… is from pages 52-53 of historian William Manchester’s gripping 1992 book, A World Lit Only by Fire; here, Manchester describes the home of a typical “prosperous peasant” in 16th-century Europe (ellipses original to Manchester):
Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without it, would have been the front yard. The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling. Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family’s apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot. According to Erasmus, who examined such huts, “almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer … remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable. Hence, with the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome.”
The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin. Everyone slept there, regardless of age or gender – grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and hens and pigs – and if a couple chose to enjoy intimacy, the others were aware of every movement. In summer they could even watch. If a stranger was staying the night, hospitality required that he be invited to make “one more” on the familial mattress.
DBx: Remember the above when you next read a tweet from a 20-year-old undergraduate – or hear a diatribe from an octogenarian socialist – asserting that “capitalism isn’t working.”
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