At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Ötzi’s body was preserved as well as it was through a combination of unusually favorable circumstances. First, he died in the open on a day that was dry but with the temperature falling swiftly: effectively, he was freeze-dried. Then he was covered by a series of dry, light snowfalls, and probably stayed in that perfectly frigid state for years before the glacier slowly claimed him. Even then he remained in an outlying eddy that saved him—and, no less important, his possessions—from being dispersed and crushed. Had Ötzi died a few steps closer to the glacier or a little lower down the slopes or in drizzle or sun, or in almost any other circumstances, he would not be with us now. However ordinary Ötzi may have been in life, in death he became the very rarest of corpses.

  What made Ötzi uniquely exciting was that this was not a burial, with personal possessions thoughtfully arranged about him, but a person found straight from life, with the day-to-day items he had on him when he died. Nothing like that had ever been found before, and it was almost wholly undone by four days of overexuberant recovery efforts. Passersby and sightseers were allowed to take turns hacking away at the ice that held the body. One well-meaning helper seized a stick and tried digging with it, but it snapped in two. “The stick,” the National Geographic reported, “turned out to be part of the hazel-wood and larch-wood frame of the Iceman’s backpack.” The volunteers, in short, were trying to dig out the corpse using his own priceless artifacts.

  The case was dealt with by Austrian police, and the body, once freed, was whisked away to a refrigerator in Innsbruck. But a subsequent GPS investigation showed that in fact Ötzi had been just inside Italian territory when found, and after some legal wrangling the Austrians were ordered to surrender their treasured body, and Ötzi was driven over the Brenner Pass to Italy.

  Today Ötzi lies on a slab in a refrigerated room in the archaeological museum in Bolzano, a German-speaking city in the north of Italy. His skin, the color and texture of fine leather, is stretched tight across his bones. His face wears an expression that looks very like weary resignation. Since being hauled off the mountain nearly twenty years ago, Ötzi has become the most forensically studied human being in history. Scientists could determine many of the details of his life with startling precision. With electron microscopes they could see that on the day of his death he consumed ibex and deer meat, bread made from a type of wheat called spelt, and some unidentified vegetables. From pollen grains recovered from his colon and lungs they were able to deduce that he had died in the spring and had begun the day in the valley below. By studying isotopic trace elements in his teeth, they could even work out what he had eaten as a child and therefore where he had been raised, and concluded that he had grown up in the Eisack Valley, in what is now Italy, then moved to a valley called the Vinschgau farther west near the modern border with Switzerland. The biggest surprise of all was how old he was: at least forty but possibly as much as fifty-three, making him exceedingly old for the period. But there was also much they couldn’t explain, including how he had died, and what he was doing nearly two miles above sea level at the time of his death. His bow was unstrung and only half made, and the arrows mostly had no flights, and so were useless, yet for some reason he took them with him.

  Normally not many people stop at small archaeological museums in out-of-the-way provincial towns, but Bolzano’s museum is thronged with visitors throughout the year and the gift shop does a brisk trade in Ötzi keepsakes. Visitors line up to peer at him through a small window. He lies naked on his back on a glass slab. His brown skin glistens from the mist that is perpetually sprayed over him as a preservative. In fact, there is nothing innately distinctive about Ötzi. He is a completely normal, if unusually old and well-preserved, human being. What is extraordinary are his many possessions. They are the material equivalent of time travel.

  In addition to the ax, knife, quiver, and arrows, Ötzi had shoes, clothing, two birchbark canisters, a sheath, a bowstave, miscellaneous small tools, some berries, a piece of ibex meat, and two spherical lumps of birch fungus, each about the size of a large walnut and carefully threaded with sinew. One of the canisters had contained glowing embers wrapped in maple leaves, for starting fires. Such an assemblage of personal effects was unique. Some of the items were, as it were, really unique in that they had never been imagined, much less seen. The birch fungus was a particular mystery because it was obviously treasured, and yet birch fungus is not known to be good for anything.

  His equipment employed eighteen different types of wood—a remarkable variety. The most surprising of all his tools was the ax. It was copper-bladed and of a type known as a Remedello ax, after a site in Italy where such implements were first found. But Ötzi’s ax was hundreds of years older than the oldest Remedello ax. “It was,” in the words of one observer, “as if the tomb of a medieval warrior had yielded a modern rifle.” The ax changed the time frame for the Copper Age in Europe by no less than a thousand years.

  But the real revelation and excitement were the clothes. Before Ötzi we had no idea—or, to be more precise, nothing but ideas—of how Stone Age people dressed. Such materials as survived existed only as fragments. Here was a complete outfit, and it was full of surprises. His clothes were made from the skins and furs of an impressive range of animals—red deer, bear, chamois, goat, and cattle. He also had with him a woven grass rectangle that was three feet long. This might have been a kind of rain cape, but it might equally have been a sleeping mat. Again, nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined.

