Episode 150 of the Renaissance English History Podcast was the start of a tour through a Tudor home, beginning with the Kitchen.
Rooms were changing in the homes of the 16th century. Chimneys made it possible to seal off rooms, allowing for second stories, and suddenly, personal space! Let’s dive in and discuss…
Book Recommendations to learn more about Tudor Living Rooms:
Bill Bryson At Home: A History of Private Life – Buy on Amazon here using my affiliate link – you pay the same price, and the podcast gets a commission – yay!
The Tudor Housewife by Alison Sim – Buy on Amazon here using my affiliate link – you pay the same price, and the podcast gets a commission – thank you!
Rough Transcript: The Tudor Living Room
This episode is going back to the tour of the Tudor home that I started with the Kitchen a few episodes ago. This week we’re going to look at the Tudor Living Room, and the way the living room was changing in the 16th century.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
The first thing to think about with the living room is, what does it actually do? What do we do in the living room? Sometimes we entertain our friends. We lounge around in our PJ’s watching movies. Sometimes we sit around the coffee table and play a board game. It’s basically a space for being social and spending most of our time. The bedroom is our place to go at night to sleep. The kitchen is the place to cook, and possibly to eat. And the bathroom is the place to take a bath and use the toilet. But what is the living room? It’s the place where we spend the large part of our day when we don’t have a specific task that happens in one of those other places. It’s sort of a catch all.
Since we see so much change during the 16th century, it’s worth going back to the end of the 15th century, and talk about how things were at the very beginning of the Tudor period. Most homes had halls where the social aspect of the home would happen. Of course halls date way back to the Viking period, and when we think of halls we often think of feasts after a battle, and scenes from the Last Kingdom – or maybe that’s just me. Interestingly, the Angles, Saxons, and other invaders after the Romans could have used the old Roman structures, but they chose not to. They didn’t even use the Roman cities – London itself was empty for 300 years while the Anglo Saxon Lundenwic grew up outside the walls, around Aldwych now. It wasn’t until the later Danish invasions and Alfred the Great that people went back behind the Roman walls. But we can thank them for not using the Roman villas because thanks to them, we have halls. Halls have lasted through even to today – how many of us say things like, “oh, my coat is in the hall closet”, though of course hall means something different in that instance.
Halls were the foundation of the Medieval society – where servants lived with their employers, and everyone lived, ate, and slept communally. People lived in social units more than we do, at least in America and much of Europe today. Even with a family that had its own small cottage, you would have relatives and extended family living together. In the hall you would have an open fireplace, and then you would have various tables – high tables for the owner of the home, where the servants didn’t ever venture, and other tables for them. The table of course is a board laid across trestles, which is where “room and board” comes from. The fire was the central feature, but since there weren’t chimneys until the Tudor period, which we talked about in the kitchen episode, the room would have been very smoky. But by the 16th century, people had chimneys. Which made the living room possible. Because the chimney split up the rooms, so that on the one side you could have a kitchen and use the fire on that side for cooking, and on the other side you could have a sitting room to just sit in front of the fire.
The floors were likely just dirt with rushes on them, and those rushes would be home to small rodents as well as bodily produce like urine and vomit, and an incredibly unhygienic way of living, conducive to spreading plague and other sicknesses. When Erasmus toured England in 1524, he wrote: “The doors are, in general, laid with white clay, and are covered with rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for twenty years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned. Whenever the weather changes a vapour is exhaled, which I consider very detrimental to health. I may add that England is not only everywhere surrounded by sea, but is, in many places, swampy and marshy, intersected by salt rivers, to say nothing of salt provisions, in which the common people take so much delight I am confident the island would be much more salubrious if the use of rushes were abandoned, and if the rooms were built in such a way as to be exposed to the sky on two or three sides, and all the windows so built as to be opened or closed at once, and so completely closed as not to admit the foul air through chinks; for as it is beneficial to health to admit the air, so it is equally beneficial at times to exclude it”.
It also meant that the space got darker since the rooms were divided. To light the room on a budget you would use a rush light – it’s a rush dragged through animal fat, on a holder, and burned. They would last about 20 minutes. You could also use tallow candles by dipping wicks into pots of animal fat repeatedly. Before you lit the candles, you would seal everything off in the house to keep any drafts from coming in, which would make the candles burn faster. The tallow candle would last longer, but cost more. Since it was so expensive to light your home after dark, people would have rotating light sharing – the candles would all go to one home so that you could pool the resources. That way you could get in extra sewing, or other household chores. The fire was also useful for light that way.
Of course chimneys became a status symbol – a chance for the wealthiest people to show off just how wealthy they were. The chimneys projected wealth because it meant there were a lot of fireplaces, with a lot of wood being burned, and lots of forests available to provide the wood. Hampton Court had 241 chimneys.
