Book Read Free

The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

Page 32

by Ian Mortimer


  In a few houses you will find specialist rooms set aside for the use of the owners and their guests. These include chapels, libraries, ‘cabinets of curiosities’, muniment rooms, billiard rooms, music rooms and, just occasionally, bathrooms and smoking rooms.28 You might even come across a house with a room equipped with a flushing loo, such as at Beddington in Surrey, although these are so rare I would not recommend hanging on until you find such a facility.29 On the other hand, some of the older houses have not been altered for the last 200 years. Many still retain their old medieval halls. Arrive at Oakley Park, Shropshire, in the 1660s and you will find that Sir Matthew Herbert’s hall is equipped with a long table with two benches along either side, a chair at the head, two side tables, one picture and a single candlestick, all of which are described as ‘old and worn out’.30 Similarly there are many gentleman’s residences where you might walk through the old hall and see muskets, halberds, swords, pikes, shields, helmets and all other sorts of armour left over from the days when gentlemen would use their manor houses for keeping the armour of the local militia. In Elizabethan houses with long galleries, the spaces are increasingly used to house the picture collections that gentlemen are busy forming. Thus a great country house can be everything from a place to sleep and eat, to a museum, an armoury, a venue for musical performances and indoor games, a library and a place of religious worship. Some are even venues for stage plays.31 In fact, choose the right stately home and you might well find that you never actually need to leave.

  Town Houses

  Some aristocratic town houses are practically stately homes in an urban setting. They are built on a similar scale and have their lavish reception rooms, stately apartments, formal gardens and even their own stables. However, for the most part, town houses differ significantly from the gentleman’s country seat. They don’t have the space to provide the same range of facilities. Nor do they need to do so. The provision of fresh food and drink is never far away; carriage and horse hire are similarly close at hand; and gardens, theatres and recreational spaces are within a short ride or walking distance. At the same time, there is more noise and less space. Your experience of staying in a town house is thus likely to be very different from your visit to an up-to-date country house.

  Let us say you are going to pay a call on the physician Henry Corbet (whose coach was mentioned in the previous chapter). He lives in an old-fashioned hall house in Lincoln. Once the hall would have been the most important room in the house; now it is hardly used, with just a table, bench and six leather-covered chairs there. These days the principal rooms are the parlours, which are panelled. In the best one Dr Corbet has two tables and fourteen chairs, a comfortable couch, curtains in the windows and a stove. Wander through into his second parlour and there you will find a round table with four chairs and a cupboard. The cellar is stacked with casks and glass bottles; the dairy is similarly full of small beer vessels; and there is a brew house too. The dining room has a leather ‘carpet’ draped across the table and gilt leather hangings around the room, with pictures suspended over the top. In Dr Corbet’s best bedchamber there are chests of drawers, dressing boxes, chairs, pictures and other furnishings, which, with the bed and its hangings, add up to the princely sum of £62 – considerably more than the value of the contents of the most lavish room in the best inn you can find in town. Add the furnishings of five more chambers – one of which includes his library – and his kitchen, and the total value of his moveable possessions in this house adds up to more than £300.32

  Even though Dr Corbet’s house is old, you can see indications of Restoration luxury that you would not have found regularly before the Civil Wars. The stove, couch, pictures and window curtains are perhaps the most obvious. But a newly built house suitable for a ‘man of ability’ shows its modernity in its fixtures and fittings, as well as its furnishings. Sash windows start to appear in the 1670s: Robert Hooke installs them at Ragley Hall, Ramsbury Manor and Montagu House; Christopher Wren does likewise at Hampton Court; and William Winde copies them at Belton. By the end of the century London is leading the way in the production of sash windows for ordinary town houses.33 As for the windows themselves, they are glazed with blocks of rectangular panes of glass up to 5 inches wide – very different from the small diamond quarrels in a lattice of leadwork that were previously used. Beams are not left exposed as they were in earlier houses; rather they are covered with plaster ceilings, which are often elaborately moulded. In some places painted hangings are used in place of tapestries, to add to the warmth and contain the draughts. Staircases are given banisters with turned balusters and, where space allows, are built around an open stairwell. The panelling in reception rooms is far more sophisticated and elegant than it used to be, and doorframes are carved with pediments above the internal doorways. The doors themselves are no longer simply vertical planks nailed together, but panelled by a joiner and provided with handles. The front door may even have a bright new door knocker on it.34

