People at Home (1)

How did a Roman spring lock work? What was Lenten bacon, and who ate it? Who designed Elizabeth I's w.c.? What was the secret of Tull's seed-drill? Gareth Adamson's new book provides the answers to all these questions, and to many more.

Crammed with information and humour, and illustrated with vigour and enthusiasm, People at Home show how our homes have become more comfortable, more secure, and - slowly - healthier places to live.

The author begins with the Dark Ages, with luckless peasants snatching up their few belongings and fleeing from raiders.

Even in medieval England, when the country had finally settle down under Norman rule, life wasn't especially secure, for fire was a perpetual danger: furniture still had to be portable - and with soot and smoke puffing all over the room, what was the good of wasting time and money on tapestries?

But slowly people began to furnish their homes in a more elaborate fashion: first shelves, then cupboards; first chests, then tallboys; four-poster beds with thick bed-curtains; linen and tableware.

The houses still weren't very healthy places, though, with their reeking middens, their rats and mice and fleas; it was a long haul to the efficiency of modern sanitation.

Mr. Adamson shows too how the introduction of new farming methods in the early eighteenth century, together with the development of industrial machinery, had a profound effect on the old patterns of country life.

He describes the development of housing, from the miseries of the slums in those first 'factory towns', through Victorian terraces, to garden cities and semi-detached suburbs.

Throughout the book he shows us the people: a medieval wife stabbing a horrible chunk of salted meat and a Victorian empire builder dining on canned oysters in the jungle; a seventeenth century family going naked to bed and a lady in an elaborate 1900 night gown; a smug Victorian family watching a magic-lantern show and a contemporary couple gazing at their television set.

Some things have changed a lot, but some have hardly changed at all.