  Ötzi wore fur leggings held up with leather strips attached to a waist strap that made them look uncannily—almost comically—like the kind of nylon hose and garter sets that Hollywood pinups wore during the Second World War. Nobody had remotely foreseen such a getup. He wore a loincloth of goatskin and a hat made from the fur of a brown bear—probably a kind of hunting trophy. It would have been very warm and covetably stylish. The rest of his outfit was mostly made from the skin and fur of red deer. Hardly any came from domesticated animals, the opposite of what was expected.

  The boots were the greatest surprise of all. They looked like nothing so much as a pair of bird’s nests sitting on soles of stiffened bear skin, and seemed hopelessly ill-designed and insubstantial. Intrigued, a Czech foot and shoe expert named Vaclav Patek carefully fashioned a replica pair, using exactly the same design and materials, then tried them on a mountain walk. They were, he reported in some astonishment, “more comfortable and capable” than any modern boots he had ever worn. Their grip on slippery rock was better than modern rubber, and it was all but impossible to get blisters in them. They were, above all, exceedingly effective against cold.

  Despite all the forensic probings, ten years passed before anyone noticed that embedded in Ötzi’s left shoulder was an arrowhead. Closer inspection showed also that his clothes and weapons were speckled with the blood of four other people. Ötzi, it turned out, had been killed in a violent showdown of some kind. Why his murderers chased him up to a high mountain pass is a question that is not easily answered, even speculatively. Even more mysterious is why the murderers didn’t help themselves to his possessions. Ötzi’s personal items, particularly his ax, had real value. Yet having evidently stalked him for quite a distance and engaged in a remarkably bloody fight at close quarters—clearly it takes a lot of lashing out to draw the blood of four people—they left him where he fell, with his possessions undisturbed. It is of course lucky for us that they did, for his personal effects provide answers to all kinds of otherwise unanswerable questions, except the one that seems bound to tantalize forever now—namely, what on Earth was going on up there?

  We are in the dressing room—or what at least was called the dressing room on Edward Tull’s original plans. One of Tull’s many architectural curiosities was that he didn’t provide direct access between the dressing room and Mr. Marsham’s bedroom next door but had both decanting separately into the upstairs passage. So in order to dress or undress, Mr. Marsham would have had to leave his bedro
om and walk a few steps along the corridor to the dressing room—rather an odd way to go about things, bearing in mind that just across the way was the “Female Servant’s Bedroom” (now the bathroom)—which is to say, that of the loyal spinster Miss Worm. Such an arrangement would almost certainly have guaranteed occasional encounters, which we may presume would tend to be awkward. But then again perhaps not. A separate oddity is how cozily proximate their bedrooms were, considering how rigorously their domains were separated by day. It is certainly a hard household to figure.

  In any case, Mr. Marsham apparently had second thoughts. In the house as built, the dressing room and bedroom are in fact connected. The dressing room is now, and probably for the better part of a century has been, a bathroom. We still do some of our dressing in there, however, which is just as well, because the long and really quite mysterious history of dressing is what we have come here to talk about.

  How long people have been dressing themselves is a question not easy to answer. All that can be said is that about forty thousand years ago, there stepped from the shadows the big-brained, behaviorally modern people commonly known as Cro-Magnons (after a cave in the Dordogne region of France where they were first found) and that among these new people was some ingenious soul who came up with one of the greatest, most underrated inventions in history: string. String is marvelously elemental. It is simply two pieces of fiber placed side by side and twisted together. That achieves two things: it makes a cord that is strong, and it allows long cords to be built up from short fibers. Imagine where we would be without it. There would be no cloth, clothing, fishing lines, nets, snares, rope, leashes, tethers, slings, bows for shooting arrows, or a thousand useful things more. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, a textile historian, was hardly exaggerating when she called string the “weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth.”

  Historically, the two most common fibers were linen and hemp. Linen was made from flax and was popular because flax grows tall—up to a height of four feet—and quickly. Flax can be sown one month and harvested the next. The downside is that flax is tediously demanding in its preparation. Some twenty different actions are required to separate flax fibers from their woody stems and soften them enough for spinning. These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.

  The result of all that effort was a sturdy and adaptable fabric: linen. Although we tend to think of linen as snowy white, its natural hue is brown. To become white, it had to be bleached in sunlight, a slow process that could take months to execute. The poorer stuff was left unbleached and made into canvas or sacking. The principal drawback of linen is that it doesn’t take a dye well, so there isn’t a great deal you can do with it to make it exciting.

