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used another person’s bed when travelling, without changing the sheets because he was ‘heavy with pain and
drowsiness.’ The next day, he wrote; ‘I shortly after paid dearly for my impatience, falling sick of the smallpox.’
(Evelyn, p. 234) Having a travelling bed reduced the risk of disease and other infections, because it allowed the
owner to regulate who slept in it. 17 The couple could sleep in relative safety, with a guarantee of quality.
To conclude this section, the bed offered a private space, within a dwelling house. Chambers served as hallways
or ‘through-routes’ for servants or others who called the house their home. Beds were frequently positioned
beside hearths; often as there was limited space and for greater warmth. If a house had just one hearth, then
this would have made it a busy area. The cupboard and tester bed therefore served a critical function: they
provided a small, intimate and enclosed space for the occupants, in a world where privacy remained a luxury.
(Hudson, p. 140) Even among the wealthy, servants needed to enter bedrooms to light and clean fireplaces, and
to access other areas of the house.
The word ‘bed’ had numerous meanings in the seventeenth-century. ‘Bed’ often followed a person through
their life, marking critical stages. To be brought to bed of a child referred to a woman giving birth; this meant
that the bed was associated with life’s beginnings. 18 Childbirth also had the strange effect of enforcing privacy
upon the bedroom by excluding men, but forcing more women than usual into the chamber to assist in the
birth. ‘Bed’ was also inextricably linked with marriage: it formed part of the legal definition; an agreement of
shared bed and board. ‘Bed’ was a social metaphor to describe marriage more generally: if a husband or wife
committed adultery they were said to have ‘defiled’ the other’s bed and to ‘kick’ a husband or wife out of bed
was to deny them sexual intercourse, and perhaps to segregate, or even end, the marriage as a whole. 19 This
close connection with marriage also connected ‘bed’ to sexual intercourse. ‘Bed’ was used to describe sexual
intercourse and ‘bed’ could describe a person’s virginity or virtue. Bed was therefore a word associated not
only with marriage, but with sexual experiences and a person’s sexual character. The final association was as a
space which a person went to when they were sick: when an affliction made someone too ill to stand, they
could be ‘brought to’ or ‘of bed’ or ‘took to bed.’ 20 If sickness ultimately took the person’s life, then bed was also
an ancient word used for ‘grave.’ 21 The deathbed, like childbirth, pushed more people into the bed chamber.
The historian, Lucinda Becker noted that; ‘for dying men and women alike, the deathbed would have been a
busy place, a semi-public event being orchestrated from within the more usually semi-private domestic
setting.’ 22 ‘Bed’ was closely related with critical stages in the human life-cycle, moments which were religious
and supernatural, and where the boundaries of public and private were tested. This was a space of emotional
polarisations: of love, but also of hate, of joy and despair, of compassion and cruelty, and, of boredom and zeal.
It was a space of actual boundaries, between public and private, but also between metaphorical borders:
sickness and health, and life and death.
The latter half of this article focuses on the negative associations of the bed. This was a space which was
considered to be sacred and one where people allowed themselves to be at their most vulnerable. People were
generally without weapons to defend themselves, they were dressed in private garments (if not naked) and
were in that most helpless and blind state of being; sleep. In 2005, Roger Ekrich published At Day’s Close, where
he claimed night-time remained a superstitious and other-worldly episode of day, retaining its own unique
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