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Bonny and buxom at bed and at board
As time went by the Saxon place or
stead
for the bed
was against the wall as a sort of cabin with curtains to
keep out drafts and prying eyes. In
The Anglo-Saxon
Home: A History of the Domestic and Customs of
England from the Fifth to the Eleventh Centuries
the
historian John Thrupp tells us that Saxon wives made
the following wedding vow:
I take thee to be my wedded husband, to have and to
hold from this day forward, for better or for worse,
for richer and poorer, in sickness and health,
to be
bonny and buxom in bed and at board
till death do
us part, and thereto I plight thee my troth.
Troth as in a pledge of loyalty but buxom not in the
modern sense (even though we tend to ascribe the
busty meaning to the mediaeval peasant wench)
buxom in the archaic sense means obedient and
tractable. Which, presumably is why it was dropped!
Still Hitting The Sack
Throughout the long mediaeval period that stretched
from Norman times right through to the Tudors most
beds were still made of hay or straw stuffed into a
sack and most people slept under their everyday cloak
although 12th-century manuscripts show some quite
richly decorated bedsteads with inlays, paintings and
carvings dressed with embroidered covers. Curtains
were hung above the bed and often there is a small
hanging lamp. The Norman bedstead sometimes
added horizontal iron rails, which projected from the
wall, to hang curtains from. This is an Arabian style
that was possibly brought home from the Crusades.
Curtained beds led on to tester or canopy beds from
the 13
th
century. The privacy afforded by curtained
beds gradually led to the evolution throughout the
14
th
century of a separate bed chamber perhaps
housing a bedstead called
The Arabian -
again a
fashion probably inspired by adventures in the Middle
East but separate bed chambers were rare. Often
mediaeval beds were designed to be shared and an
etiquette developed regarding the geography and
hierarchy of your position in a communal bed. But
you were still doing well in life to make it off the
floor. In a great house like Penshurst Place in Kent
the hall became a dormitory at night for the servants
who slept on the floor but who did at least get to en-
joy some warmth from the great fireplace.
Blankets for Beavers
Feather beds arrived in England homes in the 1300s
imporeted from France as we’d yet to learn the arts of
dressing and preserving feathers. The woollen blanket
also evolved in the 14
th
century and although blanket
fabric was the invention of a Flemish weaver, at the