Dominic Kirkham thinks about ancient origins and the modern predicament.
Home is where the heart is, so they say. Or is it, ‘where the hearth is’? Either way, both etymologically and historically, these Old English words (heorte, and heorth) are almost interchangeable. From our ancient origins the hearth has been at the heart of the home.
The oldest house to be discovered and excavated in this country (in 1949) was at Star Carr in North Yorkshire on the edge of a previous lake site in the glacially formed Vale of Pickering, a remnant of the Ice Age. What surprised archaeologists was just how old it was – some 11,000 years. This meant that almost as soon as the great ice sheets had retreated Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had wandered this far north and were beginning to settle down in permanent homes.
And quite a substantial home it was too. Roughly oval in shape and some 13 feet across (still the average width of a living room!), it had eighteen posts supporting what would have been a reed or hide roof, the floor was filled with dark earth that probably represents a floor covering of long-since-rotted-bark, brushwood and reeds. Around the mud walls of the building, where the eaves dip low, would have been the beds but in the very centre, in an area marked by the darker floor filling, would have been the hearth. Here, over countless generations, a family gathered to eat and commune.
Prompted partly by such intriguing findings over recent decades, the simple lives of ordinary people and how they lived have become of more interest to archaeologists than had previously been the case. This is reflected in a number of recent works. The title of John Allen’s new book, Home: How Habitat Made Us Human, is itself indicative of the importance now attached to our understanding of the home in the human story. Some researchers have focused on just the hearth itself and the difference cooked food made to human fitness and cognitive development.
The distinguished archaeologist, Francis Pryor (of Channel Four’s much acclaimed Time Team) recently published his latest work simply entitled Home, in which he sets out to chart the development of this pivotal institution and the lives of ordinary people, as distinct from the rich and powerful who normally hog the limelight. Looking at the remains of the earliest homes from Skara Brae in the Orkneys to Durrington Walls in Wiltshire, he notes a remarkable similarity of design in homes spanning many thousands of years, though there was one slight variation: Scottish hearths were square where English ones were more rounded, ‘but otherwise they were identical.’
One may be tempted to think that much of what went on in these ancient homes was of a practical nature, like the location and use of the hearth for cooking. You would be very wrong! The orientation of the entrance might give the first clue – these overwhelmingly pointed eastwards to the rising sun. On entering one would have been confronted by the fire in the centre of the room and beyond that on the far wall, as at Skara Brae, what seems like an elaborately constructed dresser with niches. Here one may imagine pots and jars in neat compartments, but as Pryor writes, ‘In actual fact, it was more likely used as an altar of some sort – to the gods and ancestors of the household.’ The home was in fact regarded as a sacred space.
Pryor, rather tentatively explains his growing conviction ‘that houses could also be shrines, and that religion and ritual played a hugely important part in providing the structure to ordinary domestic life.’ In fact, he need not be so hesitant. At the other side of Europe, at about the same time, in the first proto-town of Catal Huyuk in Turkey – which stands at the very dawn of urban life – the houses were built and elaborately ornamented as shrines, with the ancestors buried beneath the floor. As archaeologist Richard Rudgley notes, ‘The houses were literally built on the foundations of earlier generations.’ It is as if the inhabitants of the home were not limited to just the present generation.
There have been further surprises. Careful dating of groups of bones found in Scottish homesteads reveal that they could come from different people living hundreds of years apart. It seems that the bones of the ancestors would be gathered together, even carried around, and then displayed in household niches. What has become increasingly clear to archaeologists is that these ancient homes were not only shrines but that their construction provided the template for the later burial mounds of Neolithic times and other ritual spaces. Houses were not just residences for families but the site of the ancestral abode.
And the focal point of this ritual world of memory was the hearth. In his embracive book Inventing the Individual Larry Siedentop begins his quest at this very point, writing movingly: ‘Around the family hearth – with the father tending its sacred fire, offering sacrifices, libations and incantations learned from his father – members of the family achieved union with their ancestors and prepared their future.’ The most sacred and overwhelming duty of the head of the household was to tend the sacred fire whose flickering, immaterial flame did not just represent the family’s ancestors but symbolised their presence. Because of this the fire on the family hearth could never be allowed to die out.
The reasons for this are not hard to discern. It was the ancestors who had made possible the present, and who now provided for and protected the family. No meal was begun without first setting a portion aside for them. A family was defined as a group of persons permitted to invoke the sacred flame. In the ancient Greek language the word to designate the family signifies, literally, that which is near the hearth (hestia) and as the great historian of The Ancient City, Fustel de Coulange wrote, ‘The fire ceased to glow upon the altar only when the entire family had perished: an extinguished hearth, an extinguished family, were synonymous expressions among the ancients.’
One may wonder over the distance and difference that now separates us from those long forgotten times how much has changed. From the sacred hearth we have moved into the secular city of brash new buildings and intemperate change. None more so than Manchester, the first modern city of the industrial age. At its heart lay the rather ironically named Angel Meadow. Of all the slums created by the Industrial Revolution in England none were more notorious or worse than this. Its 33 squalid acres housed some 30,000 workers, many of them Irish immigrants escaping the desperate potato famine. Living a brutalised life in hovels and cellars, perhaps a dozen to a room, it was a violent Dickensian nightmare, ridden with crime and disease that Friedrich Engels called ‘hell on earth’ and which prompted his seminal study of The Condition of the Working Class in England.
