'True comfort, as we understand it, was invented by the French in the seventeenth century,' writes Peter Thornton, who singled out the 1630s as the key decade in this development and showed how the new comfort was quite quickly transferred to the homes of aristocratic Englishmen in the early Restoration period. This section will look at how the homes of middling Londoners were also transformed in the course of our period.
This is much easier to document then diet or apparel, since most inventories list furniture, often in considerable detail. One can start by looking at valuations of domestic goods, though it should be noted that these are 'clearance sale' and not replacement values, and people actually spent much more than the figures listed by the valuers. Table 10.8 opposite provides average valuations broken down into five wealth groups and distinguishing between two sub-periods, before and after 1690. The table shows that there was little change over time, a rather
surprising result since, as will be seen, there was considerable qualitative change in domestic goods. As one might expect, richer people spent more than poorer people, though it is clear that demand for such goods was relatively inelastic. It seems, too, that richer people were spending rather less and poorer people rather more as time went on.
It was seen in Chapter 8 that the typical middle-class house had about seven rooms, comprising four or five bedrooms, one or two living rooms, the best one normally being called the dining-room and and the second best the parlour, and a kitchen. In Table 10.9 above, the average value of the contents of the main rooms is listed and it can be seen that the most valuable
room was normally the best bedroom, a room which was used for entertaining as well as sleeping, as is clear from contemporary prints and descriptions as well as from the inventories. Five of the sample, all merchants, had magnificent best bedrooms valued at over £100. Another merchant, who died in 1701, had a dining-room valued at £100, and there was a tendency for this room to be upgraded as our period continues to provide an increasingly important second focus of display.
What one might call class as well as wealth affected the level of domestic consumption. For example, 38 of the 162 people worth more then £2000 had best bedrooms valued at less than £15. Since these people could clearly have afforded bedrooms valued at the £20, £30 or more which was normal in this wealth group, it is interesting to see if they shared any characteristics. When one looks at their occupations, it is clear that they did, since, with few exceptions, they made their money in ways not considered very genteel by their contemporaries. There were only two merchants amongst them, for instance, and virtually none of the fashionable sort of shopkeeper. The fact is that most merchants, mercers and drapers made very sure that they would not be found dead in a bedroom worth less then £15, a fear not shared by such ungenteel tradesmen as builders, wine coopers, cheesemongers, coalmongers, soapmakers, distillers, printers and cloth finishers. Such men, although wealthy, saw no reason to lay out money on unnecessary display in their bedrooms or in any other part of their homes, a fact which helps to explain why they often managed to accumulate as much as mercers and merchants, since they were not subject to the same haemorrhage of their capital on domestic display.
One can now look at the qualitative changes in the contents of houses. These were considerable and, for the most part, followed with some delay the changes discovered by furniture historians in their studies of the court and aristocracy. One striking feature was the increasing emphasis on lightness, both in terms of visibility and in the materials used for hangings, curtains, bed furniture and upholstery. The replacement of small paned windows by sash windows from the late 1680s and a much greater provision of sconces and standing candle-sticks, often backed with mirrors, did much to dispel the gloom of interiors. From the 1690s, many wealthy people were using the
much larger mirror plates now available as chimney glasses above their fireplaces and pier-glasses between the windows, while, in general, one finds a much wider use of looking-glasses and their introduction to nearly every room. In 1691, Guy Miège noted the light and airiness of the London house, the 'lightsom stair-cases, fine sash-windows and lofty ceilings', the latter usually plastered, which 'make by their whiteness the rooms so much lightsomer.'
The use of lighter textiles was equally marked, heavier draperies such as broadcloth and serge being replaced by lighter mixtures such as mohairs and camlets, and, increasingly, by silks and cottons. These changes in taste are especially marked in the furnishing of beds, which were normally adorned with a huge yardage of textiles in the form of curtains, valances, headcloths and testers, quite apart from the quilts, blankets, rugs and sheets which lay on top of the nearly ubiquitous and expensive feather-beds. By the reign of Queen Anne, the hangings of the best bed in the house were nearly always camlet, mohair, damask or silk and many were also lined with silk or cotton, a development which can be seen throughout the house as camlet and mohair gradually replaced serge in the second and third bedrooms too and as similar textiles were used as hangings and furniture coverings generally.
