You know…when you’re stuck at home in lockdown, with nothing to do but watch Youtube videos about the Cinnamon Challenge, or how to tune a ukelele, or how to sing Christmas carols in LOLspeak – a skill which will surely impress all four of your grandparents come Christmas time – you start going a little stir-crazy, and you start thinking about the weirdest, craziest shit that you wouldn’t otherwise think of.
As I sat here at my desk, randomly watching another video of “Ten Celebrities Who Had it all and Blew it!…AGAIN!” or whatever, other, asinine twaddle people upload on the internet these days…my mind started wandering…as it’s want to do…to all kinds of random thoughts – like – what would people be buying other people for Christmas this year? Or for birthdays? Or anniversaries, or whatever? What kinds of desirable consumer-goods are there out in the world today which people just have to have? The latest iPhone? A new laptop? A sparkly purple pimp-mobile with tricked out chrome rims?
And I started to wonder…what were the biggest status symbols of times past? What did our ancestors wish they had, or did have, and used, to show off their status in the world, to other people, and to the higher-ups around them?
In this posting, I’ll be looking at some of the most common, uncommon, strangest, or most unlikely status symbols that have existed throughout history! These aren’t in any sort of order, but I’ll try and include as many as possible…
Status Symbol: Land
Symbolises: Wealth & Connections
Since the dawn of humanity, right up to the present day – ownership, control, use, and monetisation of pure, and simple land, has been a symbol of wealth, power, status and influence. From the lowest freeborn peasant, to Lord Muchstuff to the manor born, and even His Majesty King Morestuff, land has been important. From Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe, and even right up to the modern day – land has been important. Back then, they called it “freeholding” – today, we call it – “real estate” – but it’s still land.
In medieval times, in theory, the entirety of a kingdom’s land was the sole ownership of the king himself. The king gave parcels of land to nobility, clergy, the warrior aristocracy, lesser royals, or close friends and advisors, as gifts for them to own – either outright – or to rent. A nobleman who owned the land bore allegiance to the king (his “liege lord”), and was in charge of collecting the king’s taxes on the land he controlled, protecting the king’s subjects who lived on the land, and of upholding the laws and the King’s Peace.
Land – especially large parcels of it – were status symbols because if you owned land, it meant that you were in the good graces of the king, who thought enough of you to sell you or let you rent, in some cases, several thousand acres of his own kingdom. Being a landowner also meant that you could use the land to make money – either by farming, or by renting it out again to tenant-farmers, who farmed the land for you – paid you rent and taxes, and who did all the hard labour.
In many of the most essential ways – ownership of land, the status it brings, still exists today. The bigger someone’s house is, or the grander their address is, the more impressed we are. Would you prefer to receive an invite to a party at someone’s apartment? Or an invite to a party on someone’s private estate?
Status Symbol: Libraries & Books
Sybolises: Education
Apart from land, one of the greatest status symbols of history was literature: Physical books, scrolls, maps and documents. Whether or not they were accurate, reliable or even truthful, was rarely the point – the contents were not nearly as important as was the mere fact of personal ownership!
During the medieval era, and for a significant chunk of the Renaissance in the 1400s and 1500s, books were prized, treasured, intensely valuable possessions. Since all books had to be written out laboriously by hand using a quill pen and expensive paper or vellum, producing a book of any substantial size, regardless of its contents – was a very expensive, and time-consuming process. Paper had to be sourced, ink had to be ground up and diluted, quills had to be collected, dried, cut and shaped, and then you had to have the time, and the knowledge to write the contents of the book itself!
Because of this, owning books was a sign of extreme wealth, since having gone to all that effort to make one book – a writer was going to be sure to sell it for as much money as they could! But owning a book – or to be more precise – an entire library of books – indicated, not only great wealth – but also education. At a time when most people couldn’t read, and never had the chance to – books, scrolls and other documents, symbolised access to education and higher learning, at a time when most people had neither the time, funds, or resources to learn how to read or write.
The status of books died away somewhat by the 1500s and 1600s, with the steady spread of the printing press, which made books significantly cheaper and faster to produce, but their status remained high enough that many grand country houses built in the 1600s, 1700s, and even the 1800s, were constructed with expansive libraries and reading-rooms to show off the owner’s wealth of collected knowledge.
