10 ms·

A Look into Medieval Homes

131 points by Thevet 4y ago

null_object 4y ago
Setting aside the problem (mentioned in the article) that these images were produced for an aristocratic class, and possibly don’t accurately describe the reality of a peasant’s home, then what’s most striking is how decorative the interiors are: patterned floors, painted walls, and neat carpentry. I’ve read the theory that the life of peasants in the Middle Ages was demonized and made to sound dystopian to encourage the working class of the Industrial Revolution (including ‘forgetting’ all the traditional festivals and days free from labor), and this sort of article makes me wonder whether this is additional evidence. Or possibly just the sanitized version for the entertainment of the upper class? PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  There's this common trope that medieval peasant clothing was all drab sackcloth. It was actually usually vibrantly dyed, and ACOUP goes into this in considerable detail: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t... Likewise, medieval houses were often painted with local dyes, like Falu red in the Nordics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red
- manderso 4y ago
  > PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. Presumably transcription errors; that example appears as "pane of glass" in the original paper visible at <https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA306 https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA...>
- automatic6131 4y ago
  >strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. I did a double take when I read that a "white car warms itself by the fire". Good to know that medieval peasants had motorized transport!
- guntherhermann 4y ago
  The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's mill and they collected a tax from it. There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class. The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool. You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper. Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy. For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.
  - null_object 4y ago
    I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia. If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- HEmanZ 4y ago
  I think you’re right, peasant life wasn’t so dystopian through the Middle Ages, and it seems to get a bad rap. Peasants didn’t have modern freedoms but they were not chattel slaves. They had a lot of free time and for much of history had a lot of land-per-person. Humans with free time and space, even if they are economically poor, carve out interesting and non-dystopian lives for themselves. I know explicit propaganda was used to try to convince Russian peasants their lives were miserable to spur the communist revolution. I’m not sure about explicit propaganda elsewhere. I think our collective consciences have merged together images of “old poverty” and we have an image of surfs that are closer to chattel slaves thanks to colonialism and industrialization. I also suspect quality of life among peasants was volatile over time, with famines and political turmoil hitting them extremely hard. By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    > Russian peasants their lives were miserable They were miserable though. The conditions of Russian peasants were much closer to chattel slavery than many of those who lived during the late middle ages in Western Europe. In fact the relative conditions of serfs in Russia (and Eastern Europe in general) got progressively worse during the 15-18th centuries as the conditions at the same time as they were gradually improving in the west. > By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe. I think the lives of people living in the country side who owned some lands (or tenancy) at least improved during the industrial revolution. Farmers in western Europe were increasingly focused on less labor intense cash crops or husbandry (as grain imports from Eastern Europe increased) which meant that there was demand for labor (forcing many to move into the crowded cities). Those who remained to a large degree were left with a bigger slice of the 'pie' compared to their ancestors.
- Aunche 4y ago
  You're assuming that factory workers are stupid and incapable of judging living conditions on their own. The fact is that millions of people voluntarily moved thousands of miles away from their families and hometowns to a country where they can't even speak the language, just so that they can work in a factory. That is not a decision that they make lightly. The fact that they had to work for long hours and shitty conditions is evidence not evidence that they made poor decisions, but that their supposedly idyllic country life was that much worse.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  It depends what you’re trying to say. Showing the home of a typical HN poster would be very different than many working poor in the United States. The transition from craft work to industrial production and assembly changed many aspects of life. My home is an urban single family detached house built in 1924 as a partially finished home that could be adapted by the owner to be a two family or you could finish the bedrooms upstairs. We did some research and the first owners of the home worked for the phone company. So not a super expensive home then, but there is still custom craftwork masonry, good trim carpentry (custom built-ins, custom millwork, etc). Today those tradespeople don’t exist. To a 1920s middle class person, a modern high end home would look unfinished in comparison.
josefrichter 4y ago
Visited “Golden Lane” under Prague Castle not long ago. Dates back to 16th century. What fascinated me was how tiny some of the “apartments” were. Basically 15 square meters for living, but also conducting their craft or business. Yet many of them seemed quite charming. Maybe we don’t need much.
- avodonosov 4y ago