The furniture itself was becoming more comfortable, curves which fitted the human body replacing the upright, angular furniture of earlier days, while improvements in upholstery led to better padded seats and a much wider use of cushions and squabs, usually stuffed with down or feathers. Sitting comfortably was now very much the thing to do and the ability to do so is indicated by the increasing appearance of couches, sofas and settees and by the 'easy chair', the high-backed, winged and well-upholstered armchair described by John Gloag as 'a national symbol of ease and comfort'. He dates the easy chair from the 1670s, but it is not common in our inventories before the reign of Queen Anne. Another innovation was the replacement of the 'turkeywork' chair by the cane chair as the normal form of upright chair for sitting at table and, in general, the much wider use of light, elegant and resilient canework in other types of furniture. Cane chairs are found in aristocratic inventories of the 1660s and John Gloag has suggested that the
demand for the new chairs 'was suddenly and dramatically expanded' by the Great Fire in 1666. This attractive thesis is not supported by our inventories, which show that the key decade for the adoption of the new chair was the 1680s, some twenty years after its first introduction, and it is in the same decade that anguished petitions from the turkeywork makers are found in a bid to ban the products of their competitors.
The decline of serge as a furnishing material and the rise of the cane chair are just two examples of the influence of fashion on domestic interiors. There were many others, such as the introduction of the 'oval table' from the 1670s, and it is clear that fashion, often derived from French or aristocratic models and followed with a delay of a decade or two, was an imperative influence forcing Londoners to change their furniture and furnishings long before they were worn out. This was good news for manufacturers and traders in general, although there were of course losers, such as the serge-makers of Exeter and the turkeywork makers of Bradford, who had good cause to bemoan their fate, while the cane-chair makers of London were basking in the sun.
Cane-work was first introduced from the Far East from where the rattans were imported and is an example of a wide range of innovations which bore a Far Eastern, Indian or Levantine influence. Japanning was another oriental import, a technique imitated by English craftsmen from at least the 1670s. Japan work begins to appear in middling homes in the 1690s, the banker Thomas Williams, for example, having Japan boxes, a chest of drawers, a table with matching candle stands and a Japan cribbage board in 1697, while after 1700 references to Japan work become commonplace. Japan and other lacquer-work was usually associated with high-quality cabinet-making and one sees increasing examples of this, much of it imported by the East India Company. The merchant John Barkstead, for instance, who died in 1694, had an 'Indian trunke and frame', 'a pair of India cabinets' and an 'India cabinet and frame'.
Another oriental product domesticated by the English was china, examples of which can be found in the earliest of our inventories but which did not become really common until the 1690s and the reign of Queen Anne. By this time, collecting china had become a craze for many people, such as John
Sherwood, a drysalter who died in 1703 with some 200 pieces of china and 'tonquin' in his house. Following in the wake of the china boom came the dual invasion of coffee and tea-making equipment into London homes. This was rare before the 1690s but, as with so many other innovations, what was rare or unknown in the 1680s becomes commonplace in the reign of Queen Anne, when inventory after inventory has its coffee-pot and coffee-mill or the standard set of tea-kettle, lamp and stand usually kept in the dining-room.
Another feature of middling homes was the huge increase in pictures, ornaments and bits and pieces as the period goes on. One finds pictures right from the beginning, but not very many of them. By the 1690s and the early eighteenth century, many people had huge collections of pictures and prints, the latter often being imported by the East India Company and thus giving a further oriental flavour to the houses. The haberdasher, Robert Fotherby, for instance, had forty-four Indian pictures in his dining-room when he died in 1709. Pictures could be found all over the house, often replacing the tapestries and wall hangings which were much commoner in the early part of the period. One is rarely told what was represented, but 'landskips', 'sea peices' and paintings of the King and Queen were quite often mentioned. Portraits of members of the family were also becoming increasingly popular, Daniel Thomas having six 'family pictures' in his hall, an indication of a growing bourgeois self-awareness which must have given a lot of work to portrait-painters from the 1690s onwards.
