The ancient Greek word for household, oikos, is the root of the modern word "economy." In early modern Europe, housing was associated both with living and working, consuming and producing. This combined function shaped the outward form and internal organization of houses during the era. It also introduces complications to explicating the theme of housing, because the focus could be equally on the domicile itself or on the groups of people who inhabited it. Contemporary officials often used the term hearth to refer to households, though the term refers to the structure used to heat a room as well. A lack of sources makes it difficult to determine who actually lived together in the early modern era: in some cases, several households lived together under one roof, perhaps in separate rooms or all together. It is also difficult to determine how people used space inside the house: there are very few descriptions of house interiors and little way of knowing how representative those descriptions are.
There was no single "typical" house of the early modern era. For one thing, there was a strong tendency toward regional cultural patterns, both among and within linguistic and political units, which were expressed in housing styles. Few things more readily distinguish different regions than the prevailing style of houses, especially in the countryside. Regional differences resulted in part from local variations in building materials, but they clearly had deeper cultural roots as well. Housing types were also shaped by the fundamental difference between urban and rural living conditions. Though the overwhelming majority of Europeans lived in the countryside, the urban world was often more dynamic and exhibited a greater variety of living conditions. Town size magnified those differences. A few great cities, such as Paris or London, had a completely different housing mixture from the typical "large" city of about 20,000 inhabitants, not to mention the numerous small towns of the era. Variation in status and the work people performed also affected how and where they lived. The houses of nobles and patricians were quite different from those of peasants and artisans. Higher status homes certainly displayed a greater variety of styles than did lower status homes. Even more importantly, however, higher status homes comprise the greater body of evidence about what was in early modern homes and how they were used. Thus, while one may talk about some general trends in all housing during the era, the key features of housing must be viewed in wider social and geographical contexts.
Building Houses
There were no significant technological changes affecting living conditions in early modern Europe. Building materials and practices did not change much. As a rule, the types of houses that people lived in at the end of the eighteenth century would have been familiar to those of the early sixteenth century, aside from external ornamentation. Indeed, many houses remained standing for the entire period, though wood-frame houses typically needed replacing every century or so. This continuity of building styles was particularly pronounced in the housing of peasants and artisans. However, elite housing did change in function and style over the period, so that a noble palace at the end of the early modern era would have appeared quite different from one at the beginning of the era.
There were three main building materials for houses: wood, stone, and brick. One may divide European housing into three zones according to which of those materials was predominant in buildings because of local availability of that material. There was, however, a status hierarchy of building materials, so that some towns would include a few stone or brick buildings in among a majority of wood-frame houses. In the great cities, homes of the elite were constructed of stone or brick, while homes in poorer districts were built of wood. Stone and brick also became more prevalent building materials over time. By the seventeenth century, Paris had (poorly enforced) regulations prohibiting wood construction. London also built more extensively in stone and brick after the devastating fire of 1666. The progress of stone building in large cities was varied. The French city of Cambrai had numerous stone houses by the middle of the seventeenth century. Nearby Rouen did not begin to build in stone until the end of the eighteenth century. The German city of Nuremberg built houses with stone first floors and half-timbered upper stories.
Wood was the favored building material in both the towns and countryside of the heavily forested parts of northern and central Europe. It was unusual for houses to be built entirely from logs. Instead, most structures were half-timbered: large hewn logs formed the frame for the house, while the spaces within the frame were filled with wattle and daub (a mixture of sticks with mud or plaster), with bricks, or stucco. Timber for housing construction was not, in fact, a highly developed industry in the era. Timber exports were more likely to be sent for shipbuilding than housing, so half-timbering eased demand for large logs. Indeed, in some port towns, the primary source of timber for house construction was old ships. Half-timbering created a distinctive colorful urban landscape, remnants of which exist today in some German, French, and English towns. By the late eighteenth century, however, half-timbered town houses were often considered excessively rustic. The facades of such houses were plastered over to create a more classical effect.
A major danger of the widespread use of wood in construction was fire. Fires leveled many towns, such as Stockholm, Sweden, in 1625. Fear of arsonists was a common concern of householders and town officials alike.
In most of southern Europe, and some parts of northern Europe, timber was much scarcer than stone, so stone and mortar were the preferred building materials for both towns and the countryside. The quality of stone used in construction could vary widely. Almost all structures were constructed from stone quarried locally. Small towns and villages took on a unified landscape from the color and texture of the locally quarried stone. For example, the all-red sandstone of the village of Collonges-la-Rouge in France distinguished it from the mostly golden or gray stone of neighboring towns. More elegant housing might rely on stone imported from a greater distance, but most quarries were small operations that depended on major public projects such as churches to drive most of their activity.
