Bill Bryson, 2010
Translation. T. Trefilova, 2012
Russian edition AST Publishers, 2014
In the old days, solitude was understood very differently than it is today. Even in the 19th century, going to bed with stranger sharing a hotel bed was common, and diarists often wrote of how disappointed they were when a late-arriving stranger climbed into their bed. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were forced to share a bed in a hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and they quarreled all night over whether or not to open the window.
Servants often slept at the foot of the master's bed so that any request of the master could be easily fulfilled. It is clear from written sources that King Henry V's chamberlain and master of the horse were present in the bedroom when the king slept with Catherine of Valois. The diaries of Samuel Pepys say that a maid slept on the floor of his matrimonial bedroom as a living alarm in case of robbery. In such circumstances, the bedside curtain did not provide the necessary privacy; In addition, it was a refuge for dust and insects, and drafts easily blew it up. Among other things, the bedside canopy could be a fire hazard, as could the entire house, from the reed flooring to the thatched roof. Almost every home economics reference book warned against reading by candlelight in bed, but many ignored this advice.
In one of his works, John Aubrey, a historian of the 17th century, tells funny story, concerning the marriage of Thomas More's daughter Margaret and one William Roper. Roper came to More one morning and said that he wanted to marry one of his daughters - no matter which one. Then More led Roper to his bedroom, where the daughters slept in a low bed pulled out from under their father's. Bending down, More deftly grabbed “the corner of the sheet and suddenly pulled it off the bed.” The girls slept completely naked. Sleepily expressing their displeasure at being disturbed, they rolled over onto their stomachs and went back to sleep. Sir William, admiring the view, announced that he had examined the “product” from all sides, and lightly tapped sixteen-year-old Margaret’s bottom with his cane. “And no hassle with courtship!” - Aubrey writes enthusiastically.
Whether all this is true is unknown: Aubrey described what happened a century later. It is clear, however, that in his time no one was surprised by the fact that More's adult daughters slept next to his bed.
The big problem with beds, especially in the Victorian period, was that they were inseparable from the era's most problematic activity: sex. In marriage, sex is, of course, sometimes necessary. Mary Wood-Allen, in her popular and influential book What a Young Woman Needs to Know, assures her young readers that it is permissible to have physical intimacy with a husband, provided that it is done “in the complete absence of sexual desire.” It was believed that the mother's moods and thoughts at the time of conception and throughout pregnancy profoundly and irreparably affected the fetus. Partners were advised to have sex only if there was mutual sympathy, so as not to give birth to a defective child.
To avoid agitation, women were encouraged to spend more time in the fresh air, not to do anything stimulating, including reading or playing cards, and above all, not to tax their brains beyond what was necessary. It was believed that education for a woman was just a waste of time; in addition, it is extremely dangerous for their fragile organisms.
In 1865, John Ruskin wrote in an essay that women should be trained until they were “practically useful” to their husbands and no more. Even the American Catherine Beecher, who was, by the standards of that time, a radical feminist, ardently defended the right of women to a full education, but asked not to forget: they still need time to put their hair in order.
For men, the main task was not to drop a drop of sperm outside the sacred bonds of marriage, but they also had to observe moderation in marriage. As one respected specialist explained, seminal fluid, remaining in the body, enriches the blood and strengthens the brain. Anyone who thoughtlessly consumes this natural elixir becomes weak both spiritually and physically. Therefore, even in marriage, it is necessary to take care of your sperm, since due to frequent sex, sperm becomes diluted and the result is sluggish, apathetic offspring. Sexual intercourse with a frequency of no more than once a month was considered the best option.
Masturbation, of course, was categorically excluded. The consequences of masturbation were well known: almost every disease known to medicine, including madness and premature death. Onanists - "poor, trembling, pale creatures on skinny legs, crawling on the ground," as one journalist described them - evoked contempt and pity. “Every act of masturbation is like an earthquake, an explosion, a fatal paralytic stroke,” declared another. Practical studies have clearly proven the harm of masturbation. Physician Samuel Tissot described how one of his patients drooled constantly, had ichor running from his nose, and “defecated in bed without noticing it.” The last three words made a particularly strong impression.
