Bed
our fathers, yea, and we ourselves also, have lien full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats covered only with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain or hap-harlots […] and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster or pillow.
William Harrison, Description of England (1587)
William Harrison's 1587 Description of England singles out an 'amendment of lodging' as one of the more dramatic social shifts of the late sixteenth century; that is, a move away from 'straw pallets' with their rough fabric coverings to comfortable and costly beds. It is not necessary to take Harrison completely at his word to conclude that, for certain social groups at least, significant changes were underway in sleeping practices. As Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson observe, Harrison’s comments ‘express a wider awareness that beds had taken on a new status for the average “good man”: rather than waiting years after his marriage, as he might have done formerly, he now saw the acquisition of a bed as essential to setting up a household of his own’. The bed, however, not only embodied the social position (or at least, the social pretensions) of its owner; as a Key Thing in Renaissance English life, it both expressed and affected the experience of that owner’s selfhood.
Shared bedchambers were not uncommon in early modern England; at the lower end of the social spectrum or among travellers, beds and bedchambers were frequently communal, while several of the better off used a roll-out truckle bed to provide an additional berth in their bedchamber for servants. Nevertheless, it was during the Renaissance that the bedchamber began its transition into a less social space, with the bed moving into a dedicated room, usually located upstairs. More than its location, however, the structure of the Renaissance bed itself is key to exploring the relationship between sleeping practices and selfhood in early modern England.
The nineteenth-century term ‘four-poster bed’ inadequately reflects the nature of the canopied and curtained bed in Renaissance homes and minds. Rather, the language used to describe the bed in the early modern period suggests that, in addition to being an item of furniture which allowed the display of fine carvings and fabrics, the bed had another identity as a domestic space in itself. The wooden headboard and canopy were made of materials similar to those that panelled the walls and ceiling of the bedchamber; hence, these beds were referred to as ‘sealed’ or ‘wainscot’ beds. Furthermore, the space bounded by the bed curtains was sometimes referred to as a ‘room’ in itself.
Hans Vredeman De Vries (designer). ‘Great Bed of Ware’. 1590-1600. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The containing space of the Renaissance bed not only kept potentially harmful or disturbing factors such as light, noise, and cold out; it also served to keep potentially noxious factors in. Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night (1594) paints a lonely picture of bedtime in Renaissance England, with individuals ‘shut seperatly in our chambers from resort’:
A solitarie man in his bed, is like a poore bed-red lazer lying by the high way side; vnto whose displaied wounds and sores a number of stinging flyes doo swarme for pastance and beuerage: his naked wounds are his inward hart-griping woes, the waspes and flyes his idle wandering thoughts; who to that secret smarting paine he hath alreadie, do adde a further sting of impatience, and new lanch his sleeping griefes and vexations.
Nashe’s point that the night was a time of spiritual danger — ‘the Diuells Blacke booke’ — would not have been unfamiliar to early modern readers. Indeed, we might see it scratched into the very structure of the Renaissance bed, whether in the form of religious carvings or more esoteric protective symbols.
However, Nashe’s language is also suggestive of another nocturnal threat. Paradoxically, the very enclosure and isolation of Nashe’s ‘solitarie man’ is associated not only with nocturnal assault from sins and temptation, but with a confusing shift in the boundaries of the self. Is Nashe’s ‘solitarie man’ contained by his body, or by the room-within-a-room of the Renaissance bed, in whose enclosure his ‘idle wandering thoughts’ swarm around like ‘waspes and flyes’? Sleeping in a sealed bed does not define and affirm the existence of the individual; rather, in concert with the changes wrought by drowsiness and dreaming, it produces a diffuse and confused sense of selfhood.
We observe similar confusion between inward and outward spaces in the nocturnal longing of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27:
Weary with toyle, I hast me to my bed,
The deare repose for lims with trauaill tired,
But then begins a iourny in my head
To worke my mind, when boddies work's expired.
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide)
Intend a zelous pilgrimage to thee,
And keepe my drooping eye-lids open wide,
Looking on darknes which the blind doe see.
Saue that my soules imaginary sight
Presents their shaddoe to my sightles view,
Which like a iewell (hunge in gastly night)
Makes blacke night beautious, and her old face new.
Loe thus by day my lims, by night my mind,
For thee, and for my selfe, noe quiet finde.
As with Nashe’s ‘flyes and waspes’, Shakespeare’s mind, when in solitude and repose, is characterised by a sense of movement, beginning ‘a iourney in my head’ that is reciprocal to the immobility of the author’s ‘lims with trauaill tired’. With the would-be sleeper’s thoughts in motion, a disorientating situation arises: the ‘sightles view’ of the darkness around the bed is filled with an image generated by ‘my soules imaginary sight’. This image, originating in the mind of the sleeper, is nevertheless experienced as if it is an object external to the body with its own independent existence, ‘like a iewell (hunge in gastly night)’.
Sonnet 27 does not express the alarming and grotesque elements of the spiritual unease suffered by Nashe’s ‘solitarie man’. However, it does provide a further indication that the sealed Renaissance bed may have produced not a sense of rest, containment, and safety from the terrors of the night, but profound confusion as to the boundaries of inward and outward space.
Niall Boyce is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
Selected Bibliography.
Hamling, Tara, and Catherine Richardson. A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (New Haven & London: Yale, 2017).
Harrison, William. The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account of Tudor Social Life, ed. by Georges Edelen (Washington, DC: Folger Library and New York: Dover, 1994) [First published London: 1587].
Nashe, Thomas. The Terrors of the Night (London: 1594).
Shakespeare, William, Shake-speares Sonnets (London: 1609).
11 August 2022.