In the coastal regions of northern Europe and in the larger cities of southern Europe, brick was the preferred building material. Brick making was a significant industrial operation, the center of which was usually located in the countryside near a town. Unlike stone and wood, brick was used almost exclusively for urban housing. Farmhouses in regions where urban brick houses predominated were usually half-timbered or wattle and daub. Bricks were well designed for constructing geometrically proportioned, stable houses, which produced regimented streetscapes. In northern European cities in the Netherlands and coastal Holy Roman Empire, exposed brickwork helped define the city landscape in the same way that colored stone defined some southern European towns. In the southern European cities that used bricks instead of stones, the bricks were usually covered with stucco, so that it was not immediately apparent that brick rather than stone was the primary building material.
Roofing material was equally subject to the interplay of local availability and a slight status hierarchy of materials. In the countryside, both stone and half-timbered houses were usually roofed with thatch. More substantial houses in the countryside and most urban houses were covered with shingles, which might be made of wood, locally quarried slate, or kiln-dried tiles. Only the houses of the wealthiest people would be sheathed in lead or copper.
The building trades themselves also underwent little change during this era. Most rural houses and houses of artisans were built by guild craftsmen, masons, and carpenters, without the assistance of architects. Some towns enforced building regulations to ensure effective design. In sixteenth-century Nuremberg, for example, the town building department acquired many drawings of new structures and additions that were to be built, few of which were created by architects. By the end of the early modern era, architects began to play a more prominent role in constructing housing for urban professionals as well as noblemen.
Peasant Houses
The majority of the European population lived in villages. Most villages exhibited a uniform housing type, because there were only small disparities of wealth and work among most peasants. Nevertheless, one can find some differentiation between the houses of the rural poor and those of the more substantial farmers. The most common dwelling for the rural poor was a one-room house, sometimes called a "long house," where the residents slept, ate, and worked in the same space. In its most basic form, it had an open hearth in the middle of the room and a hole in the ceiling to let the smoke out. The house was built on the ground, which served as the floor. Straw or grass was strewn on the floor to reduce dampness. Light could enter the house through windows, which lacked glass but could be closed by wooden shutters. More advanced houses had a brick or stone hearth with a chimney located on one side of the house instead of a centrally located firepot. Such houses had glass windows to let in light and keep out the cold. It also became increasingly common for even simple farmhouses to be built on excavated foundations and wood plank floors rather than simply resting on the ground.
For modern observers, and even for some contemporaries, one of the most striking features of the single-room house was that animals would be housed under the same roof as people. Writers who stayed at such rural farmsteads commented on being kept awake by the noises of the cows. However, animals did not have free rein of the house: there was usually a barrier between the human inhabited space and the stalls for the animals.
Sometimes, more than one family shared the one-room house. In any case, privacy was very rare. The poorest households possessed a very small repertoire of furniture. The most important item in a peasant household after the hearth was the bed. It consisted of a frame, a mattress, and usually a canopy whose curtains could be closed to attain some privacy. There was usually a long table for eating, with benches rather than chairs for seating. Many benches served double service as chests. Extra clothing, linens, and personal effects were kept in chests or armoires, which were rudimentary in the poorest households and more elaborate in wealthier ones. Though almost all parts of Europe had colorful folk-art traditions in furniture or pottery, the overall appearance of the interior of most peasant houses would have been dark and unadorned.
Many peasants lived in a slightly more elaborate version of the long house. Instead of consisting of a single room, the house was divided into two spaces: a foyer and rooms. Cooking, eating, and work all took place in the foyer. The rooms were separated from the foyer by walls, with doors that could be closed and locked for at least some privacy from the work environment. Such houses might also have a separate cellar and storeroom for grain and an upstairs room, which could be used as a bedroom. This room was usually accessible by a trapdoor and ladder rather than a stairwell. It was less common for animals to be housed under the same roof as humans in these larger houses; instead they had stalls in a barn.
The main work of rural households was, of course, agriculture. So the main house was usually built as part of a larger courtyard in which the everyday tools of farming were kept: wagons, plows, harnesses, a dung heap. More prosperous peasants might have several buildings built around the courtyard, such as grain storerooms, separate stalls for animals, sheds, possibly even a baking oven, though that was usually a communal building rather than part of an individual's property. The courtyard itself might be separated from the street by a large gate or doorway that could be closed. Some of these gateways provided an opportunity for self-expression. In Germany, it was fairly common for a married couple to inscribe their names, the date of construction, and a pious statement over the entryway of a new house.