Moreover, the habit of masturbation was automatically passed on to children and weakened the health of the unborn offspring in advance. The most thorough analysis of the dangers associated with sex was offered by Sir William Acton in his work "The Functions and Diseases of the Reproductive Organs in Children, Youth, Adults and Old People, Considered from the Point of View of Their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations", first published in 1857 . It was he who decided that masturbation leads to blindness. It was Acton who came up with the oft-quoted phrase: “I must say that sexual experiences are practically inaccessible to most women.”
Such ideas dominated society for a surprisingly long time. “Many of my patients have told me that their first act of masturbation was while watching a musical show,” Dr. William Robinson reported grimly, and perhaps with some exaggeration, in his 1916 work on sexual dysfunction.
Science was always ready to come to the rescue. Mary Roach's book Curious Parallels in Science and Sex describes one of the anti-lust remedies developed in the 1850s - a spiked ring worn on the penis before bed (or at any other time); its metal points pricked the penis if it swelled unholy. Other devices used electricity, which unpleasantly but effectively sobered up the lustful man.
It is worth noting that not everyone shared these conservative views. Already in 1836, the respected French physician Claude François Lallemand published a three-volume study in which he linked frequent sex with good health. This impressed the Scottish physician George Drysdale so much that he formulated a philosophy of free love and unrestrained sex in his work Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion. The book was published in 1855 in a circulation of 90,000 copies and translated into eleven languages, “including Hungarian,” specially notes the Dictionary of National Biography, which loves to focus on trifles. Clearly there was a desire in society for greater sexual freedom. Unfortunately, society as a whole only accepted this freedom a century later.
It is perhaps not surprising that in such a tense atmosphere, successful sex was an unattainable dream for many people - for example, for the same John Ruskin. In 1848, the great art critic married nineteen-year-old Euphemia Chalmers Gray, and things did not work out for them from the very beginning. They never entered into a marriage relationship. Euphemia later said that, according to Ruskin, he imagined women to be completely different from what they really were, and that on the very first evening she made a repulsive impression on him, and therefore he did not make her his wife.
Not getting what she wanted, Effie sued Ruskin (the details of her application to have the marriage declared invalid became the property of the tabloid press in many countries), and then ran away with the artist John Everett Millais, with whom she lived happily and with whom she gave birth to eight children.
True, her escape was completely inappropriate, because Millet was painting Ruskin’s portrait at that time. Ruskin, as a man of honor, continued to pose for Millais, but the two men never spoke to each other again.
Ruskin's sympathizers, of whom there were many, pretended that there was no trace of any scandal. By 1900, the whole story had been successfully forgotten, and W. G. Collingwood was able, without blushing with shame, to write his book “The Life of John Ruskin,” in which there is not even a hint that Ruskin was once married and that he ran out of the bedroom in panic when he saw hair on a woman's womb.
Ruskin never overcame his sanctimonious prejudices; he didn't seem to be trying very hard. After the death of William Turner in 1851, Ruskin was tasked with sorting out the works left by the great artist, and among them were several naughty watercolors with erotic content. Horrified, Ruskin decided that Turner painted them in a “state of madness,” and for the good of the nation, he destroyed almost all the watercolors, depriving posterity of several priceless works.
Meanwhile, Effie Ruskin, having escaped the shackles of an unhappy marriage, lived happily. This was unusual because in the 19th century, divorce cases were always decided in favor of the husbands. In order to get a divorce in Victorian England, a man simply had to declare that his wife had cheated on him with someone else. However, a woman in a similar situation had to prove that her husband had committed incest, indulged in bestiality or some other grave sin, the list of which was very short.
