Tiny Houses

There's a trend now to "tiny houses."  Of course most people aren't interested in such things, except perhaps as a backyard studio (for one thing, where would you put all the Stuff?), but the idea of a radically simple lifestyle, a few hundred square feet with just enough space for a tiny kitchen, a bed, a place to sit and a place to eat, has a certain appeal.

Now if a tiny house is going to function today it needs plumbing and electricity and a stove and a refrigerator, at a minimum.  Medieval people (most of them) lived in what we'd call tiny houses, but it wasn't because it was trendy.  It was because that's what houses were like.

Okay, a medieval castle was a pretty big building.  But let's face it.  Most of us our ancestors were peasants, living not in castles but in what we would probably be more likely to describe as a "hut" than a "cottage."  They didn't have plumbing or electricity or stoves or refrigerators or furnaces.  They did however have a place to sleep and a place to sit and a place to eat.  Cooking could either take place over an indoor fire (usually an open fire in the middle of the room rather than in a fireplace) or over an outdoor fire out back.  There might be a spring house to keep things cool, but there was no refrigeration.  There was certainly no plumbing.  There might not even be a privy, though there was always the handy dung heap.

These houses were usually made out of wattle and daub, sticks (not big pieces of wood) woven together and filled in with mud, plaster, or dung, and maybe some stones or old Roman bricks.  (See more here on medieval building materials.)  The floor would be dirt.  You had to be a fancy person to have a tile floor.  Peasants did not however like being dirty, and archaeology has revealed that the floors of a lot of these houses were vigorously swept so much that one might have to step down to get in from outside.

We think of houses in the US as being free standing, but medieval peasants' houses were usually snuggled up to the barn, where the animals were kept.  They didn't actually share their space with animals (other than maybe a cat), but the animals were right on the other side of the wall.  This both made it easier to take care of them and provided extra body heat in the winter.

In town, houses were built right up next to each other.  They might be a little bigger than a peasant's house, in that they could be two or three stories tall, but a lot of people would live in one of those houses, and they were very close to their neighbors.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on peasants and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.