  One of the most notable and welcome features of all this modernisation is the development of new methods of heating. There has been a shortage of firewood in England since the sixteenth century: now people are increasingly turning to coal. Iron fire baskets, ‘grates’ or ‘cradles’ have been introduced, so coal and charcoal can be burnt for domestic heat in town houses.35 Enclosed iron stoves are employed to produce continual heat all day; some can be used for cooking too. Once Tudor stone chimneystacks rose through the house, allowing large logs to be burnt inefficiently, and draughts to descend when the fire was not raging; now town dwellers are rebuilding their chimneys in brick, with smaller apertures and a more efficient draw, so there is less risk of the sulphurous smoke from a coal fire or stove entering the room.36 The fireplaces have surrounds of carved marble with fine architectural features, which stand proud of the wall, creating a useful display ledge. Although the royal family still burns only wood in its apartments, and the aristocracy tends only to buy coal for specific purposes, such as airing rooms when they are not in residence, it is most probable that coal will keep you warm on your visit to a town, especially London. By 1700, the capital’s citizens are importing 335,000 chaldrons (444,000 tons) per year to warm their toes.37 In Scotland, the faster-burning Scottish coal is used along with peat, which is still burnt even in such a prosperous town as Aberdeen.38

  Another indicator of modernity in Dr Corbet’s house is the number of pictures he owns. The ‘middle sort’ are filling up the walls of their houses with artworks, especially concentrating on the staircases, dining rooms and other areas that visitors might see. One wealthy Lincoln citizen, Elizabeth Manby, has fifteen pictures on the walls of her staircase, three in her dining room, and a framed landscape in one of her lavishly decorated spare bedchambers. At this level you don’t have to pay Old Master prices: a portrait in oils in 1660 might cost you £3 10s, which includes a suitable frame.39 In 1675 the Bristol painter John Roseworme has a stock of eighteen paintings at £1 each in his studio; he also has an oil of ‘three Roman ladies giving their father suck’ at £3; eight landscapes at 7s 6d each; two battle scenes at 5s each; various ordinary and higher quality ‘faces’ of the day at 6–8s each.40 Alternatively you can go into a dealer’s shop and select artwork off the wall. Even a relatively poor man might have a small art collection. In 1668 the organist of Bristol Cathedral, Thomas Adeane, owns six paintings, each worth just a shilling.41 Prints of famous paintings and views are cheap too, obtainable from stationers’ shops. The choir-master of Lincoln Cathedral, William Norris, has twenty-three prints of various sizes in his hall, worth £1 in total.42 Views of Italy and France are popular subjects, as are prints of churches and antiquities. By 1700, images are essential to the rich decoration of a town house.

  Not everyone is sufficiently prosperous to bedeck their house with artwork or even decent furniture. Richard Hazeltine, a labourer in Lincoln, has a small house with a hall and two chambers in which he has furniture worth £2; clothes, 10s; a brass pot, 5s; a b
roken pewter flagon, 5s; and hearth furniture, 3s. Outside he also has a cow worth £1; a sow, 10s; and a colony of bees, 16s.43 He can’t provide for guests to stay with him. Nor can Richard and Charity Griffin of Exeter: the best they can do is offer you their truckle bed. Their combined possessions include this and their own bed, cooking utensils, basic furniture such as a chest and a bench, bed linen and a few bits of brassware. All their moveable possessions come to £3 17s 6d – and they are by no means the poorest people in town.44 There are many others whose possessions simply aren’t worth valuing.

  When it comes to sanitation, everyone – rich and poor – faces the same problem. It is well illustrated by Pepys’s experience of the morning of 20 October 1660. As he goes down to his basement to see where a new window can be put in, he steps into ‘a great heap of turds’. Thus he discovers that his next-door neighbour’s cesspit is full and is overflowing into his house.45 It doesn’t matter how many chamber pots you have, or how plush the seats on your close stools: they all have to be emptied somewhere. In May 1663, Mrs Pepys and her maid between them manage to spill ‘the pot of piss and turd’ upstairs. 46 Fortunately everyone can laugh about it. You won’t laugh, however, if you witness someone defecating in the dark corners of Whitehall Palace. According to Anthony Wood, courtiers have a habit of ‘leaving their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal houses, cellars’.47 Rich and not-so-rich alike have to arrange the periodic emptying of their cesspits and the transportation of the contents to one of the laystalls on the outskirts of the city. This process has to be undertaken at night. In July 1663 workmen labour all night, until six o’clock in the morning, to clean Pepys’s ‘house of office’ (as it is called). It is just as well that they take their time, for the sake of cleanliness, when everything has to be carried through the house.48

