At Home - Bill Bryson [25]
Even what we can know, from archaeology, is often hard to fathom. For one thing, the newcomers declined to live in Roman houses even though the Roman houses were soundly built, superior to anything they had had at home, and there for the taking. Instead they erected far more basic structures, often right alongside abandoned Roman villas. They didn’t use Roman towns either. For three hundred years, London stood mostly empty.
On the continent the Germanic peoples had commonly lived in longhouses—the “classic” peasant dwelling in which humans live at one end and livestock at the other—but the incomers abandoned those, too, for the next six hundred years. No one knows why. Instead they dotted the landscape with strange little structures known as grubenhäuser—literally “pit houses”—though there are sound reasons to doubt that they were houses at all. A grubenhaus consisted simply of a sloping pit, about a foot and a half deep, over which a small building was erected. For the first two centuries of Anglo-Saxon occupation, these were the most numerous and seemingly important new structures in the country. Many archaeologists think that a floor was laid across the pit, making it into a shallow cellar, though for what purpose is hard to say. The two most common theories are that the pits were for storage, the thought being that the cool air below would better preserve perishables, or that they were designed to improve air circulation and keep the floorboards from rotting. But the effort of excavating the holes—some were hewn straight out of bedrock—seems patently disproportionate to any possible benefits to air flow, and anyway it’s thought exceedingly unlikely that better air circulation would have brought either of the theorized results.
The first grubenhaus wasn’t found until 1921—remarkably late considering how numerous these structures are now known to be—during an excavation at Sutton Courtenay (now in Oxfordshire, then in Berkshire). The discoverer was Edward Thurlow Leeds of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and frankly he didn’t like what he saw at all. People who lived in them had led “a semi-troglodytic existence” so squalid that “it inspires disbelief in modern minds,” Professor Leeds all but sputtered in a monograph of 1936. The occupants, he continued, lived “amid a filthy litter of broken bones, of food and shattered pottery … in almost as primitive a condition as can be imagined. They had no regard for cleanliness, and were content to throw the remains of a meal into the furthest corner of the hut and leave it there.” Leeds seems to have seen grubenhäuser almost as a betrayal of civilization.
For nearly thirty years this view held sway, but gradually authorities began to question whether people really had lived in these odd little structures. For one thing, they were awfully small—only about seven feet by ten, typically—which would make a very snug house even for the meanest peasants, particularly with a fire burning. One grubenhaus had a floor area that was nine feet across, of which just over seven feet was occupied by a hearth, leaving no room at all for people. So perhaps they weren’t habitations at all, but workshops or storage sheds, though