Far from close

In 1598, a certain Margaret Browne of Houndsditch gave a graphic description to the court of her neighbour Clement Underhill engaged in an adulterous act with her lover, as observed through a hole in the party wall. Some people have always been very interested in what the neighbours are up to; all of us can be affected by them.

Emily Cockayne has investigated the relationship by conjuring up scores of pieces of evidence such as the one cited, from the early Middle Ages till the present day, trawled from manorial records, police and law courts, civic authorities and newspapers. The result is a nicely personal view of how we have got on with the people next door, homing in on the perennial issues — noise, sanitation, intrusion and privacy.

The book could well have been called ‘A History of Housing’, for that is what it is, also. Neighbours are a great deal more bearable when separated from one by more than a wall of lathe and plaster through which a hole can be poked. The cramped and foetid conditions of what historians like to call the early modern period led to enforced proximity with inevitable attendant issues about sewage — Samuel Pepys had a nasty bother over his neighbour’s privy overflowing into his cellar — and privacy. The term ‘eavesdropping’ comes from exactly that: standing beneath the eaves of a house in order to overhear.

The arrival of bricks and mortar, and eventually of the suburban semi, did much to alleviate the neighbour problem. A situation that enforced constant confrontation, negotiation and manoeuvre changed to one in which there could be simply ‘distant cordiality’.

Though, as Cockayne points out, something may have been lost. Proximity could be an imposition and a torment, but it also bred a culture of mutual help and of expedient altruism.