How we love our homes: we make them cosy and secure, protected from the outside world, defended by locks, bolts and burglar alarms. But we haven’t always had our own private dwellings, and under the invasive influence of the internet, home, as we’ve come to understand it, may well soon be a thing of the past.
In early medieval times, a home was often just a basic tenement, a shelter shared with cattle, owned by an employer. As prosperity spread, so a sense of the private developed. Common areas subdivided into individual ones; pieces of furniture (chests, bookcases, beds, wardrobes) marked areas for particular activities and specific people.
At the same time, a sense of home as a place of refuge started to take hold. In 1760 William Pitt declared: ‘The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it.
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