At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (41 page)

No less perilous were threats to life and limb. Before bed, doors and shutters were double-checked. The writer George Herbert affirmed, “Many go to bed in health, and there are found dead.” Such was the alarming fate of the Hegen family in Knezta, Franken, whose members all mysteriously perished while asleep on Christmas Eve in 1558—Hans, his wife, their three sons, and a maidservant. The day before, each had been “fresh, healthy, and in good spirits.” When discovered, the bodies still possessed their “natural coloring” and did not betray any injuries or wounds. From the murder of Ishbosheth to the loss of Samson’s locks, men throughout history had fallen victim while asleep to their enemies, a late sixteenth-century writer reminded his readers; just as easily he could have included the grotesque demise of Sisera and the beheading of Holofernes.
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Georg Merckel,
The Curious Death of the Hegen Family, Christmas Eve, 1558
, sixteenth century.

In preparation for sleep, families engaged in “hunts” of furniture and bedding for both fleas (
pulex irritans
) and bedbugs (
cimex lectularius
), which had arrived in Britain by the sixteenth century. Lice (
pediculus humanus
) needed to be combed from hair and picked from clothing and skin. The French expression “dirty like a comb” (
sale comme un peigne
) may have originated from this nightly task. Bugs were everywhere, especially given the proximity of dogs and livestock. To keep gnats at bay, families in the fen country of East Anglia hung lumps of cow dung at the foot of their beds, whereas John Locke advised placing the leaves of kidney beans about a bed to avert insect bites.
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Sheets could never be damp from washing (“dirt is better than death,” observed John Byng), and in frigid weather, beds required warming with copper pans of coals or, in modest dwellings, with hot stones wrapped in rags.
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Temperatures dipped all the more quickly once hearths were banked to keep smoldering embers alive without setting homes ablaze. “In the evening,” advised the
Domostroi
, “you should again go all around the house, to look it over and to sniff out where the fires have not been banked.” Some households recited verses in order to charm hearths. “Sleep my fire, like a mouse in a nest,” urged a Latvian verse; whereas English families, according to John Aubrey, marked a cross in the ashes before praying. In addition, most lights were snuffed. “Every night we go to bed, we have nothing but combustibles under us and about us,” warned a writer in reference to the frame houses of urban denizens.
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Not only windows but also chamber doors were shut to “keepe out the evil aire of the night.” If homes boasted curtains, they needed to be drawn to block drafts and stave off rheumatic diseases attributed to sleeping in moonlight. Pepys, to keep from catching a cold, tried to tie his hands inside his bed. To shield heads, nightcaps were customary. “Nothing is more wholesome than to have the head well covered from the dampness of the night air,” proclaimed Boswell.
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Nightdress, for middle- and upper-class families, introduced by the sixteenth century, consisted of simple garments, mostly chemises and smocks. Women cleansed their faces of cosmetics, prompting a Spaniard to jest, “Why, after they have practiced to deceive during the day do they wish to spend the night clean?” The lower classes donned coarse “night-gear,” slept unclad in “naked” beds, or remained in “day-clothes,” either to save the expense of blankets or to rise quickly in the morning. The Westmorland servant Margaret Rowlandson “did not put off her clothes, being to rise early next morning to wash.” On the colonial frontier, a young George Washington wrote of sleeping in his clothes “like a Negro.”
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Within well-to-do households, feet at bedtime might be washed, beds beaten and stirred, and chamber pots set, all by servants. Laurence Sterne referred to these and other servile duties as “ordinances of the bed-chamber.” Of a lad in training, Pepys wrote, “I had the boy up tonight for his sister to teach him to put me to bed,” which included singing or reading to his master with the aid of a “night-light,” commonly a squat candle or rushlight in a perforated holder. Few persons, admittedly, went to the lengths of
Henry V
III, whose bed each night was “arrayed” by ten attendants with pillows, linen sheets, and fine blankets—only after the bottom mattress had been stabbed with a dagger to guard against an assassin.
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To calm attacks of anxiety, individuals at bedtime swallowed medicine, which in France was called a
dormitoire
. Laudanum, a solution made from opium and diluted alcohol, was a popular potion among the propertied classes. The Sussex merchant Samuel Jeake, for a soporific, placed leaves from the poisonous plant nightshade on his forehead and temples. Tiny bags of aniseed bound to each nostril or rags spread with camomile, bread, and vinegar tied to the soles of the feet—“as hot as you can suffer”—were also believed to encourage sleep.
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Alcohol served a dual purpose: it spurred slumber and numbed the flesh on frigid nights. Germans, said Fynes Moryson, refused to “suffer any man to goe to bed” sober. Habitual before bedtime was a
Schlafdrincke
(sleeping drink). “How many men and women go to bed drunk?” a London newspaper asked rhetorically.
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On the other hand, to avoid an upset stomach, common wisdom discouraged heavy suppers. Game and beef were risky at best, and sleep should not follow too quickly afterwards. As Stephen Bradwell insisted, “Let it be two houres at the soonest after supper.” Even by the second half of the eighteenth century, when social elites began to ridicule such “vulgar errors,” many persons clung to timeworn conventions. The diarist Sylas Neville, for instance, skipped eating meat at night, whereas Thomas Turner avoided supper altogether every Wednesday evening. “Light suppers make clean sheets,” counseled an English proverb.
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Moreover, to promote proper digestion, medical authorities urged, as Hippocrates once had, that sleep be taken on the right side of the body after first retiring—at least until the “meat” from supper “descended from the mouth of the stomach.” Then, explained an early sixteenth-century scholar, it “may approche the lyver, whiche is to the stomake, as fyre under the pot, & by hym is digested.” To prevent nightmares and apoplexy, among other maladies, sleeping on one’s back was always unwise. “Many thereby, are made starke ded in their sleepe,” attested the English physician William Bullein.
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The family patriarch bore a responsibility at bedtime for setting minds at rest by conducting prayers. The fabled “lock” of every night, these afforded pious thoughts during sleep. By the sixteenth century, evening devotions had become commonplace. Many households, including servants, assembled with clasped hands. Family prayers could either be a substitute for or a supplement to personal devotions. Only because he had drunk “so much wine” one Sunday did Pepys neglect reading verses to his household—“for fear of being perceived by my servants in what case I was.” A young East Anglian servant, Isaac Archer, noted that “it was the custome of our lads to pray together,” though he himself was occasionally excluded. “Because my speech was stammering,” he explained in his diary, “they said God would not heare mee.”
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Protestant and Catholic verses shared distinctive features. Along with giving thanks for spiritual guidance, requesting peaceful sleep, and asking forgiveness for moral failings, most devotions appealed for divine protection from nocturnal harm. The well-known verse “Now I lay me down to sleep, / I pray the Lord my soul to keep” dates from the Middle Ages. Some prayers spoke formulaically of “works of darkness” or “enemies both bodily and ghostly,”
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but, often, they contained more graphic expressions of nocturnal fears. A seventeenth-century verse sought deliverance “from sudden death, fire and theeves, stormes, tempests, and all affrightments.”
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Rural households in France were known to keep holy water near beds, lest death suddenly strike. According to an ancient prayer, “Sacred water I take. If sudden death takes me, may it be my last sacrament.” In Anjou, a pail of water left overnight in a kitchen supposedly allowed one’s soul, after death, to cleanse itself.
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In addition, less affluent households invoked magic when preparing for sleep. Besides potions to prevent bedwetting and spells to speed slumber, families recited charms to avert nightmares. “No ill dreams shall vex his bed, Hell’s dark land he ne’er shall tread,” comforted an early Welsh verse. In much of Europe, turning over one’s shoes each evening by the foot of the bed was considered a deterrent. In her diary, Cowper, ever the staunch Anglican, relates her servant’s clandestine efforts, through this stratagem, to ease her mistress’s stomach cramps. Insisting that “there was nothing in the feat,” Cowper forbade her servant’s assistance, believing that it was the work of the devil and that she “wou’d not be beholden to him for any benefit whatsoever.” Notably, Cowper observed that, upon refusing such aid, she was “hugely laughed att by some” for her ignorance.
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Matthias Stom,
Old Woman Praying
, seventeenth century.

