If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (15 page)

there being now and then a noise of people stirring that waked me; and then it was a very rainy night; and then I was a little sleepy, that what between waking and then sleeping again, one after another, I never had so much content.

It’s striking that he thought this was a good night, as it is so far from the modern ideal of a solid eight hours’ sleep.

By the mid-eighteenth century in London, the middle hours of the night were often disturbed by noise and movement: highwaymen, drunkards, pickpockets and nightwatchmen ‘had not yet gone to bed, while pigeon fanciers, cow keepers, water workers, and the women who attended the fish markets had already got up’. Maidservants collected water from the pumps to avoid the daytime queues; ‘Drunken Husbands’ wandered ‘home to their half-starved disconsolate Families’.

And it seems that when city life developed, and when artificial light became more readily available, the pattern of first and second sleep was disrupted. If you had the money – and candles – to stay up later in the evening darkness, then you tended to sleep for the six or eight continuous hours usually recorded in the diaries of upper-class seventeenth- and eighteenth-century individuals. Richard Steele in 1710 condemned the new habit of staying up late. He found it a ‘perverted relish’ to prefer ‘sea-coals and candles to the sun, and exchange so many cheerful morning hours for the pleasures of midnight revels and debauches’.

But Steele underestimates the sheer pleasure of conquering
night with light to those unused to it. Louis XIV’s fabulous Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles was glitteringly marvellous by day, yet really came into its own in darkness, when the astonishing mirrors reflected and magnified the light of the candles. This was perhaps the first room in modern history with artificial light levels approximating what we would today consider necessary for a social gathering, and the French court made great use of it for evening parties on a scale never before seen.

It would be the factory whistle and the steam train that created the modern toe-tapping attitude to time, in which hours and minutes are carefully demarcated and utilised. Until these developments, events had rarely been timed to the minute. Stagecoaches went when all the passengers were aboard, early-modern workplaces (often in people’s houses) kept quite flexible hours, and meals were served when all the family were present. But the departure of a train or the start of a shift in the mills waited for no man (or woman or child).

The heads of Georgian households tried to instil a similar sense of urgency into their domestic staff. Time became money in the Georgian age, and promptness and efficiency were increasingly demanded in servants’ manuals. ‘Do everything at the proper time. Keep everything in its proper place. Use everything for its proper purpose,’ ran
The Cook’s Oracle
of 1817, while Thomas Broughton in his
Serious Advice and Warning to Servants
(1768) sternly warned his readers: ‘when you hired yourselves, you sold all your time to your masters, except what God and Nature more immediately require to be reserved’.

A new housemaid, for example, might be presented with a daunting card listing her weekly duties in fifteen-minute blocks. ‘On first sight I could not see how one could possibly perform all those duties in one day,’ wrote housemaid Lavinia Swainbank, who was born in 1906 and started work as a teenager, yet ‘to this day I have not lost the clockwork precision instilled into me by a succession of head housemaids and timetables forty years
ago’. The time to sleep and the time to wake were now subject to a level of control which seems far from the dreamy awakening and sleeping again of medieval times.

And yet, as today’s market in self-help books promulgating time management reveals, the idea that time should be divided into neat chunks has always been more successful in theory than reality. At home today, the dividing line between work and leisure remains blurred: there is housework, there is computer work and there is down time, but no set hours for any of them.

And the same goes for sleep. While the healthy ideal since the Industrial Revolution has been for a solid eight hours, most people get nothing like that. Next time you’re suffering from insomnia, just tell yourself that you’re experiencing a medieval sleep pattern and maybe you’ll relax enough to drop off.

14 – Murdered in Our Beds

I lay in some disquiet all night, telling of the clock till it was daylight.

Samuel Pepys

There’s a good reason why we talk about people being murdered ‘in their beds’ rather than in their living rooms or bathrooms. The bedroom is an excellent dark and private place to do away with somebody. One of the earliest and most compelling images of child murder is that of the pillow held over the mouths of the sleeping fifteenth-century boy Princes of the Tower in Shakespeare’s
Richard III
, a crime that has been pulled inside out without the evil-seeming Richard III’s guilt having ever been finally proved (
plate 6
).

In bed we feel at our safest, which means a foul deed performed there seems all the more shocking. In 1381, the boy king Richard II took refuge from the Peasants’ Revolt in the Tower of London once again, while a mob burned his palace in the Strand and his Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered on Tower Hill. When Richard rode out of the Tower to meet his citizens, the protestors burst in, ‘pulling the beards of the Guard’. The rebels ‘arrogantly lay and sat and joked on the king’s bed, whilst several asked the king’s mother […] to kiss them’. This was the king’s mother Joan. The rebels abused her in this particularly
intimate manner because she had the reputation of being a sexual libertine.

Thomas Deloney’s Elizabethan novels kicked off the literary genre of the whodunit, in which beds would play a prominent part. In one of his books, a traveller named Thomas Cole arrives at the Crane Inn (a kind of sixteenth-century Bates Motel). He falls into a strange melancholy state, depressed by the screech owls and ravens which ‘cried piteously … hard by his window’. ‘What an ill favoured cry do yonder carrion birds make!’ he said, as ‘he laid him down on his bed, from whence he never rose again’.