Halls were also a common place to find a clock, as indeed was the head of the staircase, Tristram Shandy's father being unusual in 1715 neither in the ownership of a clock needing to be wound only once a month nor in the place where he chose to keep it. Clocks can be found from the beginning of our period and they had become very common, though not ubiquitous, by the reign of Queen Anne. By this date, there were often several clocks scattered through the rooms of houses, the dining-room being the commonest place to keep one, apart from halls and passages. Perhaps surprisingly, there were very few clocks in servants' rooms and workshops, despite E. P. Thompson's insistence on the connection between the development of the clock and labour discipline, the only two examples being Adrian
Vanderpost, sugar-refiner of Vauxhall, who had an 'old' clock in the men's garret and Richard Walford, a metalworker, who kept a clock in his workshop and only an hourglass in his dining-room.
Bric-à-brac and ornaments, such as 'images' made of alabaster and marble, stags' heads, bird-cages, chess, draughts and backgammon tables and pieces and anything else which might be captured by the catchall word 'toys', all became increasingly prominent and must, together with too much furniture, have made a terrible clutter in many homes. The impact of the collecting fever can perhaps best be seen in the inventory of Daniel Thomas, a mercer who died in 1704. In his closet, he had, amongst other things, 740 books, two models of churches, three telescopes, a globe, several maps, two hourglasses, a sailing compass, a draughts board and some fishing tackle. In other rooms, he had another 150 books and atlases, some 200 pieces of china, getting on for 100 pictures, more maps, a Noah's ark and a small organ, as well as a collection of weapons which included 18 hand-guns.
Pepys's observation that one in three families in the City had a pair of virginals amongst their goods when they fled from the Fire, and the emphasis on music-making at home in his diary, has led music historians to believe that middling Londoners were a very musical lot indeed, constantly engaged in entertaining each other in impromptu domestic concerts. This, however, is not borne out by our inventories, in which one finds only thirty-three men, less than a tenth of the sample, with any musical instruments in their house and six of these had only an instrument described as 'old' stored in the garret, suggesting that if their household had once been musical it was so no longer. The data give some substance to the view that growing access to professional music in concert rooms from the 1680s had a dampening effect on domestic music, the proportion of men with musical instruments falling from one in seven to one in seventeen before and after 1680.
The room which saw the least change was the kitchen, with its extensions into buttery and pantry, most of the change that there was consisting of an improvement of amenities in the kitchens of the less wealthy. This development meant that, by the late seventeenth century, the kitchen was the room with the
narrowest range of valuations, the great majority being valued at between £10 and £20, whatever the wealth of the householder. Kitchens were used not just for the preparation, cooking and serving of food but also for washing dishes and for making, mending, washing and ironing clothes, and their contents reflect these various functions. They were also the place where servants, apprentices and younger children ate their meals and relaxed, so that all kitchens contained one or more tables and several chairs and stools, the furnishings becoming increasingly attractive over time, with better quality chairs, curtains, perhaps a canary or a parrot in a cage, a clock, some pictures and a screen to protect the occupants from the heat of the fire.
Heat was provided by an open fire, either in a grate or a range, the latter presumably being what we understand by a range, with side ovens heated from the fire. Ovens, in fact, are rarely mentioned, possibly because they were landlords' fittings but quite probably because few houses did their own baking, the Londoner being well served by professional bakers, who baked three times a day and delivered to the door as well as being prepared to bake the housewife's pies and pasties in their large ovens. Most cooking involved spit-roasting, frying, simmering and boiling, and a formidable array of equipment for this can be found in all kitchens.
