HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/topic/history-in-the-home Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:44:04 GMT en hourly 1 Would you sleep in a medieval home? (There'd be no privacy and it might smell of bacon) https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/would-you-sleep-in-a-medieval-home/ Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:44:04 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/would-you-sleep-in-a-medieval-home/ For most people in 14th-century England, home meant a smoky, crowded hall where eating, working and sleeping all happened in the same shared space. Historian Ian Mortimer reveals what a night under your medieval ancestors’ roof would really have been like "If you imagine going to stay with your ancestors during the 14th century, you'd like to think you might stay with the wealthy ones: in a castle with a high chamber and a nice bed, a chest in the corner, a perch for your favourite hawk," says historian Dr Ian Mortimer.

In 14th-century England, perhaps four-fifths of the population still lived in rural communities, and most households depended in some way on agriculture. Society ranged from wealthy nobles and prosperous landowners to tenant farmers, craftsmen, servants and landless labourers. Their homes varied enormously, but, as Mortimer explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra Academy, “of course, the vast majority of the population does not live in castles."

Instead, your destination would probably be an ordinary house – and the centre of your evening would be a single large room: the hall. And, Mortimer argues, understanding that hall is essential to understanding what home meant to a medieval person.

Castles were primarily military, administrative and elite residences. But they were never representative of how most people lived. Even within them, the enormous stone towers and battlements visible today tell us little about the homes occupied by most medieval people. Ordinary domestic buildings were much more likely to be built from materials that survive far less readily in the archaeological record.

"[Most people] live in ordinary houses," says Mortimer. "These houses vary up and down the country, frequently built of local stone and other materials."

"But they all have one thing in common. They are all built around the hall: the open space in the middle of the house, where you have the central fire and where most of your indoor living experience would take place."

Step inside a 14th-century hall

The word "hall" can sound misleading. It didn’t mean a corridor or entranceway. In many medieval homes, it was the principal living room of the house – often the largest and most socially important space, where the household ate, worked, entertained visitors and gathered around the fire. This fire was the hall’s anchor.

"There would have been a central hearth where the family would gather to sleep at night," says Mortimer, on “a floor that would have been packed earth with rushes on it.”

Rushes were spread across beaten-earth floors, and they helped provide insulation and a softer, cleaner surface underfoot. They could be swept out and replaced, sometimes together with fragrant herbs. In wealthier homes, floors might instead be tiled or boarded, but an earth-and-rush surface would have been common lower down the social scale.

Reconstruction of a medieval great hall furnished with a large wooden table, high-backed chairs, pottery and wall hangings.

Mortimer also explains that the room itself would have been “open to the rafters. The smoke from the hearth would rise into the rafters, where bacon filchers would be hanging about the room."

Purpose-built chimneys weren’t yet standard features of ordinary English houses, making the hall smokier than a modern room. Hanging meat high in the smoky roof space could help dry and preserve foods such as bacon, extending their usefulness at a time when households had no refrigeration. Preserving food through salting, smoking, drying and pickling was fundamental to surviving the agricultural year, particularly through winter.

What would you sleep on?

This is where the experience might be particularly alien to modern ideas of domestic comfort. We tend to think of a room according to its designated purpose. The medieval hall was instead defined by the different things that happened there over the course of a day.

"[In the hall] you'd have had a trestle table and benches for eating, which would be packed away to sleep at night," says Mortimer.

At night, this flexibility of space meant that the hall would be used to sleep in.

The precise sleeping arrangements naturally depended on the household. Medieval society contained enormous disparities of wealth, and better off people had access to private chambers that poorer people did not.

But the important point is that sleeping remained a communal experience. That meant spending the night in close proximity to other people, rather than behind the closed door of a private bedroom.

Married couples slept together, but so might siblings, servants or travellers. Inns and guest accommodation could likewise expect strangers or near-strangers to share sleeping arrangements that many modern travellers would find startling. For poorer people, bedding might consist of straw-filled mattresses or sacks, blankets and cloaks laid on benches or the floor. Wealthier people could own feather mattresses, sheets, bolsters and elaborate bed hangings. Beds were valuable possessions – sometimes among the most expensive objects recorded in household inventories – and could be inherited from one generation to another.

Why did rich people start abandoning the hall?

But as the century ended, trends began to change.

"It starts to decline toward the end of the 14th century," he says.

This shift coincided with wider social changes following the Black Death. Labour shortages increased the bargaining power of many surviving workers, precipitating larger social changes. One of those was an alteration to some people’s domestic arrangements.

One clue comes from Piers Plowman, the great Middle English poem generally attributed to William Langland. Written and revised during the second half of the 14th century, the poem offers a powerful critique of the religious and social world of its age.

Medieval manuscript illustration showing men and women harvesting and binding sheaves of grain in a field.

"In the poem, the poet laments that the important people in society – the lords and gentry – are withdrawing from the hall," says Mortimer.

But why should it matter where a medieval lord ate his dinner? This, in fact, represented an important change in the relationship between elite people and the households around them.

"They're no longer eating there with their servants, guests and family members," Mortimer explains. "They're going off to the separate parts of the house, to the solar to eat."

The solar was a private chamber, often in the upper levels of a medieval house. For those who could afford such spaces, it provided an opportunity to escape from the crowded hall.

But this withdrawal had social implications. A lord dining in the hall ate in the presence of servants, dependants, guests and other household members. A lord retreating into a separate chamber put a wall – sometimes quite literally – between himself and those people.

The fact that the author of Piers Plowman apparently regarded the change as something worth lamenting is worth reflecting on.

But this didn’t mean that the hall suddenly vanished at the end of the 14th century. Far from it. "Still, it is the main focal point for virtually everybody," Mortimer stresses.

Instead, what was changing was the relationship between that communal centre and the increasingly specialised spaces surrounding it. Over time, houses could accommodate a greater separation of activities and people. The domestic world was gradually becoming more compartmentalised; a process that would continue through the later Middle Ages and into the early modern period.

Dr Ian Mortimer was speaking on his HistoryExtra academy series, A-Z of Medieval Life. Watch the full episode.

]]> "I can lose myself for hours in a hypnotic trance": why we should all spend more time in archives https://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-can-lose-myself-for-hours-in-a-hypnotic-trance-why-we-should-all-spend-more-time-in-archives/ Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:30:51 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-can-lose-myself-for-hours-in-a-hypnotic-trance-why-we-should-all-spend-more-time-in-archives/ "Every one of us has an archive of our life, which is part of a bigger history", writes Kavita Puri Having spent so much time in newsrooms and edit suites making television and radio documentaries, I have come to archives late on in my life. These are the precious places that hold records, whether that’s a digital file, an audio recording, or perhaps a paper diary, all of which can take you instantly back in time and place. I can lose myself for hours in some hypnotic trance as I stumble across a sentiment, a betrayal, a confession. All the while, I’m piecing together from these different voices a part of history. There are the official records and the private. And in both it can feel as if you are trespassing, as you turn a page that was perhaps once held by its author.

In his beautiful book An Archive (Ivory Press, 2025) the British artist, potter and author Edmund de Waal writes: “Archives are purposeful and they are random. They record the personal and the institutional, plural and singular histories. They are passed on, inherited, stolen, plundered and lost. They are destroyed by accident and by design. They record rewritings, rethinking and retellings. They hold stories so they don’t disappear. They preserve information in the hope of a future.”

Archives are, as he suggests, many things. They also reflect choices made about what and who we think should be recorded, and of what we remember. They can be self-consciously curated, but they may also not look in the direction we are expecting.

Walking around de Waal’s vast studio in south London, I saw the rows of shelves that hold all the pots he has ever made (and are not currently out on loan to museums). He pointed at different ones, and was instantly able to explain when he’d made it and how he’d felt at that precise moment in time. Standing in that room, I realised the objects in that space were not only a record of his work, but were also an emotional map of his life.

Archives are not just for historians writing books, and they aren’t (always) dusty rooms in a basement. They can also be objects like de Waal’s pots. The past lives all around us, not only in documents, but in material and physical ways, as well as in homes and public spaces.

