Housing design, even for the rich, was in a state of flux. In this period domestic architecture was moving from what are called hall houses to the organization of separate chambers. The hall house was a large room with many smaller rooms built onto it. The hall had a central hearth. In the hall, communal male activities took place, while the private chambers were occupied by women and children. But in the sixteenth century houses changed, a process which had begun much earlier but now became commonplace. Segregation by sex was replaced by segregation by class, with servants cut off from everyone else. Upstairs and downstairs assumed their significances. As a result, great houses became disconnected from those whose economic activity supported them – farms, quarries and the like were separated from houses by distance. Finally, domestic surroundings became increasingly elaborate – more and more windows had curtains, more tables were encased in cloths, more floors were covered in carpets and rugs. This inspired plenty of shopping, and shipping to fill the new shops with exotica, and to that end London acquired its first shopping mall, the Royal Exchange.
The kind of house Trapnel probably knew best was multipurpose, a dwelling and also a business. Houses above or with a shop often used the ground floor exclusively for business purposes, and the family rooms were on the upper floors. But the ‘shop’ would also be a manufacturing place – a workshop – and so it could be noisy or dusty. Many businesses needed kitchen facilities, so households would have to share their kitchen with the dairying or laundry. We can get a glimpse of this kind of house from probate inventories. When Daniel Jeames, a chandler from Middlesex, died in 1663, shortly after the tumultuous events described in this book, his house contained the following:
Kitchen: Sixteen porringers, two great flagons, nine little flagons, two pewter candlesticks, six chamber pots, one brass kettle, one brass pot, one fire shovel and tongs, and five forks, four spits and dripping pan, one gridiron, one chopping-knife, one iron pot, one iron kettle, and a jack, two cup-boards, one table, three chairs and three stools.
In the shop Butter and cheese and other commodities
In the room over the shop seven chairs, two tables, one form, one set of hangings, one chest, one cupboard
In the room over the kitchen six pairs of shoes, two dozen of napkins, three table clothes, one dozen of towels, one Featherbed, two Featherbolsters, one Flockbed, one drawbed, one green rug, one Trundle bedstead mat, one Feather pillow, two blankets, one jug, one table, three chairs, two stools, a little trunk with some other things
In the garrett two featherbeds, one bolster, a set of striped curtains and valance, one table one cupboard and one old sawpot [?] with some other lumber
Item two Bibles and a Testament
Item two silver bowls and two silver drinking cupes
Item in ready money iiii pence
Item his apparel
It all seems pitifully little, if we imagine how extensive our own inventories might be. The stress on bedclothes, too, is alien to us; before washing machines, to own a lot of bedlinen was an important source of comfort. For ordinary tradespeople like the Trapnels, home was still a bare place, about warmth and family rather than interior design. But the few possessions needed to make it livable were doubly precious.
Paradoxically, at exactly the moment people demanded more space, and more privacy, housing in London and in some other fast-growing towns like Bristol was getting hard to find; so scarce that most people lived in lodgings or took in lodgers. The family of John Milton shared a house with five other families. Anna Trapnel, when she moved to central London from Poplar, lived with two different landladies. They may have been her employers, too, for everyone but the very poorest also had servants. Servants were vital assistants in the constant struggles for food, warmth and cleanliness, which all centred on the hearth and the fire. Later eras have sentimentalized the phrase ‘hearth and home’, but in the kind of house Anna Trapnel lived in, the maintenance of a good fire involved much vital, risky and backbreaking work, wrestling not only with heavy, dirty fuel but with extreme heat, red-hot implements, and boiling liquids.
While Anna Trapnel’s father struggled with hot metal in the shipyard, or with bubbling tar, she grappled with blistering cauldrons at home. The difference between industry and cooking – in smell, risk, filth – was much less marked than it later became. Despite women’s efforts, inadequate fires meant that houses were not comfortable. Most bedrooms had no fireplaces, and even the biggest houses, with fifteen or more rooms, had on average only a third of them heated. Innovations were beginning to change this, and with the developments in heating came social changes. Just as the city was dividing into rich and poor districts, so the house itself was increasingly marked off into different areas.
Though Poplar was outside the walls, Trapnel was still a Londoner, an inhabitant of by far the largest and most important city in the British Isles. Between 1600 and 1650 the population grew from 200,000 to 375,000, despite outbreaks of bubonic plague. If this book were to attempt the impossible task of writing about the Civil War experience ‘representatively’, then most of those it studied would need to be Londoners. In 1642, London stretched for five miles from Stepney to Westminster, and south five miles more to Rotherhithe. One of the main sights of the old city was London Bridge, with its eighteen solid stone piers which rested on piles that forced the current into narrow and swift channels; the boatmen couldn’t shoot the bridge on a flood tide, and it was also dangerous on an ebb tide. Many people avoided the danger by getting out at Old Swan Stairs, on one side of the bridge, walking down Upper Thames Street, and getting back into boats at Billingsgate Stairs. Fifty watermen or so died every year trying to shoot the bridge, usually by drowning.
While the East End was being built, rich landowners were arriving in town for what came to be known as the season. They also needed housing, and it was for them that the West End was built. The new city catered for the rich, and for their new power to shop. For a gentleman like Sir Humphrey Mildmay, the whole day could be spent shopping. When you had promenaded down Paul’s Walk, the middle aisle of St Paul’s, which was also a shortcut that saved walking around the cathedral itself, you could say that everyone important had seen your new clothes. Or you could go to an ordinary, or eating house, which were graded according to cost. They served good simple food. Servants could eat at a threeha’penny ordinary. Around St Paul’s too were the London booksellers and the tobacconists. In Cheapside there were the goldsmiths’ shops, the nearest London came to actually having streets paved with gold. The menagerie in the Tower was another spectacle.
But Trapnel may not have done any of these things. They were part of a richer, more leisured life than hers. Her focal point was the church. As she herself wrote:
When a child, the Lord awed my spirit, and so for the least trespass, my heart was smitten, and though my godly mother did not see me offend, that she might reprove me, which she was ready to do, being tender of the honour of her beloved Saviour, even the least secret sin, that the world calls a trifle, though I thought it nothing, yet still the all-seeing eye watched my ways, and he called to me, though I knew it not … a child of wrath as well as others.
We don’t know how old Trapnel was when she wrote this, but she was part of a local community which felt the same. In 1641, Stepney produced the first call to allow parishes to appoint their own lecturers, visiting speakers, often not in holy orders, who might preach for hours. Many disliked their way of speaking, which was to allow themselves to say anything prompted by the Spirit. Ex tempore, thought one critic, excludes the pater noster. One lecturer was Jeremiah Burroughs, suspended by Bishop Wren and later chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, a defender of popular sovereignty; another was William Greenhill who established a gathered church in 1644.
Greenhill was a man who