He was killed in his sleep by the inn’s evil keeper, who’d fashioned a trapdoor beneath the bed. When the pins holding the trap were removed in the middle of the night, unfortunate guests would whistle straight down into an enormous cauldron in the kitchen below, there to be ‘scalded and drowned’. In this particular case, the murderer was discovered, for the innkeeper had overlooked one detail: he told everybody that his guest had never arrived, but Cole’s horse wandered off from the inn, was recognised, and gave the game away.

The privacy of the bedroom also makes it a favoured place for suicide. John Evelyn recounts how the ‘extraordinary [
sic
] melancholy’ Lord Clifford, formerly Lord Treasurer, had been found strangled ‘with his cravat upon the bed-tester’. Clifford’s servant, however, had looked in ‘through the key-hole, and seeing his master hanging, brake in before he was quite dead, and taking him down, vomiting a good deal of blood’. He was just in time to hear Lord Clifford’s last words, which were ‘there is a God, a just God above’.

It’s therefore not surprising that bedchambers are also the most haunted rooms of a house. James Boswell, that bundle of bravado and insecurity, was not immune to frights in the night. Sharing a room with his friend Lord Mountstuart, they lay one night talking about superstitions: ‘I was afraid that ghosts might
be able to return to earth, and for a time wished to get into bed with my Lord. But I lay quiet.’

In the previous century, though, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes treated the question with his usual rationality. His brilliant work aroused jealousy, and his enemies spread false reports:

One was that he was afraid to lie alone at night in his Chamber; I have often heard him say that he was not afraid of Sprights, but afraid of being knockt on the head for five or ten pounds, which rogues might think he had in his chamber.

Most people, though, were with Boswell rather than Hobbes. Going to bed in an age when witches, ghosts and robbers were all equally real in the mind required a good deal of resolution. Preparing to survive the trials of the night was a much more arduous task than it is today, when you merely set the alarm and switch off the light. The precautions one could take ranged from a pragmatic attention to household security, to prayers and rituals designed to scare off even the most awful evil spirits. First you had to get into the right frame of mind: ‘Discompose yourselves as little as may be before Bed-time,’ was the sensible advice of Humphrey Brooke in 1665, ‘the Master of the Family prudently animating and encouraging his Wife, Children and Servants against Fear and Disorder.’ It was wise to pray for protection each night against ‘sudden Death, Fears and Affrightments, Casualties by Fire, Water or Tempestous Weather’, and obviously, ‘Disturbance by Thieves’. There was also symbolic protection to be gained by placing a pig’s heart over the hearth, or putting a shoe among rafters in the roof, or carving the protective letter ‘M’ (for Virgin Mary) by the window or chimney through which a witch could conceivably enter. You might also put rosemary leaves under your bed in order to ‘be delivered of all evil dreams’.

One could also take the practical step of locking all the doors; a Georgian house at night was described as ‘barricaded’, ‘bolted’
and ‘barred’, both ‘backside and foreside, top and bottom’. ‘I always go round every night to see that all is fast,’ explained the London laundress Anne Towers, concerned that thieves would try to steal her customers’ linen overnight. Rural robbers might try to steal a family’s pig, and its male members would blunder outside with their sticks or cudgels in a literal attempt to ‘save their bacon’. Burglar alarms are an older invention than you might think. In
The Footman’s Directory
(1827), the retiring footman is encouraged to lock up carefully, and ‘if the shutters and doors be secured by an
alarm-bell
, be sure to put the wire of the alarm-bell to them, so that they cannot be opened without its going off’.

Today, night fears are more about intruders and serial killers than ghosts, but they still persist. Many people think that the 3 a.m. existential angst is a modern phenomenon. Like most human problems, though, people have suffered from it for centuries.

PART TWO
An Intimate History of the Bathroom

Separate rooms for washing were not standard in people’s homes until at least the middle of the twentieth century. In this section we nevertheless cover the activities of washing, defecating and grooming, which today take place in that most private of places, the bathroom. Bathrooms are now usually the only rooms in a house with a lock on their doors, yet the activities that take place within did not always require privacy.

Nor did people’s bodies inevitably grow cleaner as the years marched on. It’s surprising to discover that the many enthusiastic users of medieval communal baths probably smelled better than their Tudor descendants, who thought that bathing was dangerous. The Georgian period saw an enthusiasm for baths and washing return after an absence of more than two ‘dirty’ centuries. But many people had to make do with a bowl of water in the bedroom well into the twentieth century.

It seems horrible today to imagine life without hot water, but our notion of what it really means to be clean has changed dramatically. Developing ideas about cleanliness and social habits have dominated the history of the bathroom. Technological improvements in the art of plumbing have merely followed, rather than led, change.

15 – The Fall of Bathing …

GLOUCESTER: O, let me kiss that hand!
LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.