Status Symbol: Obesity
Symbolises: Ease of living
For millennia throughout human history, one of the most prominent status symbols ever was obesity. At a time when growing, farming, hunting, catching, preparing and preserving food was extremely labour-intensive, and when physical labour such as tree-felling, lumberjacking, mining, farming, and other occupations burned up precious calories, obesity of any kind was virtually unheard of. Because of this, obesity, and pale skin were considered signs of wealth, privilege and plenty. Not for nothing is the Chinese God of Prosperity – Cai Sen – (often mistaken for Buddha) – traditionally depicted as being good-natured, happy, and extremely obese!
To be able to achieve such awe-inspiring obesity, you had to have not only enough food to eat, but enough servants to do all the work which you therefore wouldn’t need to, allowing you to live a life of luxury! This also meant that you could stay indoors, away from the sun while enjoying the high-life. This preference for pale skin and rich living can be seen in figures such as Queen Elizabeth the First, who famously slathered white lead makeup on her face to appear pale and beautiful, and in the fairytale “Snow White” where she is described as having hair as black as ebony, lips as red as blood, and skin as white and pure as snow.
Status Symbol: Gout
Symbolises: A rich diet & access to expensive foods
Gout is a condition where hard lumps of crystalised uric acid (lumps known as tophus or tophi) build up in a person’s joints – in particular, the toes and knuckles (but most commonly in the big toe), caused by a heavy diet of red meat, sugar, salt, and excessive consumption of alcohol and other rich, fatty foods. As such foods as sugar, chocolate, and cakes were rare, and beef and mutton were expensive, being able to eat as much of this stuff as you wanted, to the extent that you could contract gout from it was seen as a sign of extreme affluence!
Despite the, at times, excruciating pain, which could render a gout-sufferer all but immobile for days, or even weeks on end, until the tophi broke up or were dissolved (usually aided by applying heat to the affected joints) – gout was seen as a huge status-symbol – it was almost fashionable to try and get it, because it proved how immensely privileged and wealthy you had to be! Because of this association with wealth, privilege and a rich diet, for centuries, gout has been known as “The Disease of Kings“.
One of the most famous sufferers of this ‘royal disease’ was His Royal Highness, Prince George, Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent – later known as George IV. Famous for throwing extravagant banquets, George IV was a lecherous whoremonger, known for chasing two things: Food, and women. His waistline exploded and his obesity shot up. This on its own would’ve been bad enough, but his nonstop indulgence caused agonising flare-ups of gout, which would’ve been treated by warming, resting and elevating the foot, and by taking copious amounts of painkillers – usually in the form of tincture of laudanum – a mix of opium and alcohol – the most common painkilling drug of the era.
Status Symbol: Sugar, Chocolate, Jelly, Ice-Cream, etc.
Symbolises: Extravagant living!
In medieval times, and even for hundreds of years afterwards, certain foods were so hard to obtain or hard to produce that they were – right up until the modern era – considered luxuries. Anybody who could afford to eat these foods were living high on the hog! Here’s a list of some of the various foods that were once considered to be highly desirable status foods!…and they’re not always the ones you might expect.
Sugar
For centuries, access to sugar was incredibly rare. Extracted from sugar-cane, grown on large plantations in tropical climates, and processed into raw sugar-crystals before being exported, sugar was a supreme luxury in the Renaissance era, when getting to enjoy it in Europe meant that it had to come on the most amazing, round-the-world voyages from the Far East, or the Caribbean. As late as the 1700s, King George III declared that in the event of war with the American colonies, the French, or the Spanish, and their colonial possessions in the new world, Britain could lose just about anything except its sugar plantations – the enormous amounts of money that sugar brought to Britain were too valuable to risk falling into enemy hands!
Sugar did not start becoming cheaper until the 1800s, when it was discovered that sugar could also be extracted from the much more easily-grown sugar-beet, which could be cultivated in more temperate climates. Before this time, sugar had been so rare that only those with significant wealth were able to afford it.
Chocolate!
Some are convinced that it’s evil in physical form, others are sure that this is the very food of the gods themselves! For centuries, chocolate has been one of mankind’s most sought-after treats, but for much of history, chocolate was nigh on inaccessible, and even when it was, it would be centuries before it could be enjoyed by the masses.
Harvested from enormous cacao-pods grown in tropical countries, chocolate comes from the cocoa beans stored inside the pods. And here’s something you may or may not know: Chocolate in its raw state tastes disgusting!