  Rural Houses and Cottages

  As we have seen, three-quarters of the population live in a rural area.Thus you are far more likely to find yourself staying with the country people ‘who fare indifferently’ and the poor ‘who fare hard’ than with the nobility or gentry. I recommend that you avoid staying with Defoe’s lowest sort, the miserable, ‘who really pinch and suffer want’, as they can’t afford to feed themselves, let alone another mouth.

  Ordinary country folk have a different set of priorities when it comes to housing. Whereas the wealthy demonstrate their cultural sophistication by rebuilding their country houses, and urban professionals can spend all their spare cash on pictures, carpets and similar luxuries, the less fortunate are more concerned with protecting themselves against the next bad harvest. They do not rebuild their houses simply on account of fashion. In fact they don’t rebuild them at all, if they can help it. They do not build new houses, either, except where the old one proves unsafe or a farmer has managed to consolidate his land through enclosure and wants a new farmhouse situated in the middle of his farm. When this happens, his old house in the village is immediately freed up, to be used as cottages, thereby adding further to the housing stock.

  This is not to say that rural housing doesn’t change. Since the mid-sixteenth century people have been modernising their homes, adding fireplaces and chimneys, porches, glass windows, staircases and extensions. Most of those improvements are complete by the early seventeenth century; you won’t come across a hearth still set in the middle of the hall floor, with smoke billowing around the room, except in Scotland and the remotest parts of England and Wales.49 Similarly, few cottages south of the Scottish border are completely unglazed. But what you will find in both countries are old houses that still have halls open to the rafters, or with little private space, or with a newly built parlour wing tacked on to an old hall. This is the most common reason for late-seventeenth-century construction work: farmers and tradesmen who have prospered require more living accommodation for their families and servants, who are no longer content to sleep beside the hall fire every night.

  Look at Nether Fletchamstead Hall, near Coventry, the house of a yeoman, William Meigh, from the 1660s. With its mullion windows on both floors and high chimneys, it is obviously a high-status building from earlier in the seventeenth century – but one that has been modernised by a farmer with cash to spare. Indeed, at the time of his death in 1685 William’s goods and chattels are worth over £520.50 However, his hall is sparsely furnished at the time of his demise: just the traditional long table and bench, another small table and the furniture for the fireplace – shovel, tongs, andirons and a newly bought grate for burning coal. The hall is no longer the grand centre of the house that it once was; in fact, an extra bedchamber has been built above it. The focus has shifted to the next room, the parlour, where William has a drawing table, a round table, a cupboard, a chest, an armchair, six chairs upholstered with Russia leather and another coal-burning grate with tongs and fire shovel. In a second hall there is nothing but an old iron turret clock and a fire grate. The rest of the rooms on the ground floor include the buttery, the kitchen, a mill house (where there is a malt mill installed) and a dairy or cheese chamber. All of these are utilitarian. Walking through the bedchambers on the first floor, you will see that they are all quite comfortable as far as sleeping goes: the best ones have feather beds with curtains, valance, counterpane, rugs and blankets; and there are besides many chairs and stools. What you will not see are pictures, carpets, screens, japanned furniture, mirrors and cushions. There isn’t a single book in the house, or a chamber pot. Apart from the Russia-leather chairs, the nearest thing to a modern luxury item in the whole house is a practical tool: a smoothing iron, in the bedchamber over the buttery. William Meigh is a man with a barn full of rye, wheat, oats, barley, vetches and peas; 40 acres of corn in the fields; ninety-two sheep; nine horses; six pigs; fifty-eight cows, bulls, heifers and calves; and several hundredweight of cheese – you’d have thought he’d have spent a little bit on luxuries, but no. Nor is he the exception. The improvements of the late seventeenth century lie in the quality of everyday items, such as the furniture. Separate chairs and stools have replaced benches; some of the chairs are upholstered. Cupboards have come to replace shelves. Much of the furniture is now made by a specialist joiner. Otherwise, the wealth of a prosperous farmer is largely in his fields and barns; there are very few non-necessities.

