Did you know that people in the past didn’t sleep in a single eight-hour block? The Medieval Two-Sleep Cycle was a common practice where people slept in two distinct phases—first sleep and second sleep—with a period of wakefulness in between. This nightly pattern, known as biphasic sleep, was a natural and widespread habit across pre-industrial societies, referenced in historical texts, medical writings, and even literature like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Before artificial lighting and industrial work schedules reshaped our sleep habits, medieval people embraced this segmented sleep as part of their daily lives. In this article, we’ll explore how this ancient sleep cycle worked, why it faded, and what it means for modern sleep health.
Rough transcript of Medieval Nights: The Lost Tradition of Two Sleeps
Today, we are talking about sleep and the way people slept before the modern period. There’s a wonderful book called At Day’s Close: Night in Time’s Past, and I’ve talked about it before on this channel. I’m a little bit obsessed with sleep. I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with sleep.
But, as I go through the pre-menopause, sleep gets more elusive as I get older and stuff like that. It’s become something that I think about even more, and how to get sleep, and how to sleep through the night better, and all that. It’s weird when you’re in your twenties, and before you have kids in your thirties, you just don’t think about sleep that much.
You think about going out and partying, and not getting sleep and stuff, and then something shifts, I swear it’s like when middle age hits and you suddenly just become obsessed with your sleep and like how are you getting sleep and all of the stuff. And it starts when you have a baby and you’re like obsessed with their sleep and they’re sleeping through the night and then it shifts over to you.
So I’m in that phase right now in my life where I’m like obsessed with my sleep. I’m protecting my sleep and like making sure I get enough sleep and blah blah blah blah blah. So I’m very interested in how people slept in the past. And it might actually blow your mind a little bit to know that people did not always lay down for eight hours at once and think that was the best way to sleep.
In fact, they slept in two phases. It was biphasic sleep first sleep and second sleep. And then you got up in the middle of the night and did some stuff in the middle. So we’re going to talk about that. But before we get into it, if you want to see more Tudor and British history in your YouTube feed, And who doesn’t?
Why don’t you go ahead and hit subscribe so you never miss a video that I put out. Alright, let us get into it. Let me pull up my notes here. So the historian Roger Ackridge actually wrote this book at Days Closed, Night in Time’s Past. And he talks about this story when he was reading a document talking about a nine year old girl, Jane Routh, in 1699, who woke up from what she called her first sleep.
And this phrase, first sleep, was probably something people passed over, regularly, but it stuck out to him and he wanted to investigate what is a first sleep, just this casual mention. And it actually hinted at a whole pattern of life, one that was so ordinary it didn’t need any explanation at all.
And so for millennia, humans slept in two distinct shifts, so this idea of going to sleep once and Waking up, going to bed at 11 and getting up at 7 or whatever your thing is. That’s a very modern, very new type of thing. So we’re going to talk about how this started, biphasic sleep. What it entailed and how it faded into obscurity for most of us anyway.
My husband still gets up in the middle of the night. He gets up, he has a whole secret life. I swear, it’s the weirdest thing. And it’s always been like that, ever since, for 20 years since we’ve been together. He’ll get up at 2 in the morning, he’ll have a meal, he’ll play video games, sometimes he plays his guitar.
It’s like a whole, he just has a whole thing that he does between 2 and 4. Very interesting. So my husband is doing this kind of medieval pre modern sleeping pattern. So he’s channeling his medieval person without even knowing it. Anyway, biphasic sleep, segmented sleep, refers to the practice of dividing the night into two distinct phases, the first sleep and the second sleep.
Between these periods was an interval of wakefulness known as the watch. This wasn’t a quirk or anything, this was a widespread and normal part of life across pre industrial societies. Historical records are filled with references to this practice. Chaucer mentioned it in the Canterbury Tales. William Baldwin described it in Beware the Cat, a satirical story from the 16th century.
It appears in medical texts, in letters, in diaries, and even in ballads. For example, the old ballad of Robin of Portengale includes the lines, At the wakening of your first sleep, you shall have a hot drink made. And it wasn’t unique just to England. It was across Europe. People had names for their first and second sleeps.
Premier Somme in France, Primo Sono in Italy, and references to the practice appear as far afield as South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It seems that biphasic sleep was a global phenomenon, an ancient inheritance that shaped how people structured their nights. So a typical night in the 16th century would probably look very different from what we do today.
People would go to bed shortly after sunset, probably around 8, 9 o’clock. Those who could afford it would sleep on a mattress with feathers or straw, while the less fortunate would fill their mattress with like plants or grass or even bare floors. Sleeping arrangements were communal, families, servants, sometimes even strangers would share a bed.
You hear these stories all the time about people sharing inns sleeping in the same bed while they were sharing an inn, things like that. That was quite common. We talked a lot about the idea of privacy, that there just wasn’t this idea of privacy like we have. I did an episode on that just a couple months ago, pretty recently.
Anyway. After two or three hours of sleep, they would naturally wake up. A lot of times, too, there were church bells that were ringing through the night, because, of course, you had the church was keeping the hours of the church, and there was complin, there were vespers, there were all of these kind of nighttime services as well.