III

Let the bedsted be large and long and no higher than a man may easily fall into it.

THOMAS COGAN,
1588
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The centrality of sleep to the lives of preindustrial folk is underscored by the importance they attached to their beds, typically the most expensive articles of family furniture. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, European beds evolved from straw pallets on earthen floors to wooden frames complete with pillows, sheets, blankets, coverlets, and “flock” mattresses, filled with rags and stray pieces of wool. William Harrison in 1557 recalled of his youth, “Our fathers, yea, and we ourselves also, have lien full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats covered only with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain or hapharlots . . . and a good round log under their heads, instead of a bolster.” “Pillows,” he noted, “were thought meet only for women in childbed.” In Harrison’s view, bedding was one of the “things” most “marvelously altered in England.” Well-to-do homes by the mid-sixteenth century contained elevated bedsteads with canopies, feather mattresses, and heavy curtains to ward off drafts, insects, and inquisitive eyes. So large was the interior space that wealthy Tuscans referred to each bedstead as a “room.” Bedclothes included linen sheets, wool blankets, and quilts.
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The growth in superior beds mirrored other innovations in domestic comfort and convenience in the sixteenth century. In addition to chimneys, which helped to conserve heat from hearths while dispersing smoke, improvements included partitioned rooms, facilitating the specialization of household space, and glass windows, resulting in greater warmth and enhanced light. The adoption of these and other refinements in the domestic environment would be hastened, beginning in the late seventeenth century, by a major revolution in mass consumption, making household comforts increasingly available to broad segments of the population on both sides of the North Atlantic. But of all these material advancements, none, perhaps, were more popular or more widely enjoyed than improvements in bedding. Beds were among the first items bequeathed in wills to favored heirs as well as the first possessions purchased by newlyweds. In modest homes, beds sometimes represented over one-third the value of all domestic assets. Although humble families often made their own frames, a bed was usually the piece of furniture first acquired upon entering the “world of goods.” In 1598 a German visitor was surprised to find English beds “covered with tapestry, even those of farmers.” Only half in jest, one historian of material culture has quipped that the early modern era might be rechristened the Age of the Bed.
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