Today's blog is by Elizabeth Sharrett who is studying for a PhD in English Literature at the Shakespeare Institute.
“There’s his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing-bed and truckle bed”
— Host - The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.5.
In a household like Shakespeare’s childhood home, if children survived beyond infancy they moved at nine to ten months of age from sleeping swaddled in a cradle to a truckle bed next to their parents. Truckle beds, like the one at Palmer’s Farm in Wilmcote, were stored under the standing-bed during the day, and pulled out from the foot at night. Up to two to three children may have snuggled together on this low-lying structure until about the age of five or six, when, once they demonstrated that they could carry a candle properly, they slept in their own beds. The importance of ensuring fire safety when five year olds carried open flames in wooden houses was not to be underestimated.
If there were no children in the truckle bed, it was not unusual for servants to occupy it. Indeed, the Friar in Romeo and Juliet references this practice when he advises Juliet on the night she is to drink the “vial…[of] distilling liquor” (4.1.93-94), to make her appear dead, “Let not the Nurse lie with thee in thy chamber” (4.1.92). Othello also may refer to this custom when he commands Desdemona, “Get you to bed/ On th’instant; I will be returned forthwith: Dismiss your attendant there” (4.2.5-7). As most people slept on the floor with bedding made from straw, wool, or feathers, the chance to sleep on a structure that raised them from the cold floor was a luxury indeed.
While sleeping in bed with someone only a few feet away might seem strange to us today, our concept of privacy and personal space did not really exist in early modern England. Though houses like John Shakespeare’s or Palmer’s Farm represent the comfortable, spacious family homes of the well-to-do middling sort, it is important to remember that around fourteen to sixteen people inhabited these residences, including the family, servants, and apprentices. With so many people and so few bedchambers, certainly more people slept in a room than just those occupying bedsteads. Thus, tester bedsteads—like those discussed in my previous blog—often had curtains to provide not only warmth but also privacy, however limited. As we have seen from Stephanie Appleton’s previous post on the parlour, beds were often situated in semi-public spaces in the house. But the use of truckle beds suggests that even when people retired to semi-private areas of the house to sleep, such as an upstairs bedchamber, they did not necessarily enjoy solitude.