Coal Pt 1: The Heat in the Kitchen
How the shift from wood-burning to coal four hundred years ago in London changed what you eat, how you clean yourself, and how men and women think about one another.
Winter at Blame Cannon invites you to enjoy a rotation of stories about global warming in prehistoric times, stories about some memorable departures in my life, and our third series below investigating, well, you’ll see. We’ll be back with the next chapter in what humans did the last time the world warmed next week.
Where there’s smoke there used to be fire.
The Jones household recently bought a swanky new stove to replace our old electric. It’s brushed nickel to match our brushed nickel fridge and dishwasher and has a panel in front as liquid black as a dead iPhone screen. The top is also the same liquid black but with white circles etched like Nazca glyphs to show where to set the pots and pans. It’s called an “induction stove” and it runs on electric but not like the old unit. When a hidden button is pushed, the stove chirps, red rings begin to glower beneath the liquid black top, and soon the pot boils or the pan sizzles. I don’t know how it works but then I don’t really know how electricity works.
It’s a cool bit of technology, but I doubt it will replace non-induction electric stoves. Electric stoves and their rival gas stoves have been dominating kitchens for about a hundred years.1
Before electric and gas stoves a stove or “range” was a big cast iron thing—black but flat black not liquid black—with bulging doors and boxes, and clanging covers, with raised lettering and corner curlicues, and it heated the old fashioned way—with fire.
Humans have a very long relationship with fire. For our ancestors fire was for staying warm, preparing hides, and hardening the ends of wooden sticks into sharp points, but what really matters was cooking. Mammals turn food into energy by chewing, swallowing, and digesting.2 You’ll notice most mammals have jutting snoutfuls of mouth to do the biting, tearing, and chewing that starts the process and then the carnivores often lay around 14 hours a day so their digestive system can absorb the nutrients.
Cooking basically subcontracts out a part of that process. Cooked food (unless it’s burnt) is much easier to chew and much easier to digest, so our ancestors were able to have snoutless dainty little mouths and we’ve been able to get by on 8 hours of sleep or less.3 Increased time awake meant spending a lot of time after dark sitting around those very fires, which I believe was a major impetus to developing speech, singing, and maybe thinking. But that’s for future posts.
For our story today I want to go to the British Isles, where from Neolithic times up until Henry VII was beheading his wives, as empires and kingdoms rose and fell, as invasions came and went, as languages and religions changed, one thing didn’t: In almost any poor or middle-class home you entered there would be an open fire—the hearth—in the middle of the room.
Hearth & Home
The poorest hovel, a weaver’s house, or even a lord’s “mead hall” such as described in Beowulf, would be a big room with a fire on the ground in the middle and no chimney. The open fire was the room’s source of heat and where the cooking happened. The smoke rose straight up eventually finding its way into the thatched roof where it killed vermin and helped prevent the thatch from rotting from England’s constant rain. Before absorbed into the thatch, however, the gathered smoke lingered in a cloud just above head height and this helped trap the fire’s heat in the room. This meant the area near the floor stayed warm. If the walls are well-caulked and tapestries hung to prevent drafts the lower several feet of the room stays very comfortable.
The Norman nobility (who conquered England in 1066) preferred hearths at one side of the room—fireplaces—with chimneys to draw away the smoke. By 1400 in London and the late 1500s in the rest of England middle class families were following suit. This meant the upper part of their rooms were now smoke free, and they could make use of lofts and upper stories without these being smoked out, but there were a lot of drawbacks to fireplaces and chimneys. Fireplaces, being at one end of a room, don’t do a good job of heating the other end. Fireplaces lose a lot of heat since heat rises with the smoke up through the chimney so houses with fireplaces had to use a lot more fuel.
