It also explains why lodgers are called boarders and why an honest person-someone who keeps his hands visible at all times-is said to be aboveboard.Īfter an evening meal, the inhabitants of the medieval hall had no bedrooms in which to retire. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. The dining table was a plain board called by that name. In humbler dwellings, matters were generally about as simple as they could be. “The ‘ground floor’ was justly named,” as the historian James Ayres has put it. The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.īare earth floors remained the norm in much of rural Britain and Ireland until the twentieth century. Although slaves were property and could be sold-and for quite a lot: a healthy male slave was worth eight oxen-slaves were able to own property, marry, and move about freely within the community. However, slavery from the ninth to eleventh centuries in England was not quite the kind of dehumanizing bondage we think of from more modern times, as in the American South, for instance.

By contrast, freemen, known as ceorls, had freedom in principle but often were too poor to exercise it. In the late medieval period, one in twenty owned fifty acres or more-substantial holdings for the time. The principal effect of serfdom was to remove the holder’s freedom to move elsewhere or marry outside the estate. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner. The head of the household was the husband-a compound term meaning literally “householder” or “house owner.” His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.Įvery member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family-they were literally familiar, to use the word in its original sense. We don’t know anything at all about these people-where they came from, what language they spoke, what led them to settle on such a lonesome outpost on the treeless edge of Europe-but from all the evidence it appears that Skara Brae enjoyed six hundred years of uninterrupted comfort and tranquillity.

At Home by Bill Bryson