There were also some specialized forms of housing in the rural world. There were three structures which, while not present in every village, were central to peasant life: the parsonage, the tavern, and the mill. The parsonage, or priest's house, was usually just a large version of the typical peasant house of the region. Throughout the early modern era, the pastor or priest participated in the broader agricultural economy as well as attending to his spiritual duties, so his house had to be arranged to perform both kinds of tasks. Rural inns, like their urban counterparts, had to provide lodging and meals to travelers, but relied primarily on a local customer base for support. Mills were fundamentally important for rural society because they converted grain to flour; their living space was subordinated to their economic function. The sites of both windmills and water mills depended on geography. Building a mill was a greater capital investment than building a house, so most mills were built with higher quality materials with the intention that they would last for several generations. Millers, innkeepers, and pastors were usually the wealthiest members of the community, so their housing was the most elaborate in the village.
In most parts of Europe, peasants lived in nucleated villages. It was possible to survive in a village with only a one-room house and no elaborate courtyard because much work was done communally, so one's house did not have to have all the required work materials. But large isolated farmhouses were characteristic of Alpine lands, in which raising animals was more important than tending cereal crops. Isolated farmsteads had to be self-sufficient because there were no neighbors to rely on. As a result, the houses of isolated farmsteads were significantly bigger than those in villages, even if the farmstead occupants were sometimes poorer than some of the more successful inhabitants of villages. The farmstead houses almost invariably consisted of two or even three stories, with stalls for animals in the lower story. Since these houses were often built in hilly country, they were arranged with ground access to the upper story, which was a large open space for storing grain and supplies.
Urban Artisan Housing
Perhaps the most important distinction within the towns of early modern Europe was between citizens and noncitizens. In almost all towns, ownership of a house in town was a prerequisite for citizenship. The single-family–owned house, therefore, was the norm for merchants, professionals, and most independent craftsmen, the bulk of the citizens in urban Europe during this era. Not everyone aspired to or acquired citizenship, however. Many of the working poor lived crowded together with other families in single houses. For example, in seventeenth-century Augsburg, 70 percent of the households lived in houses containing an average of four families. Though there was some tendency for the houses of the wealthiest citizens to concentrate in the center of town near the public buildings, different trades were usually mixed together throughout town. This mixing of wealth and occupation was one of the most striking characteristics of the small- and medium-sized towns of the era.
Space was at a premium in urban areas. House facades directly abutted the street and were built one on top of the other. The characteristic urban street was a narrow alley with houses built close enough to block out the sun on the street. In some towns, the upper stories of houses overhung their entrances, almost touching the houses across the street. Houses generally showed a narrow front to the street and extended deeply to the rear. In the far rear, there was usually a garden or courtyard. In smaller towns (and earlier in the sixteenth century) ordinary houses tended to be only two stories tall. The first story was taller than the second. In those cities that experienced strong population growth, houses tended to be built upward, though it was very rare for them to reach more than five stories.
The interior of an artisan's house was organized for craft production, not as a haven from work. It often made sense to have one fairly undifferentiated room on the main floor of the house. That room would serve as kitchen, eating area, and workspace. Sometimes journeymen and apprentices would also sleep in the work area, rolling up their bedding at the start of the workday. There was usually at least some sense of separation between work areas and living areas, even in the large rooms, but that separation sometimes blurred. As late as the eighteenth century, one could still find blacksmiths' houses where the kitchen hearth also served as the foundry for the iron. The specific craft of the homeowner influenced home design and location. Tanners, for example, had to be located near a watercourse (and tended to produce unpleasant odors), so they were concentrated in the same neighborhood. Their houses' interiors included built-in vats for soaking and treating of hides, which had to be separate from living spaces. Such occupational needs placed constraints on housing design.
Most artisan houses had two or three rooms on each floor. There was often a parlor on the first floor, in addition to the main work area or shop. This room was also a public space of the household. The upstairs rooms were usually for sleeping. It is possible that one could find greater privacy in a typical urban home than in its rural equivalent, but it was still mostly a shared rather than isolated living situation.
Though it is unlikely that conditions were quite as squalid as they would become in the first decades of the industrial revolution, it is clear that many urban workers throughout the early modern era lived in dingy, crowded conditions, with little that could be considered luxuries or even comforts. Furnishings in artisan households were mostly comparable to those of the peasantry: sturdy furniture and supplies with perhaps a smattering of folk-art coloring. Studies of inventories at death show that the most important piece of personal property of the poor was the bed and accompanying linens. Urban houses differed from rural ones in some other respects. Most rooms in the urban house had fireplaces to keep them warm in the winter. Latrines inside the house became commonplace in the sixteenth century; in some cities, such as in Rouen in 1519, interior latrines were mandated by law. These comforts suggest that urban housing was more advanced than rural housing, even for the poor.