Also fireplaces lift where the warm layer is. As smoke is drawn up through the chimney cold air is pulled in from the outside at floor level, so the lowest part of the room now become the coldest and draftiest. This changes furniture. A family with an open hearth in 1400 would want low stools and pallets for sleeping since the ground level was the warm, smoke-free air. A family with a fireplace in 1600 needs tables, chairs, and raised beds to stay above the now cold drafty floor. This switch is seen in the furnishing of rooms.4
So did the English switch to fireplaces and then adopt a different way to use rooms involving more furniture, or did they adopt more furniture first and now need fireplaces to enjoy it comfortably? Or was the change due to the better safety of chimneys or the space saved by moving the fire to one side of the room—or as I said above the need for using second and third stories? I don’t know. This is the kind of question about change that we struggle to answer about the past, and that future historians will struggle to answer about us.
Today we ask the same sort of question about an even bigger mystery with a wider impact—for almost as soon as England changed from open hearths to fireplaces with chimneys, Londoners did something even more extreme—they switched from burning wood to coal.
Wood & Coal
1. Wood.
All human cultures are heavily dependent on fire, so all human cultures are heavily dependent on fuel. For most human cultures for most of our history (and prehistory) fuel meant wood—various kinds of wood dried, split, bundled, or stacked to create all sorts of heating and cooking. That heritage of wood fire is part of our anatomy. We even like the smell and taste of wood-cooked food. (Even adding wood chips to fires to artificially induce it.)
Humans have burned lots of other stuff. Peat is a type of sod from swampy ground. Cassons are dried dung. Charcoal is wood that has been essentially baked in a kiln with low oxygen so it becomes a lightweight high-energy fuel. (Charcoal works as well as wood for cooking and better for heating, but it’s much more expensive.)
Coal has been burned since the last ice age and has been used by the Romans, Chinese, and in medieval England, but has been limited. There are forms of coal that burn almost without smoke, but most coal is far smokier and dirtier than wood, so it’s tended to be used for things like lime burning, blacksmithing, and heating water for baths in a separate chamber. But it’s hard to cook with coal because the smoke combines with fat in food to create a terrible sulfurous taste. (No one is adding coal chips as flavoring for BBQ.)
Nevertheless, starting in London in the late 1500s, households began to switch from wood to coal. Originally, this seems to have been for heating, such as upperclass houses using coal to heat servants’ quarters—because it was cheaper and hotter than wood—while continuing to use wood or charcoal for cooking. But eventually households began to cook with coal and this changed everything.
As fuel wood catches fire relatively easily, then heats up slowly, and keeps different temperatures in different parts of the fire. A cook can bank a fire, or rake it into a hotter pile, or rake it out into a group of smaller fires. English food before coal—like food in most of the wood-burning world—consisted of pots of stuff brought slowly to a boil, and then left over the fire all day. Or all week. While medieval and pseudo-medieval scenes in movies often show bread, actual medieval people usually ate their grain in the form of porridges, pottages, pones, and frumenties, like the delicious pots of goupy rice, beans, corn, oats—or whatever gurgling from peasant pots the world over. Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.
A “housewife” rose early, started a fire, and set a pot full of whatever they had—called “pottage” for pot—directly on the fire. After it boiled the wife would move the pot to the side or hang it up on a hook, and then she would add whatever else the family had at hand to eat. Meat was usually roasted on a spit over the fire—the original meaning of “roasting.”
Baking required a separate contraption—an oven. Most home-use ovens were chambers of brick or clay. A fire would be built inside it, then the fire would be raked out, the dough put in, and the opening sealed up. Later it would be opened and the bread would be baked.
Cooking and baking with wood could be fun or infuriating, exhausting or exhilarating, creative or boring, but one thing pre-coal cooking was not, was precise. Nothing required exact measurements or exact timing. Cooking and baking could be integrated with all the other household tasks. Middle class homes rarely hired full-time cooks as servants.
2. Coal.
Coal is much harder to light, but once lit it heats very quickly, burns hotter, and burns evenly, not bunching up to a point like a wood fire. The only way to slow the burn is to limit the oxygen which neither fireplaces nor open hearths are equipped to do. Open hearths in the center of a room were a poor fit for burning coal anyway due to the acrid fumes.