  Yes, human can live in a burrow, it seems.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  They could be small partly because several of the feature of modern homes that are regarded as indispensable now were mostly absent from such dwellings: kitchens, bathrooms, and toilets in particular. I have an ex-colleague who lives with his wife in Oslo in a 45 sq. m. flat but that does include a bathroom, kitchen, and a bedroom. That would feel claustrophobic to me having lived for the last 34 years in a house with three times the floor area, 800 sq. m. of garden, and a cellar. Nonetheless the demand for apartments where he lives is such that his 45 sq. m. apartment is worth almost double what my 130 sq. m. house and garden are worth. We might not need much but many of us feel much more comfortable and happier with more!
  - dalke 4y ago
    > Oslo in a 45 sq. m. flat While I live in Sweden (about 4 hours away from Oslo by train), I think the two countries are sufficiently similar that I can mention some of my experiences moving here from the US. Many apartments here have a shared laundry room/area, with washer and dryer, or drying cabinet/room, and place to iron/fold. I think just about every apartment also has a storage area, either in the basement or the attic. For us this is about 10 sq. m. Many apartments have access to a common area that can be booked for parties or other larger events. Two rooms with kitchen is pretty common. Some have a bookable sauna, that isn't common. I've also seen places with a bookable guest rooms, which reduces the need for everyone to have a guest bedroom. Many have some sort of green space with a play area for the kids. Some have an enclosed courtyard where residents can have their own garden. Some have a gazebo, or grill area, and one new construction here has a freestanding shared conservatory (labeled "orangery", but without any orange trees). We don't have this, but we are a block from a small park and four blocks from a couple good play areas. Even with these, the result is certainly not as spacious as the house you describe. Rather, I wanted highlight there might be some additional aspects of the Oslo flat which aren't reflected in your summary. While researching what I wrote I found https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arealberegning_av_bygninger https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arealberegning_av_bygninger with a chart showing "Size in relation to primary area and number of people in the household - Area standards" ("Størrelse i forhold til primærareal og antall personer i husholdning - Arealnormer"). It puts 45 sq. m. for 2 people as "cramped", with the lower range for "normal" being 55 sq. m. Above 100 sq.m. for 2 people is "spacious" and above 150 sq. m. is "very spacious." You are right too about kitchen and toilet. In the late 1800s there would have been one shared well, for the apartment building, with a shared toilet. I've read that people would have kept a pig or other animals in the courtyard. And one of the buildings here was the first worker-owned apartment building in town. The historical sign on it says it had a shared kitchen for all the residents.
romanhn 4y ago
The couple warming up their genitals by the fire was a rather unexpected detail in an otherwise mundane early 15th century painting (and one I'm surprised did not warrant a mention). I suppose it was a mundane act indeed.
- bartvk 4y ago
  Good catch. I think that's where one major artery lays (femoral artery, if I searched correctly). I am not a back sleeper but I was advised to put a hot water bottle between my legs, to stay warm when camping in the winter. Apparently that was already well-known in medieval times.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Still used in winter in cold places.
ggm 4y ago
The last scene of Joseph and Mary from the tres riche heures shows an adjustable pot hanger, over the fireplace. Assuming it's not just artistic licence or artistic invention, The fireplace has a reverbatory rear: it's designed to reflect heat. It's also part of the thermal mass of the house. The adjustable pot hanger would be familiar to any cook for the next 400 years: it provides for variable sizes of pot, and distance from the fire: it's heat adjustable cooking for a slow summer or fast boil. I checked in Google images, Victorian examples abound, substantively the same. You'd be as much in control of cooking temperature as in an aga cooker.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  A trammel hook! Something I find interesting is that it is used in the French equivalent of house warming: "pendre la crémaillère" or hanging of the trammel hook.
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  Trammel hooks are still used in the corner of Portugal in which I live - quite a lot of families have an old house which still has a hearth covering half the kitchen, filled with chains and hooks for setting various fires and putting pots on at various heights. Of course, most folks also have a modern kitchen, but for high days and holidays they cook the old way still. Not unusual to see an old lady cranking a kid goat on a turnspit, either. Thing is, some of these “old” houses were built as recently as the 70’s, using techniques which hadn’t changed since the medieval era - stone and timber, lath and plaster, packed earth floors - such are the privations of nearly a century of stunted development, particularly in rural areas.
tragomaskhalos 4y ago
The style of art from that period tends to show human figures at a much larger scale than their environment - I remember a picture showing a siege in which the attacking army could almost have stepped over the walls! I'm sure there are interesting reasons behind this, but it does have the unfortunate effect of making it very difficult to discern how big these dwellings actually were.
- reidjs 4y ago
  I have a pet theory that this relates to how on social media picture sharing apps, in general, low effort selfies tend to get more engagement than beautiful landscape photography. People like looking at other people, and people especially like looking at themselves