Until 1857, all property and, as a rule, children were taken away from a divorced wife. According to the law, such a woman was completely powerless; the degree of her freedom and non-freedom was determined by her husband. In the words of the great legal theorist William Blackstone, a divorced woman gives up “herself and her own individuality.”
Some countries were a little more liberal. In France, for example, a woman could divorce her husband if there was adultery, but only if the adultery took place in the matrimonial home.
English legislation was characterized by extreme injustice. There is a known case where a certain woman named Martha Robinson was beaten for years by a cruel, mentally unstable husband. In the end, he infected her with gonorrhea, and then seriously poisoned her with drugs for sexually transmitted diseases, without his wife's knowledge, putting powders in her food. Broken both physically and mentally, Martha filed for divorce. The judge listened carefully to all the arguments and then dismissed the case, sending Mrs. Robinson home and advising her to be more patient.
Being female was automatically considered a pathological condition. Men almost universally thought that women became ill when they reached puberty. The development of the mammary glands, uterus and other reproductive organs “takes up energy that is available to each person in limited quantities,” according to one authority. Menstruation was described in medical texts as a monthly act of willful neglect. “If a woman experiences pain at any point during the menstrual period, it is due to disturbances in clothing, diet, personal or social habits,” wrote one reviewer (a man, of course).
Ironically, women actually got sick often because common decency prevented them from getting what they needed. medical care. In 1856, when a young Boston housewife from a respectable family tearfully confessed to her doctor that she sometimes found herself thinking about men other than her husband, the doctor prescribed her a series of harsh treatments, including cold baths, enemas, and thorough douching with borax, recommending to exclude everything stimulating - spicy food, light reading, and so on.
It was believed that because of light reading, a woman developed unhealthy thoughts and a tendency to hysterics. As one author gloomily concluded, “young girls reading romance novels, excitation and premature development of the genital organs are observed. The child physically becomes a woman several months or even years before the time prescribed by nature.”
In 1892, Judith Flanders writes about a man who took his wife to have her eyes checked; the doctor said that the problem was a prolapsed uterus and that she needed to have this organ removed, otherwise her vision would continue to deteriorate.
Sweeping generalizations did not always turn out to be correct, since not a single doctor knew how to conduct a correct gynecological examination. As a last resort, he would carefully probe the patient under the covers in a dark room, but this did not happen often. In most cases, women who had complaints about the organs located between the neck and knees shyly showed their sore spots on mannequins.
In 1852, one American physician proudly wrote that “women prefer to suffer from dangerous diseases, out of scrupulosity refusing a full medical examination.” Some doctors refused to use forceps during childbirth, explaining that women with a narrow pelvis should not give birth to children, because such inferiority could be passed on to their daughters.
The inevitable consequence of all this was an almost medieval neglect of female anatomy and physiology on the part of male doctors. In the annals of medicine there is no better example of professional gullibility than the famous case of Mary Toft, an ignorant female rabbit breeder from Godalming, Surrey, who for many weeks in the autumn of 1726 fooled medical authorities, including two royal physicians, by assuring everyone that she could give birth to rabbits.
It became a sensation. Several doctors were present at the birth and expressed complete surprise. It was only when another royal physician, a German named Kyriakus Ahlers, carefully examined the woman and declared that it was all just a hoax that Toft finally admitted to the deception. She was sent briefly to prison for fraud and then home to Godalming; No one heard from her again.
Understanding female anatomy and physiology was still a long way off. In 1878, the British Medical Journal engaged in a lively, lengthy debate with its readers on the topic: Could the touch of a menstruating cook spoil a ham?
According to Judith Flanders, one British doctor was expelled from medical registry for what he observed in his published work: a change in the color of the mucous membrane around the vagina shortly after conception is a reliable indicator of pregnancy. This conclusion was completely fair, but extremely indecent, because in order to determine the degree of color change, one had to first see it. The doctor was banned from practicing. Meanwhile, in America, the respected gynecologist James Platt White was expelled from the American Medical Association for allowing his students to be present at births (with the permission of the women in labor, of course).