From the beginning coal fires needed equipment: grates for lift the coal and other contraptions for adapting it to cooking. The first “range” was a series of bars that would allow a coal fire to be used for roasting. This required a wall of coal to be built in the grate so roasting this way was expensive. These grates, as well as fireplace lining and venting, evolved into stoves, which is why they are still sometimes called “ranges.” The big black beast pictured at top is from 1885, but coal-burning households were experimenting with adapting their fireplaces for coal burning and cooking from the start.
Pottages couldn’t be left gurgling slowly over coal fires; they would dry out too quickly and end up a crust on the bottom of the pot, so more water was added and English porridges became English soups. Since coal made boiling easy boiled puddings and boiled meats became English staples. Stove manufacturers began to include built-in ovens heated by vents so fires didn’t have to be built inside and then raked out. Baking could now be done anytime. English breads, cakes, and pies became staples. Soon enough cooks realized meat could be “roasted” in the oven, that is, baked, and the old meaning of roasting was forgotten.
All this changed the pans and pots. Wood fires from ancient times to Shakespeare’s favored pots of brass or wrought iron with rounded bottoms, and long legs. Coal fires favored flat-bottomed pots and pans of the same cast iron the stoves were made of. Cast iron worked well with coal.5
Complex baking recipes and the new faster style of stove-top cooking meant that the meals required concentration. The cook couldn’t do the laundry or knit socks while occasionally stirring a pot. Everything needed precision time and amounts. So in England hired cooks became a staple of middle-class houses as Americans know from Mary Poppins.6
Cleaning Up
Coal had a profound impact on cleaning. To begin with coal just burns dirtier than wood; its smoke is stickier and sootier so everyone involved in using it and every room where it’s used needs a lot more cleaning. Google pictures of coal miners and compare them with pictures of lumberjacks. That’s the difference.
A wood-heated room could be cleaned with brooms and brushes, and occasionally sand for scouring. A coal-heated room required far more effort. Coal smoke ruined the old tapestries, and the oils in bare wood could interact with the smoke to feel sticky, so oil paint and wallpaper made their interior debut in English homes.
While the switch to coal made a house harder to clean, it also robbed the English household of the primary means of cleaning—wood ash.
Sifted wood ash mixed with water makes an excellent detergent, and along with sand for scouring—and a few plants and stain removers—has been the basic cleaning product of the world since ancient times. Pots, pans, floors, laundry—wood ash would clean it all. Best of all, wood ash works just well mixed with cold water. So the wood-fire housewife doesn’t need to heat hot water to clean her pots and dishes. With some sand for scrubbing, wood ash for disinfecting, and a good rinse, clean up is done. Wood ash was sometimes mixed with animal fat, put into trays to dry, and then cut into bars for use as a portable soap, and scarcely is there a historical reenactment without a cauldron of “lye soap” bubbling away with scare stories of how bad the soap used to be. But mostly the wood ash was sifted straight out of a spent fire and it cleaned quite well.
Coal ash doesn’t clean anything so the coal-burning households needed manufactured projects, often turning to the “castle soaps” from Spain made of olive oil, or new soaps of whale oil. But unlike wood ash, all such soaps, lye, castile—whatever—need hot water to work. That presents a couple of problems. One is that while soap works just as well as wood ash as a disinfectant when it is paired with hot water, it doesn’t clean as well as wood ash when paired with cold water, so if a family cuts corners as most real families will, soap isn’t really disinfecting anything. The other problem, which adds to the first, is that heating water meant burning more coal. Which meant still more cleanup. Which meant hauling more buckets of water. And here’s one of the great secrets of human history that nobody tells you:
Hauling water sucks.
Water is heavy. Carrying buckets of it is hard work.
Moreover since coal began in the United Kingdom (as it would come to be known) at the very time the UK was becoming the largest empire in the history of the world, its colonial administrators, drawn from those coal-burning, soap-using middle-class homes, become the moral scolds and judges of those uncivilized people for not using soap! Many classes of people adopted soap to suck up to the colonial masters but these people are often using imported English soap without hot water, so they were becoming less healthy and hygienic than they had been using free, leftover wood ash.
So Why the Switch?