131 points by Thevet 4y ago

Setting aside the problem (mentioned in the article) that these images were produced for an aristocratic class, and possibly don’t accurately describe the reality of a peasant’s home, then what’s most striking is how decorative the interiors are: patterned floors, painted walls, and neat carpentry. I’ve read the theory that the life of peasants in the Middle Ages was demonized and made to sound dystopian to encourage the working class of the Industrial Revolution (including ‘forgetting’ all the traditional festivals and days free from labor), and this sort of article makes me wonder whether this is additional evidence. Or possibly just the sanitized version for the entertainment of the upper class? PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.

rippercushions 4y ago
There's this common trope that medieval peasant clothing was all drab sackcloth. It was actually usually vibrantly dyed, and ACOUP goes into this in considerable detail: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t... Likewise, medieval houses were often painted with local dyes, like Falu red in the Nordics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red
manderso 4y ago
> PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. Presumably transcription errors; that example appears as "pane of glass" in the original paper visible at <https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA306 https://books.google.com/books?id=AQDtAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PP7&pg=PA...>
automatic6131 4y ago
>strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper. I did a double take when I read that a "white car warms itself by the fire". Good to know that medieval peasants had motorized transport!
guntherhermann 4y ago
The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's mill and they collected a tax from it. There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class. The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool. You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper. Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy. For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.
- null_object 4y ago
  I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia. If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
HEmanZ 4y ago
I think you’re right, peasant life wasn’t so dystopian through the Middle Ages, and it seems to get a bad rap. Peasants didn’t have modern freedoms but they were not chattel slaves. They had a lot of free time and for much of history had a lot of land-per-person. Humans with free time and space, even if they are economically poor, carve out interesting and non-dystopian lives for themselves. I know explicit propaganda was used to try to convince Russian peasants their lives were miserable to spur the communist revolution. I’m not sure about explicit propaganda elsewhere. I think our collective consciences have merged together images of “old poverty” and we have an image of surfs that are closer to chattel slaves thanks to colonialism and industrialization. I also suspect quality of life among peasants was volatile over time, with famines and political turmoil hitting them extremely hard. By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe.
- qwytw 4y ago
  > Russian peasants their lives were miserable They were miserable though. The conditions of Russian peasants were much closer to chattel slavery than many of those who lived during the late middle ages in Western Europe. In fact the relative conditions of serfs in Russia (and Eastern Europe in general) got progressively worse during the 15-18th centuries as the conditions at the same time as they were gradually improving in the west. > By the industrial revolution it may really have been dystopian in much of Europe. I think the lives of people living in the country side who owned some lands (or tenancy) at least improved during the industrial revolution. Farmers in western Europe were increasingly focused on less labor intense cash crops or husbandry (as grain imports from Eastern Europe increased) which meant that there was demand for labor (forcing many to move into the crowded cities). Those who remained to a large degree were left with a bigger slice of the 'pie' compared to their ancestors.
Aunche 4y ago
You're assuming that factory workers are stupid and incapable of judging living conditions on their own. The fact is that millions of people voluntarily moved thousands of miles away from their families and hometowns to a country where they can't even speak the language, just so that they can work in a factory. That is not a decision that they make lightly. The fact that they had to work for long hours and shitty conditions is evidence not evidence that they made poor decisions, but that their supposedly idyllic country life was that much worse.
Spooky23 4y ago
It depends what you’re trying to say. Showing the home of a typical HN poster would be very different than many working poor in the United States. The transition from craft work to industrial production and assembly changed many aspects of life. My home is an urban single family detached house built in 1924 as a partially finished home that could be adapted by the owner to be a two family or you could finish the bedrooms upstairs. We did some research and the first owners of the home worked for the phone company. So not a super expensive home then, but there is still custom craftwork masonry, good trim carpentry (custom built-ins, custom millwork, etc). Today those tradespeople don’t exist. To a 1920s middle class person, a modern high end home would look unfinished in comparison.

josefrichter 4y ago

Visited “Golden Lane” under Prague Castle not long ago. Dates back to 16th century. What fascinated me was how tiny some of the “apartments” were. Basically 15 square meters for living, but also conducting their craft or business. Yet many of them seemed quite charming. Maybe we don’t need much.

