Excerpt from The Making of Home by Judith Flanders, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

This pattern could be seen elsewhere: in Friesland, the standard housing of the sixteenth century, low wattle-and-daub buildings that accommodated animals and people together, was replaced in the seventeenth century by brick houses and separate barns. A second Great Rebuilding took place in the eighteenth century in the USA, but even before this, the original poorly constructed frame houses of the colonies had always been intended to be temporary: as times improved, they were torn down and replaced. As a result, no houses at all survive in the USA from the first half-century of colonial settlement, up to 1667. A 1652 inventory recorded 'one smale house and garden' in Plymouth. The word 'small' is unusual in these inventories, and it may be that this was a house surviving from the 1620s, which already by 1652 seemed unnaturally tiny. From the later part of the century, from 1668 to 1695, only five houses survived, and of these, two were heavily restored in the 1930s, to make them resemble more closely a twentieth-century vision of what colonial America had looked like. Apart from these five, the only surviving seventeenth-century houses in the colonies date from the last four years of the century, and so are, to all intents and purposes, typical of the eighteenth century. It is important to stress this, as most assumptions about early colonial housing are based on five examples, of which just three can be said to be original.

These anachronisms of style and size are essential to keep in mind. We are so habituated to the standard types of housing that emerged with industrialization and urbanization that we have been all but blinded to what went before. We remember the scant number of great halls of the medieval nobility, overlooking the reality that this was less than 1 per cent of what existed at the time; similarly the surviving Tudor great houses or gracious colonial governors' mansions have wiped from our minds the vanished habitations of everyone else; while the terraced townscapes that began to appear in Britain in the eighteenth century created a false history in which 'everyone' lived more or less as we do today. And thus centuries of hugger-mugger, cheek-by-jowl living, which almost everyone experienced, and expected, have vanished from common knowledge. Yet without knowing how people lived, it can be difficult to understand why they acted as they did. It is only when we know what the physical circumstances people lived in were like that we can appreciate how changes to those circumstances reflected changed ideas and expectations.

In general, in sixteenth-century England, labourers who had enough money to have a house at all, or were housed by their employer, lived in a one-room building, which might have a lean-to attached to serve both as a sleeping and a storage space. Among the better-off, most houses averaged two to four rooms. Two-roomed houses consisted of a hall and a chamber; those with more had a hall, a kitchen and chambers. The main function of chambers was storage: most contained anything from two to five chests, and possibly a press to hold more goods; many were also where looms, barrels, tools, churns or other equipment were kept; in larger houses chambers were used for sleeping as well, and most of these therefore had two or three beds.

Excerpted from The Making of Home by Judith Flanders. Copyright © 2015 by Judith Flanders. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.