In episode 152 of the Renaissance English History Podcast we continued our tour of the Tudor home, and discussed the Bedroom. Sleeping habits. Beds themselves. The rituals of the bedroom, and even courting.
As usual, I am inspired in this series by Bill Bryson’s At Home: A History of Private Life. You can order it on Amazon here, using my affiliate link. I get a portion of the proceeds, and you get to support the podcast without paying any extra fees. Hoooray!
Related Englandcast Episode:
Episode 024 from 2014: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Tudor England https://www.englandcast.com/2017/04/englandcast-024-pregnancy-and-childbirth-in-renaissance-england/
Dr Sasha Handley’s sleep studies
http://www.historiesofsleep.com/
Rough Transcript of Episode 152: The Tudor Home Tour – The Tudor Bedroom
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts 🎁 for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is episode 152 – and we’re going back to the tour of the Tudor home that we started with the kitchen back in the summer. Today, we’re moving on to the bedroom, and looking at how bedrooms were used, and the changes that were taking place during the 16th century.
But before we do that, I want to remind you about Tudorcon. It’s in just about 2 weeks – and it’s all ONLINE! So you can come from wherever in the world you are. There are lectures and talks from leading Tudor historians and authors, a Tudor cookalong, period entertainment, and more. It’s a weekend Tudor extravaganza, doing our best to bring the learning, fun, and community of Tudorcon live to the virtual world. And the cost for the entire weekend is $29. See the speakers, learn more, and reserve your spot at englandcast.com/Tudorcon2020, and we’ll see you online on October 2!
So now, the Tudor bedroom. I think most of us have heard the story about Shakespeare leaving his second best bed to his wife in his will, and the speculation that that has led to throughout the years as to their matrimonial bliss, or not. But for me, at least, that’s generally where any thought about the bedroom ends. But let’s go back and examine the history of bedrooms.
As we talked about in earlier versions of these home tours, the idea of privacy was foreign to people in medieval and Tudor England. Everyone slept communally. Even Henry VIII, though of course that was largely for safety reasons. But no one was alone. The bedroom was actually a very social and public place – the opposite of how we see it today. You would have all sorts of communal activities in your bedspace, including courtship – but more on that in a bit.
So for the vast majority of history, people slept communally. If you were working in the manor home of a local landowner, you would sleep in the great hall, along with all the other servants. You would sleep on the rushes on the floor, with a bed you made up – making the bed – by putting hay in a big sack.
And of course, the main activity in the bedroom now is sleeping, and I think we need to chat now about the sleeping habits of the Tudors. Dr Sasha Handley at the University of Manchester has been studying the sleep patterns of Medieval and Early Modern England, and has found some fascinating information about sleep patterns in her study that ran through 2017.
During the Tudor period, people believed that the main function of sleep was helping with digestion. Food was heated and purified in your stomach during sleep, and physicians told people to first sleep on their right side, which was believed to be the hotter side, and then turn to the left side. People also tried not to eat very much right before bed – which is still good advice to follow today.
Sleep was a period where the natural and supernatural worlds came together, and you had to always be wary and watchful of spirits, pixies, and monsters who might come into your home while you were asleep. So you took precautions against such spirits, such as turning your shoes upside down to prevent them from putting your shoes on and walking away with them. Also, if you slept in the light of the moon, you might go mad, which is where the word lunacy comes from (luna being the word for moon).
You also prepared for a good sleep by praying and asking for protection of angels throughout the night. This is also good advice for getting a good night’s sleep today – relieving yourself of the stresses of the day by having a mantra or meditative time to switch off the screens and relax. Those of you who had children may remember the importance of a bedtime ritual for babies. Our was bath, read and sing, feed, and then sleep. The Tudors held the importance of sleep so high in their estimation that they also had a number of bedtime rituals.
You would also prepare for sleep by drinking a tonic or hanging something around your neck that would have sleep-inducing ingredients like lavender, rose, chamomile, or even a bit of poppy. These ingredients were known to be cooling – which would stop your body from overheating overnight – and also restful.
Interestingly, the idea of getting 8 solid hours of sleep each night is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Tudors slept in two distinct phases. They would sleep once for a few hours, then wake up, and that was their quiet time to read – there are records of people reading by the light of a full moon – meditate, or have some intimate time with their spouse. The church bells rang even hour on the hour, so they likely got used to hearing the 1am or 2am bell, and woke up to it for another hour or two of awake time before going back to bed for another catnap. These two sleeps were called first and second sleeps.
Let’s talk about beds. Shakespeare’s aforementioned second best bed would have cost about 5 pounds, which was about half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. In many homes, beds would be kept downstairs, even in the main living room, where they could be displayed to visitors, or seen through the window. Bedsharing was common, even among strangers. In inns, sharing beds was common until the 19th century, and there are plenty of diary entries where a traveler thinks he has a bed to himself, and then is surprised in the middle of the night by another stranger who arrived later.
Beds were expensive not just because of the wood, and skill it took to make them, but also because of the bed curtains, which would offer the only privacy that you would get in your bedroom. You would have heavy curtains for winter, keeping it cozy and warm in your little area, and you would change them out for lighter ones in summer. But bedcurtains were also a fire hazard, especially in rooms that had rushes on the ground and thatch in the roof, and as people began to value privacy more, and better heating with chimneys became affordable, the bedcurtains began to fade away.
