Smoke, chimneys, and beds in Tudor times

Posted on by

No part of the past makes sense in isolation. Or it only does when you’re kidding yourself. Take a wider view and it gets messier but more interesting.

I started out wondering where medieval people slept and ended up learning about chimneys, so let’s start with chimneys.

They were introduced to Britain in the twelfth century, but they were only for the super-rich–the kind of people who had a castle or two–or for monasteries. Think of them as the era’s equivalent of a private plane: They weren’t something even your economically well-above-average person would lust after. They were too far out of reach. What most houses had at the beginning of the Tudor era was a central hearth–a nice fireplace on the floor, in the middle of the room. 

Irrelevant photo: wild blackberries, stolen from an earlier post but who’ll notice?

The smoke rose from the hearth and worked its way out through the thatch, if the roof was thatch, or through whatever other openings were available if it wasn’t. Don’t worry, because even if the house didn’t have a hole in the roof above the fire, it would’ve been rich in chinks and openings. If it had a window, it would at best have been a wooden shutter but was more to have been likely oiled cloth. Glass was a luxury item. And I’m going to make a reckless guess and say the door wouldn’t have been a tight fit. 

If all that sounds awful, it also had its advantages. A website that quotes re-enactors from a Welsh museum says that on its way out the smoke would have waterproofed the thatch, killed bugs, and smoked meat hanging from the ceiling.

But that’s only the beginning. I’ve been re-reading Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor and–well, let’s back up, as I always seem to in these posts, and talk about who Goodman is before we come back to our alleged topic.

Goodman calls herself a historian of social and domestic life in Britain, and as far as I can figure out she more or less invented her field, coming into it before respectable historians showed much interest in how ordinary people lived. But she doesn’t just study social history, she inhabits it, working out how people lived and trying it herself. Want to know how they cleaned their teeth? She can compare the virtues of chalk, salt, and the soot a wax candle leaves on a polished surface, because she’s tried them all. 

She consults for museums and for the BBC and has presented some wonderful programs on daily life in various eras. She’s fascinated by how people did ordinary things. 

As she puts it, “Our day to day routines have a huge cumulative effect on the environment, our shopping habits can sway the world’s patterns of trade, how we organise and run our family life sets the political tone of nations. We matter. Us, the little people, women, children and even men. How our ancestors solved the problems of everyday life made the world what it is today.”

Never mind for a moment that today’s world isn’t great advertising for the wisdom of our ancestors’ choices. How many of us can know where our decisions will lead, and how many of our ancestors had much of a range to choose from? Can we not get snotty about this? Most of them were only trying to cook a meal and stay warm. 

Which takes us, handily, back to fireplaces. 

Central hearths were good at warming a room. No heat disappeared up the chimney–there was no chimney–and they kept the floor of the house level nice and warm. This brought the people down to floor level, not just because it was warm but because the clearest air was down below. Sitting on the floor starts to look appealing when the higher levels are smoky. So does sleeping on the floor. You don’t want furniture that lifts your head up into the smoke.

What was it like to sleep on the floor? Well, having read that medieval floors were strewn with rushes, Goodman tried to figure out what that meant. By trial and a couple of errors, she found that if you make them into bundles and lay them somewhere between two and six inches deep, you get a solid surface that’s comfortable to sleep on–both springy and warm. (If you just strew them around, they get caught in your skirts.)

When she watered them lightly every couple of days, they stayed fresh and didn’t catch fire when a spark fell on them (that’s a plus), and they smelled like cucumber (that’s another plus if you like cucumber). And in spite of people walking, cooking, sitting, eating, sleeping, and spilling on them during a re-creation she participated in (and in spite of a family of chickens that no one had the heart to evict), at the end of six months the surface was still clean and when she cleared the rushes all out there was no mess at the bottom. Also no evidence of mice or insects or mold.

So sleeping on the floor? Not a hardship. Which is lucky, because that’s where lots of people slept, not just in the cottages of the poor but in castles. Have you ever wondered where the many, many servants in big households slept? Beds were for the few (to reverse the Labour Party’s current slogan), not the many. So what did everyone else do? I couldn’t help imagining that they had some sort of mattresses, no matter how basic, and I sometimes wondered where they stashed them all during the day. How much storage space could they devote to them?

