Finland has nearly half a million cottages, and almost every one has a sauna
Today a cottage suggests a cosy rural retreat. In feudal England it was a working arrangement: a small house and a patch of land granted to a cotter in exchange for labour on the lord's manor. Over the centuries the tie to land vanished, and the word came to mean holiday homes worldwide.
The word descends from Old English cot, a hut, with relatives in Old French, Old Norse and Middle Low German. Cotters ranked just above slaves in the social order recorded by the Domesday Book of 1086, holding perhaps two or three acres to live from. What defined a cottage was its function, not its shape. It was built cheaply from whatever lay nearby: thatch in wheat country, slate in Cornwall, rubble stone where stone was plentiful, and cob in Devon.
Industry and law reshaped it. From the 18th century weavers' and miners' cottages multiplied, and in 1845 Friedrich Engels pointed to cottages as symbols of bad housing. Enclosure acts stripped cottagers of their plots; as historians John and Barbara Hammond put it, a labourer with land became a labourer without. An Elizabethan statute had once required at least 4 acres per cottage, yet modern English law defines one as a small house without land. In Wales, squatters could claim a plot by raising a house in a single night, its edges marked by an axe thrown from each corner.
North America stretched the meaning. In Michigan a cottage is a summer place up north by a lake; elsewhere the same building may be a cabin or a camp. Quebec's English-speaking estate agents use the word for any two-storey house. In the 1920s and 1930s about a third of new American petrol stations were built to look like quaint Old World cottages.
The Nordic countries take it seriously. Finland counted 474,277 cottages in 2005, most of them near water, in a country of 187,888 lakes. Sweden had 680,000 by 2007, and about half of Swedes can use one. Before the Second World War only a wealthy elite owned them, until rapid urbanisation let families convert old farmhouses into getaways.
Source: Cottage