Against this background, the actions of surgeon Isaac Baker Brown seem even more extraordinary. Brown became the first gynecological surgeon. Unfortunately, he was guided by obviously false ideas. In particular, he was convinced that almost all female ailments are the result of “peripheral stimulation of the nerve in the external genitalia, centered in the clitoris.”
Simply put, he believed that women masturbate and this leads to insanity, epilepsy, catalepsy, hysteria, insomnia and many other nervous disorders. To solve the problem, it was proposed to remove the clitoris surgically, thereby eliminating the very possibility of uncontrollable arousal.
Baker Brown was also convinced that the ovaries had a bad effect on the female body and should also be removed. No one had tried to remove the ovaries before him; it was an extremely difficult and risky operation. Brown's first three patients died on the operating table. However, he did not stop and operated on the fourth woman - his own sister, who, fortunately, survived.
When it was discovered that Baker Brown had been cutting out women's clitorises for years without their knowledge or consent, the medical community reacted violently and violently. In 1867 Baker Brown was expelled from the Society of Midwives of London, ending his practice. Doctors have finally accepted how important a scientific approach to the intimate organs of patients is. The irony is that, being a bad doctor and apparently a very bad person, Baker Brown, like no one else, contributed to the advancement of women's medicine.
A juicy story filled with rare facts about things that have surrounded the English for centuries. Chapter titles: “Kitchen”, “Basement”, “Office”, “Garden”, “Staircase”, “Bedroom”, “Bathroom”, “Wardrobe”, “Children’s room”, “Attic”, etc. Subject USA periodically appears in the book, since technical innovations could come in England it is from there, and indeed in front of us in general, that we have an overview of Western civilization. There was a place in the book for Columbus and Karl Marx, furniture maker Thomas Chippendale and architect John Nash, famous eccentrics, linguistic research and much more. Is it true that Stonehenge had to be saved from barbarian tourists in the 19th century? How many slaves did the 3rd US President Thomas Jefferson have? It’s like listening to a lecture by Evgeny Zharinov, Leonid Matsikh or Natalia Basovskaya, very entertaining. At the same time, the author does not fall into mushi-pusi-flirting with the reader. I recently encountered something similar: I opened the much-praised “Europeana” by Patrick Ourzhednik and simply threw up my hands - it was written by a schoolboy for schoolchildren, a set of platitudes.
Bryson's book has analogues, which is not surprising, because England is a very popular topic:
Dittrich T. - Everyday life Victorian England - 2007
Morton G.- London. Walking around the capital of the world - edition in Russian 2009
Ovchinnikov V.V.- Oak roots. Impressions and thoughts about England and the British
Picard L.- Victorian London - edition in Russian 2011
Worsley L. - English house. An intimate story - edition in Russian 2016
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The most common remedy was opiates, mainly in the form of tincture of opium, but even the largest doses could not numb the severe pain.
The amputation of a limb usually lasted less than a minute, so the most excruciating pain did not last too long, but then the doctor had to tie the vessels and stitch the wound, and this also had to be endured. I had to work quickly. In 1658, Samuel Pepys had a kidney stone removed; it took the surgeon only fifty seconds to reach the kidney, find and cut out a stone the size of a tennis ball (meaning a 17th-century tennis ball, which was much smaller than a modern one, but still not exactly tiny). Pepys was lucky, as Lisa Picard notes, because the surgeon operated on him first that day and his instruments were relatively clean. Despite the speed of the operation, it took Pips more than a month to recover. Now it is difficult to understand how patients endured wild pain during more complex operations.