And it is not always about the great and good, but can be personal too. An archive might comprise the books we read, the letters we write, even the emails we send. Every one of us has an archive of our life, which is part of a bigger history. Most of us will not end up in a history book, museum or library, with the contents of our lives pored over in the future. But our own personal archive is meaningful nevertheless, and is something to be valued.

A black and white photograph of a young man, resting his chin on his hand

Sometimes an archive takes on its own life. I was recently at the exhibition Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion at the Centre of Federico Garcia Lorca in Granada. It tells the story of the Spanish poet, who was murdered during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. After his death, his personal archive was hidden for years from the Nationalists. His family feared it would be destroyed for political reasons and so much of it was smuggled out of the country, but decades later it was returned to Spain and carefully preserved. To this day, Lorca’s body has never been found. But the archive of his work – his intimate feelings, his political recordings – was saved and lives on.

Ultimately, archives offer us clues to another time, which like a detective in the present we can try and piece together. We shall never all agree on that version of the past, and so history is perpetually revised. Cataloguing what has been before us will always be incomplete. Items are lost, and there are silences and absences that may be unrecovered. Ultimately, as de Waal says: “Archives are absolutely unfinished. That is the point.”

This column was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine

]]> The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-sinister-secrets-of-samuel-pepys/ Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-sinister-secrets-of-samuel-pepys/ His diaries are revered for their kaleidoscopic evocation of Restoration England. Yet a fresh analysis of Pepys’ world-famous journals – carried out by Guy de la Bédoyère – reveals a man with a proclivity for coercion and sexual violence Samuel Pepys is England’s most celebrated diarist. Between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669, he recorded his day-to-day life in fascinating and illuminating detail. He wrote about his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and the frustrations of managing his household and the servants. He left first-hand accounts of the plague epidemic that likely claimed around 100,000 lives in the capital in 1665–66, and of the Great Fire of London that followed. He has come down through the years as one of the key primary sources for anyone trying to understand the early Restoration era.

But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages.

London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)

Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance.

His diary entry – tellingly, one omitted from editions published in the 19th century, and which appeared without its meaning explained in the 1970s edition – describes what happened. “Yo had Mrs Burrows all sola a my closet and did there besar and tocar su mamelles as much as yo quisere hasta a hazer me hazer, but ella would not suffer that yo should poner mi mano abaxo ses jupes which yo endeavoured. [I had Mrs Burrows all alone in my closet and did there kiss and touch her breasts as much as I wanted until making myself do, but she would not suffer that I should put my hand below her skirts which I endeavoured.] Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of York’s playhouse.”

A black and white image of a young woman with curly hair tied back. She is wearing a low cut dress and has her arm across her lap, holding a plant stalk

The description is typically offhand. That Pepys went to collect his wife, also Elizabeth, immediately afterwards is astonishing. The mix of English and foreign words was a deliberate tactic, as we will see. Pepys tended to avoid specifics in his writing, and often used indirect references to sexual details, but the meaning of “making myself do” is obvious.

Ignoring infidelities

Why isn’t this unpleasant side of Pepys’ character better known? It helps to understand that, in the past, diary transcribers and some biographers often depicted these activities as recreational capers – or simply ignored them altogether. The full extent and implications of Pepys’ self-confessed adulterous activities, including the coercion and sexual violence, were often glossed over and evaded. It’s a story further complicated by the history behind the publication of the diary text, sections of which first appeared in print in 1825.

Pepys wrote the diary in Tachygraphy, a commercial form of shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton in the early 17th century – a time when such abbreviated forms of writing were extremely popular. Shelton’s system uses symbols for consonants, prefixes and suffixes, and arbitrary symbols to represent specific words. Medial (middle) vowels were not normally written, but instead were indicated by the positioning of later consonants in a word. (I have been using Tachygraphy for more than 20 years in my everyday life.)

Pepys’ diary was not strictly ‘secret’ – but, when it came to his adulterous activities, he was worried that someone might realise what he had written about. In 1664, when his recorded infidelities become more frequent, Pepys resorted to writing parts of the key sentences in French. But he soon found that Shelton’s shorthand was unsuited to French – unlike Spanish, which has fewer vowel sounds. He therefore began to use a mixture of foreign languages: French and Spanish were preferred, but words from Italian, Portuguese, Latin and Greek also crop up in his entries.

Five dark brown books with gold insignia on the front, with one open book, covered in writing

Pepys’ graphic accounts of his sexual activities horrified previous transcribers and editors of the diary. The 19th-century editions generally omitted such material, although the editors alluded to the excised filth in their introductions, so readers were left titillated but none the wiser. “Have faith in the judgment of the editor,” pleaded Henry Wheatley, whose 1890s edition of the 1870s transcription by the Reverend Mynors Bright remained in print for decades.

By the late 1950s, plans were afoot to publish the whole, unexpurgated diary text in a transcription by Robert Latham and William Matthews, but legislation around obscene publications presented an obstacle. Then, in 1960, Penguin published the first unexpurgated UK edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. In the landmark court case that followed, lawyers successfully argued that a provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed publishers a defence for works of literary merit, and Penguin was acquitted.

That verdict opened the way for Pepys’ full diaries to be made public. Even then, lawyers urged restraint. In the event, Latham and Matthews decided to publish the whole text but not to analyse or translate any of Pepys’ polyglot. Nor would they flag up which passages were previously unpublished. Their edition, appearing throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, has always been regarded as the definitive text – which, to a large extent, it is.

Out of kilter

When I embarked on a project to analyse and translate the controversial passages in 2024, I realised that avoiding doing so in the 1970s edition had resulted in some dubious readings of the polyglot being printed. Unlike my predecessors, I was able to magnify scans of the diary and scrutinise them in unprecedented detail. In doing so, I found that the correct readings were largely obvious and could be tracked easily to contemporary French or Spanish dictionaries that Pepys owned.

Using such methods, I made my own fresh transcriptions from the original shorthand and translated them. This was laborious but revelatory, and led me to discover other ways in which Pepys disguised his meanings.

In May 1667, while writing in the shorthand, he started adding what previous transcribers called “dummy letters” or “extraneous consonants” to certain English words, though very rarely applying this to the polyglot. One of the best examples is maladimen hered, which Pepys wrote (in shorthand) to represent ‘maidenhead’.

Not one of the earlier transcribers realised that this method had been devised by the polymath clergyman John Wilkins (1614–72) and explained in his Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641). A copy of this book that belonged to Pepys is shelved near the diary volumes in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Pepys had several other books by Wilkins, and greatly admired him.

As I worked through Pepys’ diary, transcribing and translating these controversial passages, I realised that these were the private revelations of a man who had what seemed to be a neuro-psychological form of addiction. When he was in what he called his “hot humour”, by his own admission he sought out any woman he could find. And on at least two occasions he raped one of them.

Elizabeth Bagwell was the wife of William, a naval carpenter whose father, Owen, was yard foreman at Deptford royal dockyard. Conducting official business, Pepys frequently visited that site, where he spotted Elizabeth – and the Bagwells spotted Pepys, too. They wanted to secure positions for William, and used Elizabeth as a honeytrap. Was she willing to play the part? We can’t know – but father and son both pushed the young Mrs Bagwell on Pepys, who admired what he thought was her virtue while at the same time being determined to wear her down.

Pepys understood the transactional nature of this relationship. He found William jobs in Charles II’s navy – but, in return, he wanted Mrs Bagwell’s services. Whether she realised the risks of what she was being forced to do is impossible to know. But then came a day when Pepys could restrain himself no longer.

On 20 December 1664, he wrote, he “walked to Deptford where after doing something at the yard I walked, without being observed, with Bagwell home to his house and there was very kindly used, and the poor people did get a dinner for me in their fashion. Of which I also eat very well. After dinner I found occasion of sending him abroad, and then alone avec elle je tentoy à ferer ce que je vodre et contre sa force je le fesoy, bien que pas à mon contentement [alone with her, I tried to do what I would like and against her resistance I did it, although not to my full satisfaction].” Pepys had clearly raped Elizabeth Bagwell.

On the evening of 20 February 1665, he again headed to Deptford and “it being dark did privately entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell [enter the house of Bagwell’s wife], and there had sa company, though with a great deal of difficulty, néanmoins enfin j’avais ma volonté d’elle [nevertheless, in the end I had my will of her].”