Nearly everyone had at least two or three spits turned by a weight-driven jack, the grease being caught in a large drippingpan. The battery of kettles, pots and pans, which were increasingly made of brass or copper and were becoming more specialized into saucepans, stewpans, fish-kettles, tea-kettles etc., were suspended from hooks over the fire or, from about 1700, from a swinging chimney crane, or they could be placed on the 'cheeks' of the range. All households also had frying-pans, grid-irons for grilling or broiling, long-handled skillets for boiling or stewing, each with their own little legs, and chafing dishes whose base held burning charcoal to keep food hot. Food preparation is represented by cleavers, chopping and shredding knives, flesh forks, skewers, ladles and scummers, a vast array of metalware which helps one to understand why London had so many smiths and metalworkers, the jacksmith for instance being an important and independent trade.
Very few houses had less then 100 pounds weight of pewter
as well as brass, copper, iron and tinware. This was normally valued by weight but was occasionally itemized. The cheesemonger Samuel Palmer, for instance, had twenty pewter dishes including a basin, a cheese plate and a pie plate, thirty-nine plates, a dish frame, two saucers and a salt. Pewter was gaining at the expense of the wooden trencher, in common use at the beginning of our period, but losing out to glass, china, copper, brass and tinware. Silver was not in common use as table-ware by the middle class but almost everyone had some 'plate', which might range from the silver cup and two silver spoons of the salesman Richard Stock, valued at £4 12s., to several hundreds of pounds worth for the richer men, objects of pride and display which would only be seen in the kitchen for cleaning. The quantity of cutlery, sometimes silver but usually steel, also grew; forks, in particular, which were hardly used at all for eating in the 1660s, had become a common item by the early eighteenth century.
Most kitchens had a cistern or sink, with water pumped from the companies' mains, and most had a copper and numerous tubs for washing clothes. Ironing was done with smoothingirons heated on the fire or with box-irons filled with charcoal, and what had to be ironed can be seen by looking into the linen cupboards, whose contents were usually listed separately, their average value being greater than that of the entire contents of the kitchen but with a similar range from about £10 to £25. These valuations represented an amazing number of separate items, an average of thirty-six sheets, eighty-nine napkins and fifteen table-cloths; linen chests also held pillow-beeres (i.e. cases), towels, childbed linen, window curtains (mainly of cotton or muslin) and yards and yards of Holland, diaper, huckaback, damask etc. which had not yet been made up.
Peter Thornton writes that faces and hands were wiped after meals with a hot, damp napkin, which would help to explain the large numbers. He also claims that many people in the seventeenth century 'were a good deal less dirty than is now generally supposed'. He makes a good case but it is difficult to be totally convinced. Houses, clothes, bed linen, cooking equipment and furniture certainly seem to have been kept scrupulously clean—but were people? There is not a single bath-tub, let alone a bathroom, in the 375 inventories that have
been studied, though both the vessel and the name existed. Thornton says that many of the numerous tubs kept in kitchens and cellars may well have been used for personal washing, which seems a reasonable hypothesis but no more. Many houses also list ewers and bowls in bedrooms and, of course, materials for washing such as soap and perfumed washballs were easily available, though pretty expensive. Nonetheless, one must still be slightly suspicious of the personal hygiene of our period. Pepys often complained about dirtiness in other people and seems to have washed regularly every morning but whether this normally went beyond hands and face seems doubtful. Washing his feet seems to have been sufficiently rare to merit the occasional diary entry, as it does in the diary of Stephen Monteage seventy years later, whose feet were washed about once a month, normally by his maid. Whether either of them were in the habit of washing those parts of their bodies which lay between face and feet one cannot tell since they never tell one, which in the circumstances would suggest that they rarely did.