I still remember my mother speaking of the area in a hushed, dispirited voice (she started her teaching career nearby when slums were still places of despair) and it is an area I have come to know well – though in its later more benign mutation – as a small park. Its burial pits, holding perhaps as many as 40,000 bodies – not so much buried as discarded (children used to kick around skulls in place of a ball) – are now grassed over. It is a place I have often visited, whilst walking the dog, musing over the ghosts of the past and contemplating the old Ragged School, which still stands overlooking the Meadow, now as an incongruous relic in the midst of a forest of up-market high-rise flats.
But there are surprises! Whilst excavations were taking place for the prestigious new Co-op offices adjoining the Meadow, a number of those Victorian cellars were found to be still intact and hardly touched since. Through some serendipitous investigations it seemed that one of them was inhabited by a William Kirby from County Mayo, whose great-great-great-grandson John happened to be a local writer and historian interested in his family’s past. 170 years later he was still able to clamber down a ladder and touch the still-sooty bricks of William’s fireplace and the walls that separated this 10ft square one-up one-down from the house next door. Here was a hearth that still spanned the generations.
There was something overwhelming at being able to reconnect so tangibly with one’s family past. As John wrote, ‘William Kirby finally died from chronic bronchitis and exhaustion in the workhouse in 1902. I left the dig with a brick from his hearth. It was still covered in soot from the fire that had kept him warm.’ And now that memory also provides a warmth and meaning which allows a person to locate himself in the vast panorama of history as the member of a family; to find an identity shaped in a humble home.
One of the benefits of my having a dog is the opportunity it gives to visit such off-road back-street places, to stand unobtrusively in reflection and even to meet and speak with some interesting characters. There are other little green and more squalid inner-city spaces, hidden away in back streets that I often visit and which have some surprising secrets hidden in the undergrowth. From thence people incongruously appear and disappear and one may even discern tents hidden away in the shrubbery. These are the habitations of the new hunter-gatherers, the scavengers, of our modern progressive society.
As I sometimes visit such places with a friend who is a social worker and resident of an inner city estate (and also has a dog), she often knows these people by name as former clients which makes for more interesting meetings. Generally, they are an amorphous but increasingly numerous group labelled ‘homeless’ and who seem to present such an intractable problem to our society. Their backgrounds are diverse but essentially similar – alcohol and drug addiction, childhood abuse, mental instability, failed relationships, family feuding, an insecure home. All the effects and symptoms of social breakdown now just subsumed in the one chilling word, ‘homeless’.
In light of the growing seriousness of this problem one would have thought measures would be taken to address it. From my experience of an inner-city housing estate, run by a housing association with extensive PFI initiatives, the raft of policies that the government has implemented seem only to have made matters worse. For example, the ‘right to buy’ has the iniquitous effect of diminishing the supply of much needed social housing, handing it, at a discount, to those well able to afford it with the tax payer picking up the subsidy. I am also aware of the distress that the ‘bedroom-tax’ is causing to those unable to pay, yet find there is no alternative smaller accommodation. The answer to such a predicament, from the clerk at the Housing Office, is the casual dismissal that you can always make yourself homeless then the council will have to find you alternative accommodation. As if ‘accommodation’ is any substitute for the loss of one’s home.
One case in particular stays in my mind. Of a middle-aged lady with mental health issues who objected to the refurbishment of property under the estate programme. Whatever the finer details of the case, she finished up being evicted and left sitting on the roadside kerb, where I last saw her, with a few bags in the gutter crying over what was she to do whilst the bailiffs boarded up her home. Such is how we create homelessness in the twenty first century.
Sometimes in the evening – in fact rather often, if the truth be told! – I sit in the old armchair, in which my father and grandfather sat before me, and gaze into the hearth of my own home. Unfortunately, the old coal fire is no longer in use, the flame long since extinguished (thanks to the Clean Air Act), though the grate is still there behind the cardboard screening. In its place I have a modern electric look-alike log fire so I gaze at the imitation flickering flames, trying to work out their sequence, whilst pondering all that my ancestors have made possible for me.
On the wall a fine large print hangs that my grandfather acquired – a copy of the famous depiction of Christ on the Mount of Olives gazing over a moonlit Jerusalem. He too is pondering, perhaps, the tumultuous past of that city if not the even greater tumult to come. And still it goes on! The devastation of millions of homes in Syria with an efficiency that not even Sennacherib’s ruthless Assyrians could have bettered. And as I ponder the human tide of homeless people now clamouring at Europe’s frontiers and the condition of those already here I think how very, very fortunate I am in what my ancestors have made possible for me. How privileged to have as my own a hearth and a home.
Dominic Kirkham is a community activist in Manchester. His book From Monk to Modernity was published by SOF in 2015.