If Walls Could Talk Read online

  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 her mother’s bed. Sharing a bed was the action of a grownup, 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 up tonight for his sister to teach him to put me to bed’. A man of his time, his bedroom hours were not restricted to sleeping: in his diaries, he may also be found using the room for playing his lute, reading, singing duets, discussing music with a friend, hearing his serving boy’s Latin translation, arguing and teaching his wife astronomy.

  Pepys’s bed would have been made with a feather mattress placed on top of the one stuffed with straw. A feather bed was a prized possession: no wonder, as fifty pounds of feathers had to be saved from the plucking of numerous geese. Sometimes female servants in the kitchen were allowed to keep the feathers of the birds they’d plucked for the table as a kind of dowry, and saved them up for a marital feather bed. Such a bed needs constant punching, turning and shaking to keep it fresh and to disperse the lumps, and a new one was not necessarily more desirable than an old one because of the farmyard scent it would emit.

  Efficient housewives would try to amass a large amount of bedlinen so that they only needed to do a big load of laundry once a month. When James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited the Isle of Skye in 1773, the latter slept in the actual bed at Flora Macdonald’s house in which Bonnie Prince Charlie had spent the night when he was on the run from the English a few years previously. Mrs Macdonald even had the Bonnie Prince’s own dirty sheets kept safe and reverently unwashed, and was rather ghoulishly saving them for the wrapping of her own corpse.

  Boswell noted that on this remote Scottish island people continually came barging into his bedroom. ‘During the day, the bedrooms were common to all … children and dogs not excepted.’ He was rather surprised by this because, by the Georgian age, the wealthy urban classes had begun for the first time to expect to be left alone in their bedrooms.

  The conventional design of a middling seventeenth-century house – perhaps a farmer’s, or a tradesman’s – had an upper floor with the bedrooms leading off each other. This meant that the users of the second room could only access it through the first. In the eighteenth-century townhouse, though, an increasing demand for privacy meant that space was now being given over purely to circulation. The classic tall, thin, terraced townhouse had a landing on each floor, with two separate bedrooms opening off it. Now the people occupying the smaller, back bedroom could reach their room directly from the stairs, without passing through someone else’s room first.

  The next step, in larger houses, would be the corridor: its appearance at the very end of the seventeenth century allowed every bedroom to become completely independent and private. Cassandra Willoughby, an interested poker-about in other people’s houses, thought it worth noting with approval in 1697 that one Mr Arthington’s new house had an arrangement of balconies which allowed ‘a very convenient passage from one room to another without making any of the Bed Chambers a thorough fair’.

  So the Georgians began to treat their bedrooms as more exclusive, private spaces than the Tudors had done. It became customary to hang a bedroom door so that it opened inwards, towards the bed. ‘The idea behind this is that the person entering shall not be able to take in the whole room at a glance as he opens the first crack of the door,’ explained Hermann Muthesius, a German commentator on British homes, in 1904. Instead, a visitor must circumnavigate the door ‘to enter the room, by which time the person seated in the room will have been able to prepare himself suitably for his entry’.

  But bedrooms were still to some extent social, used for cards or tea or gatherings of friends, or else for writing or business or study. In William Hogarth’s picture The Countess’s Levee (1743), the countess in question has no less than ten people in attendance to help her dress: hairdresser, flautist, singer, priest, female friend, black page; even a boy from a toy shop has visited to offer his wares. But the countess is a flighty character, and her male guests are clearly undesirable, unmanly figures. Oliver Goldsmith in 1765 described such a bedchamber party:

  Fair to be seen, she kept a bevy

  Of powdered Coxcombs at her levy.

  His disapproval shows that this kind of bedchamber socialising was beginning to be thought inappropriate. The next stage in the bedroom’s development occurred in the Victorian age, where separation and privacy became not only desirable, but essential, and its achievement a source of paranoid anxiety. Men and women were to be kept apart, as were menservants and maids, and bed-making became an ever more time-consuming and expensive ritual.

  For the Victoria
n upper classes, it would be unthinkable for a husband and wife with a large house to share a bedroom. This was an age in which shame and scruple grew up around sex, with ladies knowing less about it and fearing it more, and their husbands shielding them from carnal knowledge. The activities of the bedroom were now limited to sex and sleeping alone, and the other social purposes of the room fell away. The Architect magazine was very strict on the matter, stating that using a bedroom for anything other than sleeping was ‘unwholesome, immoral and contrary to the well-understood principle that every important function in life requires a separate room’.