I got interested in a lot of this during Covid from watching documentaries about daily life in distant times on YouTube. Some of my favorites were the three series captured in the images from above that included Ruth Goodman and other historians and archeologists living in older settings. Goodman also wrote some books that I’ve enjoyed reading. One of the biggest surprises that I’ve gotten secondhand from her surprising living with the technology of the past was that Tudor life was easier and better than Victorian life. At least for women. Specifically, the adoption of the coal stoves, between more intensive cooking, more cleaning, and more water hauling, made the life of a housewife in England much harder.7 At the same time the increase workload may have been a factor in restricting the lives of women to the domestic sphere while simultaneously motivated new thinking on women’s rights.
So why did hosueholds switch? Maybe men were making all the decisions, but it’s not clear that coal-burning benefited them either. Stoves themselves have definitely have advantages as well as disadvantages over fireplaces or open hearths, but stoves can work quite well burning wood; Americans have been burning wood in stoves since Ben Franklin’s time.8
The obvious answer is that England was running out of wood, and as evidence of this the price of wood was increasing throughout our period, so maybe they had to switch to coal, and do it first in London because that was the biggest city, and hence the place where wood would be most expensive. Plus London was on a river so it was the cheapest place to ship coal to. It’s a story of resource depletion, which in our age of climate change and possibly declining fossil fuel availability, seems relatable.
As I said, it’s an obvious answer.
It’s also wrong.
I became interested in ovens and coal because of those Ruth Goodman shows and books I mentioned above, but I’m sharing it with you now because of a Substack article by a historian named Anton Howes. You can read it at the link now or read it later and take more word for what it says.
Howes looks though the evidence and demonstrates convincingly that the truth is the opposite. Coal wasn’t adopted because wood disappeared. Wood disappeared because coal was acopted. Coal adoption led to the conversion of land once used from growing firewood into land used for grazing and other types of farming. Prices of firewood rose in London because it wasn’t as profitable for regional suppliers to grow trees for firewood because there wasn’t as much demand.
Understand that the English countryside was managed. Trees for furniture, fuel, or construction were grown for harvesting over decades like trees in an orchard today are grown over seasons. Types of wood, the growth of limbs, the use of bark, stumps, and shoots, were carefully managed by families and villages through multiple generations. When a region switched to coal, the trees formerly grown for firewood were dug up and something else was grown in their place.9
That brings us back to the question of why the people of London chose coal to begin with.10 Was it just cheaper? That’s another obvious answer that is almost certainly wrong. A household with no furniture is cheaper than a household with furniture, yet families spend money on furniture. Open hearths were cheaper than chimnies but families switched to fireplaces with chimneys. Since time immemorial families want to have safety, comfort, and dignity and will undergo a lot of effort to get it. Dung is surely cheaper than any other fuel, but humans almost always burn other fuels if other fuels are available.
We humans spend money and time on all sorts of lifestyle choices that cost a lot, and while these usually are not irrational, they aren’t usually rational either. My guess is that coal was being adopted in many crafts and trades—like blacksmithing—where it was as effective as charcoal yet far cheaper. This got some people accustomed to its use. Then wealthier families adopted it for cheaply heating their servants’ quarters. This got more people accustomed to it, including those servants. In pre-Victorian times working as a servant was often temporary, so those servants could go on to get married and have families of their own. Then temporary shortages, the rebuilding after the London fire, the English civil wars, or inflations could lead to temporary use of coal that finally gets enough people used to it. In many cases coal could be adopted for heating before it was used for cooking in a city like London where many laborers might depend for their meals on pie shops and such—that is, takeout.
Coal stoves in Great Britain continued past World War II until after health scares and new housing designs gas and electric stoves finally drove them out of the market. Coal use was banned for cooking in 2023.
I don’t know enough about English history or London history to know why coal was adopted, but I have two conclusions that I want to share:
Two Conclusions
First, we know the common sense assumption that Londoner’s switched to coal simply because they ran out of affordable wood is wrong because historians have a lot of records, letters, laws, and so on in the case of London in 1600. Knowing it’s wrong reminds us of how intensely and carefully land was once used in the British Isles. The forests and fields of England were not wilderness but human creations. Thinking of this is awe-inspiring to me and much more useful than just-so stories about markets.
