England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [9]
The men breakfasted at four in summer and five in winter. Sarah and Mary were up half an hour or so before to fetch water for cooking, supplementing the rainwater they gathered in a barrel. Men's work began and ended at set hours and it gave them time for leisure. Women's chores were never finished. At least twice a day, Sarah or Mary walked through the rain or cold to stand in the long queue at the pump. If it was functioning, they worked the stiff handle until there was a gallon or so in the bucket and then carried it back. They also had to find fuel for the fire. Sarah probably did not risk pocketing more than a few pieces of coal from the sacks she carried to Chester, for if her neighbors spotted a different type of smoke from the chimney, they could report her. Wood was not an option, for Glynne and other landowners owned the surrounding forests. Most poor families used gorse, sticks, or furze, but Sarah had no time to scour the hills. Luckily, however, she had privileged access to one of the most efficient domestic fuels: horse dung. Sarah, like most carters, would have collected the hods of manure in a bucket, mixed them with pieces of straw, kneaded them into lumps, and left them in the sun to dry (or inside if the weather was stormy) before storing them in a bucket by the fire. The Kidd cottage was filled with horse dung in various stages of assemblage, and the hods released an acrid, meaty smell as they burned. As it was necessary for heat, light, cooking, water heating, and rubbish disposal, the fire would be continually lit when the family was awake. Emma grew up in a house so dependent on dung that her clothes, hair, and even skin carried the stench of manure.
In the eighteenth century, a house was considered hygienic if there were no lice or insects visible in its eating and sleeping areas. People washed their bodies infrequently and then usually only in the milder summer months. Even the genteel rarely bathed more than their faces and hands. There was no toilet, and newfangled inventions such as piped water were a novelty for the adventurous urban rich. At night, the family used an indoor chamber pot, usually kept in the kitchen area (which it was Mary's task, as the family's domestic worker, to empty). Otherwise, they may have used a rudimentary privy—a hole in a wooden bench over the ground shared between three or four houses—or relieved themselves behind hedges or in fields. They ate and drank off wooden trenchers and basins, and it was the woman's job to wash the dirty dishes with grit in the local stream, along with the family's clothes and linen. As the stream was the main place for bathing, and an occasional toilet for the village as well as the animals grazing upstream, typhoid and diphtheria were rampant, inevitably killing the weakest children.
Everything Emma ate was cold or boiled. Meat, potatoes, and even puddings were dropped into a smoke-blackened iron pot suspended over the fire. Her staple diet consisted of bread, lard, and potatoes (which were cheaper than bread), eked out with the water in which meat had been cooked, and varied with a little oatcake or porridge. When the family felt rich she might enjoy a breakfast of oat bread and Cheshire cheese, bacon and potatoes for lunch, and a Sunday meal of beef and stewing vegetables followed by a dumpling or boiled roly-poly pudding. Ovens were the preserves of the wealthy, and the Kidds could not afford to pay the baker the few pennies he charged to cook pies or meat. In times of real hardship, every meal might be cold potatoes and dripping, and some country families sank to eating horse bran or even straw. Rural poverty was so terrible that young