  His dressing room was the place where a well-off gentleman often slept, perhaps slipping in late after an evening spent smoking with his male friends. A lady’s own dressing room might be called her boudoir, a room which takes its name from the French verb ‘bouder’, to sulk. This ideal of separation, once it became established in the homes of the rich, looked modern and desirable and was something to aspire to for the middle classes. The early twentieth century saw them emulating it in a small way by sleeping happily in twin beds in their semi-detached homes.

  The beds in the Victorian home were more elaborately made than ever. Nineteenth-century household manuals devote much attention to the need to keep beds fresh, aired and layered with a multitude of sheets and blankets. They seem almost to fetishise bed-making, but then again a damp bed could be extremely dangerous in an age of tuberculosis.

  In 1826, coiled metal springs began to replace the old rope bed strings. Now too the wool and linen of earlier beds were replaced with a new wonder product whose profits powered Britain into the industrial age. The nineteenth century was an age of cotton: half of the value of Britain’s exports lay, by the 1830s, in cotton textiles alone. It was first India, and then America, that supplied the raw cotton spun and woven in the mills of Lancashire. The number of mills in Manchester (or ‘Cottonopolis’) peaked in 1853, when there were no less than 108 of them.

  The products of these mills were jealously hoarded by Victorian housewives who prided themselves on their well-stocked linen cupboards and carefully husbanded their sheets by reusing the top sheet as the bottom one after a fortnight’s use. Victorian bed-making was tight with tension, and Mrs Panton, author of From Kitchen to Garrett (1887), confided her fears that no servant could ever make a bed to her obsessively high standards. ‘I have never yet found in all my experience a servant who can be really and truly trusted to properly air the bed,’ she complained. Inevitably a servant’s ‘first idea is to cover it up and get it made’, leaving it ‘stuffy and disagreeable’.

  All very well – but just imagine the labour involved in ‘properly airing’ a Victorian bed. It consisted of a bedstead, a sheet of thick brown Holland fabric to cover the metal springs, then a horsehair mattress, feather mattress, underblanket, undersheet, bottom sheet, top sheet, three or four blankets, eiderdown and pillow covers. Mrs Panton recommended stripping all this off, every day: ‘there is not one single thing that should be left on the bed once one is out of it. Do not be content with turning all the bed-clothes over the rail; see they are all pulled out from under the mattress, separated, and hung up.’ She then advised that her unfortunate servant should ‘pull off the mattress, placing it as close to the window as it will go’. She also advocated that the frilled pillow cases decorating the pillows during the day be removed every night, ‘and replaced by plain ones, from motives of economy’. At Tatton Old Hall in Cheshire I had a go at making a Victorian bed according to her instructions. It took half an hour, and I simply wasn’t strong enough to turn the horsehair mattress without help. No wonder Mrs Panton’s servants skimped.

  Frilled pillow cases would not have made an appearance in Mrs Panton’s servants’ bedrooms. These, Victorian household manuals insisted, were to be kept as scrupulously simple as possible. ‘A servant’s bedroom should have as few articles in it as are consistent with comfort,’ recommended Cassell’s Household Guide (1880s). ‘A bed and bedstead … unbleached sheets … inexpensive coloured counterpane, a chest of drawers, a looking-glass, washstand … and a chair, are all that is needed.’ It sounds more than a little prison-like.

  Mrs Panton also agreed that servants’ rooms should not be ‘unduly luxurious’, though she did concede that each individual should have a separate bed. She treated her maids rather like animals, expecting little from them in terms of taste or care. Curtains should be forbidden, and ‘neither should their own boxes be kept in their rooms … they cannot refrain somehow from hoarding all sorts of rubbish in them’. Given that their trunks, brought from home, were the only private space that the servants possessed in their employer’s house, it seems more than mean of Mrs Panton to take them away.

