Bryson's home thoughts reveal links with past

In this week's review of the property scene, estate agent Trevor Cooper considers Bill Bryson's novel At Home, a book that reflects upon the last 150 years of eating, sleeping and relaxing within our houses.

BILL BRYSON'S short history of private life entitled 'At Home' is a fascinating and entertaining study of how we live in our houses.

The extraordinary is found in things familiar as he wanders from room to room in his own house, a former Victorian rectory in Norfolk, to unearth some bizarre origins of what we take for granted when setting up home.

The book reveals how our habits have evolved in eating, sleeping, relaxing and most other functions of everyday life. It concentrates on the last 150 years during which we have grown accustomed to being clean, warm and well fed.

But this is not a book review, as such, more like extolling Bill Bryson's considerable knowledge of our links with the distant past.

As the author notes, 'you can't talk about baths without talking about Romans'. Likewise, much attention is paid to the Angles and Saxons of the Middle Ages who introduced large barn-like buildings to Britain. These had long since been called 'Halls' and everyday living, day and night, was spent in this one open space with an earthen floor and a smoky open hearth in the middle. The only concession was a raised platform where the owner and his family would eat apart from the servants and other habitants – the tradition of dining at high tables being continued in some colleges today.

Tables have grown in importance from when dining tables were simply boards laid across trestles and stored against the wall when not in use. In the absence of trestles, the board perched on the diners' knees. From this way of dining come expressions like 'room and board' and 'boarders', among many others.

Seating was on plain benches. Chairs were rare and denoted authority, the same way someone now 'chairs' a meeting or is chairman of the board – board being the table company directors sit at, not the directors themselves.

Hall improvements, however, were generally slow in the making. The idea of a lantern-style hood or cowl which allowed smoke to escape through the hole in the roof but also kept rain, wind and birds out was not considered until the 14th century, about the time chimneys were being built.

Chimneys had been used by the Romans for heating hot baths and baking bread but were inexplicably ignored during the later Middle Ages, as with so much of Roman expertise and innovation. The Normans at the time of the conquest had a form of fireplace in their castles which was little more than a recess in the thick stone wall with a hole at the back to let smoke escape. These were ineffective and a hazard inside wooden houses, which most homes were back then. It was the development of good bricks that paved the way for chimneys.

The introduction of chimneys was, to quote Bill Bryson, 'one of the great breakthrough moments in domestic history'. Before then, smoke from open fires would hang continuously in the hall, being particularly dense at the upper level. Directing the smoke up a chimney created a whole new space to live in – upstairs. Floorboards were laid across structural beams and space that used to be filled with thick smoke now became habitable.

The word 'room', as in separate defined rooms, is not recorded in English until Tudor times and it was not long before then that the idea of personal space, so natural to us now, was a revelation. Masters and servants who formerly ate, lived and slept together in the hall were now segregated in an early form of Upstairs Downstairs.

Space apart from each other, even among the family, became craved after as separate rooms were created upstairs and began to spread off from the hall on the ground floor (a current expression that derives from the earthen floor inside the building). Names for these new rooms such as bed chamber, parlour, gallery, study and many others familiar to us now date from this time.

Some habits die hard, however, and toilets with multiple seats and sharing beds and baths often in the company of others continued. Neither was the specific use of the new rooms rigorously kept to as the sparse and basic furniture was often moved from room to room in search of light or heat or shade.

Following these developments, Bill Bryson remarks how the hall in our homes has been demoted from its original state as the entire building, progressing from prestigious heights in grand houses to now acting as no more than, 'a place to wipe one's feet and hang coats.'

* 'At Home' by Bill Bryson is a Black Swan Book published by Doubleday for Transworld Books.