  It will not surprise you to hear that the houses of poorer people also have few luxuries. When Thomas Jeffery of Dunsford, Devon, dies in 1691, the lease of his cottage is worth £10 – more than half the value of everything he owns. In the bedchambers there are just three old beds besides two coffers – nothing of decoration at all. Similarly there is nothing in the hall except a storage cupboard, a table and form, a settle and his cooking pots. Apart from the glass windows, nothing much has changed domestically from the time of his great-grandfather. Those at the bottom of the social ladder have every reason to feel that the changes of the age have passed them by.51

  You will of course be making a mental note not to stay with people like Thomas Jeffery. They have little to offer you in terms of comfort. But it cannot be repeated often enough that the majority of people (62 per cent) fall into this category: labourers, cottagers and paupers – the poor ‘who fare hard’. They don’t have a choice between burning coal or wood; they cannot afford either. Peat is the standard fuel of the poor right across Great Britain – from Cornwall to Scotland – but it is not available everywhere. Celia Fiennes notes that, around Penzance, there is no fuel except ‘gorse, furze and fern’; and that people living near Swanage in Dorset ‘take up stones by the shores that are so oily as the poor burn it for fire, and it’s so light a fire it serves for candle too, but it has a strong offensive smell’. Near Peterborough she sees ‘upon the walls of the ordinary people’s houses the cow dung plastered up to dry in cakes which they use [for] firing – it’s a very offensive fuel but the country people use little else in these parts’.52 In Wiltshire, Thomas Baskerville notes the poor of Highworth doing the same thing: daubing the walls of their cottages in cow dung to dry it
over summer, for use in winter.53 In Scotland, seaweed is dried and used, along with cow and horse dung.54 And don’t forget that these fuels are not only used for heating, but for cooking and lighting too. Candles are unaffordable if you have barely enough food to eat. Therefore, if you think that visiting a city is a multi-sensory experience, with all the smells of the ordure and the smog, then rest assured that visiting the homes of the rural poor can be just as much an assault on the senses. One of the few things you don’t have to worry about, though, is the next-door neighbour’s cesspit overflowing. The advantage of living in the country is that there is plenty of space for you to dig a hole.

  9

  What to Eat, Drink and Smoke

  If you think that by visiting Restoration Britain you are returning to a healthier way of life, with a diet that is natural and more wholesome, you are in for a shock. Putting aside for the moment the heavy smoking and drinking, you will be surprised by what people consider a healthy diet. In the modern world, we balance the tastiness of a few types of meat with our nutritional needs. In the Restoration, people simply see lots of animals and think God put them all on Earth for their benefit. It is almost as if Noah’s Ark were a menu. This is Edward Chamberlayne’s list of abundant English foods:

  What plenty everywhere of sheep, oxen, swine, fallow deer, conies and hares … red deer, goats [and] roe [deer]. What abundance of hens, ducks, geese, turkeys, pigeons and larks; of partridge, pheasants, plovers, teals, thrushes, merles, fieldfares, ouzels or blackbirds; wild ducks, wild geese, swans, peacocks, buntings, snipe, quails, woodcocks and lapwings. [England] wants not sandlings, knot, curlew, bayning, dotterel, roe, char, chough, maychit, stint, sea plover, pewits, redshanks, rails, wheatears, herons, cranes, bitterns, bustards, puffins, godwits, heath-cocks, moor-pouts or grouse thrushes and throstles. What plenty of salmon, trout, lamperns, gudgeons, carp, tench, lampreys, pikes, perches, eels, breams, rock, dace, crayfish, flounders, plaice, shads, mullets. What great abundance of herrings, whitings, mackerel, soles, smelts, pilchards, sprats, oysters, lobsters, crabs, shrimps, thornback … prawns, ruffs, mussels, cockles, conger, turbots, cod, skate, [mades?], scallops, etcetera. What great plenty of apples, pears, plums, and cherries. How doth England abound with wheat, barley, rye, pulses, beans and oats; with excellent butter and cheese; with most sorts of edible roots and herbs.1

 

‹ Prev