* * *
Contrary to its title, The Book of Housekeeping covers its stated topic in just twenty-three pages, with the next nine hundred devoted to the subject of cooking. However, despite this obvious bias towards cooking, Mrs. Beaton did not like to stand at the stove and tried, if possible, not even to come close to her own kitchen. To guess this, just glance at her recipes. For example, Mrs. Beaton advises cooking pasta for one hour and forty-five minutes. Like many people of her background and generation, she had an innate distrust of everything exotic. Mangoes, she writes, are liked only by “those who have no prejudice against turpentine.” Lobsters, in her opinion, are “very indigestible” and “not nearly as nutritious as people think.” She considered garlic “provocative”, potatoes – suspicious, since “many root vegetables have a narcotic effect and many of them are poisonous.”
Bill Bryson
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Transfer from Tatiana's English Trefilova
Bill Bryson is the author of the international bestseller " Short story almost everything in the world." After the phenomenal success of this book, dedicated to “big” problems - the birth of the Universe, the development of planet Earth, the origin of life - he decided to focus on seemingly smaller issues, which, nevertheless, are extremely close to most of us: the history of private life, everyday life and home comfort. The story about everyday trifles and household items turns into a historical narrative, leading us into the deep past of human culture.
ISBN 978-5-17-083335-1
What to read about England and the English? About culture, traditions? Please advise best books about Great Britain, England, mentality, features national character. Is it possible to get used to England? Is it worth moving to England?? Great Britain Why did Britain leave the European Union? Help me find! What are some good books about England? Island mentality - those strange Englishmen - list of books - download - read. The most important thing is where to find out
“A Brief History of Everyday Life and Private Life,” of course, is not at all brief - 640 pages in medium-sized print - but it is fascinating from the first letter to the last. It would seem like nothing special: facts and stories related to household items. However, the narrator's love of detail, his way of presenting information, and the flow of his presentation make the non-fiction book an extremely enjoyable read. “A Brief History...” is a kind of antipode to another scientific pop, “Pinball Effect”, which I did not like for the fragmentation of information and the author’s rushing from one subject to another. Here the stories are memorable - however, some of them are also repeated, which is a little annoying.
A house is an amazingly complex object. To my great surprise, I discovered that no matter what happens in the world - discoveries, creations, victories, defeats - all their fruits eventually end up in our homes in one way or another. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment - you will find traces of them in your sofas and chests of drawers, in the folds of curtains, in the softness of down pillows, in the paint on the walls and in the water flowing from the tap. The history of everyday life is not just the history of beds, wardrobes and kitchen stoves, as I vaguely assumed before, it is the history of scurvy, guano, Eiffel Tower, bed bugs, dead body snatching, and just about everything else that has ever happened in human life. A house is not a refuge from history. Home is where history ultimately leads.
Bryson takes as a basis the former home of an English parish priest in a Norfolk village and travels through the rooms: hall, kitchen, pantry and pantry, switchboard, living room, dining room, basement, corridor, office, garden, “plum room”, staircase, bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, children's room, attic. For almost every piece of furniture he has a long story with a focus on previous centuries. Table? Well, for example: a dining table used to be a simple board, which was placed on the diners’ laps, and then hung again on the wall - since then the word board has come to mean not only the surface on which one eats, but also the food itself. Bed? We can talk at length and in detail about medieval materials for stuffing mattresses. And behind the salt and pepper shakers there is a trail of the bloodiest and most creepy stories. Here is a remarkable description of how the ritual of tea drinking appeared in the British Empire:
Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from 13,000 pounds to almost 1.2 million pounds, and quadrupled over the next thirty years. The workers noisily slurped tea and the ladies elegantly savored it. It was served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was the first drink in history that did not belong to any special class and, moreover, had its own ritual time of consumption, called tea drinking. It was easier to prepare tea at home than coffee, and it went especially well with another pleasant ingredient that suddenly became available to average city dwellers - sugar. The British, like no other nation, are addicted to sweet milk tea. For a century and a half, tea was the heart of the East India Company, and the East India Company was the heart of the British Empire.