It’s important to note that not everyone aspired to chimneys, though. Some people missed the open hearths, and believed that they were healthier with the air moving about more. In 1577 William Harrison said that “in the days of open fires ‘our heads never did ake.’” Smoke in the roofplace discouraged nesting birds, which people believed made the roofs stronger. And chimneys weren’t nearly as warm as before – fireplaces were so inefficient, so they kept being enlarged, and some actually had benches inside the fireplace itself so people could sit in the fire to get warm.
The wealthiest homes also had glass windows. Glass had been around since medieval times in churches, but in the 16th century glass made it out of the church to normal homes. But they were still status objects, even through the 16th century. For example, in 1590 in Doncaster, an alderman’s will left his house to his wife, but his windows to his son. Which would make the wife quite chilly, I’d think. Some owners of large homes would have their windows taken out and stored if they went away. Then take my favorite Bess of Hardwick, who built her home, Hardwick Hall, known as more glass than wall. Though one fun fact is that the builders were learning how to work with glass as they were going – initially the architect, Robert Smythson it’s believed, didn’t know how to fit all the windows in on the plans. Some of the windows are shared by rooms on different floors, and some are blanks in front of chimneys.
One thing we see at Hardwick Hall was the fact that chimneys allowed the easy construction of second floors – whereas when there was one big central hearth and no chimney, you would have the ceilings as high as possible, and maybe even have windows up there for the smoke to get out. But with a chimney, you can seal off those high spaces, and put rooms upstairs as well. And that allowed for the new room called a Great Chamber where the homeowner and his family discovered the joy of privacy away from servants. The Great Chamber allowed the Lord and family to do all the things they had done in the hall before, but in the privacy of just their family. They would then use the great hall just for banquets and other events. Suddenly people had personal space, and that revolutionized the way everyone interacted with not just their servants, but even their equals. With the discovery of personal space, eventually people wanted to have rooms where they could escape not just their servants, but their family as well. In the 14th and 15th century we would see new names of new rooms come into use to describe the new arrangements – the study, privy, closet, oratory, parlor, library, salon, suite, lodging, and more. By the end of the 16th century, these rooms were filtering down to the middling classes, and we go from an entire household living in a great hall to people splitting off into all these other rooms.
At Hardwick, there was still an entry hall, but the real heart of the home was a new room called the Great Chamber several floors up. That room was reserved for visitors, unlike the medieval hall where servants and homeowners mixed. Hardwick hall’s great chamber was used for hosting events and parties. In a home like Hardwick Hall you would have furniture with cushions, tapestries, and other textiles in the room to show off your wealth, in addition to the light that would bathe the room thanks to the huge windows. Down a long gallery there was another room reserved just for the very close friends called the Withdrawing Room, which eventually became known as the Drawing Room. All of this led to a change in the relationship between the Lord and the servant – the servant was no longer a part of the family as they had been when everyone was just in a hall together.
Speaking of textiles and tapestries, carpets were so expensive that most people would have actually hung them on the wall. Walking of them would have been unheard of. But some people would keep them in a trunk, and just bring them out when important visitors came, to impress them.
So in the 16th century a drawing or living room was something really reserved for the aristocracy. The poor people didn’t have any time to just sit because they were always working, and they probably lived in the home of their employer. But in the rising middle class, this class that grew during the 16th century, more and more people were interested in creating their own versions of living rooms.
Let’s talk about furniture for a minute. Because large estates had so many servants living on them, people were much more mobile than they are today. Just like the king would move around from house to house, so would other lords. Furniture was made to be mobile as well, and most furniture didn’t start to take on the permanence and heirloom status that we have today until the end of the 16th century with a place like Hardwick Hall that was made to last and be lived in year round. One reason why chests often have curved tops is because it would throw off the rain or snow when traveling. People didn’t start to put drawers into trunks, and make them chests of drawers, until around the 16th century, which was another sign of a more permanent level of society emerging.
When we think about the living spaces of these homes, we see that things weren’t really comfortable in the way are now. For most people, remember, life was hard. Much of their time was spent just figuring out how to survive – to get enough firewood, enough food, and enough clothing to make it through. When harvests were poor and crops failed, as they did about once out of every 4 years, the hunger happened right away. Plus there was plague, and other disease. Take Hardwick Hall – the floor was still simple rush mats, and in that long gallery of 166 feet long, there were only 3 small tables, and a few straight backed chairs.
Bill Bryson has said that you could sum up the history of private life in a sentence just by saying that it was a slow movement towards comfort. The word comfort only took on its modern meaning as a place where you want to get into your PJ’s with a cup of tea and read a book for a few hours in the 18th century, and it was Horace Walpole who first wrote of it in that way when he said that he was as comfortable as is possible. We start to see just the very tiniest beginnings of that in the 16th century with places like Hardwick Hall.
So that’s it for this week. You can get show notes with sources at englandcast.com/livingroom. And do let me know what you thought about this episode -You can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or through twitter @teysko or facebook.com/englandcast. Thanks so much for listening.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]