For much of human history, dwelling places were heated using an open hearth, which makes for a smoky dwelling. The open hearths were usually on the ground though sometimes elevated using stone.
The largest domestic unit in Medieval England was the manor house. Every small community had one. It was the home of the local landowner, and the centre of community life.
The manor house began as a hall. This was built of stone, brick and timber, depending on the materials available in the part of the country in which the building was put up. It was big enough to accommodate the boss and his family, his servants, domestic animals, and as many guests who chanced to drop in for bed and board. Often surrounded by a protective wall or moat, or both, it was dark (because there was no glass for windows), smelly (because of the people and animals), and smoky (because the log fire in the central hearth had no chimney arrangement save a hole in the roof above).
By the time of the Early English period of Gothic architecture, when Salisbury Cathedral was built, the basic hall arrangement had been improved by the addition of smaller rooms leading off. There might be a kitchen, a larder, a wardrobe, a solar (which was a private sitting room for the owner’s family), and even a small chapel. The hall fire still smoked. -- Britain is a living museum of fine domestic architecture posted February 5th 2014, adapted from the Look and Learn issue number 543 published June 10th 1972
Various techniques were implemented to manage the smoke within the home; early attempts to funnel smoke from open hearths were with hoods. Hoods are still in use today, usually above cooktops, attempting to capture odors rather than smoke.
The solution to the problem of smoke is the chimney, but most homes prior to about 1550 rarely had one. Domestic fires typically sat upon an open hearth in the middle of the room. All the heat generated by such a blaze was trapped within the living space while the smoke rose, cooled and slowly drifted up and out through any gap it could. Since windows were largely unglazed and roofs were generally thatched, a special opening in the roof was not always necessary. Smoke simply hung in the roof space until it could gently percolate out of the structure. -- from The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman, which is about England, chapter 3, in the section 'The problem with smoke'
Later in the same section:
No rooms above the ground floor was the norm during the era of open hearths.
Chimneys were in use for a long time for industrial purposes, albeit these were more of an exhaust vent, which is a different function. Many places in the world had kilns and furnaces for making bricks, which probably had some form of chimney, also more of an exhaust vent. No known chimneys were used in residential settings for most of human history. There may have been residential earthen chimneys that did not survive to be noted. The first known use of a residential chimney occurs in Europe in AD 12th century. Ruins of Norman castles have chimneys built into walls, and might have been at the forefront of chimney construction in British Isles, as these were of the same era. Residential chimneys did not become common until centuries later.
The chimney as it is known today was developed about 600 years ago. -- from the USDA Farmers' Bulletin No. 1889, FIREPLACES & CHIMNEYS, December 1941
These earliest of chimneys [in England] were perhaps viewed more as status symbols, following imported patterns [from mainland Europe] rather than developing organically to solve a domestic problem [within the British isles]. A fire on the floor in the centre of the room is very heat efficient. All of the energy released by the fire radiates out evenly into the living space. Chimneys, on the other hand, channel around 70 per cent of the heat of a fire straight up and out of the building. Moreover, these structures are typically located at the edge of the room, creating an unevenly heated space. They also produce a draw, which sucks cold air in at the base, creating a cold draught at the floor level. With so much inefficiency built into the design, those who built chimneys needed considerable means to contend with the original capital investment of building and significantly higher ongoing fuel costs. It came down to a choice of burning considerably more fuel or accepting a much colder home. -- from The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman, which is about England, chapter 3, in the section 'Chimneys and their cousins'
There are three modes of heat transfer, being reminded of these is useful in understanding the recent (as in the last two centuries) of heating innovations:
Heat transfer by convection occurs when a gas or liquid is heated, becomes less dense, rises, transfers energy to other objects it encounters as it rises. Imagine a camp fire, you are standing close and hold your hand over the fire at a safe distance, you are able to feel hot air and smoke rising.
Heat transfer by conduction occurs when a solid object, transfers energy within its body, or when energy is transfered between two solid objects that are touching. Imagine the same camp fire, you hold a metal rod above the fire. The end of the rod above the fire heats up due to convection, in turn the heated end of the rod begins to dissipate the energy through conduction to the opposite end of the rod that is not above the fire, and in turn your hand that is holding the end of the metal rod begins to feel the rod heating up, that is also conduction.
In a residential setting, radiant heat transfer occurs when energy is emitted as wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically this is either light from a lightbulb, or infrared energy from various sources. Consider the camp fire scenario, you stand close to the fire but not close enough to touch the burning firewood (conduction) or close enough that the smoke hits you (convection), but you still feel the heat of the fire, that is the radiant heat. Although this webpage is about heating in the winter, radiant heating also occurs in the summer months when the house heats up as a result of solar radiation, which the mass of the house in turn releases radiant heat in the form of infrared energy. If your house is air conditioned, and you have the thermostat set for 70 degrees fahrenheit, you may still feel hot during the late afternoon on a sunny day, because the cooler conditioned air inside is not able to extract the heat from your body through convection fast enough compared to the radiant heat the house is transferring to you from the walls, carpet, furniture, et cetera. It is common for people to be clothed in shorts and tshirts during this time of year. Reverse the seasons, the inside air is conditioned to 70 degrees fahrenheit, but the exterior of the house is convecting heat to the lower temperature outside air, also the less daylight intensity and hours of daylight cause the house to receive less solar radiation. The house has less energy to emit infrared radition to the occupants of the house, so that the occupants radiate more infrared energy to the house than what the house emits to them. The inside air is still conditioned, but often the occupants are wearing pants, shirt and sweater to feel comfortable.