The following day, Pepys nursed an injured finger: it seems he’d used force on Mrs Bagwell, who had clearly done everything possible to fight back.

Controlling behaviour

These horrifying episodes were conducted during the course of Pepys’ professional duties, and while he was married. He loved his wife, Elizabeth, passionately but also gaslit her, often denying her money and controlling her behaviour. She was so unhappy that she wrote down her concerns, only for Pepys to destroy her papers on 9 January 1663. On 19 December 1664, he became enraged by her challenges to his authority, and hit her so hard that she was left with a visible injury over one eye.

Elizabeth Pepys, who was half-French, died in November 1669, aged just 29, having contracted a fever – probably typhoid while on a trip to Paris and the Low Countries with Samuel. This followed a debacle the previous autumn when Elizabeth had caught him touching the genitals of her 18-year-old companion, Deb Willet, with whom Pepys had been obsessed ever since she came to work for them in 1667. It sent Elizabeth into a paroxysm of rage that lasted months. Pepys was contrite, but continued to seek out Deb, who had fled. Having found her, he forced himself upon her again.

Pepys with his wife, Elizabeth, depicted at home in a 19th-century coloured engraving. Their relationship was often fraught: Pepys reacted violently to what he saw as her challenges to his authority, on one occasion leaving her with a visible injury above her eye (Image by TopFoto)

He also returned to his other mistresses, among them Betty Martin and her younger sister, Doll, milliners who worked at Westminster. Betty, nearly 24 when Pepys first mentioned her at the beginning of the diary, had long been his most regular mistress, and seems to have been willing and pragmatic. By the early 1660s, though, he was encouraging her to marry. When she did wed one Samuel Martin, she worked on Pepys to give her husband a position as a naval purser. He obliged, and was even godfather to one of her children.

Despite the abuse and exploitation to which she had been subjected, Deb Willet married a client of Pepys called Jeremiah Wells, had two daughters, and lived near Pepys in London until her premature death in 1678. Pepys helped Jeremiah, who died in 1679, with his career in the church. Did Pepys’ pursuit continue during the marriage? Certainly, Deb had been confronted with a dilemma that so many women faced during this era: her security was tied up with her husband’s employment. We will never know if Pepys pursued the relationship, because he had ceased writing his diary on 31 May 1669.

By extracting all of these entries in sequence, the patterns of Pepys’ sex life have become easier to follow. He loved women, but also treated them as chattels. He revelled in the exuberant company of the actress Elizabeth Knepp: “I… got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night.” He routinely did the same to his maids and other people’s servants.

One mistake easily made is to assume that the diary is a comprehensive record of Pepys’ activities. He once referred to his antics with Betty Martin’s sister Doll, a decade her junior, and that he had been with her “100 times”. Though that was obviously metaphorical, it and other comments suggest that the diary records only a fraction of his philandering.

Pepys was so over-sexed that he masturbated in public places. At the Queen’s Chapel on Christmas Eve 1667, “I did make myself to do la cosa [the thing] by mere imagination mirando a jolie móça [looking on a pretty wench] and with my eyes open which I never did before. And God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel.”

Read those two lines back out loud and you will spot another aspect of the diary that has escaped comment. Pepys used alliteration, metre and rhymes often in these controversial passages, suggesting that he took a perverse pleasure in composing them. Alliteration is so conspicuous in the polyglot sexual passages that it’s amazing it has gone unnoticed hitherto.

Lost voices

The tragedy is that nothing written down by any of the women in his life – even by his humiliated and angry wife – has survived. However, modern online genealogical resources (such as ancestry.co.uk and familysearch.org) unavailable to previous editors have made it possible to trace some new details.

These women were trapped in a society where their autonomy was limited. They were treated – and expected to be treated – as commodities. Mrs Bagwell was still visiting Pepys’ office when she was in her forties, two decades after their initial encounter, seeking positions for her husband. Pepys, then Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote her husband a letter telling him to stop his wife. Even so, Pepys helped William Bagwell throughout the rest of his career; the latter died as a master shipwright in 1697, and Mrs Bagwell passed away in 1702, a well-to-do widow. Was that really any consolation to her? We shall never know.

A painting of a man in a brown shirt with white scarf and cuffs. He is looking directly at the viewer and is holding a piece of music in his left hand

It’s clear that Pepys was a bully, a vain and philandering hypocrite, and a domineering and mean-minded husband. He was capable of sexual violence as well as being coercive, deceitful and manipulative. He groomed his female targets into submission, and disregarded their feelings. He was easily manipulated by others who spotted his inclinations. He also routinely beat his servants.

Yet he was equally capable of generosity, compassion and love. His enduring loyalty was one of his most edifying characteristics. He was meticulous, exceptionally well organised and a superb administrator. He had an overwhelming, if credulous, curiosity about life, and a well-developed appreciation of art and music. He was an invigorating individual and was manifestly held in great esteem by many of his contemporaries.

Pepys’ graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions. Yet the treatment of that diary in previous editions, all to a greater or lesser extent suppressing his least edifying characteristics, has created an image of Pepys that has falsified his own witnessing of his life. Now, with this side of his life laid bare as he wrote it himself, at last we have a fuller picture of the truth.

Pepys died in 1703, highly esteemed by many other luminaries of the period, none apparently aware of his controversial private life as a younger man. Had his secrets emerged, his reputation and career could have been destroyed. He had hidden in plain sight – but left a record of the truth without parallel. 

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025)

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Inside a Roman home https://www.historyextra.com/membership/inside-roman-home-podcast-hannah-platts/ Wed, 13 Apr 2022 11:48:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/inside-roman-home-podcast-hannah-platts/ Hannah Platts offers a multisensory tour of the Roman home – from the smells of the kitchen to the surprises of the dinner table What could you expect to hear in the atrium of a Roman home? What was everyday life like for the slaves who worked in the kitchens? And which emperor hosted the worst dinner party? In conversation with Emily Briffett, Dr Hannah Platts takes us on a multi-sensory tour of the ancient Roman home.

Hannah Platts is author of Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome: Power and Space in Roman Houses (Bloomsbury, 2019)

]]> What time of the day did medieval people eat? https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/when-eat-what-time-day-night-middle-ages-breakfast-lunch-supper-afternoon-tea-vespers/ Wed, 13 May 2020 16:00:02 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/when-eat-what-time-day-night-middle-ages-breakfast-lunch-supper-afternoon-tea-vespers/ In the Middle Ages, who you were and what you did for a living had great bearing on what you were allowed to eat – and when. Here, Professor Chris Woolgar explains medieval mealtimes… What meals are eaten by whom and when? There were three principal meals eaten in the Middle Ages: breakfast, lunch and supper. Breakfast (jantaculum) was largely confined to the elite; to travellers and to some manual workers. In terms of timing, it was not to be eaten until the first mass of the day had been completed. It was also not eaten on Fridays.

Lunch (prandium) was the main meal of the day and was probably eaten at around 11am, but this varied across establishments, depending on the number of people there and the number of sittings required. The timing of lunch also depended on which day of the week it was: the meal was eaten later on Fridays, when in many establishments it may have been the only meal eaten that day, and there was a notion that it should not be eaten until after vespers (evening prayers). The evidence suggests, however, that vespers were said much earlier on Fridays – around the middle of the day – so people did not, in fact, have to wait until into the evening to eat lunch.

Supper (cena) was an evening meal, which was lighter than lunch. What time of day it was eaten depended on the time of year. In winter, it may have been eaten during daylight hours.

Afternoon tea

There were two other occasions for drinking and food. There was mid-afternoon drinking, a bit like afternoon tea (although they didn’t actually have tea). The masons at York Minster, for example, in around 1350 in summer were to work until the first bell to vespers and then they might drink in their lodge until the third bell, after which they would return to work.

Then there was also something called ‘all night’. This was a livery of food and drink typically directed to a chamber so that the Lord and some others might have food and drink during the night. The buttery and pantry in great households were closed up overnight. In my talk, we will discuss the bars to these offices – that is, the barrier on which food and drink was dispensed. The bar was closed overnight.

(Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Did medieval people snack during the day? I'm sure they did. But it was considered part of the sin of gluttony to eat at inappropriate times. Indeed, one of the big worries of the great medieval household was keeping control of where food might be eaten. One of the reasons why people ate in the hall was that they concentrated their expenditure and their effort on consumption at a particular time and a particular place, where everybody could see it going on. You didn’t have people eating privately in their chambers because this would mean they could potentially eat anything there. Furthermore, the lord would lose one of the greatest benefits of providing food for his household – he wanted it to be consumed in public so that his largesse might be seen.

To watch Chris Woolgar's talk on food in the Middle Ages, recorded as part of our free virtual Medieval Life and Death History Festival, click here. There you can also watch the other festival lectures – on medieval disease and medicine, religion, marriage and crime.

]]> From slums to suburbs: Britain’s council house revolution https://www.historyextra.com/membership/slums-suburbs-britain-council-house-revolution-social-housing/ Thu, 08 Aug 2019 05:24:40 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/slums-suburbs-britain-council-house-revolution-social-housing/ A century ago, the government triggered a massive housebuilding programme aimed at freeing Britons from the scourges of rats, damp, poor sanitation… and Bolshevism. Historian Eugene Byrne chronicles Britain’s council house revolution In the middle of the Sea Mills estate on the edge of Bristol there is an open green space generally known as Sea Mills Square, though it is actually a semi-circle. It was here, on 4 June 1919, that Dr Christopher Addison, president of the Local Government Board and the architect of the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act, formally inaugurated Bristol’s council house building scheme. A large crowd looked on.

Cutting the first sod, Dr Addison said he could not imagine a more glorious location for housing than Sea Mills, a greenfield site close to the upmarket suburbs of Sneyd Park and Stoke Bishop. Addison proclaimed himself happy that the famous and ancient city of Bristol was now at the forefront of the nation’s great postwar drive to create new homes. Around the square, tidy red-brick houses, which are still there today, would be built in the coming years.

Bristol’s lady mayoress planted an oak tree to mark the occasion, and the attending great and good drove off to inspect plans for the houses. That evening, Addison gave a speech in which he said that, under legislation just passed, he was to become the country’s first minister of health, and that housing would most definitely be part of his responsibilities. Housing would remain the preserve of successive health ministers for decades to come, because everyone understood that housing was a health issue.

His remarks reflected the fact that the living conditions of many of the poorest in urban Britain were truly shocking. Numerous Victorian and Edwardian social reformers and journalists had catalogued the atrocious living conditions of the poor in towns and cities around the country, yet little had been done about it. Rats, mice, lice, damp, dry rot, bad or non-existent sanitation and overcrowding all curtailed the lives and opportunities of millions of Britons. Army medical officers were appalled by the poor health of many recruits in the First World War, just as they had been during the Boer War less than a generation previously.

A new blueprint

Councils had powers to build houses before 1919, though few used them. Just a handful of corporation housing schemes were carried out, notably in London, Glasgow and Liverpool. There was also a patchwork of working-class developments in major cities, run by charitable and philanthropic organisations. Most of these were quite practical, offering decent housing for decent rents, which would provide equally decent returns for investors – so-called ‘five per cent philanthropy’. Many of the developments that survive are now homes to the comfortably off or very wealthy. London’s Hampstead Garden Suburb, for instance, was started in the early 1900s as an idealistic community where all social classes mixed, but poorer tenants were priced out decades ago.

The prewar schemes were seriously underpowered, and any well-intentioned council trying to clear its most egregious slums came up against the problem of finding sufficient affordable accommodation for displaced tenants. The war put the housing problem on hold, then made it worse. With labour and resources diverted to feeding the war machine, few new houses were built and little was done to maintain existing ones.

Children tend a garden in Hampstead Garden Suburb

But the war also caused a massive cultural change within the establishment. The Victorian attitudes of minimal government intervention in economic and social affairs evaporated with the need to mobilise and direct the nation’s resources. Now it was taken for granted that government would intervene more in peacetime, too.

Before the war’s end, policymakers were already thinking about future housing. The influential Tudor Walters report, published in late 1918, laid out detailed standards for housebuilding. And by the time Dr Addison visited Sea Mills, the government had another pressing incentive to trigger a boom in housebuilding: self-preservation. The end of the First World War had ushered in a period of great political turmoil and uncertainty. There had been a revolution in Russia, and Germany and the Austrian empire appeared to be going the same way. Now the nervous British establishment saw signs of revolt at home. Irish nationalists were fighting for independence and labour unrest was rife on Glasgow’s ‘Red Clydeside’ and in other cities. There were even police strikes.

In the general election of December 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George successfully traded on his history of prewar radicalism, and promised “a country fit for heroes to live in”. So the Housing, Town Planning &c Act of 1919 was partly a product of national solidarity at the war’s end, and of establishment goodwill towards working-class people who had made so many sacrifices. But it was also driven by the need to head off discontent. In an oft-quoted observation by Waldorf Astor, parliamentary secretary of the Local Government Board: “The money we are going to spend on housing is an insurance against Bolshevism and revolution.”

Parlour games

The Addison Act marked the start of wholesale government intervention in the housing market. The costs would be shared by central government through subsidies, by local government through the rates, and by the tenants through the rents they would pay. Construction of new estates started all over the country and many of the first dwellings that resulted were of a high quality, but there were nowhere near enough of them.

By 1923 the Conservatives were back in power, and this brought a change in housing policy. Neville Chamberlain, as Conservative minister of health, oversaw a housing act based on the belief that private enterprise would provide housing more cheaply and effi-ciently, and which offered a smaller subsidy favouring private builders. In general, homes built under the Chamberlain Act were smaller, and usually came without a parlour.

This changed the following year during Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived Labour government. Health minister John Wheatley increased subsidies, insisted that all houses be built for rent and secured the confidence of the building industry by promising the scheme would last 15 years. It was scaled back in the economic crisis of the early 30s, but the Wheatley Act would account for the majority of council houses built between the wars.

By now, the ideological differences that would dominate Labour and Conservative debates over council housing for decades to come were clear. Labour politicians wanted good-quality housing for all, while Conservatives wanted to encourage owner-occupation. They viewed council housing as just being for those who could not afford to buy.

But between the wars, council houses were aspirational. The rents were often quite high, and while this did nothing for the poorest people living in the most abject conditions, the thinking was that improved housing would ‘trickle down’. As more and more moved into new homes, the quantity and quality of privately rented housing would have to improve.

Moving into a home on a council estate meant you were going up in the world. Countless families left old Victorian terraces and courts in the middle of grimy industrial cities for bright and airy estates, and a home with a garden and an inside toilet. You might also have a bathroom and a gas cooker and perhaps a parlour – a ‘front room’ – for guests and special occasions. There was often (but not always to start with) electricity as well.

“Compared with the old houses they were a dream to keep clean,” remembered a woman who moved to a new home on Liverpool’s Larkhill estate in 1922. “And then having running hot water, well, that was wonderful, especially for women with young kiddies. All my life, till we came here, I’d had to go down a yard to the toilet. You can imagine the difference it made, having the toilet next to your bedroom, especially in winter. You felt like a queen.”

New homes, new Britain

Four ways in which council housing changed a nation

The growth of the garden

Tenancy agreements obliged council householders to keep their front gardens neat and tidy, and many grew vegetables in their back gardens. Gardening clubs sprouted on many estates to share knowledge, tools, seeds and cuttings. On middle-class estates, a neat garden was an essential hallmark of respectability.

The rise of the car

People on new developments had to travel further to work. In 1919, there were just over 100,000 privately owned cars on UK roads. By 1939, there were more than 2 million. Public transport in regional cities also shifted from trams running on fixed rails to motor bus services, whose routes could be more easily modified.

Smaller families

Suburban homes were more healthy, with lower infant mortality, and couples of all classes felt they could safely restrict the number of children they had in order to maintain their new lifestyles.

The age of the housewife

As estates were often far from places of employment, many middle and working-class women had no choice but to be full-time home-makers. But women did have the vote, and politicians had to talk up the needs of ‘the housewife’.