Bedrooms were shared by servants and children, and they would have slept on a trundle or truckle bed, underneath the main bed. There is a story from the 17th century historian Thomas Aubry about when William Roper came to see Thomas More, proposing that he marry one of Thomas’s daughters, but he didn’t care which one. Thomas marched him upstairs to where both of his daughters were sleeping in the truckle bed next to the parental bed, and pulled the blankets off both girls so William Roper could appraise them. The meat market aspect of this story aside, it’s interesting to note that two teenaged girls of marriageable age were sharing a truckle bed sleeping right next to their parents, which we would likely consider pretty weird today.
If you were really well off, you would have your rope bed – pull the ropes tight each night, which is where the saying “sleep tight” comes from – covered with a straw mattress. Then on top of that you would put a sack of feathers. To keep bedbugs out, you would sprinkle wormwood on your mattress. Then, you would have an early hot water bottle by heating up a rock in the fire, and wrapping it in cloth to warm up the bed before you got in.
The Elizabethan traveller William Harrison once wrote about the beds of the medieval period, hinting that the modern people had become a bit softer:
“… straw pallets, covered onelie with a sheet, under coverlets … and a good round log under their heads in steed of a bolster, or pillow. If it were so that our fathers or the good man of the house, had within seven years after his mariage purchased a mattress or flockebed, and thereto a sacke of chaffe to resh his head upon, he though himself to be as well lodged as the lord of the town, that peradventure laye seldome in a bed of downe or whole feathers; so well were they contended, and with such base kind of furniture…”
In 1582 Thomas Offley, a wealthy gentleman, had an inventory made of his bedroom, and it listed a plain bedstead with wool mattress, feather bed and bolster, white and red blankets, a green coverlet embroidered with letters and flowers, canopy and curtains of yellow and blue dyed canvas as well as a truckle bed for his servant.
Bedrooms were also where your marriage was consummated, and even where you may have courted. It became popular by the 17th century, but even earlier couples who were interested in getting married might participate in ‘bundling’. This was where a girl was wrapped up in a sack and put into bed, the boy was put into bed with her, and a board was put down the middle between them to keep any hanky panky from happening. It gave you a chance to talk and be intimate, in a way, without being fully tempted.
After you got married, the bedroom was part of the marriage. After the wedding reception, before bed, the bridesmaids would bring the bride into the bedroom and undress her. Then the bridegroom would come in and his friends would undress him. And they would put them into bed together. In medieval England, in the morning you might display a bloody sheet to show that the marriage was consummated, and the girl was a virgin.
It should be noted that officially, marital relations were for marriage only, and beds were a constant reminder of the thorniness of bedroom activities. You were forbidden from coupling on feast days, sundays, lent, and other holy days. It’s actually a wonder how any children were born at all. And as for liking the act? No way. Forget that. Especially for a woman. One argument against educating women is that it might titillate them a bit too much, and lead them to desire … well… men. You were meant to lie back and think of England, and have that be it. Women were told that to avoid arousal, they needed to get lots of fresh air, avoid anything stimulating like reading, and not really do much thinking. It should be noted that syphilis had developed by 1495 when some Italians had developed pustules on their skin. By 1503 it was in England, known as the French pox. It spread throughout the 16th century, and became a warning against engaging in any sort of extramarital coupling.
The bedroom is also where life began, as it’s where a woman gave birth. Experienced women would gather in the bedroom with the mother. I did do an episode on pregnancy and childbirth in medieval and Tudor England, so I won’t go into that detail here, but you can check that out if you are interested – I’ll put the link in the show notes at englandcast.com/bedroom. But it’s interesting to note that bedrooms were where the most important events in life happened. You were born in a bedroom. You were married in a bedroom. You gave birth in a bedroom. And you died in a bedroom.
Dying was a more public event than it is today. There were so many interesting ways to die in the pre-modern era – the itch, freezing, sore throats, worms, french pox, drowning (nearly 40% of accidental deaths), mortification – whatever that is – and listed as a leading cause of death in the mortality rolls was teeth – which may refer to when teeth fall out because of scurvy. Looking at death rolls from pre-modern England includes causes of deaths like fright, drinking cold water, or stagnation of the fluids. Also, of course, for women there was childbirth – one in 5 women died in childbirth, and nearly a quarter of all marriages were re-marriages because one spouse had died.
And so death was public, and mourning was an important part of life, much more so than today.
In the 19th and 20th century we began to move to hospitals for many of these life events, and so the bedroom may have become more private since those previously public rituals no longer happened there.
By the 19th century, privacy was becoming more important, and even the middle classes expected to have privacy. Homes began to have hallways with bedrooms off to the sides with closing doors. And so the importance of beds, and the ritual of the beds began to disappear. As the scientific revolution began to move us to a world that is explainable through science, the rituals to fend off spirits and the otherworldly visitors have disappeared as well. Though perhaps bringing some of the ritual back might help us all get a better night’s sleep.
So that’s it for this week. You can get show notes with sources at englandcast.com/bedroom. And do let me know what you thought about this episode -You can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or through twitter @teysko or facebook.com/englandcast. Thanks so much for listening.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]