So you would hear these church bells. So people would wake up for the watch, and this was a period of wakefulness that would last from one to three hours. This was just like their natural rhythm. And during this time, people would engage in a variety of activities. They would do some household tasks, maybe like adding logs to the fire, maybe peeling rushes for the candles, or maybe even brewing beer.
Farmers might check on their livestock or prepare a little bit for the next day’s work. You would also talk to your spouse. That would be maybe when you were having some time with your partner, with your spouse. Maybe some quiet reflection, maybe some intimate time with your partner. Husbands and wives would use this time to talk.
After being busy throughout the day, this was this was like your quiet, sacred time in the middle of the night. Religious devotions also played a role. Christians would use this time for prayer and for meditation. It was just really like your peaceful hour when the world was still, the world was quiet, nobody was up working.
It was the time to just be focused on you and your family and your spiritual life. After the watch, people would return for their second sleep. which typically lasted until dawn. So this rhythm of rest and wakefulness was integral to how people lived their lives. The roots of biphasic sleep stretch far back in human history.
The earliest references can be found in texts, ancient texts, like the Odyssey and works by Roman authors like Livy and Virgil. These sources suggest that sleeping in two phases was a norm for millennia, possibly even among our prehistoric ancestors. That kind of makes sense, right? Many researchers believe this was an adaptive behavior, dividing sleep into two segments.
allowed you to remain alert during vulnerable nighttime hours, reducing the risk of predators coming in or other dangers to you. This practice is often mirrored in nature. Many animals do this segmented sleep as well to maximize their survival. If you have a cat, you will also probably be familiar with bipasic sleep because it seems like, I don’t know if it’s just my cat or what, but Every night, she’s indoor outdoor and every night at about three o’clock is when she wants to go out and she jumps up on the bed and starts scratching and she’s like, all right, I’m awake time to let me up.
Of course, Jonathan’s usually awake at that time anyway, but yeah, sometimes he’s not. Sometimes she comes to me even when he is awake. And that really makes me mad because I’m like, no, I’m not the one who gets up in the middle of the night. Go talk to dad. By the middle ages, this practice of two sleeps had become very ingrained in European culture and it was reinforced by religious traditions.
Monks would rise at midnight to pray. And this habit gradually spread to lay people as well. So then the watch just became an accepted part of life, a cherished part of the nighttime. By the 19th century, biphasic sleep began to change. Why was this? Of course, the answer lies, like the answer to many things, in the Industrial Revolution.
Artificial lighting became more prevalent, so the structure of the night began to shift. There were gas lamps on the street as well, so public lighting allowed people to extend their waking hours far beyond sunset. People could go out. And, go to the pub late and walk home and not necessarily be afraid you were going to be a victim of a crime because there was light and so you could see by the late 19th century, there was electric lighting, which made it possible to stay awake even longer.
This created an entirely new relationship with time and with productivity. Instead of. Going to bed early and waking for the watch, people started going to bed later and compressing their sleep into one single block. Work schedules also played a significant role. The industrial economy demanded punctuality and long hours, so there wasn’t much room for the leisurely middle of the night break.
Sleep became more utilitarian, it was designed to be a rest to fuel the next day’s work, and people started to adapt to this new rhythm and the practice of segmented sleep quietly what does this forgotten habit mean for us today? For one, it challenges assumptions about sleep. Many people experience insomnia or wakefulness in the middle of the night, especially if you are going, a woman of a certain age going through a certain time in your life.
But anyway, people view that as a problem, right? But historical records suggest that this might not be a problem at all, it might just be a part of natural biology. In the 1990s, sleep scientist Thomas Vere conducted a groundbreaking experiment that recreated the conditions of pre industrial life.
Participants were exposed to only 10 hours of light each day, simulating a world without electricity. Within weeks, their sleep patterns shifted. They began sleeping in two phases again, with this period of wakefulness in between. It’s fascinating. So this suggests that biphasic sleep is actually really deeply ingrained in our physiology.
even though modern life suppresses it. For those who struggle with middle of the night wakefulness, this knowledge can be a source of comfort as well. Understanding that segmented sleep was once the norm may help to alleviate some anxiety about insomnia, reframing it as a natural rhythm rather than a disorder that needs to be dealt with.
So there’s something undeniably intriguing about the idea of the watch, and if you are someone who does get up in the middle of the night, And has some time, some productivity time like my husband at 2 a. m. I would love to hear from you in the comments and tell me what you think. These twilight hours offer this unique blend of quiet, of introspection.
of sacredness as well as productivity. For our pre modern friends, it was a time to connect with their family, reflect on life all under the soft glow of the moonlight. So there you go. I’ve talked about this biphasic sleep before in other videos, but I saw something online today about it and I wanted to revisit it because I think it’s a really fascinating part of our history.
And it’s something that we don’t really think about. We just think this idea of going to bed and waking up eight hours later is just the norm and what we’re supposed to be doing. But it’s not necessarily. Again, if you sleep biphasically, let me know about that. What is that like for you? I would like to know.
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