Urban Elite Housing
Dutch genre paintings by Vermeer, Steen, and de Hooch, among others, show sumptuous interiors that are not at all like the rather drab artisan households. The Dutch Republic was in the forefront of a broader based development of a self-confident "bourgeois" culture. Indeed, the explosion of genre painting in the Netherlands was partly a symptom of the new culture that it portrayed. Urban elites, and even those who possessed above-average wealth, no matter what their status, began to decorate their homes in a more elaborate style, akin to that of the nobility. Inventories show that paintings and prints were some of the decorations that became commonplace in bourgeois homes.
The interiors of urban elite homes reflected two important cultural trends. The first was a sharper separation of public and private lives. Unlike in the houses of urban artisans, the kitchen, storerooms, and servants' quarters were in the basement of the houses of merchants and members of the professions, separate from the general living and working space. A modern eighteenth-century town house consisted of ten to fifteen rooms spread over three or four stories. The first floor was mostly for interaction with the public. The key room was the parlor, where guests were greeted. Merchant houses also included a counting room or study that could be a place of repose but also a place to meet clients. The second floor contained the main dining room for entertaining guests, but also semi-private rooms such as the drawing or dressing room. Architects recognized that homeowners might conduct some business in the drawing room and thus advocated separating the drawing room from the bedrooms, which were often placed on the third floor.
The second cultural trend reflected in urban elite homes was the emergence of a consumer culture. Simple comforts that characterized most artisan homes by the eighteenth century, such as hearths in every room, internal latrines, and glass windows, were widespread in elite homes at the beginning of the early modern era. In addition, the rooms of bourgeois town houses were decorated profusely with moldings, wainscoting, marble mantlepieces, carpets, drapery, and mirrors. The increasing importance of new decorative objects such as mirrors, clocks, and sofas can be traced through inventories. Again, these trends were most conspicuous in large cities such as London and Paris, but they also extended to medium-sized towns. The Dutch were particularly noted for their comfortable and clean houses. In Germany, clocks were becoming an accessory in professional homes by the 1720s. A building boom in the late eighteenth century, exemplified in towns like Bath, created town houses appropriate for such conspicuous consumption.
Noble Housing
Housing in towns and villages in the early modern era consisted primarily of elaborations on medieval forms. But noble housing underwent a conspicuous change between the medieval and early modern eras, caused mostly by changes in the quintessential noble activity: warfare. Gunpowder weapons and artillery rendered the fortified castle useless as a safe haven for nobles. Some saw their castles destroyed during royal pacification campaigns; others decided that castles were uncomfortable and incompatible with the kind of splendor that went with living nobly. So noble housing became oriented toward display rather than defense.
Already in the Renaissance, urban nobles in Italy had revived the country villa as a retreat from urban life. The villa was modeled on the ancient Roman estate, but without the slaves. Architecturally, it incorporated classical notions of proportion and harmony that typified the Renaissance. In northern Europe, some royal palaces were built as a retreat from the hectic pace of urban life. Many were used primarily as hunting lodges. But many northern nobles were already primarily based in the rural world. The palace replaced the castle as the house from which nobles exerted their control over the countryside. The pace of the conversion of castles or construction of noble palaces in the countryside varied from region to region in Europe. Poorer noblemen had to be content with modest additions or remodeling of already existing castles. The largest concentration of new construction was in France and England. In England, the secularization of the monasteries opened large properties to development by regional elites. A wave of "great houses" went up beginning in the early sixteenth century. In eastern Europe, by contrast, rural palaces continued to exhibit clearly their function as agricultural centers as well as centers of noble power.
Part of the function of noble housing was the extravagant display of wealth and authority. A rural palace was symbolic as well as domestic architecture. It achieved its impact by its setting as well as by its facade and furnishings. Noble landowners might divert a river or extend a moat to make the approach to the main buildings more dramatic. Extensive formal gardens were an important accompaniment to the main structure.
The impact created by the approach to the building was then reinforced by its interior layout and decoration. In the country houses of England, the centerpiece of display was the hall, which one entered from the front door of the house. This was the most public space in the house and was decorated to focus attention on the head of the house, even when he was not present. Placing a great stairway in the hall became increasingly common, turning what had been a necessary but decidedly secondary architectural feature into another element of prominent display. Great houses had innumerable other rooms branching off from the hall, with increasing degrees of privacy associated with them.