Neat gardens – but no pigeons

Would-be tenants had to jump through a lot of hoops. You would be interviewed by a council official, who quizzed you about your income, children and whether you kept pets. Women might be asked about how often they did their washing.

One woman allocated a council house recalled: “When I moved here in 1929, you needed a letter from the Holy Ghost himself to get a council house. You had to show your birth certificate, marriage lines, rent book, everything. You see, they had to make sure you were decent. It used to be a really lovely estate, had a really good class of tenant.”

Tenancy agreements included a long litany of dos and don’ts: you cannot keep animals or livestock (chickens or rabbits might be overlooked, but pigeons usually weren’t); no banging nails into any of the walls; no erecting a garden shed without permission; keep the front garden “neat and cultivated”; clean the windows once a week; get the chimneys swept once a year; no repainting the front door; and definitely no sub-letting. The rent collector would report any infractions back to the Housing Department. In practice, though, the majority of evictions were for non-payment of rent.

A council home might be a palace compared to your previous abode, but there could be drawbacks. Estates were often miles from the family breadwinner’s workplace. (This goes some way to explaining why the number of privately owned cars on UK roads rocketed from around 100,000 in 1919 to more than 2 million in 1939.) When you added public transport fares into the rent, such a wonderful home might be beyond your means.

There were other problems, too. The Becontree estate was a vast development, built in the Barking/Dagenham area by the London County Council between 1921 and the mid-30s. One day, the story goes, a policeman was patrolling the estate when he was stopped by a woman in floods of tears: “We’ve just moved in,” she said, “and I went for a stroll and now I can’t find my house!” (The story may be a legend; it gets told about other big estates around the UK, too.)

Flats in mid-air

By the 30s, writers, journalists and sociologists had descended on the new estates, and didn’t always like what they found. The well-travelled George Orwell couldn’t understand the British preference for suburban semis instead of continental-style blocks of flats in town: “Apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more their own than a flat situated in mid-air.”

Women, particularly housewives who were stuck at home while their husbands spent long hours working and commuting, reported feeling lonely and alienated. People became nostalgic for the warmth and friendliness of their former urban communities, no matter how squalid and smoky.

Nearly every estate was built in a hurry, with little initial regard for community facilities. People moved into brand new homes in places where the nearest shops, schools, libraries, churches, cinemas and pubs were miles away. This was a commercial advantage for some: the van selling fruit; the man selling fish from a motorcycle side-car; hucksters trying to sell overpriced encyclopedias (because council estates were aspirational). Meanwhile, George Orwell, noting how the pub was often the heart of an urban working-class community, observed that the few built on estates were often “dismal sham-Tudor places fitted out by big brewery companies and very expensive”.

Other commentators were more positive. In 1937, the poet John Betjeman was broadcasting a talk from the BBC’s Bristol studios, and mentioned the estate where Addison’s Oak had been planted 18 years previously:

“I drove… around my favourite parts of Bristol with a friend. Bristol was looking at its best. Sunset behind the Avon Gorge and the new Sea Mills estate, with a surprising beauty, showing off in the evening sunlight; and vistas of trees and fields and pleasant cottages that the magic estate has managed to create.”

Eugene Byrne is a historian, fiction writer and journalist specialising in the history of the British Isles

This article was first published in the September 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]> 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Charles Dickens and his family home https://www.historyextra.com/membership/facts-charles-dickens-writer-children-family-home/ Sun, 09 Jun 2019 05:05:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/facts-charles-dickens-writer-children-family-home/ Charles Dickens (1812–70) was a famed writer of Victorian literature, whose most famous works include Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Often considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, his writing is famous for its social commentary and observation of Victorian society. Louisa Price, curator of the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street in London, shares seven lesser-known facts about Charles Dickens and the family home in which he wrote many of his famed novels  

Charles Dickens loved decorating his home

Dickens cared a great deal about how his home looked. Here at the Charles Dickens Museum we hold letters in our archive detailing requests to the landlord for painting and cleaning at 48 Doughty Street (a Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury that Catherine and Charles Dickens called home from 1837–39).

Dickens made various changes to the property, particularly the drawing room. He removed the unfashionable dado rail [a decorative waist-high moulding round the wall of a room], hung wallpaper, and installed a fitted carpet and a veined marble hearth stone. Decorative items in our collection such as ostentatious gilt candlesticks illustrate Dickens’ preferred style.

At Doughty Street and in subsequent homes, Catherine participated in decision-making about decorating, but she still had to contend with Dickens’ strong opinions on the matter. While travelling in northern Italy in 1844, Dickens wrote home to Catherine, urging her not to rearrange furniture in his absence: “Keep things in their places. I can’t bear to picture them otherwise.”

48 Doughty Street, today the Charles Dickens Museum. (Photo by Charles Dickens Museum)

 

Charles Dickens worked from home

For the first half of his career Dickens worked from a study inside his family home, which would have been alive with the noise and bustle of young children, servants and visiting family members. At 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’ study was situated on the first floor, with a door leading into the drawing room. By the time he and Catherine left in 1839 they had three children under the age of three (Charley, Mamie and Katey), and employed four servants.

Dickens tended to keep to a strict routine of working in the morning without disturbance. There were, of course, exceptions to the rules: one day at Doughty Street, hearing the hilarity in the drawing room, Dickens left his study and joined his family, bringing with him his portable writing desk, ink pot, quill and paper. There he went on writing Oliver Twist, telling the family not to worry about him but rather to go on with their play.

A desk at 48 Doughty Street. (Photo by Charles Dickens Museum)

 

Charles Dickens's house had plumbing and draining issues

Just like any other Londoner, Dickens experienced problems with draining and water supply into his homes. Upon leaving the property at Doughty Street in 1839 he complained to the landlord that “the drains... have been a serious annoyance to us, and although we have had the plumbers in the house half a dozen times, we have not been able to make them last our time without often receiving strong notice of their being in the neighbourhood”.

One article in Dickens’ weekly journal, Household Words, concerns a trip he and a friend made to assess a water pumping station off the river Thames. Dickens’ interest in water supply for Londoners hit close to home: letters written during his time at Tavistock House (his London home from 1851–60) include a complaint about intermittent water supply to the house from the New River Company.

 

Although Charles Dickens loved music, he had no talent for it

Both Charles and Catherine came from musically talented families, so it is little surprise that they kept a piano in their home. Letters recall how Dickens and his friend John Hullah composed pieces for the operetta The Village Coquettes on Dickens’ piano in Furnivals Inn in around 1836, and a cottage piano is listed in the inventory of another home in 1843.

Though the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street does not possess a Dickens instrument, we have installed a late 18th-century Longman & Broderip piano – the kind a middle-class couple like Charles and Catherine would have owned. It is positioned in the drawing room, and each Christmas it is used for concerts to entertain our guests.

But although Dickens had a passion for music, he was not necessarily a great pianist. In a letter to the Daily News in around 1871, Dickens' old school chum John W Bowden recalled that Dickens had tried to learn music, but that one day their music master had given up teaching him the piano, declaring: “He had no aptitude for music, and it was robbing his parents to continue giving him lessons.”

The drawing room at 48 Doughty Street, set up for Christmas. (Photo by Charles Dickens Museum)

 

Charles Dickens loved mirrors

Dickens is known to have loved mirrors. Several still hang in the drawing room of his final home at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent (where Dickens lived from 1856 until his death in 1870), and photographs of Dickens’ Swiss chalet summer house, where he spent much of the warmer months writing, show mirrors situated around his desk.

As well as being a decorative feature that brought more light into rooms, Dickens used mirrors in the process of writing his novels. His eldest daughter, Mamie Dickens, remembers a day she was ill and her father permitted her to lie on the sofa in his study while he worked. She recalls: “He suddenly jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making... for the time being he had not only lost sight of his surroundings, but had actually become in action, as in imagination, the creature of his pen.”

 

Dickens immortalised some of his pets through taxidermy

The Dickens family had many pets, ranging from a canary called Dick to a series of dogs including Mrs Bouncer the pomeranian and a large mastiff called Turk. One of the more famous pets was Grip the raven, who died unexpectedly after consuming paint. Dickens had Grip stuffed, and the creature now resides in the Philadelphia Free Library. Grip is believed to have been the inspiration behind the raven in Barnaby Rudge (1841).