avodonosov 4y ago
Yes, human can live in a burrow, it seems.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
They could be small partly because several of the feature of modern homes that are regarded as indispensable now were mostly absent from such dwellings: kitchens, bathrooms, and toilets in particular. I have an ex-colleague who lives with his wife in Oslo in a 45 sq. m. flat but that does include a bathroom, kitchen, and a bedroom. That would feel claustrophobic to me having lived for the last 34 years in a house with three times the floor area, 800 sq. m. of garden, and a cellar. Nonetheless the demand for apartments where he lives is such that his 45 sq. m. apartment is worth almost double what my 130 sq. m. house and garden are worth. We might not need much but many of us feel much more comfortable and happier with more!
- dalke 4y ago
  > Oslo in a 45 sq. m. flat While I live in Sweden (about 4 hours away from Oslo by train), I think the two countries are sufficiently similar that I can mention some of my experiences moving here from the US. Many apartments here have a shared laundry room/area, with washer and dryer, or drying cabinet/room, and place to iron/fold. I think just about every apartment also has a storage area, either in the basement or the attic. For us this is about 10 sq. m. Many apartments have access to a common area that can be booked for parties or other larger events. Two rooms with kitchen is pretty common. Some have a bookable sauna, that isn't common. I've also seen places with a bookable guest rooms, which reduces the need for everyone to have a guest bedroom. Many have some sort of green space with a play area for the kids. Some have an enclosed courtyard where residents can have their own garden. Some have a gazebo, or grill area, and one new construction here has a freestanding shared conservatory (labeled "orangery", but without any orange trees). We don't have this, but we are a block from a small park and four blocks from a couple good play areas. Even with these, the result is certainly not as spacious as the house you describe. Rather, I wanted highlight there might be some additional aspects of the Oslo flat which aren't reflected in your summary. While researching what I wrote I found https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arealberegning_av_bygninger https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arealberegning_av_bygninger with a chart showing "Size in relation to primary area and number of people in the household - Area standards" ("Størrelse i forhold til primærareal og antall personer i husholdning - Arealnormer"). It puts 45 sq. m. for 2 people as "cramped", with the lower range for "normal" being 55 sq. m. Above 100 sq.m. for 2 people is "spacious" and above 150 sq. m. is "very spacious." You are right too about kitchen and toilet. In the late 1800s there would have been one shared well, for the apartment building, with a shared toilet. I've read that people would have kept a pig or other animals in the courtyard. And one of the buildings here was the first worker-owned apartment building in town. The historical sign on it says it had a shared kitchen for all the residents.

romanhn 4y ago

The couple warming up their genitals by the fire was a rather unexpected detail in an otherwise mundane early 15th century painting (and one I'm surprised did not warrant a mention). I suppose it was a mundane act indeed.

bartvk 4y ago
Good catch. I think that's where one major artery lays (femoral artery, if I searched correctly). I am not a back sleeper but I was advised to put a hot water bottle between my legs, to stay warm when camping in the winter. Apparently that was already well-known in medieval times.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Still used in winter in cold places.

ggm 4y ago

The last scene of Joseph and Mary from the tres riche heures shows an adjustable pot hanger, over the fireplace. Assuming it's not just artistic licence or artistic invention, The fireplace has a reverbatory rear: it's designed to reflect heat. It's also part of the thermal mass of the house. The adjustable pot hanger would be familiar to any cook for the next 400 years: it provides for variable sizes of pot, and distance from the fire: it's heat adjustable cooking for a slow summer or fast boil. I checked in Google images, Victorian examples abound, substantively the same. You'd be as much in control of cooking temperature as in an aga cooker.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
A trammel hook! Something I find interesting is that it is used in the French equivalent of house warming: "pendre la crémaillère" or hanging of the trammel hook.
madaxe_again 4y ago
Trammel hooks are still used in the corner of Portugal in which I live - quite a lot of families have an old house which still has a hearth covering half the kitchen, filled with chains and hooks for setting various fires and putting pots on at various heights. Of course, most folks also have a modern kitchen, but for high days and holidays they cook the old way still. Not unusual to see an old lady cranking a kid goat on a turnspit, either. Thing is, some of these “old” houses were built as recently as the 70’s, using techniques which hadn’t changed since the medieval era - stone and timber, lath and plaster, packed earth floors - such are the privations of nearly a century of stunted development, particularly in rural areas.

tragomaskhalos 4y ago

The style of art from that period tends to show human figures at a much larger scale than their environment - I remember a picture showing a siege in which the attacking army could almost have stepped over the walls! I'm sure there are interesting reasons behind this, but it does have the unfortunate effect of making it very difficult to discern how big these dwellings actually were.

reidjs 4y ago
I have a pet theory that this relates to how on social media picture sharing apps, in general, low effort selfies tend to get more engagement than beautiful landscape photography. People like looking at other people, and people especially like looking at themselves