  Hemp was roughly similar to flax, but coarser and not so comfortable to wear, so it tended to be used for things like rope and sails. It did, however, have the evidently very considerable compensating advantage that you could smoke it and get high, which Barber believes accounts for its prevalence and rapid spread in antiquity. Not to put too fine a point on it, people throughout the ancient world were very, very fond of hemp, and grew more of it than they needed for ropes or sails.

  But the primary clothing material of the Middle Ages was wool. Wool was a lot warmer and more hard-wearing than linen, but wool fibers are short and difficult to work, especially as early sheep were surprisingly unwoolly creatures. Their wool, such as it was, originally was a downy undercoating beneath dreadlocks of tangled hair. To turn sheep into the blocks of fleeciness we know and value today took centuries of devoted breeding. Moreover, wool wasn’t sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.

  Even once medieval people had a pile of wool in front of them, their work was really just beginning. To turn it into cloth required washing, combing, carding, teaseling, warping, sizing, and fulling, among many other processes. Fulling consisted of beating and shrinking the cloth; sizing involved the application of a glaze. Combing the fibers flat created a hard-wearing but comparatively stiff fabric: a worsted. For softer wool, carding paddles were used to make the fibers fluffier. The hair of weasels, stoats, and other animals was sometimes blended into the mix to make the finished cloth more lustrous.

  The fourth principal fabric was silk. Silk was a rare luxury, literally worth its weight in gold. Accounts of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly always dwell on the way criminals were imprisoned or transported to Australia for the theft of a handkerchief or packet of lace or some other seeming trifle, but in fact these were often items of great value. A pair of silk stockings could cost £5 and a packet of lace could sell for £20—enough to live on for a couple of years and an exceedingly serious loss to any shopkeeper. A silk cloak would cost £50—well beyond the means of any but the highest nobility. Most people, if they had silk at all, had it in the form of ribbons or other trim. The Chinese ferociously guarded the secrets of silk production; the punishment for exporting a single mulberry seed was execution. The Chinese needn’t have worried too much about northern Europe, because mulberry trees were too sensitive to frost to thrive there. Britain tried hard for a hundred years to produce silk, and sometimes got good results, but ultimately couldn’t overcome the drawback of periodic harsh winters.

  With these few materials, and some trimmings like feathers and ermine, people managed to make wondrous outfits—so much so that by the fourteenth century rulers felt it necessary to introduce what were known as sumptuary laws, to limit what people wore. Sumptuary laws laid down with fanatical precision what materials and colors of fabric a person could wear. In Shakespeare’s day, someone with an income of £20 a year was permitted to wear a satin doublet but not a satin gown, while someone worth £100 a year had no restrictions on satin, but could wear velvet only on doublets and then so long as the velvet wasn’t crimson or blue—colors reserved for people of still higher status. Restrictions existed, too, on the amount of fabric one could employ in a particular article of clothing, and whether it might be worn pleated or straight and so on. When Shakespeare and his fellow players were given royal patronage by King James I in 1603, one of the perks of the appointment was that they were allowed four and a half yards of scarlet cloth—a considerable honor for someone in as louche a profession as acting.

  Sumptuary laws were enacted partly to keep people within their class, but partly also for the good of domestic industries, since they were often designed to depress the importation of foreign materials. That’s why for a time there was a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping national capmakers through a depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons, Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. Although various clothing restrictions were enshrined in statutes in 1337, 1363, 1463, 1483, 1510, 1533, and 1554, records show they were never much enforced. They were repealed altogether in 1604.

  For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history—perhaps most—it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.

  Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn’t have to do physical work. Throughout history, and across many cultures, this has generally been far more important than comfort. In the sixteenth century, to take just one example, starch came into fashion. One result was the magnificent ruffs known as piccadills. Really enormous piccadills made eating almost impossible and necessitated the fashioning of special long-handled spoons so that diners could get food to their lips. But there must have been a lot of dismaying dribbles and
a general sense of hunger at mealtimes for many.

  Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn’t get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn’t actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.

  Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.

  Wigs might be made of almost anything—human hair, horsehair, cotton thread, goat hair, silk. One maker advertised a model made of fine wire. They came in many styles—bag, bob, campaign, grizzle, Ramillies, cauliflower, brown tie, riding bob, and more, all denoting some crucial difference in length of braid or bounciness of curl. Wigs were so valuable—a full one could cost £50—that they were left as bequests in wills. The more substantial the wig, the higher up the social echelon one stood—one became literally a bigwig. Wigs were also one of the first things snatched by robbers. The ridiculousness of outsized hairpieces didn’t escape comedic notice. Sir John Vanbrugh in The Relapse had one of his characters, a wigmaker, boast of a wig “so long and full of hair that it may serve you for a hat and cloak in all weathers.”