It’s bitter and rank and nigh inedible! And even if you could get a hold of it, the processes to extract chocolate from the beans were extensive!
First, the beans have to be dried, then crushed, then ground up, and finally, the pure cocoa has to be mixed with other ingredients to make it palatable – such as sugar, water, eggs or milk. Since sugar was already so expensive, combining sugar AND chocolate was considered exceptionally extravagant.
For centuries, chocolate wasn’t even a food – it was a drink! From the 1500s until the 1800s, chocolate existed in only one form: as drinking-chocolate. What we’d call today – hot chocolate. The only way to physically eat chocolate was to incorporate the cocoa and sugar mass into something else – like a cake, pie, tart or a tray of cookies. Eating chocolate on its own did not happen until the Victorian era. Only when this became possible, and mass production of the first chocolate bars began, was chocolate finally democratised to the peasants and plebians!
Pineapples
Introduced to Europe in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the humble pineapple was the latest fruit from the New World to capture the imagination of the old. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and because pineapples were very difficult, indeed, almost impossible, to grow in a European climate, getting your hands on one was no mean feat!
To grow pineapples in Europe, the only way to do it was to cultivate the plants in a large, glass greenhouse, usually on the private estate of some wealthy landowner. The warm, humid micro-climate inside a greenhouse allowed pineapples to grow, and owning and getting to eat pineapples was an enormous luxury! Greenhouses designed or built specifically for growing pineapples became known as ‘Pineries’. Because why not?
Just being able to see, and hold a pineapple – never mind eating one! – was such a rarity that wealthy people used to – and I’m not making this up – RENT – pineapples from other people! Yes indeed! You could go up to a guy, a friend of yours, perhaps, whom you knew owned a pineapple, and you could ask to borrow or rent it! You know, to have it as a centerpiece at your latest dinner-party or banquet! Showing off a physical pineapple showed that not only were you rich enough to rent one, but that you had connections to people who could grow them – a massive brag back in the 1700s!
Jelly & Ice-Cream
In an age before freezers, refrigerators and instant-foods, both jelly and ice-cream were considered extreme luxuries. Jelly – produced by boiling out the gelatin from the hooves of animal-trotters – took hours to create, with the gelatin being continually boiled, skimmed, refined, and boiled again, to extract pure gelatin, which could then be flavoured, shaped and coloured to produce jelly.
Ice cream, made from eggs, cream, sugar and flavourings, was another extreme luxury. Sugar was expensive, and without freezers, the only way to produce ice-cream was to place it in a bath of salt and ice – two more very expensive commodities – which again, increased the price (and status) of ice-cream.
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that ice-cream could be produced relatively easily at home, or on an industrial scale, with the invention of hand-cranked ice-cream machines, which whipped the mixture inside a metal canister surrounded by ice and salt. This process made ice-cream cheaper, faster to produce, and better-tasting, as the aerated mixture (caused by the constant stirring and freezing) was lighter, and smoother on the tongue.
Status Symbol: The Fountain Pen.
Symbolises: Modern Technology and Taste!
Since the dawn of writing, thousands of years ago, mankind has struggled and striven for countless lifetimes, to produce a writing instrument which contained its own ink-supply, and which could operate independently of a separate inkwell. After many false starts and mistakes…and a lot of mess…the fountain pen finally came of age in the late 1800s, with visionaries such as George Parker and Lewis E. Waterman creating the essential elements that would make the modern fountain pen possible.
While fountain pens in the early days were laughably simplistic items, comprising little more than a cap, a nib, feed, section to hold it all together, and a tank for the ink – they were incredibly expensive, and were considered real luxury items! Owning one of these newfangled “reservoir pens” as they were originally called, was a mark of pride and distinction!
From the late 1800s until the middle of the 20th century, most fountain pens were expensive, and while cheap “third-tier” pens did exist, the cost of a new fountain pen was often out of the reach of most people, which is why institutions like schools, banks, hotels, etc, continued to rely on old-fashioned dip pens, well into the 20th century. They were simply cheaper, easier to use, and easier to replace.
Although ballpoint pens have largely usurped the fountain pen’s throne since the end of the Second World War, fountain pens are making a big comeback in the 21st century, and there is an avid global community of collectors, users, repair-technicians and manufacturers still thriving today.