Grip was followed by another raven, ‘Grip the second’, and when painting a portrait of the Dickens children in 1841 (pictured below), Daniel Maclise includes Grip sitting behind the siblings. This portrait is today on display at the Charles Dickens Museum.

A pet kitten named Bob, who was known for his devotion to the writer, was also memorialised through taxidermy like the original Grip. When Bob died, Dickens made his paw into a letter opener. This is now on display in the New York Public Library.

A 1841 drawing depicting four of Charles Dickens' children - Charlie, Mamie, Katie, and Wally - with Grip the raven. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

 

Charles Dickens was a bit of a party animal

Dickens was in his element when hosting, and Christmas presented the perfect opportunity to invite friends and family to his home for meals and parties. Catherine and Charles’s eldest son, Charley, was born on Twelfth Night (the last day in the Christmas season), and the couple celebrated with a joint birthday/Twelfth Night party, which grew over the years to include dancing, magical performances and even amateur theatricals.

At one such party in the 1850s, Dickens staged Fielding’s Tom Thumb, casting his children in various roles and himself as the ghost. English novelist William Thackeray was among the audience, and is reported to have fallen off his chair with laughter at the performance.

Over the festive period at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, visitors can enjoy candlelit tours, evening performances of A Christmas Carol, and a new exhibition titled ‘A Christmas Carol Reimagined’. To find out more, visit www.dickensmuseum.com

This article was first published on History Extra in December 2015

]]> David Olusoga on house histories: "Our homes are often the sites of great dramas and tragedies" https://www.historyextra.com/membership/david-olusoga-house-through-time-history-liverpool-townhouse/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 07:35:51 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/david-olusoga-house-through-time-history-liverpool-townhouse/ The first series of BBC Two's A House Through Time turned an unheralded Liverpool townhouse into a media sensation. Now, fresh from filming a second series, David Olusoga reveals why Britons are finding the history of their homes so captivating. Accompanies the four-part BBC Two series A House Through Time What are the first things we do when we move into a new house? We immediately set about stamping on to it our tastes and our identity. We redecorate, organise the furniture and methodically arrange our books – the carefully collected volumes that we hope say something about us and our lives. This, and the frenzy of cleaning and scrubbing that precedes it, is about much more than personal taste and domestic hygiene. It is also an attempt to exorcise from our new private space the lingering presence of its past residents. In order to make the empty frame of an old house into a new home, we attempt to disguise an unavoidable truth: that until recently it was the home of other people, and before them yet more people, a line of strangers stretching back decades and sometimes centuries.

Our homes – the most private and intimate spaces in our lives, and the most expensive material objects we ever purchase – are, in some ways, things we can never truly own. Because, whatever it might say on the deeds, there’s no escaping the reality that we are merely the latest characters to appear on stage for an inevitably short cameo. People live for decades. Houses last for centuries. We are just passing through, and no matter how many layers of paint we slap on, or how many changes and alterations we make, we can never quite succeed in wiping away the traces of the lives that have been lived before us.

Some people find it unsettling to think too deeply about this, but there are others who have no desire to exorcise their home of its former owners and tenants and instead seek to commune with them. The television series A House Through Time, which I present on BBC Two, has tapped into that phenomenon, and perhaps played a small part in accelerating it. What the series demonstrates is that, for some homes, it is possible to excavate from the archives a full genealogy, a list stretching back in time of everyone who has ever lived there. The team behind the series uses deeds, land registry documents, wills, tax records, maps (lots of maps), business directories, the national census, local and national newspapers, birth and death certificates to build what is in effect the family tree of a single house. Fans of the series are fascinated by that process of historical detective work, and moved by the human stories that tumble out of the documents.

So many people were captivated by the stories of the former residents of 62 Falkner Street – the beautiful townhouse in Liverpool's Georgian quarter, featured in the first series of A House Through Time – that it has become an unofficial addition to Liverpool's list of tourist attractions. An endless stream of selfies taken by people who watched the series appeared on social media within days of transmission. Some people apparently took day trips to Liverpool specifically to see the house.

The history of one’s home is becoming a new form of popular genealogy. People who have already traced their families back through the generations and the centuries are now turning their attention to their homes. They want to commune with the ghosts of past owners and residents, to discover their names and something about their lives.

Chilling discoveries

What those looking for the histories of their homes quickly discover is that, while the architectural history of our homes is fascinating, it is the flesh and blood stories of the former residents that really matters. The house, and its physical fabric, is the tangible link we have to them, but our true connection is a human one. What did our home mean to them? What role did it play in their lives? Were they happy within its four walls, or did misfortune overtake them? What scenes played out in the rooms we now call our own?

Every house not only has a chain of former residents; it is also, inevitably, the site of a string of dramas and tragedies. We don’t have to go far back into our national past to find ourselves in an age where births, and also deaths, took place at home rather than in hospitals. That’s a fact that leads many house historians to chilling discoveries.

And our homes need not be centuries old for them to be the repositories of such dramas. We only have to go back 75 years – still within living memory – to meet people for whom homes were not just personal spaces but the refuges where they sheltered from German bombs. Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed in the Blitz. Many houses carry the scars of bomb damage today. Those shrapnel marks and patches of repaired brickwork, combined with the documents in the archives, can transport us back to the nights when former residents cowered inside steel Morrison shelters in what are now our living rooms, or huddled together in Anderson shelters dug into our gardens.

That most tantalising of questions – “Who lived in my house during the war?” – can be one of the easiest to answer, as in 1939 the government carried out a national register of every home in England and Wales. It was used to organise the issuing of identity cards and ration books, but eight decades later this special, one-off census provides us with a snapshot of Britain at the start of the conflict. As such, it carries the names of most of the 43,000 people who were to be killed in the Blitz, and lists most of the addresses that would not appear on the first postwar census. The comparatively easy, online exercise of looking up who was living in our homes in 1939 can be the gateway to deeper research.

Townhouse to flophouse

In the same way that the history of a house is much more than the architectural history of the building itself, the story of any single dwelling is something that spills out into the surrounding streets. The history of any individual address is intimately wrapped up in the history of the neighbourhood where it stands – then, as now, it is 'location, location, location' that counts. Both 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool, the house in the first series of A House Through Time, and 5 Ravensworth Terrace in Newcastle, the subject of the second series, are homes whose place on the ladder of respectability and desirability has changed over time. The latter was built in the 1820s for Newcastle's booming merchant classes, who were keen to escape the noise and pollution of the overcrowded quayside area. Yet by the early 20th century, it was a lodging house in an area that had fallen out of fashion and into neglect, outdone in the desirability stakes by the emergence of newer and swankier Victorian suburbs situated ever further away from Newcastle's heavy industries.

It is these rises and falls, these shifts in the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities, that make the histories of individual houses so fascinating. The economic cycle, combined with the coming of the railways and the expansion of city boundaries, condemned once fashionable districts to precipitous declines. They became urban twilight zones, and houses designed for wealthy families were subdivided into lodging houses or tenements. The pattern was so common that foreign visitors to Victorian and Edwardian Britain noted with surprise that the poor lived, packed sardine-like, in elegant homes originally designed for the rich. And it didn’t take much for a once desirable residence in a formerly fashionable area to become a flophouse. A new railway line cutting across a Victorian city, for example, could condemn the streets on one side of the line to decay and degeneration. Literally on the wrong side of the tracks, such areas spiralled ever downwards – and this was only one of the mechanisms by which houses built for the rich became the homes of the poor.

Material wealth

What this means is that even some of the country’s grander Georgian and Victorian townhouses have humbler chapters in their pasts. Without giving too much away, the history of 5 Ravensworth Terrace begins as you might imagine, with lawyers and doctors – men of means for whom the house is a symbol of social status and material wealth. A century later, the address had little cachet. For those who lived in its rooms – as it was, by then, a lodging house favoured by Tyneside’s Irish community – it was not a ‘des res’, but simply a place to pass through.

What the two series of A House Through Time demonstrate, I hope, is something many historians are well aware of: that looking at the past through a highly particular and often narrow aperture can open up, counterintuitively, into a broadened and enhanced picture of the past. The history of a single life, a single year, or, in this case, a single house, can be unexpectedly wide-ranging.