Consider the AD 17th and 18th centuries in North America. Houses often have a hearth as part of a fireplace with a chimney, but the chimney is likely unlined. The fuel was firewood. Depending on the layout of the house the primary hearth of a house was the kitchen fireplace, either it was the hall of the house, or it was an extension of the house in order to keep the fires burned for cooking during the summer from further heating the house. If the house were large there may be smaller fireplaces in other rooms.
Colonial houses had offered only scant protection from the winter's ravages. Early colonists spent most of their waking hours confined to the "hall" or central room, where the blazing fire served both to heat the room and cook food. Fireplaces in other rooms, generally smaller than kitchen hearths, provided heat only close to the fire. Insulation was unknown; fireplace construction was not yet based on accurate physical principles. Veterans of British winters, milder and shorter than those of the New England colonies, did not know how to protect themselves against the cold. New Englanders shivered through six or seven months of the year; their diaries record their sufferings as ink froze in their pens while they wrote by the fireside, where oozing sap froze at the ends of flaming logs, and basins of water, even when set directly in front of blazing fires, froze solid. Four-poster beds served utilitarian rather than decorative purposes: in unheated bedrooms, heavy wooden bed curtains insulated sleepers, as well as providing privacy. Some colonists enjoyed the luxury of beds preheated with warming pans, usually copper or brass containers filled with hot coals from the fire. British settlers in the Southern colonies encountered milder, shorter winters, but their winter discomfort may have been nearly as great in houses to accommodate the hot, muggy Southern summers, with more open space, larger windows, fewer fireplaces, and kitchen hearths in separate structures. -- from the book "Never Done: A History of American Housework" by Susan Strasser
The English forrestry practices, particularly their standards of wood processing likely came over with the English colonists, but the constraints that led to those practices did not exist in North America. In England, woodlands were managed and harvested on regular schedules, coppicing trees and bushes, pollarding some trees. The regrowth would be harvested again and again. In the beginning of AD 17th century, a standard for wood sizes was enacted in England, three sizes for the 'billet' with a length of 40 inches and often used as firewood, the 'fagot' a bundle of branches 3 feet long and about 22 ? inches in circumference, 'tallwood' 4 feet lengths of wood, the 'cord' was 24 feet long and consisted of the amount of tallwood that a cord could be strung around; there was also 'bavins' which were smaller bundles of branches but I don't know if this was a standard. In the decades after the enactment in England, English (masonry) ovens were constructed in sizes that took advantage of the standardization of commercially processed firewood. In North America, the vastness of old growth forests made for easy harvesting, and cheap firewood. North American colonists avoided unnecessary labor of cutting firewood down and splitting by using logs cut to cord length (really 'tallwood' length), unsplit in their large hearths, and probably did not even bother with tallwood measurements, if it fits then cut longer lengths.
In colonial days, when cordwood was plentiful, fireplaces 7 feet wide and 5 feet high were common, especially when used in kitchens for cooking. -- from USDA Farmers' Bulletin No. 1889, FIREPLACES & CHIMNEYS, December 1941
This colonial style replica residence of an early 18th century house has a large kitchen hearth on the far end of a room extension off the main structure. Large hearths like this one require respectively large chimneys, and it can be seen on colonial era homes chimneys that are large in comparison to the size of the house. Additionally, in the colonial era it was not known the proper dimensions and ratios that chimneys needed to be in relation to the size of the fireplace they served, so even smaller fireplaces were built with relatively large chimneys.
The smaller fireplaces during the heating season, and a smaller fire during the warm months in part of the large kitchen hearth for cooking, would still have required smaller firewood sizes. Only the term 'cord' survived in North America, and for practical purposes its measurement now represents the volume of stacked firewood, 4 feet lengths of firewood stacked 4 feet tall by 8 feet long. Today, few large hearths exist or wood burning appliances that can accept long pieces of firewood that dealers typically sell partial cords of firewood pieces that are cut to shorter lengths; yet a full cord stack of these shorter pieces still represents a measurement of 4 feet wide by 4 feet tall by 8 feet long.
When British colonists moved out across the seas, coal cookery went with them. The very earliest of such settlers, leaving Britain in the early seventeenth century for America, hailed more from the wood-burning regions of Britain rather than the coal-burning metropolis of London, and finding themselves on a wood-burning continent and encountering new sorts of food, quickly reverted to their old practices. -- from The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman, which is about England, chapter 7, in the section 'Adaptations abroad'
So although elements of coal cookery can be seen in the contemporary food of the US and Canada - particularly in the fondness of toast - these regions of early British colonization owe less to coal than more recently settled places. -- from The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman, which is about England, chapter 7, in the section 'Adaptations abroad'