At Home - Bill Bryson [26]
Fortunately, the newcomers—the English, as we may as well call them from now on—brought a second kind of building with them, much less numerous but ultimately far more important. These buildings were much larger than grubenhäuser, but that was about as much as could be said for them. They were simply large barnlike spaces with an open hearth in the middle. The word for this kind of structure was already old in 410, and it now became one of the first words in English: hall.
Practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together—“a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,” as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.
Every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family—they were literally familiar, to use the word in its original sense. In the most commanding (and usually least drafty) position in the hall was a raised platform called a dais, where the owner and his family ate—a practice recalled by the high tables still found in colleges and boarding schools that have (or sometimes simply wish to project) a sense of long tradition. The head of the household was the husband—a compound term meaning literally “householder” or “house owner.” His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner.
Even the very grandest homes had only three or four interior spaces—the hall itself, a kitchen, and perhaps one or two side chambers, known variously as bowers, parlors, or chambers, where the head of the house could retire to conduct private business. By the ninth or tenth century, there was often a chapel, too, though this tended to be used as much for business as for worship. Sometimes these private rooms were built on two stories, with the upper—called a solar—reached by a ladder or very basic stairway. Solar sounds sunny and light, but in fact the name was merely an adaptation of solive, the French word for floor joist or beam. Solars were simply rooms perched on joists, and for a long time they were the only upstairs room that most houses afforded. Often they were barely more than storerooms. So little did people think of rooms in the modern sense that the word room, with the meaning of an enclosed chamber or distinct space, isn’t recorded in English until the time of the Tudors.
Society consisted principally of freemen, serfs, and slaves. Upon the death of a serf the lord was entitled to take a small personal possession, such as an article of clothing, as a kind of death duty. Often peasants only owned one main item of apparel, a type of loose gown known as a cotta (which eventually evolved into the modern coat). The fact that that was the best that a peasant had to offer, and that the lord of the manor would want it, tells you about all you need to know about the quality of medieval life at many levels. Serfdom was a form of permanent bondage to a particular lord, and often it was offered as a religious declaration—an act that must have dismayed more than a few offspring, for serfdom, once declared, extended in perpetuity to all the declaring party’s descendants. The principal effect of serfdom was to remove the holder’s freedom to move elsewhere or marry outside the estate. But serfs could still become prosperous. In the late medieval period, one in twenty owned fifty acres or more—substantial holdings for the time. By contrast, freemen, known as ceorls, had freedom in principle