At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (42 page)

Anon.,
Tobias and Sara
, ca. 1530. The Old Testament couple sleep contentedly under the sumptuous covers of an elevated bedstead more representative of a wealthy sixteenth-century household. Note the pillows, heavy drapes, and slippers, as well as the nightcaps to protect their heads from the night air. In lieu of a chamber pot, a “close-stool,” a small box-shaped privy, appears to sit in an alcove behind the bed.

Families invested heavily in beds not only as a mark of social prestige but also for their physical comfort. A bed, of course, served many functions over the course of a lifetime. It was where most persons were conceived and born, convalesced from illness, made love, and died. “The near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe,” wrote Isaac de Benserade. No other role, however, matched the bed’s everyday importance in facilitating sleep. “Because nothing,” remarked the sixteenth-century Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, “is holesomer than sounde and quiet sleepe,” a person needed “to take his full ease and sleepe in a soft bedde.” Declared another, “Let the bed bee soft, well shaken, and made rising up toward the feete.” Elevation was essential, Stephen Bradwell explained in 1625. “The nearer the earth, the more deadly is the air; and the immediate stroke of the cold ground is very dangerous.” A raised bed frame also permitted storage of a “truckle” or “trundle” bed underneath during the day.
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Much of the population beneath the middling orders, however, still suffered from tattered blankets and coarse mattresses, with many families hard put to afford those essentials. In Gloucestershire during the late seventeenth century, most estate inventories left by householders worth less than £50 (weavers, small farmers, poorer artisans) contained mattresses and bedsteads but not sheets. Bereft of any comforts was a weaver in Hastings visited by John Taylor the Water-Poet: “No lodging but the floor, / No stool to sit, no lock upon the door, / No straw to make us litter in the night.”
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In Scotland and Ireland, entire families slept upon earthen floors strewn with rushes, straw, and heather. Not only was the cost of bedsteads prohibitive, but they occupied valuable space in cramped dwellings. Of the “better sort of cabins,” a visitor to Ireland found in the late 1600s, “there is generally one flock bed, seldom more, feathers being too costly; this serves the man and his wife, the rest all lie on straw, some with one sheet and blanket, others only their clothes and blanket to cover them. The cabins have seldom any floor but the earth.” As the acerbic writer Ned Ward ridiculed, “The
beds
are upon such a firm foundation, that nothing but an
earthquake
can move them.”
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William Hogarth,
The Idle ’Prentice Returned from Sea and in a Garret with a Prostitute
(pl. 7 of Industry and Idleness), 1747. A bed shared by Tom Idle and a prostitute features sheets and a blanket, but the wooden bedstead has collapsed amid the squalor of their rat-infested garret.

Little better were quarters for servants, unless allowed to sleep with a member of their master’s family. “As for servants,” Harrison wrote of the early sixteenth century, “if they had any sheete above them, it was well, for seldom had they any under their bodies, to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas of the pallet and rased their hardened hides.” Even by the 1700s, the most fortunate domestics in France received only narrow cots to support their straw mattresses; whereas a London servant, Mary Clifford, before being beaten to death in 1767, often was forced to lie in her master’s cellar, “sometimes” having a “bit of a sack” and a “bit of a blanket” for bedding. Pepys also forced his “little girle” servant to lie in the cellar, after she was beaten one evening. Apprentices and journeymen reclined wherever space permitted, including on the floor of their masters’ shops. More fortunate were journeymen bakers in Paris, who slept in empty flour sacks on top of warm ovens.
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Beggars and vagrants fared the worst of all. The urban poor slept in doorways fronting public streets or, if lucky, atop or beneath wooden platforms (“bulks”) abutting shop windows—“bulkers,” these indigents were nicknamed in England. The fifteenth-century French poet François Villon wrote of “outcasts under butchers’ stalls.” In 1732, the London Court of Common Council observed that “divers poor vagrant children are suffered to skulk in the night-time, and lie upon bulks, stalls, and other places in the publick street.” Some years hence, youths were found sleeping within hollow trees in Hyde Park. Hayracks, stables, and barns afforded “nests” for rural vagabonds, such as the thirty men, women, and children found “naked in straw” in a barn near Tewkesbury in 1636. “To lie at the sign of the star” (
coucher a l’enseigne de l’estoile
) was a French expression for the fate of countless paupers. Alternatively, many of the “poorer sort,” in such far-flung locations as Naples and Philadelphia, took refuge at night inside caves.
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Inadequate bedding meant that families in the lower ranks routinely slept two, three, or more to a mattress, with overnight visitors included. Sharing not only the same room but also the same covers conserved resources and generated welcome warmth during frigid nights. An Italian proverb urged, “In a narrow bed, get thee in the middle.”
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Probably most parents slept apart from children other than infants, although entire households of European peasants, numbering up to five or six persons, occasionally shared the same bed. There was little evident dissatisfaction. “Do you not remember those big beds in which everyone slept together without difficulty,” queries a dialogue of Noël Du Fail, a sixteenth-century storyteller. In poor households, as the French historian Jean-Louis Flandrin has pointed out, the communal bed enjoyed a special aura. Often the only meeting-place for families apart from meals, it was a critical source of domestic cohesion.
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“To pig” was a common British expression for sleeping with one or more bedfellows, with designated positions for family members according to age and gender. Of Irish households, an early nineteenth-century observer recorded, “They lie down decently and in order, the eldest daughter next the wall farthest from the door, then all the sisters according to their ages, next the mother, father and sons in succession, and then the strangers, whether the travelling pedlar or tailor or beggar.” Males, by lying closest to the door, secured the household before retiring. More important, female members of the family were insulated from both invited guests and unexpected intruders. Forced to sleep overnight at the home of an acquaintance, Jacques-Louis Ménétra slept on one side of the bed, with his host in the middle, and the host’s wife next to the wall.
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Peasant families at night brought farm animals under their roofs, still a customary practice in traditional societies today. Besides providing protection from predators and thieves, boarding beasts generated greater warmth, notwithstanding the “nastiness of theire excrements.” In eighteenth-century Wales, “every edifice” reportedly represented a “Noah’s Ark”—among other reasons, Welsh peasants believed that cows yielded better milk if allowed to view a fire. And they were easier at night to milk indoors. Often, stock were confined within homes to adjoining biers, though pigs were known to roam freely. In Scotland and parts of northern Europe, curtained beds were built into walls, in part to allow animals additional room. According to a visitor to the Hebrides in the 1780s, the urine from cows was regularly collected in tubs and discarded, but the dung was removed just once a year.
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IV

