At Home - Bill Bryson [27]
Slaves, often rivals captured in wartime, were pretty numerous—one estate listed in the Domesday Book (the land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086) had more than seventy of them. However, slavery from the ninth to eleventh centuries in England was not quite the kind of dehumanizing bondage we think of from more modern times, as in the American South, for instance. Although slaves were property and could be sold—and for quite a lot: a healthy male slave was worth eight oxen—slaves were able to own property, marry, and move about freely within the community. The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.
Medieval estates were often highly fragmented. One eleventh-century thegn (or thane, that is, a free retainer) named Wulfric had seventy-two properties all over England, and even smaller estates tended to be scattered. Medieval households were, in consequence, forever on the move. They were also often very large. Royal households could easily have five hundred servants and retainers, and important peers and prelates were unlikely to have less than a hundred. With numbers so substantial, it was as easy to take the household to food as it was to bring food to the household, so motion was more or less constant, and everything was designed to be mobile (which is why, not incidentally, the French and Italian words for furniture are meubles and mobilia, respectively). So furniture tended to be sparing, portable, and starkly utilitarian, “treated more as equipment than as prized personal possessions,” to quote the architect and author Witold Rybczynski.
Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids—to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted out to get at things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time—till the 1600s—before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers.
In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strewn with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,” as the Dutch theologian and traveler Desiderius Erasmus rather crisply summarized in 1524. New layers of rushes were laid down twice a year normally, but the old accretions were seldom removed, so that, Erasmus added glumly, “the substratum may be unmolested for twenty years.” The floors were in effect a very large nest, much appreciated by insects and furtive rodents, and a perfect incubator for plague. Yet a deep pile of flooring was generally a sign of prestige. It was common among the French to say of a rich man that he was “waist deep in straw.”
Bare earth floors remained the norm in much of rural Britain and Ireland until the twentieth century. “The ‘ground floor’ was justly named,” as the historian James Ayres has put it. Even after wood or tile floors began to grow common in superior homes, at about the time of William Shakespeare, carpets were too precious to be placed underfoot. They were hung on the walls or laid over tables. Often, however, they were kept in chests and brought out only to impress special visitors.
Dining tables were simply boards laid across trestles, and cupboards were just what the name says—plain boards on which cups and other vessels could be arrayed. But there weren’t many of those. Glass vessels were rare, and diners were generally expected to share with a neighbor. Eventually cupboards were incorporated into rather more ornate dressers, which have nothing to do with clothing but rather with the preparation, or dressing, of food.
In humbler dwellings, matters were generally about as simple as they could be. The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself,