The Age of the Bed Changed

the Way We Sleep

A night without electric lights – not to mention glowing screens – is almost unimaginable for modern
residents of wealthy nations. Looking at writings from the British Isles in the early modern era, A. Roger
Ekirch reconstructs what it was like, and how the darkness affected people’s sleep patterns.
Ekirch notes that only the wealthiest families of the era would have had candles to keep their homes
bright. Heading out of the house
on moonless nights meant
navigating by hearing, smell,
and touch, and using charms to
ward off evil spirits. Children
learned early to be aware of the
landscape around their houses
“as a rabbit knows his burrow.”
Still, people found things to do
after dark. Families might gather
around the hearth to mend
clothes and chat, or join a small
crowd at a neighbor’s house to
listen to a storyteller. Men might
frequent the local tavern, or, in a
larger town or city, the brothel.
The environment for sleep itself
changed dramatically between
the fifteenth and seventeenth
centuries, Ekirch writes, going
from straw pallets on the floor to wooden frames with pillows, sheets, blankets, and mattresses filled with
rags and wool. Sixteenth-century clergyman William Harrison recalled a people in his childhood sleeping
with “a good round log under their heads, instead of a bolster” and wrote that pillows “were thought meet
only for women in childebed.”
Still, when beds were introduced people took to them eagerly. Quoting historian Carole Shammas, Ekrich
writes that we might think of the early modern era as “The Age of the Bed.” Beds were the first and most
valuable piece of furniture families acquired, accounting for a quarter of the value of a modest household.
They were also often infested with bugs and shared by several people.
Still, this was far preferable to sleeping in public streets, as the urban poor might have to do, or in straw-
filled barns with a dozen or more other people – the fate of some rural vagabonds.
To post-industrial people, the weirdest part of early modern sleep might be the habit of waking in the
middle of the night. Ekrich argues that Europeans in this era commonly divided the nights into “first sleep”
and “second sleep.” Some people used the time of wakefulness in the night to do chores or commit petty
theft. But many found it a good time for contemplation, quiet conversation, or sex.
Ekrich suggests that this general sleeping pattern wasn’t unique to one time and place. He writes that
ancient Romans and twentieth-century Nigerians in villages without electricity slept in similar ways. Even
modern westerners revert to a pattern including a few hours of nighttime wakefulness when deprived of
artificial light for several weeks. A researcher studying this phenomenon found that people’s hormonal
balance during that nighttime waking period produced “something approaching an altered state of
consciousness not unlike meditation.”
Perhaps, the foreignness of the pre-electric past goes deeper than daily habits and social conventions,
reflecting biological processes that work differently in our era of unlimited light.
https://daily.jstor.org/how-the-age-of-the-bed-changed-the-way-we-sleep/