TAILIEUCHUNG - Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Century - The structures of Everyday Life - Fernand Braudel2
4S up erfluity and S ufficiency :.Houses , Clothes and F N THE LAST CHAPTER we tried to draw the line between superfluity and suffi.ciency in an area ranging from meat to tobacco. To complete the picture us a further opportunity of studying the differences between rich and remains to describe housing and costume. After all, where is luxury than in house, furniture and dress? At the same time we shall to make comparisons between civilizations, for no two were alikeHouses throughout the cannot hope to look at all the kinds of houses in existence between and eighteenth centuries. We can do little more than pick out a general characteristicsFortunately, almost everywhere we turn, we shall be looking at changed only very slowly, if at all. Many houses standing today, restored, refer us back not only to the eighteenth century but to the sixteenth and fifteenth or even earlier, as we can see in the Golden Street of the Prague, or in the breathtaking village of Santillana, near Santander. remarked in I 842 that Beauvais retained more of its ancient that time than any other town; he described 'some forty wooden houses to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries' . , houses are built o r rebuilt according t o traditional patternsHere more than anywhere else the strength of precedent makes itself felt. called in to rebuild the houses of the rich at Valladolid after the of I 564 were the unconscious representatives of the old Muslim crafts/ beautiful new houses were archaic in design. The influence of custom is always present, for these are ancient legacies that can never . Traditionally, for instance, Islamic houses are closed in on themselvesThe traveller was right when he said that all well-off homes in Persia in , Clothes and Fashion 267.'are of the same architecture. There is always a room about thirty feet square middle of the building, at its centre a hollow full of water in the form of pond and surrounded by carpets. '3 The force of tradition is even in the case of country-dwellers throughout the world. To have seen poor peasant's house being built from its frail wooden frame in the Vitoria north of Rio de Janeiro in I9374 is to possess an ageless document,.valid for centuries before the present day. The same applies to the nomad' tent: it has come down through the centuries without change, on the same primitive loom as in the pastIn short, a 'house', wherever it may be, is an enduring thing, and it witness to the slow pace of civilizations, of cultures bent on preserving,.maintaining and building materials: stone and was all the more natural as building material varied little and limitations on every region. That is not to say that civilizations imprisoned inside the restrictions imposed by stone, brick, wood . But these materials often did constitute long-lasting limitations. 'It is stone,' a traveller noted, (and lack of wood too, we might add) 'that obliges.[the Persians] to build walls and houses of earth. ' In fact they were built of sun.dried, or sometimes baked bricks. 'Rich people decorate the outside walls mixture of whitewash, Muscovy green and gum which makes them . 's They were still walls of clay, for all that: geography explains why, does not explain everything. Human beings also had a say in the matterStone was a luxury which had to be paid for; otherwise it was necessary compromises, like mixing brick with stone, as Roman and had already done and as Turkish and Chinese masons still regularly did;.or using wood and stone; or reserving s
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