The quote I've read is from Ruth Goodman's book "How to be Tudor":
"In 1515 the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus wrote in a letter that the floors of English houses ‘are, in general, laid with white clay, and are covered with rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for twenty years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish and other abominations not fit to be mentioned’."
This made me curious of a few things:
The question in the title: how did the English compare to Western continental Europe, for instance - France - in this regard? Would stone or wooden flooring have been more common among the French, even for those who belonged to low-middle end of society?
For what types of people would this practice of covering the floor with rushes been common? As he claims this applied to English houses "in general", what kind of people would he have had to have visited to have been given this impression, and where would they land on the socio-economic spectrum?
Finally, when did wooden flooring (or stone, but I assume wood would be more common) become the norm among farmers who were slightly more well to do? (Small landowning farmers, who would make a profit a good year and not live hand to mouth)
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Just a message to the mods: you're doing such a good job. Seriously. I want to thank you as individuals for the time you put into this subreddit. Even you /u/sunagainstgold, who deleted my previous question (which was perfectly reasonable). If you review this post - don't have mercy on me. Protect the community.
Broadly speaking, England was considered "backward" or "crude" vis-a-vis the continent at this point in time (the Italians would say the same, e.g., about the "Germans"). To some extent, then, what you're getting here is filtered through the lens of stereotype mixed with Erasmus' own personal gift for rhetorical "color". The kind of flooring described here was common in the period for most classes, and almost certainly for low-middle class people, though wood floors had been becoming increasingly popular with the middling classes; the big difference would be the (perceived) lack of cleanliness when it comes to "changing" the floor. Most individual households and institutions did that ~annually ("Spring Cleaning"), and what Erasmus seems to be getting at here is that the English were, to his mind, particularly lazy about doing so: "so imperfectly..." Without seeing the Latin behind this quote I can't say for sure, but I've read a lot of Erasmus and that fits his usual style.
This was common practice at pretty much every level of society. While the wealthy may have had access to wood floors and/or stone ones, covering them with hay or rushes was still a common strategy from a cleanliness perspective - especially in high-traffic areas like the main hall. The biggest distinction would have been how often they changed the stratum itself. The richer you were, the more hands you had to bring in fresh and take out waste, &c.
Not until much later vis-a-vis "small, landowning farmers". Remember, you're talking about the period when enclosure is just picking up and that category of people is becoming increasingly precarious. Investment in those sorts of floors would have been (a) expensive and (b) not necessarily worth the cost/energy of doing so compared to just cleaning the house out well. For comparative context, my grandfather-in-law lived with a dirt floor in KY for his childhood, and didn't have indoor heating/plumbing until the early 2000s. One thing we often see in Erasmus is a clash between his sensorial expectations and what he discovers on his travels, esp. in England, i.e. he seems to have been particularly attuned to and bothered by such things in ways that many of his contemporaries, esp. in England, just weren't yet. Comportment manuals had just started coming out in English in the late 15th century, and Castiglione wouldn't even publish until 1526, so we don't see a real, substantive change in cultural mores about "courtesy" vs. "politeness" there until ~Elizabeth.