If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home Read Free

in the 1860s record similar sleeping arrangements, though by then they must have been exceedingly old-fashioned: ‘There were three or four beds in a room. Many of the men had folding or press beds here and there in the pantry and the hall.’
    But the Tudor age also saw one of Europe’s greatest inventions take on a fixed form. The four-poster bed was often the most expensive item in a house, and was an essential purchase upon marriage. (If you were lucky, you inherited yours from your parents.) Its canopy protected you from twigs or feathers falling from a roof which might lack a plaster ceiling. Its woollen curtains provided warmth, and also some privacy. It’s very likely that even in a middle-ranking Tudor household the master and mistress would be sharing their bedroom with children or privileged servants using pallet beds or even wheeled truckle beds that lived underneath the four-poster during the daytime.
    On a Tudor four-poster, the mattress lay upon bed-strings made up of a rope threaded from top to bottom and side to side. This rope inevitably sagged under the sleeper’s weight and required regular tightening up, hence the expression ‘Night, night, sleep tight’.
    Pictures of pre-modern people in bed often show them in a curious half-sitting position. Propped up against pillows and bolsters, they look rather uncomfortable, and one wonders if they actually slept like that. Perhaps the answer is that art did not mirror reality, and that artists always positioned their models to get the best possible view of their faces. (Also it isn’t likely, as so many contemporary images seem to suggest, that medieval kings slept in their crowns.) But I think the explanation for the pose is that beds strung with rope cannot fail to dip in the middle and feel rather like hammocks. In fact, sleeping on one’s front is well-nigh impossible in a rope-strung bed, as I discovered when I spent the night in the medieval farmhouse at the Weald and Downland Museum.
    On into the seventeenth century people were still accustomed to share their beds. When the daughter of Lady Anne Clifford was nearly three, her maturity was measured with three changes in her daily life: she was put into a whalebone bodice, left free to walk without leading strings, and allowed to sleep in hermother’s bed. Sharing a bed was the action of a grown-up, not (as now) of a child.

    Did kings really wear their crowns in bed? And did medieval people sleep sitting up?
    Indeed, if you’d slept all by yourself in the ‘Great Bed of Ware’, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, you might well have felt a little lost and lonely. It’s a massive 10 ft 8½ ins wide. Dating from between 1575 and 1600, and once the property of the Crown Inn in Ware, it could accommodate a considerable number of sleepers. No less than twelve people once spent the night in it together (although that was ‘for a frolick’).
    For people rich enough to possess a four-poster and all the appropriate sheets, hangings and linen, the ceremony of getting into bed involved a certain amount of ritual and help from their servants. A foreign phrase book for visitors to England published in 1589 includes a section on what an overseas tourist might expect to say to his hotel chambermaid as she prepared him for sleep:
My shee frinde, is my bed made? Is it good?
Yea, Sir, it is a good feder bed, the scheetes be very cleane.
I shake as a leafe upon the tree. Bryng my pillow and cover me well: pull off my hosen and warme my bed. Where is the chamber pot? Where is the privie?
At the right hand. If you see them not you shall smell them well enough.
My shee friende, kisse me once, and I shall sleape the better.
I had rather die than to kisse a man in his bed, or in any other place. Take your rest in God’s name.
I thank you, fayre mayden.
    Samuel Pepys, merely a prosperous seventeenth-century civil servant, nevertheless had servants to help him at bedtime: one day he wrote that he’d ‘had the boy