But no. The lower orders bedded down on the floor, more or less communally, although separated by sex. Come morning, all they needed to store away were some blankets.

As the Tudor era rolled onward, fireplaces became more common, and with them, beds–or at least platforms that raised people off the floor and some sort of mattress to soften them. Bring in a fireplace and you get rid of the smoke (and can add a second story) but the tradeoff is that you get drafty floors and colder rooms. A huge amount of heat is carried up the chimney. Furniture that lifts you off the floor starts to look pretty good. 

That still leaves us with the storage problem, and I’m not sure how they solved that or if the lowest orders still slept on the floor–which was now drafty.

Mattresses ranged from a heap of straw to bags stuffed with everything from straw to wool to down, and bedsteads from simple platforms to boxes to hugely expensive four-poster beds, which you can think of as yurts set up inside a room. Sleeping in a four-poster was the original glamping. Your bed would be covered on top and on the sides, and inside all that covering you got not only warmth but some kind of privacy.

Privacy was a hard thing to come by at this point. 

That doesn’t tell us how many people slept in some form of bed, whether the ones who were left on the floor got something mattressy to protect them from the drafts, or where the mattresses got stacked in they did. Nobody was tracking people’s welfare and no one was keeping statistics–or not that kind of statistics anyway. 

What we do know is that life moved upward, into the now-clear air. And they all slept happily ever after. 

Or some of them did.

42 thoughts on “Smoke, chimneys, and beds in Tudor times”

  1. I didn’t see any mention of that subject which has occupied column inches bar argume nts and dinner conversations since…oh! I forget.Several years and at least three prime ministers.
    For that , I am grateful.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  2. Things hadn’t moved on much from the fourteenth century. Goodman did the experiment with rushes at Guedelon. Her solution makes far more sense than strewing loose rushes over a floor of beaten earth. That would have been dreadful to sleep on and impossible to keep clean.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  5. I always feel smarter after reading your stories. It’s difficult to imagine life around the hearth. It’s more difficult to imagine how folks found the privacy and opportunity to create new life, if you get my drift.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  6. A very interesting piece. I’ve seen several of Ruth Goodman’s tv series and agree with your assessment of her interest and passion for social history through the ages. When our daughters were younger we went a couple of times to a place called Kentwell Manor in Suffolk. They do a variety of period re-enactments throughout the year, several of which are based on the Tudor period. The main one, in summer, involves around 300 people living and speaking as we believe the Tudors did. Absolutely fascinating, and also a wonderful day out – kids can’t help but learn something!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  7. Well this was lovely, and now after searching out info on Goodman I have found a plethora of videos to add to my watch list now that autumn weather is starting to force us inside more. Thank you!

    Like

    Reply ↓

  8. Some of them slept happily ever after… Probably the ones still living without chimneys, and still sleeping on the rush beds, since even with the smokey room, they actually sound like they were the warmer and more comfortable bed options.

    Although, having said that, I wouldn’t mind owning a four poster bed… More for the look of the thing than anything though, since central heating exists these days, so it’s generally warm whether you sleep on a bed or not if the heating is on and you have a blanket. At least, that’s been my experience, based on sleeping on floors, futons, matresses on the floor, camp beds, sofas, hospital beds, various other beds, and once a pile of Lego bricks (I don’t recommend that last one). Although, I have to admit, I never did take detailed notes in an attempt to research the comfort factors involved in the various sleeping options, though I don’t recommend the pile of Lego for comfort, as already mentioned.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • I never heard that and I’d question it. I think the canopies were primarily for warmth, and secondarily to cater for the growing desire for privacy. Unless they had different bugs in the house in the medieval era, the only thing above people in bed would have been spiders, and in spite of what I’ve thought on the occasional night when I didn’t have the oomph to get a duster and scoop them off the ceiling but did have the oomph to worry about them, they don’t drop down. As far as I can tell, they spent too much time getting up there and it’s where they want to be.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

Talk to me

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.