The new series follows the story wherever the lives of the residents take us – to art galleries and factories, abandoned docks, faded seaside retreats, cemeteries hundreds of miles away, and even to one of the battlefields of the American Civil War. The best historical biographies do exactly the same. As well as allowing us into the inner lives of their subjects, they also take us into the worlds they moved within and introduce us to the tensions and obsessions of the age. The makers of Who Do You Think You Are? have been pulling off the same trick for 15 years, following leads and exploring the surprising hinterlands they take us into.

Yet while I understand all of this in principle, I am still struck by the fact that so many people turned on their TVs and laptops last year to spend four hours with figures from the past who were neither famous nor exceptional. A House Through Time presented the viewer with a string of individual lives, a collection of strangers who had nothing to link them together other than their connection to a single house in a single British city.

Why did this journey into the past – something that on paper seems so pedestrian and (literally) domestic – prove so popular and so emotionally engaging? If pushed for an answer I’d say that, when it comes to the big things – life and death, birth, marriages, childhood, love and loss, hope and despair – the lives of others become universal. We recognise the parallels with our own lives and our own families. And when arranged into a family tree or the history of a single house, they remind us of our place in a longer story. And that we are just passing through.

How to research your home’s history

Sarah Williams, editor of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, offers advice to budding historical house detectives

The history of a house is as much about its past inhabitants as its bricks and mortar. As David mentions, if your house predates 1939, you should be able to find who was living in it at the outbreak of the Second World War because a register was taken to provide the nation with identity cards and ration books. Next, use census records to trace who was living in your home from 1911 and all the way back, in 10-year increments, to 1841.

The 1939 register and census records are available on subscription websites findmypast.co.uk and ancestry.co.uk and may be free to access at your local library. To fill in any gaps, you can use electoral rolls, phone books and even rate books and land tax records, all of which are gradually being added to these websites.

Historic maps are also increasingly going online. The National Library of Scotland has put online OS maps from across the UK (maps.nls.uk), while there are local projects such as Know Your Place (kypwest.org.uk) for the west of England. For old photographs, try historicengland.org.uk or visit your local record office and see if they can help; they may also have building plans. Always check an archive's website before you visit, as they often have guides to their resources and you may need to order some records in advance.

For more house genealogy advice, go to whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com

David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster. His books include Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016)

The four-part series A House Through Time, presented by David Olusoga, airs on BBC Two from 8 April

This article was first published in the April 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]> A brief history of shopping https://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-shopping-sales-black-friday-boxing-day-what-oldest-shop-selfridges/ Fri, 23 Nov 2018 07:30:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-shopping-sales-black-friday-boxing-day-what-oldest-shop-selfridges/ Where is Britain's oldest shop? And was Selfridges really the first department store? Julian Humphrys serves up four facts about our shopping culture... Where is Britain’s oldest shop?

The site with the strongest claim appears to be the Boxford Stores in the Suffolk village of that name. Records suggest that this partly medieval building has been open for business in one form or other since the reign of Henry V.

If you want to see what a medieval shop might have looked like, check out the merchant’s house in French Street in downtown Southampton. Built at the end of the 13th century for a local wine merchant, it features a vaulted cellar for stock, accommodation for the family and a shop at the front of the property.

When did shopping malls arrive?

The shopping mall has a surprisingly long history. London’s Royal Opera Arcade, completed in 1818, and Burlington Arcade (1819) sought to woo well-to-do shoppers away from the city’s muddy, crowded streets into a more genteel environment.

Looking back even further, the trading floor of London’s Royal Exchange, opened by Elizabeth I in 1571, was in 1660 surrounded by a two-storey shopping mall featuring 100 kiosks and shops.

Was Selfridges the first department store?

Though Harry Selfridge’s Oxford Street store, opened in 1909, was perhaps the first to sell shopping as a pastime rather than a chore, Britain’s first true department store had begun trading over a century earlier. Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine, which opened on Pall Mall in 1796 with four departments selling furs and fans; haberdashery; millinery; and jewellery, ornaments and perfume.

When did we go self-service?

Though the world’s first true self-service store – the intriguingly named Piggly Wiggly – opened in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that the idea caught on in Britain. Sainsbury’s first self-service store opened in Croydon in 1950. As Alan Sainsbury found out to his cost, the concept wasn’t universally popular. When one customer realised that the days of simply handing over a shopping list were numbered, she reputedly showed her disapproval by taking the wire basket she’d been given and throwing it at him.

This article was first published in December 2015.

]]> Top 5 Dickensian recipes https://www.historyextra.com/membership/top-5-dickensian-recipes/ Wed, 21 Nov 2018 16:46:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/top-5-dickensian-recipes/ Food is a key theme in the work of novelist Charles Dickens, from the pork pie that Pip stole for Magwitch in Great Expectations to the 'highly geological home-made cake' which features in Martin Chuzzlewit. Victorian food may have a reputation for being either stodgy or unnecessarily fussy, but recreating the dishes that Dickens and his characters tuck into shows that it can be delicious, savoury and warming, light and elegant. Here, author Pen Vogler shares five top Dickensian recipes, updated for modern kitchens… The many scenes of eating in the novels of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) are useful ingredients of Victorian social history, particularly his scenes of the young, who are hungry for food and security and are let down by the well-fed adults and, crucially, the institutions who should be caring for them.

Dickens knew the agony of childhood hunger and loneliness. He loved convivial meals and we know his wife Catherine gave a lot of thought to them, because she published a little book of ‘bills of fare’ called What Shall We Have for Dinner? In their London home, she oversaw the cook sweltering over a coal-burning cast-iron range in a cramped basement kitchen, to produce an impressive variety of dishes for a dinner party. To help balance the books, family menus featured economic and filling puddings.

Dickens’ knowledge of domestic details is unusual in a Victorian man: in A Christmas Carol, he knows that Mrs Cratchit, too poor to have an oven, sends her goose to the baker’s and the washing copper doubles up as a pudding pan; in Martin Chuzzlewit he makes a joke about making a beefsteak pudding pastry with butter. This is all part of a picture he loved to paint – a rosy-cheeked young woman learning to cook for her brother or husband.

Victorian food may have a reputation for being either stodgy or unnecessarily fussy, but recreating the dishes that Dickens and his characters tuck into shows that it can be delicious, savoury and warming, light and elegant – and always best shared. With new book Dinner with Dickens, fans of Victorian cooking can try their hand at recreating more than 60 dishes featured in the author's work, including 'charitable soup', oxtail stew and pineapple rum…
 

Charitable soup

Catherine Dickens’ menu book is most indebted to the recipes of the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer. In 1847, in the midst of the Irish potato famine, he travelled to Dublin to set up a famine-relief kitchen and wrote Soyer’s Charitable Cookery, the proceeds of which he gave to charity. He later travelled to the Crimea to change the diet of soldiers, particularly those in hospital.

SERVES 6

Preheat the oven, if using, to 325°F/165°C/Gas 3.

Sauté the onions in a little olive oil in a skillet/frying pan until they begin to soften, then add the leeks and celery and continue to soften for 5 minutes.

Tip this into a saucepan. Add a little more oil to the pan and brown the meat lightly on all sides in two batches—don’t let it sweat in the pan—then add it to the onions. Add the turnips, herbs, and either stock or cold water plus the stock bones. Season with salt and pepper, bring to a simmer and simmer on a very low heat, or cover and put it in the preheated oven, for 1½ hours.

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How to throw a medieval feast. An elaborate banquet depicted in a 14th-century illuminated manuscript of Froissart's Chronicles. (Getty Images)

Add the pearl barley and carrots and continue to simmer for 45 minutes, or until the pearl barley is cooked. Toward the end of the cooking time, take the stock bones and herbs out of the pan and discard.

Take the meat out of the broth, pull it off the bones and shred it, then return the meat to the pan.

 

Oxtail stew

In The Old Curiosity Shop, Nell, her grandfather, and their eccentric fellow travellers are revived at The Jolly Sandboys with an equally eccentric “stew of tripe… cow-heel… steak… peas, cauliflowers, new potatoes, and sparrow-grass [asparagus] all working up together in one delicious gravy.” Margaret Dods’ dish of oxtail rather than cow-heel, served with peas and root vegetables, is also good for a hungry crowd on a rainy night.

