You know the feeling.

Someone is telling you about “The Good Old Days.” This was better back then. So was that.  What a slipshod yet convoluted world we’re living in now.

But what’s so bad about having a chimney?

Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle (1577) quotes William Harrison, the Rector of Radwinter and Canon of Windsor, as several villagers of long standing have their say:

“ There are old men yet dwelling in the village where I remaine, which have noted three things too too much increased. One is the multitude of chimnies latelie erected, whereas in their young dayes there were not above two or three, if so manie, in most uplandish towns of the realme, the religious houses, and manour places of their lords alwayes excepted, and peradventure some great personages, but each one made his fire against a reredosse  in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat.”

They went on to throw into their pot of disapprobation the bedding that was getting too comfortable (read ”less agonizingly uncomfortable”), making a man soft. Also the increasing use of pewter, tin, and even silver at table when wooden utensils were good enough in the past.

It is remarkable to think that the idea of a masonry chimney would be regarded as anything other than a much-needed improvement over a mere hole in the roof to allow smoke to (eventually) leave the confines of a house. The “reredosse” referred to above was usually an iron or stone backing to an open hearth.  A considerable amount of smoke in an English dwelling prior to about the mid-sixteenth century was regarded as normal, and even the brick or stone chimneys that began to appear were generally less than efficient.

In Richard Harris’ Discovering Timber Framed Buildings (1978), he notes that “in the transition from open fires to masonry chimneys various timber structures were used to keep smoke from reaching every corner of the house or cottage. Sometimes a short bay (a segmented , narrow portion of the structure) called a “smoke bay” was sealed off from the upper part of the rest of the house as an escape for smoke.

An alternative to the smoke bay was a “smoke hood” a timber-framed enclosure supported on the mantle beam of the fireplace and tapering to an outlet or chimney on the roof. They presented a considerable fire hazard, even though the inside surface would have been plastered (the plaster being mixed with cow dung) to protect the timbers.”

Both external chimneys, with the masonry structure almost entirely outside the building, and internal chimneys, which according to Harris usually had a short bay to itself within the house, were becoming more common by the end of the sixteenth century. Frequently, the construction of internal chimneys would take advantage of a pre-existing medieval smoke bay.

Wood gradually gave way to coal as fuel in fireplaces,  in no small measure because procuring firewood became more difficult in the face of draconian royal and manorial laws protecting the wooded lands under their respective jurisdictions. There were also areas, particularly in the southeastern parts of the country, where deforestation had taken a considerable toll.

Among royalty and the highest ranks of the nobility, numerous elaborately-finished chimneys on a home became a kind of status symbol, a Tudor parallel to today’s four-car garage.  With that wealth in mind, the hearths and hence the chimneys were taxed: in the 1662 Hearth Tax returns Agecroft Hall was listed as having 11 hearths, out of a total of 35 for all of Pendlebury.

One conclusion seems unavoidable: that anyone in the populated parts of Tudor England ever breathed a liter of smoke-free air is unlikely.