The most prominent room in the house after the hall was the great chamber. Originally, it had been a general-purpose sleeping, eating, and meeting room of the head of the house. Increasingly, the sleeping area of the householder developed into a suite of rooms, including an antechamber and dressing room. An important part of the work of a nobleman was entertaining other noblemen. Great houses and palaces contained apartments in the family's own wing of the house and also in other wings to accommodate visitors. The status of visitors could be seen by where they were lodged in the house. An apartment consisted of four rooms: a sleeping chamber, a dressing room, an antechamber, and a room for personal servants.
As in bourgeois houses, the service rooms of the house were generally kept separate from both the public and private spaces. Some servants, of course, lived in rooms adjacent to their masters' or mistresses' chambers, but others slept in a separate section of the house, often dormitory style, when they were not on duty. Undoubtedly the central service room of the house was the kitchen. Along with the pantry, buttery, bakehouse, larder, and brewery, kitchens were kept out of the way of regular traffic. There was almost no space devoted exclusively to children, though most great houses had a separate nursery for the very young.
Noble houses experienced the same expansion of domestic comforts as bourgeois homes did. By the eighteenth century, it was commonplace for palaces to have running water, interior latrines, and fixed lighting. Instead of a single public room, such as the parlor, noble houses had a library or study, galleries, and a chapel. Formal gardens and outbuildings such as an orangerie (akin to a greenhouse) or folly (akin to a gazebo) provided another setting for nobles to meet or enjoy privacy. Indeed, gardens, in addition to their function as display, played an important role in noble intimacy and escape from the very public activity of much of the house.
The growth of the state drew more and more nobles to capital cities. The same issues of display and representation affected the housing nobles chose to live in or build in cities such as Paris and London. City layouts made it difficult to recreate the dramatic effect of the approach to a rural palace. Instead, the interiors and courtyards became the primary areas for dramatic display. Italy, which already had an established urban nobility in the Middle Ages, set the initial standards for the urban palazzo. In most respects, they followed the same internal organization as their rural counterparts. The architectural principles of "classicism" established in Paris became the norm for urban noble housing throughout Europe. In the eighteenth century, court cities such as Berlin, Vienna, and Munich experienced a building boom of noble houses based on variants of the classical and baroque styles.
Housing As Property
The populated areas of Europe had already developed clear property lines at the beginning of the early modern era. New buildings were visibly constrained by these legal boundaries. This situation was particularly acute in urban areas, where the existing structures meant that the only way to increase the area of one's house was to build it upward, with additional stories, or to purchase a new plot of land with greater space. But even in villages, property lines defined housing spaces in the core of the village that were clearly differentiated from the croplands and pasture. Houses were restricted to that core. Once built, a house was expected to survive for a long time before being replaced. Increasing population in the countryside spurred the construction of new housing in the eighteenth century, often on subdivided plots. But, except in cases of a major catastrophe, such as fire, building a house was an infrequent phenomenon in most villages. Many structures built in the early modern era survived into the industrial era. The most extensive building projects for new housing were in the expanding suburbs of major cities or in newly founded court cities such as Versailles, Karlsruhe, or Turin, built explicitly on a grid pattern on property made available by the prince for the purpose of dynastic display.
Relatively clear property boundaries fostered a real estate market. One can, of course, find many instances of a single family residing on a piece of property for several generations. But some property became available because a lineage died out, and still more became available because of a change in the economic fortunes of a lineage. So purchasing a house was not at all a rare occurrence. Prices, of course, varied greatly. Even within the peasantry and artisan class, there were clear gradations in the quality of housing. Fancier peasant houses were worth about five times as much as cheaper ones in the housing market. Joint ownership of houses was also possible.
In the great cities, urban expansion was fostered by speculation in real estate. Urban elites invested in numerous building projects in suburbs and occasional renovation projects in the center of town. Some of these projects, the most famous of which is probably the Place Royale in Paris, completed in 1612, attracted elite buyers. Many others appealed primarily to people of middling means. Still others were rented out, either short term for noncitizens or long term for the working poor. The Fuggerei in Augsburg is perhaps the best-known example of housing for the working poor built by elite investors, but it was exceptional in being built primarily as a charitable institution rather than as an investment. In some cities, rental housing was a significant part of the housing stock. Fifteen percent of the population of Lübeck lived in rented cellars or rented row houses in alleys. The owners of such rental properties were often the urban elites of the towns.
By the end of the eighteenth century, urban housing was beginning to take on characteristics that would become widespread in the nineteenth century. Increasing population in towns such as Manchester put pressure on the housing stock for the working poor. At the same time, town house developments targeted at the upper middle classes, such as New Town, Edinburgh, became an important economic factor reshaping cities. They fostered speculation in both land and houses, which in turn fed urbanization on an unprecedented scale.
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—JOHN THEIBAULT
