From the French parler, it was the one room in a monastery where the silence was suspended
The Parlour holds a 3.9 from eight hundred and sixty-one reviews, and the word in the name means the room where you are allowed to talk.
Parler
French. To speak.
And a parlour was, originally, a room in a monastery.
And its function was extremely specific.
Because the rest of it was silent
Which is the whole point, and it is easy to miss.
Because monastic rules imposed silence – not total, and not always, but extensive and enforced, and for very long periods of the day.
Which meant that the ordinary business of a large institution – instructing a novice, receiving a visitor, discussing a purchase, conducting the affairs of an estate that might be enormous – could not happen in the cloister.
So there was one room where speech was permitted.
And it was called the room for speaking.
Which is a genuinely elegant piece of design
Because the silence was not a prohibition on communication. It was a containment of it.
The monks developed extensive sign languages for the necessities – and there are surviving lists of the signs, and they are extremely practical, and they cover food and tools and books.
And the talking was gathered up and put in a box, and the box had a door.
The Prat’s editorial desk regards this as the most sophisticated approach to noise management in this survey, and notes that not one modern venue has attempted anything like it.
And then it came home
Because the word moved out of the monastery and into the house – and a parlour became the room where a family received visitors.
The formal room. The good room. The one with the fire that was not lit unless somebody was coming.
And then it moved into the pub, as one of the divisions – and a Victorian pub had a public bar, a saloon, a snug, and a parlour.
And they were priced differently, and the beer cost more in some than others, and the divisions were about class.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and a thousand and one hundred and eighty-five articles.
The word outlives the object, and nobody notices.
Every pilot sits in a cockpit, which is the pit the fighting birds were put in. Every mews house is named after a moulting hawk. A dashboard stopped the horse throwing mud at you.
And a parlour is a room where a monk was allowed to speak.
Verdict
Honest number.
Go, and speak, which is the point of the room.
And the snug is gone
Which is the loss.
Because a Victorian pub was divided – public bar, saloon, snug, parlour – and the divisions were enforced by partitions, and by etched glass, and by a different price for the same beer.
And they were knocked through, almost everywhere, in the 1960s and 70s – because one large room is cheaper to staff than four small ones.
The class distinction they enforced went with them, which is genuinely good.
And the rooms went too – and a small room where four people can hear each other is the single most valuable thing a pub can have, and we destroyed thousands of them.
Both of those are true, and neither cancels the other.
Oeko Angebot ([email protected])