SERVES 4

For the sauce hachée

Optional extra flavourings for sauce

Rinse the oxtail pieces and then leave to soak in salted cold water for an hour or two.

Drain the oxtail, place in a pan of fresh water and bring to a rolling boil for 10–15 minutes, skimming the scum from the surface (this removes the bitterness).

If you are cooking the stew in the oven, preheat it to 300°F/150°C/Gas 2. Fry the bacon in a very little olive oil in a large flameproof pot. Add the onions and garlic and sweat until they begin to soften, then add the rest of the vegetables.

Add the drained oxtail pieces to the pot, fry them a little in the fat until they start to color, then add the herbs, the beef stock, and enough water to make sure the meat is completely covered. Bring to a simmer, check the seasoning, and add a little salt if necessary. Cover and either keep on a very low heat or put in the oven for 4 hours. Add a little water if the oxtail is becoming dry.

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When the meat is falling off the bone, take the stew off the heat or remove from the oven. If the gravy is too thin, remove the meat and vegetables with a slotted spoon and boil it fast to reduce it until it is the depth of intensity you like, then add salt and pepper to taste and return the meat and vegetables.

Serve with peas, mashed carrots, and parsnips. For the sauce hachée, simply mix the ingredients and any extra flavouring you select together and serve separately, along with a bowl of horseradish sauce. Or make horseradish mash by infusing warm milk with grated horseradish root while the potatoes are cooking.

 

Ruth Pinch's beefsteak pudding

Beefsteak pudding. (© CICO Books 2017)

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Ruth Pinch - the sort of ingénue housekeeper that Dickens loved writing about - is worried that the beefsteak pudding she cooks for her brother Tom will “turn out a stew, or a soup, or something of that sort.” Tom enjoys watching her cook, but later teases her when they realize she should have used suet for the pastry. Eliza Acton gives Ruth the last word by devising “Ruth Pinch’s Beefsteak Pudding,” made with butter and eggs.

SERVES 4

For the pastry

For the filling

And any of Eliza Acton’s suggested additions:

Start by making the pastry. Sieve the flour and salt into a basin; add the butter and rub it in. Beat the eggs together with a dash of cold water, then stir them into the flour mixture with a wooden spoon. Pull the mixture together with your hands, adding a little more water or flour as necessary. When you have an elastic dough, turn it onto a lightly floured board and roll out into a large disc. Cut a quarter out and put to one side.

Fold the two outer quarters over the middle quarter and put into a well-buttered 2-pint/1.2-litre basin, with the point in the bottom. Unfold the two outer quarters and push the pastry into the sides of the basin, wetting the edges so that they seal together and the whole basin is fully lined. Trim the top edge so there is ½–1 inch/1–2cm of pastry overhanging the edge of the basin.

Roll out the remaining quarter to make a circular lid.

Mix the meat with the remaining ingredients except the liquid, making sure the flour is well distributed. Turn it into the pastry-lined basin and pour the stock or liquid over. Brush the top edge of the pastry in the basin with water and put the pastry lid on top, pinching it around to seal.

Put a lid of buttered foil or a circle of parchment or greaseproof paper and a cloth on top, adding a pleat to give room for the pudding to puff up.

Place the basin in a saucepan so that the water comes halfway up the side of the pudding. Cover and steam for up to 4 hours, checking and topping up the water level every half hour or so.

Serve straight from the bowl or turn it out and cut it into segments. The butter crust makes this easier to do than the traditional suet one.

 

French plums

French plums. (© CICO Books 2017)

The French Plums that Scrooge sees in the greengrocer’s are “blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes” (which, if “exceedingly ornamental,” even Mrs. Beeton concedes might be put directly on the dining table). Port and cinnamon turn too-tart plums into a Christmas delight. Candied French plums were Christmas gifts, but should not be confused with “sugar plums,” which are, in fact, sugared nuts or seeds.

Put the water or orange juice, port, sugar, cinnamon stick, and lemon rind in a pan and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved and you have a syrup.

Add the plums, cover, and stew gently for 15 minutes.

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Christmas dinner, 1917 (© imageBROKER / Alamy)

Serve with cream, Italian Cream (see page 157), or custard. Alternatively, make into a plum pie by mixing the ingredients together in a pie dish, adding a pastry lid (see pastry recipe on page 129), and baking at 400°F/200°C/Gas 6 for 30–35 minutes.

SERVES 4

 

Almond cake for Steerforth

The feast of currant wine, biscuits, fruit, and almond cakes that Steerforth persuades David Copperfield to provide feeds David’s infatuation with the charismatic older boy. A subsequent gift from Peggotty, of cake, oranges, and cowslip wine, he lays at the feet of Steerforth for him to dispense. William Kitchiner’s light almond cake pairs well with oranges, berries, or other fruit.

SERVES 8–10

For the frosting

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/Gas 4. Grease a 9-inch/23-cm bundt pan/tin or ring mold, or a plain springform pan/tin. Separate the eggs and leave the whites to come to room temperature.

Make sure there is no yolk or fat in the whites, which would prevent them from beating properly.

Beat the yolks with ½ cup/100g of the sugar until pale and fluffy, then beat in the lemon or orange zest and the almond extract, if using.

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Charles Dickens - Getty Images

In a completely clean bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff (you should be able to turn the bowl upside down and they won’t fall out!). Add a quarter of the remaining sugar, the pinch of salt, and the cream of tartar, beat again, then fold in the rest of the sugar.

Fold the whites into the batter, a quarter at a time, followed by the almonds and flour. Scrape the mixture into the mold or pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 35–40 minutes until the cake is shrinking from the sides of the pan.

Remove from the oven and leave the cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn it out.

To make the frosting, stir the orange or lemon juice into the sifted confectioner's/icing sugar, then drizzle over the cake. Fill the centre of the cake with fresh fruit such as raspberries or cherries.

Alternatively, keep it plain and serve it with a compôte of fruit such as oranges, apricots, or plums.

Almond cake. (© CICO Books 2017)

Compotes of fruit

Eliza Acton recommends a compôte of fruit as a more elegant dessert than the “common ‘stewed fruit’ of English cookery.” The fruit, being added to a syrup, better retains its structure and taste, and the syrup is beautifully translucent. She recommends serving the redcurrant compôtes with the substantial batter, custard, bread, or ground rice puddings Victorians loved.

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Queen Victoria

The preparation is simple. Gently boil white granulated sugar and water together for 10 minutes to make a syrup, skimming any scum from the surface. Add the fruit and simmer until the fruit is lightly cooked. If the syrup is too runny, remove the fruit with a slotted spoon and arrange it in a serving dish. Reduce the syrup over a medium heat, let it cool slightly, and then pour it over. It may also be served cold, and it keeps for a day or two in the fridge. Cinnamon, cloves, vanilla beans/pods, or a little orange or lemon peel can be used as flavourings when you make the syrup.

Eliza Acton recommends the following proportions and timings:

Rhubarb, gooseberries, cherries, damsons - syrup made from ¾ cup/140g sugar with 1¼ cups/280ml water; add 1 lb/450g fruit and simmer for about 10 minutes. Redcurrants and raspberries - syrup made from ¾ cup/140g sugar with 2/3 cup/140ml water; add 1 lb/450g fruit and simmer for 5–7 minutes.

Mrs. Beeton recommends the following proportions and timings:

Oranges - syrup made from 1½ cups/300g sugar with 21/3 cups/570ml water; add 6 oranges, skin and pith removed, cut into segments. Simmer for 5 minutes. Apples—syrup made from 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons/225g sugar to scant 1¼ cups/280ml water; peel, halve, and core the apples and simmer in the syrup with the juice and rind of a lemon for 15–25 minutes.

Dinner with Dickens: Recipes Inspired by the Life and Work of Charles Dickens by Pen Vogler (CICO Books, £16.99) is on sale now. Pen Vogler is a food historian whose other books include Dinner with Mr Darcy and Tea with Jane Austen.

This article was first published by History Extra in October 2017.

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