At Home - Bill Bryson [31]
What was needed was something that would seem, on the face of it, straightforward: a practical chimney. This took a long time to happen, however, not because of a lack of will, but because of the technical challenges. A roaring fire in a large fireplace generates a lot of heat and needs a sound flue and backstop (or reredos, to use the architectural term), and no one knew how to make good ones before about 1330 (when the word chimney is first recorded in English). Fireplaces had been brought to England by the Normans, but they weren’t impressive. They were made simply by scooping out part of the thick walls of Norman castles and poking a hole through the outer wall to let smoke escape. They weren’t greatly used outside castles because they drew air poorly and so didn’t make good fires or generate much heat. Also, they couldn’t be safely used in timber houses, which is what most houses were.
What made the difference eventually was the development of good bricks, which can deal with heat better over the long term than almost any rock can. Chimneys also permitted a change in fuel to coal—which was timely because Britain’s wood supplies were rapidly dwindling. Because coal smoke was acrid and poisonous, it needed to be contained within a fireplace—or chimneypiece, as they were first known (to distinguish them from open hearths, also known as fireplaces)—where fumes and smoke could be directed up a flue. This made for a cleaner house but a filthier world outside, and that, as we shall see, had very significant consequences for the look and design of homes.
Meanwhile, not everyone was happy with the loss of open hearths. Many people missed the drifting smoke and were convinced they had been healthier when kept “well kippered in wood smoke,” as one observer put it. As late as 1577, a William Harrison insisted that in the days of open fires “our heads did never ake.” Smoke in the roof space discouraged nesting birds and was believed to strengthen timbers. Above all, people complained that they weren’t nearly as warm as before, which was true. Because fireplaces were so inefficient, they were constantly enlarged. Some became so enormous that they were built with benches in them, letting people sit inside the fireplace, almost the only place in the house where they could be really warm.
Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.
II
The upward expansion of houses changed everything. Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves. The first step, generally, was to build a grand new room upstairs called the great chamber, where the lord and his family did all the things they had done in the hall before—eat, sleep, loll, and play—but without so many other people about, returning to the great hall below only for banquets and other special occasions. Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants.
The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.
As houses sprouted wings and spread, and domestic arrangements grew more complex, words were created or adapted to describe all the new room types: study, bedchamber, privy chamber, closet, oratory (for a place of prayer), parlor, withdrawing chamber, and library (in a domestic as opposed to institutional sense) all date from the fourteenth century or a little earlier. Others soon followed: gallery, long gallery, presence chamber, tiring (for attiring) chamber, salon or saloon, apartment, lodgings, suite, and estude. “How widely different is all this from