps this
story was spread about by the supporters of Katherine of Aragon, still trying to get Henry back for his treatment of his first wife.)

  Elizabeth I, famously virginal, lost her final battle to prevent her body from being penetrated by a man. Her Privy Councillors, well aware of her wish not to be autopsied, had their attention distracted by the business of proclaiming James I as her successor. Contrary to her orders, Secretary Cecil gave ‘a secret warrant to the surgeons’, let them into her chamber, and there ‘they opened her which the rest of the council afterwards passed over, though they meant it not so’.

  These surgeons removed her entrails, but the techniques for preservation were still inadequate. Elizabeth’s body was stuffed with herbs, wrapped in cerecloth, nailed up in a coffin and left at the Palace of Whitehall to be watched over by her ladies-in-waiting. But that night Lady Southwell, sitting up in vigil with the dead queen, was horrified to experience the ‘body and head brake with such a crack, that [it] splitted the woods’.

  A century later, embalming was more effective when Mary II met her death from smallpox in 1694. ‘Rich gums and spices to stuff the body’ kept her safe from the worst ravages of decay until her funeral. Charles I’s corpse also survived well after his execution in 1649. When his coffin was opened in 1813, his body was discovered to have been

  carefully wrapped up in cerecloth, into the folds of which a quantity of unctuous or greasy matter, mixed with resin, as it seemed, had been melted, so as to exclude, as effectually as possible, the external air.