In centuries past, people’s homes were often quite unpleasant, as recounted in Judith Flanders’s book The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes. Before industrialization, most people lived in housing that would be considered cruel and unusual punishment if it were used to house prisoners in 21st century America.
“Five people living in one room, with no sanitation, lit and warmed by firelight, ‘cramped, musty and indescribably filthy’. . . [these were] the ordinary living conditions of [our] own history.”
There was little or no privacy. “For most, the past was a world where every aspect of life was lived in sight of others, where privacy was . . . almost unknown. For most of human history, houses have not been private spaces.” Having multiple rooms devoted to different purposes was an unimaginable luxury in the past. “For much of human history, cooking [took] place in the main living space” over the central hearth.
As The Doomslayer explains:
The first corridor or hallway to appear in a domestic residence debuted in 1597 in London. Most homes had far too few rooms to justify such an extravagance.
Comfort was rare as well. Earth floors were common for centuries. By the 17th and 18th centuries, wooden floors were more common, and “even the rich generally had wooden floors,” with the marble floors seen in many paintings of the period being aspirational rather than realistic depictions of homes. In the 17th century, the Dutch routinely spread sand over their floors, and the British did so into the 18th century. “The sand soaked up grease from open-fire cooking, as well as wax and oil from lighting.”
People had few furnishings or other possessions throughout most of history, so what little they owned often served multiple functions. “Furniture was mobile because there was very little of it, and what there was necessarily moved around to fulfil many and different needs.” It makes sense that in most European languages—from the French and Spanish meubles to the German Möbel, and from the Polish meble to the Swedish möbler—the word for furniture shares an etymological root with the English word mobile: “Furniture for everyone but the very wealthiest, was historically almost perpetually on the move.” At one time, the word moveable could mean furniture in English (it is used in this sense in a line in The Taming of the Shrew, for example).
Even the wealthy often moved their furniture around. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the servants of the wealthy Capulets are told to clear a room for dancing by moving the furniture away after a meal: “Away with the join-stools, remove the court-cubbert [a kind of cupboard] . . . turn the tables up.” Turning a table up consisted of removing its legs and putting it against the wall for space-saving storage. “Until the first third of the nineteenth century, and later in many places, for most people below the rank of French kings, furniture . . . remained pushed back against the walls” when not in use. Heavy furniture that remains in the same place all the time, as opposed to light moveable furniture, is a recent phenomenon. “It was only from the end of the seventeenth century, as some of the great houses began to allocate a separate room for eating in, that wavy tables that were not routinely moved came into use” among the wealthy.
In Europe, “until well into the late seventeenth century the household furnishings of the modestly prosperous were so scanty that it is possible to itemize them almost entirely in a few sentences.” A typical house might have a table, benches, a single chair, a cupboard, fireplace tools, cooking implements, and little if anything else.
Most people slept on straw-stuffed sacks. “Until the fifteenth century, most Europeans slept on sacks stuffed with straw or dried grass, which were nightly placed on boards, benches or chests, or directly on the floor, in the main, or only room.”