But historians don’t know nearly so much about most times and places in human history and archeologists know even less about most human prehistory. So if this were a story of Minoan Crete or Monacan Virginia there would be no facts to tell us when our common sense assumptions are wrong. Questions of evolution, speciation, language, religion, technology, and warfare lend themselves to common sense answers that rob us of the counterfactual possibilities that help us truly see. We tried to address one of these when talking about global warming in prehistoric times, where only if we can both imagine the possibility of earlier “civilizations” could have theoretically existed and accept that the evidence that it turns out they didn’t, can we see what “civilization” might really be. We’ll revisit that next week.
Second, the changes around 1600 in England matter because that’s when England somehow changed from a small country minding its business into a world-dominating empire.
As I said in a post long ago about the abandoned Monacan town near Charlottesville:
In the Middle Ages the English maintained common pastures, coppiced woodlands, living hedges, and fertile fields for a thousand years. They were just as close to nature as the Monacans. Then in a few generations suddenly they enclosed their commons, started burning coal, and launched navies, armies and settlers across the globe. What brought the change? What made the English, or the Spanish, Mongols, Visigoths, or Huns suddenly go from minding their own business, living close to nature, and keeping their fighting mostly among themselves to taking everything that wasn’t nailed down and fighting and killing anyone who objected?
Did coal and chimneys and soap have anything to do with that? Maybe.
Next week in our prehistory series we’ll return to the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial for more about the last two times the world warmed and the “roots” of agriculture. On February 5th I’ll share another personal story. The next history post on February 12th will feature Jamestown, the first time America was run by a corporation. Somewhere in there I hope to add a bonus post that ties together some of my rantings from the fall.
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Gas stoves were developed in the 1820s in England but were not a commercial success until the 1880s (since they depended on gas works), and then dominated kitchens in the early 20th century. Electric stoves were invented in the 1890s and became commercially viable a decade later, but were much slower to takeover kitchens.
Birds and reptiles don’t really chew. They swallow and rely on their digestive system to do everything. Birds and reptiles are nasty. Be good or you might return in the next life as a bird or reptile stomach.
When I was a kid some hippies promoted a “raw foods” movement under the true factoid that lab tests revealed that cooking reduces the nutritional value of food. It does! BUT reduced nutrition easily absorbed is better than high nutrition that can’t be absorbed. The raw food movement let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
Note how the rise of central heat has returned the use of mattresses and futons directly on floors.
In fact “cast iron” itself was developed with the high heat derived from replacing charcoal and coal with coke—basically coal baked in a kiln much as charcoal had been wood baked in a kiln.
Mary Poppins the movie is actually set in Edwardian times. Elizabethan, Victorian, Edwardian are labels for periods of English history based on the king or queen on the throne at the time.
Before Goodman I assumed that the suffragist movements in the U.S. and United Kingdom were brought about by some sort of inexorable progress, but it’s possible in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence’s “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable” that mankind, or in this case, womankind, rebelled because the evils were increasing to the point they were no longer sufferable. They were driven to be politically involved in order to halt the increasing abuse. But America didn’t adopt coal to a similar degree. Though they did embrace soap.
The “Franklin Stove” was a series of metal panels and vents inserted into a fireplace, not a pot-bellied thing that I once pictured.
As evidence of Howes’ direction of causation the same thing happened to peat. Once coal took over the peat bogs were drained and the land converted to other, more profitable uses.
Howes’ piece on coal back in October promised the next chapter would be on why he thinks they switched, but the Substack doesn’t show any free essays since then. I don’t know what brilliant Englishmen do over three months of not writing the next chapter of their Substack. A single game of cricket? Waiting for a day without rain? Maybe he’s still writing essays but they’re only for paying customers, but it seems like he’d at least hint at what’s behind the paywall.
Thanks for the write-up. I chuckled at that final footnote. I don’t hide anything behind a paywall without telling those on the free list too. And in general don’t really paywall much at all. But as you’ll now know, I just spent all that time writing the next piece!