Not everyone immediately liked the tea. The poet Robert Southey told the story of a country lady who received a pound of tea as a gift from her city friend when the drink was still a novelty. Not knowing what to do with it, she boiled it in a saucepan, put the leaves on sandwiches with butter and salt, and served it to the guests. They bravely chewed on the unusual treat, declaring that it tasted interesting, although somewhat strange. However, in the places where they drank tea with sugar, everyone was happy.
The author, however, sometimes goes into areas that are not particularly related to everyday life. For example, while talking about comfort, he talks about the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, and in the chapter about the garden he talks about the problem of burials. However, all the topics turn out to be reinforced concrete: private life is not only a house, it is also a person. And about cemeteries in England in the 19th century. no less interesting to read than about the history of furniture.
...The cemeteries were so overcrowded that it was almost impossible to dig with a shovel without accidentally picking up someone's decomposing arm or other body part. The dead were buried in shallow, hastily dug graves, and they were often exposed, either by animals digging them up or rising to the surface of their own accord, as happens with rocks in flower beds. In such cases, the dead had to be reburied.
Townspeople mourning their deceased loved ones almost never visited their graves and did not attend the funerals themselves. It was too hard and also dangerous. It was said that visitors were put off by the putrid odors. A certain Dr. Walker testified at a parliamentary inquiry that gravediggers, before disturbing the coffin, drilled a hole in it, inserted a tube into it and burned the escaping gases - this process took up to twenty minutes.
Dr. Walker personally knew one man who neglected this safety measure and immediately fell, “struck as if by a cannonball, poisoned by gases from a fresh grave.” “If you inhale this gas, not mixed with atmospheric air, instantaneous death will occur,” the committee confirmed in a written report, adding grimly: “Although even mixed with air, it causes severe illness, usually ending in death.”
“A Brief History...” is good for everyone except for one thing: there is no list of sources. Bryson, of course, points out here and there the monographs and works from which he got the facts, and my fragmentary knowledge of some subjects suggests that his information is reliable, but it’s still a little strange to see stories without links to the original data. Of course, if you attach a footnote to every little detail, the book will double in size and become completely unreadable, but a list of at least the main literature in which the author excavated would be desirable.
In general, “A Brief History of Everyday Life and Private Life” is incredibly informative and useful - for a scientist it is relatively easy to understand, without losing any of its nutritional qualities. So give free rein to your curiosity: learn the history of various products and home furnishings, be horrified by the plight of medieval servants, and read about past misconceptions about women and sex.
Bill Bryson
Brief history of everyday life and private life
Jess and Wyatt
Introduction
Some time after we had moved into the former English vicarage in an idyllic but featureless village in Norfolk, I went up into the attic to see where a mysterious leak suddenly appeared. Since our house does not have an attic staircase, I had to use a high stepladder to crawl through the ceiling hatch, writhing for a long time and indecently - that’s why I hadn’t gone there before (and then I didn’t feel much enthusiasm for such excursions).
Having finally climbed into the attic and somehow risen to my feet in the dusty darkness, I was surprised to discover a secret door in the outer wall, which was not visible from the yard. The door opened easily and led me into a tiny space on the roof, barely larger than the top of a regular table, between the front and back gables. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural absurdities, but this one seemed completely incomprehensible: why was there a need for a door where there was no obvious need for one? However, there was a wonderful view from the site.
When you suddenly see a familiar world from an unusual angle, it is always fascinating. I was about fifty feet above the ground; in central Norfolk, such a height already guarantees a more or less panoramic view. Right in front of me stood an old stone church (our house once served as an addition to it). Further, slightly downhill, at some distance from the church and the parsonage, there was a village to which both of these buildings belonged. On the other side rose Wymondham Abbey, a mass of medieval opulence dominating the southern skyline. Halfway to the abbey, in a field, a tractor rumbled along, drawing straight lines on the ground. The rest of the landscape was a serene and sweet English pastoral.