Innovations in the kitchen may have been rare, except for the multiplication of relatively minor gadgets, but they were widespread elsewhere in the house and even the kitchen saw the introduction of the equipment for making hot drinks. Who were the innovators? Who were the people who had already abandoned serge bed curtains before 1680, who already had cane chairs in the 1670s, china before 1690 or tea-making equipment before 1700? None of these innovations was particularly expensive; all of them were within the purchasing power of all the sample and indeed virtually everyone had adopted them by the end of the period. Nevertheless, with the exception of china, whose acquisition seems to follow no particular pattern, those who innovated were by no means a random group. They were nearly all either very wealthy men who might well have the entrée to West End houses or they were tradesmen with an aristocratic business who would see the new fashions when they delivered goods to their clients' houses and who might well think that being fashionable themselves could only enhance their business reputation.
These new fashions represent the 'true comfort', which was mentioned at the beginning of this section, and which, by the
reign of Queen Anne, had been introduced to a very considerable extent into the homes of middle-class Londoners. They now lived in houses which were better lit, were hung with more attractive textiles and were furnished in a way which would have made both sitting and sleeping more of a pleasure than they had been in the 1660s. Furniture was more sophisticated, walls were decorated with pictures instead of just hangings and tapestry, and surfaces were covered, perhaps littered would be a better word, with china, glass and ornaments instead of just with table carpets. Overall, there was little difference in the total valuation of domestic possessions at the beginning and the end of the period. However, it does seem clear that the poorer members of the middle station had definitely upgraded their domestic interiors. One might take as an example Thomas Toms, a barber-surgeon of Stocks Market, who died in 1719 aged only thirty. His total assets were valued at £484, of which £49 consisted of the value of his domestic possessions, which were kept in just four rooms. Lack of space forced him to keep a press bed in his dining-room, but the rest of the furniture was very fashionable: a chimney glass, two pier glasses, a pair of glass sconces, nine cane chairs with cushions, eleven pictures and two prints, a glass case, a tea table and forty-one pieces of china. Such a room would have seemed amazingly luxurious to a similar barber-surgeon in the 1660s but, by the 1710s, it was simply in fashion and Thomas Toms was doing nothing extraordinary in furnishing his room in this manner.
Such changes made houses much more comfortable, but they also have a wider significance. When one finds that men worth less than £500 were making a fairly successful attempt to furnish their homes in a way similar to those of great merchants, one can be sure that the economy as a whole was benefiting. Thomas Toms' mirrors and his forty-one pieces of china were good news for the expanding English glass and pottery industries. This deepening of the market also encouraged manufacturers and suppliers to cut costs and prices, by innovations, imitations and a successful search for cheaper sources of supply, and this could well be why what seem to be much better domestic interiors were valued in the early eighteenth century at little more or even less then those of the 1660s and 1670s.
This section has concentrated on those personal possessions
which were accumulated in the house and for most people these were all the possessions that they had, apart from their investments and the tools and stock in trade connected with their business. However, some members of the middle class owned their own transport, the greatest status symbol of the age being one's own coach or carriage. This was no light matter, as readers of Pepys's diary will remember, months of planning, worry and discussion finally ending with the arrival of his coach and horses in November 1668, an acquisition which 'doth put me into the greatest condition of outward state that I ever was in, or hoped ever to be, or desired'. Such glory was an immense expense, not just for the £50–£100 or more that the coach would cost, but for the very high maintenance costs and such ongoing expenses as rent of a coach house, the wages of the coachman and the cost of feeding the horses, a horse's food being about 5s. a week, very much the same as that of any other member of the household. It is not surprising, then, that only sixteen men in our sample owned a coach, nearly all of them merchants with a median fortune of £15,000.
Lesser men had to content themselves with their own riding horse, though this too posed problems in the more densely populated areas and horsekeeping was likely to cost considerably more each year than the value of the horse. Nevertheless, one in five men had his own horse, this being virtually essential for some occupations, such as the apothecaries who had to be able to visit their patients. The remainder had to content themselves with hiring a coach or a horse when they needed one, while on most occasions they would have walked, this being much the commonest way of getting round London. Contemporary diaries leave us in no doubt that early modern men and women were much more active pedestrians than we are today. It is clear, too, that they positively enjoyed walking for the fresh air and exercise and also for their health, though, as will be seen in the next chapter, it might take more than walking to keep a person alive in Augustan London.