The bed is the best rendezvous of mankind.

SIR THOMAS OVERBURY,
1614
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Even well-to-do individuals, when separated from home, occasionally shared beds overnight. Proper behavior required that bedfellows adhere to well-understood conventions, especially among strangers. New norms of civility in Western society extended to slumber. A “good careful bed-fellow” was expected to lie still, keep to himself, and not pull away the blankets; and “when ze have talkyd what ze wyll,” to “byd” your sleepmate “gode nyght.” Among the bons mots contained in a French phrase book compiled for English travelers: “You are an ill bed-fellow,” “You pull all the bed cloathes,” and “You do nothing but kick about.” Few protected their prerogatives as zealously as Philippe d’Orléans, the only brother of Louis XIV. Confided his wife, the Duchess, to a friend: “When His Grace slept in my bed I had to lie so close to the edge that I sometimes fell out of bed in my sleep, for His Grace did not like to be touched, and if perchance I happened to stretch a foot in my sleep and to touch him, he would wake me up and scold me for half an hour.”
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By the eighteenth century, communal sleep inspired widespread disdain among the gentle classes, likely spawning the contemptuous term “bed-faggot.” In no other sphere of preindustrial life did a mounting appreciation for personal privacy among the upper ranks of society manifest itself more plainly. Many religious leaders added their voice, condemning the morality of families in common beds.
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Yet, often, even in middle-class households, bedfellows were thought a blessing. Sleeping beside a familiar soul, whether a family member, a fellow servant, or a friend brought advantages beyond enjoying another’s warmth or saving the cost of an extra bed. It also provided a sense of security. On especially foreboding nights, friends and relations, to allay common fears, slept under the same covers. Boswell, seized by “gloomy terrors” as night approached, importuned a friend to share his bed since he “durst not stay” by himself. Another evening, after conversing about apparitions (“I was afraid that ghosts might be able to return to earth”), he again was tempted to join a companion. So fearful of the devil was the Pennsylvanian Isaac Heller that “many times rather than lay alone” he “got up & gone to bed with black persons” on the farm where he labored.
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Doubly appealing were the close bonds of affection between bedmates, fostered by hours of intimate conversation. Some persons, of course, rapidly succumbed to exhaustion. Richard Baxter thought workers in the evening “so toiled and wearied with hard labour” that they could “scarce open their eyes from sleeping,” and a London beer porter attested in 1758, “Our business is very laborious, so that we soon fall asleep after we get to bed.”
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But most members of preindustrial households probably did not drift quickly to sleep. Whereas the current time for lapsing to sleep averages from ten to fifteen minutes, the normal period three hundred years ago may have been notably longer. During a recent study designed to simulate sleeping conditions at night before the advent of artificial lighting, subjects remained awake for two hours after entering their beds. Much more typical in the past, probably, was the regimen followed by a dutiful daughter in
The Manners of the Age
(1733): “In bed by eight—her blessing ask’d, at seven; in her first sleep at nine.” Elizabeth Drinker observed, “I retire about 11 o’clock, and seldom or ever, I may almost say never, am asleep till after midnight.”
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