I was especially interested in looking around because just yesterday I was wandering around these places with my friend Brian Ayres. Brian had recently retired as County Archaeologist and probably knew the history and landscape of Norfolk better than anyone else. However, he had never been to our village church and really wanted to look at this beautiful old building, older than Notre Dame Cathedral, and about the same age as the cathedrals in Chartres and Salisbury. However, Norfolk is full of medieval churches- as many as 659 pieces (their number per square mile here is the largest in the world), so they do not attract too much attention to themselves.
Have you ever noticed,” Brian asked as we entered the churchyard, “that village churches almost always seem to be buried in the ground?” - The church building really stood in a shallow depression, like a weight on a pillow; the church's foundation was approximately three feet lower than the surrounding church cemetery. - Do you know why?
I admitted, as I often did around Brian, that I had no idea.
It’s not that the church is sagging,” Brian explained, smiling. - This is a church cemetery rising. How many people do you think are buried here?
I looked at the gravestones with an appraising glance:
Don't know. Eighty people? One hundred?
I think you a little“You’re understating it,” Brian responded with good-natured equanimity. - Think yourself. Such a rural parish has an average of 250 people, which means that about a thousand adults die over a century, plus several thousand poor little ones who never had time to grow up. Multiply this by the number of centuries that have passed since the construction of this church, and you will see that there are not eighty or one hundred dead here, but twenty thousand.
(All this, as we remember, happens one step from my front door.)
- Twenty thousand? - I asked in amazement.
My friend nodded calmly.
Yes, that's a lot. That's why the ground rose three feet. - He was silent for a while, giving me time to digest the information, then continued: - There are a thousand church parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all these centuries of human activity by a thousand, and it turns out that we have before us a significant part of material culture. “He gestured around the bell towers that rose in the distance: “From here you can see ten or twelve other parishes, so in fact you are now looking at a quarter of a million burials - and this is here, in rural silence, where there have never been any serious cataclysms.”
Some time after we had moved into the former English vicarage in an idyllic but featureless village in Norfolk, I went up into the attic to see where a mysterious leak suddenly appeared. Since our house does not have an attic staircase, I had to use a high stepladder to crawl through the ceiling hatch, writhing for a long time and indecently - that’s why I hadn’t gone there before (and then I didn’t feel much enthusiasm for such excursions).
Having finally climbed into the attic and somehow risen to my feet in the dusty darkness, I was surprised to discover a secret door in the outer wall, which was not visible from the yard. The door opened easily and led me into a tiny space on the roof, barely larger than the top of a regular table, between the front and back gables. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural absurdities, but this one seemed completely incomprehensible: why was there a need for a door where there was no obvious need for one? However, there was a wonderful view from the site.
When you suddenly see a familiar world from an unusual angle, it is always fascinating. I was about fifty feet above the ground; in central Norfolk, such a height already guarantees a more or less panoramic view. Right in front of me stood an old stone church (our house once served as an addition to it). Further, slightly downhill, at some distance from the church and the parsonage, there was a village to which both of these buildings belonged. On the other side rose Wymondham Abbey, a mass of medieval opulence dominating the southern skyline. Halfway to the abbey, in a field, a tractor rumbled along, drawing straight lines on the ground. The rest of the landscape was a serene and sweet English pastoral.
I was especially interested in looking around because just yesterday I was wandering around these places with my friend Brian Ayres. Brian had recently retired as County Archaeologist and probably knew the history and landscape of Norfolk better than anyone else. However, he had never been to our village church and really wanted to look at this beautiful old building, older than Notre Dame Cathedral, and about the same age as the cathedrals in Chartres and Salisbury. However, Norfolk is full of medieval churches - as many as 659 of them (their number per square mile is the largest in the world), so they do not attract too much attention to themselves.
Have you ever noticed,” Brian asked as we entered the churchyard, “that village churches almost always seem to be buried in the ground?” - The church building really stood in a shallow depression, like a weight on a pillow; the church's foundation was approximately three feet lower than the surrounding church cemetery. - Do you know why?
I admitted, as I often did around Brian, that I had no idea.