  The growing awareness of the existence of germs and the subsequent Sanitary Reform Movement brought an end to the most extravagant frills and furbelows of the heavily draped Victorian bedroom. Edwin Chadwick’s report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842) stressed the economic value of preserving workers from disease by keeping houses clean. Sanitary reformers favoured iron for bedsteads because, unlike timber, it failed to harbour lice and other nefarious pests. The only really certain way of getting rid of the bugs from a wooden bed was to burn it. So iron became the material of choice.

  Yet the bed layered with sheets, blankets and eiderdowns persisted into the 1900s, and the labour of making it was still faithfully performed. The duties of a housemaid from the early twentieth century show that the occupant of a bedroom in even an only moderately grand house might by now have slept alone, but still shared the use of the space with at least one other very busy person:

  Rise 6.30 am Open windows, etc Prepare early tea Take hot water to the bedrooms Prepare baths Sweep and dust hall, clean doorstep Lay and light fires After breakfast, make beds, empty slops and tidy bedrooms Prepare rooms for sweeping, clean them thoroughly Be dressed [in uniform] by 3pm Take hot water to bedrooms before dinner Light fires and gas, draw curtains If needed assist with toilet of younger ladies or guests Help wait at table if needed Turn down beds and prepare bedroom for the night.

  It wasn’t until the 1970s that the greatest revolution yet in bed-making occurred. This was the decade during which the duvet arrived from Scandinavia. With it the use of top sheet, blankets and bedspread would almost disappear, or at the very least, would come to appear deliberately nostalgic.

  Terence Conran deserves the credit for introducing what was initially known as the ‘Slumberdown’, or by the alternative name which reveals its origins, the ‘continental quilt’. Only a little later, after the French had enthusiastically adopted its use, did it become known by the French word for ‘down’: duvet.

  Duvets were associated with liberation from the drudgery of bed-making, but also with liberation of other kinds: ‘sleep with a Swede’ was an early advertising slogan in this newly permissive age. Duvets and their covers were sold in Conran’s new chain of Habitat shops, and Patricia Whittington-Farrell was one of the demonstrators employed to show customers just how quick and easy they were to use. She spent her days taking the covers on and off, and demonstrating the art of making the ‘ten-second bed’. When I met and talked to her, she could no longer quite meet her ten-second standard, but she was still hugely enthusiastic about Habitat and the life-affirming qualities it represented to the young 1970s housewife.

  The ‘ten-second bed’, put to rights with the flick of a wrist, also made a proud appearance in Habitat catalogues. The fabrics pictured were boldly coloured or patterned, as far distant from the pristine white of Victorian bed linen as possible. Modern and striking, they were navy, magenta, mustard, striped or flowered. People experimented by buying duvets for their children first, and those born in the 1970s – myself included – grew up knowing nothing else (though I remember overhearing the reservations of my grandmother and her friends: ‘Isn’t it heavy? Isn’t it hot?’).

  But few people, once they’d tried duvets, went back to sheets and blankets. In fa
ct, anyone still found sleeping under many layers of bedding is actually indulging in conspicuous consumption: they, or their staff, have the time to put such a bed back together in the morning, and to clean the component sheets, blankets, eiderdowns and throws according to their various complicated requirements.

  The simplicity of most modern beds – just one mattress, just one covering – takes us back in a strange kind of circle to the medieval period, when a sack full of straw and a cloak were all one needed.

  2 – Being Born

  Grant we beseech thee to all infants yet unborn, that knit together with their due veins and members, they may come forth into this world sound and perfect without fault or deformity.

  Thomas Bentley, a prayer for pregnant women, 1582

  Until lying-in hospitals began to appear in the eighteenth century, nearly everyone was born at home. Life began in a bedchamber, and more often than not it ended there too, perhaps in the very same family bed. Until these great events were shuffled off to hospitals, this room was the first and last sight a person saw.

  Any expectant mother today feels some sense of trepidation, but in the past the stakes were much higher. Childbirth was the biggest risk to life for young women, and the bedchambers to which they retired as their time drew near were frightening, daunting places. The medieval death rate was one in every fifty pregnancies. Considering that it wasn’t unusual for a woman to give birth a dozen times, the odds quickly mounted up for reproductive wives. Many pregnant Tudor ladies had their portraits painted for the poignant reason that they might well have been saying goodbye to their husbands for ever when they disappeared into confinement. If so, their families would at least have had a final image of a lost loved one (plate 8).