Alan Crosbyreveals how our ancestors slept
Alan Crosby shares his views on family history
OFF THE RECORD
A few days before Christmas last year we stayed for a couple of nights in a ‘pub with rooms’ owned by a major landed estate in the Midlands. What a bed we had! It was a proper four-poster, complete with a tester: the rectangular panel that forms the ceiling of the bed. Sometimes you come across slightly absurd imitations of the real thing, beds with flimsy upright posts and swathes of net instead of heavy curtains – but this had thick wooden uprights, built to last.
What struck us immediately, though, was the height of the bed and its very deep mattress. The top, the sleeping level, was as high as my chest. There was a little portable set of steps to help with the ascent, but getting into bed felt like mountaineering. And once at the summit, there was the ever-present fear of falling out and tumbling into the abyss.
I’ve many times come across entries about such beds when working on probate inventories. They are usually called ‘standing beds’ and might be constructed in situ, so that once built they were unlikely to be moved. Very often, too, inventories list the ‘furniture’ of the bed – the curtains, valance and tester-cloths. The whole ensemble was prestigious and costly: a beautifully carved and decorated bed was a status symbol and heirloom. There our ancestors might have lain, sinking into the luxurious depths of a soft mattress and buried under an immense featherbed. With the curtains drawn to keep out the draughts, even icy winter nights could be cosy and snug.
Of course, most people were not so lucky, and bedstocks are well-nigh ubiquitous in inventories for those lower in status. The word seems designed to confuse any researchers who are new to 16th- and 17th-century handwriting, who may be deeply puzzled as to why bedsocks seem so expensive!
‘Stock’ meant ‘post’ or ‘beam of wood’, so bedstocks were the frames of beds, eight hefty wooden beams – four uprights and four horizontals – that could be slotted and pegged together, or taken apart for easier storage: the flat-pack furniture of 400 years ago. IKEA is nothing new! Because they could be dismantled and reassembled relatively easily, they were ideal for households that fluctuated in size, and we often come across instances where there were several sets in
