Page 8 - March 2013

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time he was living and working in Bristol. But when
we think of carpets it’s not Bristol but Witney in
Oxfordshire that comes to mind where blankets
were made from the middle ages through until 2002
when the last factory, Early’s, closed. Alongside the
strong Cotswolds wool the secret ‘ingredient’ in the
soft Witney blanket was the lime rich water from the
River Windrush which shrank the cloth so much
that the blankets needed extra pounding (fulling) and
stretching known as tentering which leads to uptight
folk being described as being on tenter hooks.
The Witney blanket even became the currency of
traders out in the colonies when from the 1670s
Witney began supplying the Hudson Bay Company
with Point Blankets. The points are thin black
parallel lines representing quality and weight –
a sort of 17th century bar code. The blankets were
traded with First Nations Indians in Canada for
beaver belts and legend has it that each point was a
unit of currency: 3 points for 3 pelts and so on.
Second Best Beds
Royalty often led the way in bedroom fashions and
so of course this involved a lot of French influence.
Our barons started investing in the rich Eastern silk
fabrics and carpets beloved of the French nobility.
In 1348 Isabella, wife of Sir William Fitz-William
left in her will “a bed from India with carpets”.
Beds and bedding were prized possessions and they
would feature in wills and bequests for the next five
hundred years or so. The most famous bequest of a
bed is undoubtedly William Shakespeare leaving to
is wife his second best bed. This is not the insult it
appears to be at all – the second bed is probably the
treasured marital bed as opposed to the bed for
show, a less intimate object intended to impress.
Now of course we live in a more disposable age and
there is a growing and disgusting habit in London of
unscrupulous buy-to-let landlords, who replace the
mattress for every new set of tenants, to dump the old
one on the pavement. A new form of fly tipping for
which I wish they’d open new cells in The Tower.
Bed Tourism
The four post or great standing bed was introduced,
probably from Austria, in the 15th century. As the lords
moved from one manor to another so their bed went
with them. In large households yeoman hangers, and
yeomen bedgoers were employed to put the beds in
sacks or hides. Portable beds were known as "trussing"
beds, and the hangings were called 'the portable cham-
ber.' The 17th century historian Roger Twysden tells us
the following story about just such a bed belonging to
man of the moment Richard III.
On the 21st of August, 1485, Richard III arrived at
Leicester. The charioteers had proceeded him with
the running wardrobe, and in the best chamber of the
"Boar's Head" a ponderous four-post bedstead was set
up: it was richly carved, gilded and decorated, and
had a double bottom of boards. Richard slept on it at
night. After his defeat at Bosworth field, it was stripped
of its rich hangings: but the heavy and cumbersome
bedstead was left with the landlord, and continued to
be an attraction for years to come and the glory of the
"Blue Boar," being transmitted from tenant to tenant
as a fixture. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the "Blue
Boar" was kept by one Clark, who's wife one day,
while shaking the bed, noticed an ancient gold coin
roll on the floor; this led to careful examination, the
double bottom was discovered, lifted up, and the
interior was found to be filled with gold, partly coins
of Richard III, and the rest from earlier times.
This bedstead with its old tradition long continued to
be one of the sights of Leicester.