It’s not that the church is sagging,” Brian explained, smiling. - This is a church cemetery rising. How many people do you think are buried here?
I looked at the gravestones with an appraising glance:
Don't know. Eighty people? One hundred?
I think you a little“You’re understating it,” Brian responded with good-natured equanimity. - Think yourself. Such a rural parish has an average of 250 people, which means that about a thousand adults die over a century, plus several thousand poor little ones who never had time to grow up. Multiply this by the number of centuries that have passed since the construction of this church, and you will see that there are not eighty or one hundred dead here, but twenty thousand.
(All this, as we remember, happens one step from my front door.)
- Twenty thousand? - I asked in amazement.
My friend nodded calmly.
Yes, that's a lot. That's why the ground rose three feet. - He was silent for a while, giving me time to digest the information, then continued: - There are a thousand church parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all these centuries of human activity by a thousand, and it turns out that we have before us a significant part of material culture. “He gestured around the bell towers that rose in the distance: “From here you can see ten or twelve other parishes, so in fact you are now looking at a quarter of a million burials - and this is here, in rural silence, where there have never been any serious cataclysms.”
Brian's words made it clear to me why archaeologists find 27,000 antiques a year in bucolic and sparsely populated Norfolk, more than in any other county in England.
People have been losing things here long before England was England. Brian once showed me a map archaeological finds in our parish. In almost every field something was found - Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, burials Bronze Age, Viking manors. In 1985, a farmer walking through a field discovered a rare Roman phallic pendant near the very border of our property.
I imagine a man in a toga standing very close to my site; he pats himself from top to bottom in confusion, discovering that he has lost a valuable piece of jewelry; just think: his pendant lay in the ground for seventeen or eighteen centuries, survived endless generations of people engaged in a wide variety of activities, the invasions of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans, the birth of the English nation, the development of the monarchy and everything else, before it was picked up by a farmer at the end of the 20th century, for sure very surprised by such an unusual find!
So, standing on the roof of my own house and looking at the unexpectedly revealed landscape, I was struck by the strangeness of our existence: after two thousand years of human activity, the only reminder of outside world a Roman phallic pendant remains. Century after century, people quietly went about their daily affairs - eating, sleeping, having sex, having fun, and I suddenly thought that history, in essence, consists of such ordinary things. Even Einstein spent most of your intellectual life to think about a vacation, a new hammock, or the graceful leg of a young lady getting off the tram on the other side of the street. These things fill our lives and thoughts, but we do not attach serious importance to them. I don't know how many hours I spent in school studying the Missouri Compromise or the Wars of the Roses, but I would never have been allowed to spend as much time on the history of food, the history of sleep, sex, or entertainment.
I thought it might be interesting to write a book about ordinary things that we deal with all the time, to finally notice them and pay tribute to them. Looking around my house, I realized with fear and some confusion how little I knew about the everyday world around me. One afternoon, when I was sitting at the kitchen table and mechanically twirling the salt and pepper shaker in my hands, I suddenly wondered: why, in fact, with all the variety of spices and seasonings, do we revere these two in particular? Why not pepper and cardamom or, say, salt and cinnamon? And why does the fork have four tines, and not three or five? There must be some explanation for things like this.
As I was getting dressed, I wondered why all my jackets had several useless buttons on each sleeve. On the radio they talked about someone who “paid for housing and board,” and I was surprised: what kind of table are we talking about? Suddenly my home seemed like a mysterious place.
And then I decided to take a journey through the house: walk through all the rooms and understand what role each of them played in the evolution of privacy. The bathroom will tell the story of hygiene, the kitchen - cooking, the bedroom - sex, death and sleep, and so on. I will write the history of the world without leaving home!
I admit, I liked the idea. I recently finished a book in which I tried to understand the universe and how it came to be—not an easy task, to be honest. Therefore I thought with pleasure of such a clearly limited, limited object of description as an old parsonage in an English village. Yes, this book could easily be written in slippers!