Asking how people slept in the Middle Ages sounds embarrassingly pointless. Surely the answer is, the same way we do. 

Well no, they didn’t. That would make the post too short and I want to be sure you get your money’s worth here. They broke the night into two separate sleeps, which is the same way everybody in the pre-industrial world seems to have slept. The sources I’ve found are heavily tipped toward Europe, but some say the practice clings on in unindustrialized pockets of the world today. 

 

The two sleeps

We’re talking, remember, about a time before there was much in the way of artificial lighting, so no electricity, no gas lamps. They had candles, sure, but they were expensive and weren’t all that bright. And when people went to bed,they either blew them out or risked burning down the house. So when it got dark, they–or most of them anyway–toddled off to bed. 

We’ll talk about the definition of bed in a minute.

A couple of hours later, they woke up, not because that was the plan but because they just did, and they spent another couple of hours–let’s say from 11 to 1, although no one would’ve been watching the time–either lying awake or up and about, in both cases without fretting about what was wrong or how they were going to get back to sleep, because waking up in the middle of the night was just what happened.

This went on into the early nineteenth century, and a couple of studies have documented this way of sleeping among non-industrial people and people asked to live without industrial-age lighting and entertainment. 

 

What did they do in the interval between sleeps? 

Some people lay in bed and chatted, because at least in the medieval era, rare was the person who slept alone. Some got up and worked–by moonlight, by starlight, by rushlight (those were the waxed stems of rushes–the candle-substitutes of ordinary households), by candlelight if they could afford candles–although the people who could you probably didn’t need to work in the middle of the night. 

All the folks you’d expect to recommend prayer and meditation recommended the time between sleeps as a time for prayer and meditation, and no doubt some people did both. Folks drank their religion straight back then: no ice, no mixers.

I’ve read about monks and nuns getting up in the middle of the night and traipsing to the chapel for prayers, and it’s sounded downright punitive. I imagined someone having to haul them out of their sleepy little beds. This puts it in a different light. They were awake anyway. If the purpose of their lives was to pray, this was a time to go pray.

The time between sleeps was also a time for sex, and was considered a particularly good time to conceive children.  

Sex when people weren’t sleeping alone? For one thing, sharing a bed didn’t mean all its occupants had to get up or stay in bed in unison. For another–I’ll go out on a limb here (I’ve read this somewhere but haven’t looked for a source to confirm what my memory insists on) and say that sex wasn’t thought of as something people should do in private. Privacy wasn’t a thing yet. (Sex has always been a thing. In the early Middle Ages, even your local lord and lady bedded down in the hall with their kids, their hangers-on, their guests, their attendants, their servants, and anyone I’ve forgotten to list. The solar–a room for the aristocrats alone, along with maybe a servant or three on hand in case they were needed–didn’t come into existence until midway through the medieval period. 

Eventually, people went back to bed for what was called their morning sleep. 

 

Bed sharing

Beds were communal places, and an entire family might sleep together, with the couple in the middle, the girls arranged on the side nearest the wall, with the youngest closest to her mother, and the boys on the other side, also in age order. 

But it wasn’t just the family tucked up in bed. Non-family members would also be likely to crawl in, and they’d be on the outside–guests, friends, servants. And, as one article I found reminds us all, fleas and lice. When people traveled, strangers who stayed at inns would share a bed.

Sleepers and would-be sleepers were expected to minimize their fidgeting and avoid physical contact.

 

Beds

If you were rich enough in the medieval era, your bed was elaborate and impressive, with several mattresses–straw, then wool, then feather, and sheets, blankets, coverlets, pillows, bolsters, all that good stuff. The bed was your most important piece of furniture.

A coverlet? That was a bedspread, although in recent times it seems to have wandered off and become something smaller. 

The curtains and canopies we think of as the mark of the nobility’s beds came into use midway through the medieval period. 

Middle-ranking people had beds with simple wooden bedsteads with plain headboards and as much of the accompanying stuff as they could afford. The main thing was that they were up off the floor. 

Everyone else? It depends on what stretch of time we’re talking about, but at least in the early medieval period, they slept on the floor. They might have had a mattress stuffed with straw, wool, hair, rags, or feathers, or some mix of them. Whatever it was made from, it could be moved out of the way during the day. 

As I write this, a couple of wildflowers called bedstraw and lady’s bedstraw have just come into bloom in the hedges. I haven’t been able to find out much about bedstraw itself, but lady’s bedstraw (the lady in question of the Virgin Mary, not the local Lady Muck) was added to straw mattresses both for its fragrance and to keep fleas away. It was also believed to ease a birth.

If you were at the bottom of the economic and social heap, you slept on straw or hay–or according to one website, the earthen floor. A BBC article says the poor might sleep on a scattering of heather, and I hate to argue with the BBC, but we have some growing out back and it’s pretty woody stuff. I haven’t tried sleeping on it but I have a hunch I’d do better on the bare ground.

 

How do we know any of this?

In the 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch was researching a book on the history of nighttime. He wasn’t expecting to find anything new for a chapter on sleep, but how could he write about night and ignore sleep? So good historian that he was, he started digging through court depositions, where all sorts of odd and wondrous facts about everyday life can be found.

What he found was a seventeenth-century case mentioning, casually, the first sleep, which implies a second sleep. The case was about an incident that happened in the interval between the two. He kept digging and found many mentions of what he was now calling biphasic sleep. It showed up in letters, diaries, medical textbooks, philosophical writings, newspaper articles, ballads, and plays. He found records or hints of it in Europe, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America, and the Middle East, the earliest dating back to the eighth century BC.

And somehow, all of that had slipped out of our awareness and our histories.

*

Important information about Britain’s recent election

In last week’s post, I missed a crucial bit of lunacy about the election. Nick the Incredible Flying Brick stood as a candidate for the Monster Raving Loony Party in Holborn and St. Pancras. His statement to voters said, “We have a manic-festo that includes scrapping January and February. It would help with fuel bills and the cost of living.” He got 162 votes against Keir Starmer’s 18,884.  

Somebody mentioned him in a comment, and I did look for it so I’d know who to thank, but I’m damned if I can find it now. Whoever you are, my thanks. Along with my apologies.