Housing

Housing, like clothing, visually distinguished the upper classes from the middle class and both from the lower class. Extremely poor people subsisted in shantytowns, hovels made of earth and hay. Peasants had a house built of wood or of earth with a thatched roof and a floor of packed dirt or tiles. Their windows were simply rectangular holes covered with shutters. The ground floor of most houses was covered in flowers and herbs in the summer and hay in winter, most likely to mask odors. Many town houses for the middle class were constructed entirely of wood, or of the wood and stucco combination known as Tudor style, with a slate or tile roof. Because of their narrow street frontage, these houses usually had only two or three small rooms on each floor, connected by a spiral staircase that required less space than a stairway. Where stone was more plentiful than wood, stones formed both the inner and outer walls, with the roof made of thatch or tiles. Bricks were used in areas where clay was

12.5 Fifteenth-century merchant’s home, Dinan, France. The shop was on the ground floor with living quarters above. (Courtesy of Sandra Sider)

Daily Life

12.6 Iron door knocker, Spain, 16th century. (Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, R128) plentiful and became more popular in towns toward the end of the 16th century. Although wooden houses were somewhat less expensive, they presented a serious fire hazard in crowded urban centers. (See Chapter 4 For information about villas and other housing for the upper classes.) Windows could have several designs, depending on climate and the homeowner’s budget. One ingenious solution was to build a large window in which the upper half consisted of stationary leaded glass, for light, and the bottom half of wooden shutters, for ventilation and better security at street level. Renaissance craftsmen did not have the technology to produce large, flat single panes of glass. Indoor plumbing did not exist in Europe until the 17th century, although some experiments were made with flush toilets before 1600.