The Middle Ages is a time when some decided sleeping in closets for a powerful reason that until now we had not even imagined. These are days when we remember this past and perhaps we should start thinking about this golden age when people had very different customs than today. We live worse or better, depending on how you look at it, the lifestyle was undoubtedly very different from the current one, therefore the expectations of life were different.
Like everything in life, the family you are born into could be important. This way of sleeping had a purpose in the upper classes, it was not something that would be a part of every household. Especially when it comes to the kinds of details we need to know. The closets that people lived in during the Middle Ages had their reason for being located in the wealthier homes that lived in specific areas, where it was colder. These types of wardrobes, bed type, may surprise us or have a certain relationship with those that exist today.
He slept in the cupboards
Today, the world’s population faces a space problem which they did not have in the Middle Ages. Today we have before us some elements which could be essential and which we perhaps had not even imagined until now. We live in smaller and smaller, but more and more expensive, houses.
The price per square meter in the main cities of the world is increasingly expensive. So it’s important to start seeing these types of elements that can be fundamental. An element that will mark a before and after is the way we sleep.
Capsule hotels are a reality in Asian countries, the most populous in the world. It’s a way of sleeping in a hole in the wall as a closet. Something that could end up connecting us to this Middle Ages in which we discovered a detail that may be fundamental and that we perhaps would not have imagined until now.
Centuries ago, people slept in closets, although at this historical moment, the change of sleeping in a closet or not, so it is important to determine some fundamental changes.
This is the reason why in the Middle Ages we slept in cupboards.
These types of wardrobe beds are typical of Northern Europe, as they explain to us on the BBC where they chose to discover one of the pieces from a Scottish museum that we must discover. As they explain: “In a museum in Wick, in the far north of Scotland, there is what appears to be a large pine cabinet.
With its two full-length double doors at the front and a few suitcases stacked on top, it wouldn’t look out of place in a modern bedroom. It even assembles like normal furniture, with each piece fitting together, so it can be easily moved and rebuilt. But this closet isn’t meant to store shirts or jackets; They have no hangers or shelves inside. “It’s a closet bed designed for people to sleep in.”
We continue with the same explanation: “Cupboard beds were versatile pieces of furniture. They were often used almost as miniature bedrooms: auxiliary places for people to sleep where there might not otherwise be enough space. In one case documented by the Wick Society in 1890, a family too large for their one-room house in the Scottish Highlands had several of its members sleeping in cupboard beds in the barn, among dogs and horses. Sharing a box bed with family or colleagues was not unusual. In the 1825 melodrama The Factory Lad, workers slept in stacks of closet beds, with two or three people occupying each bed. Some had holes for ventilation, but too many could have presented a suffocation hazard: one story from 13th-century France tells of a woman who hid three secret guests in a bed closet who died suffocated due to poor ventilation. These beds were particularly common in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. According to an 1840 account, most chalets in Brittany, France included this furniture, usually made of oak. There could be several in a room, and each would have a long wooden chest located at the base.
The main reason for these wardrobe beds was linked to the temperature: “But these coffins for sleeping had another advantage: warmth. Without modern heating or insulation, rooms could reach freezing temperatures in winter, so much so that it was common to go to bed with a hat on, so that only the face was exposed. And at that time, the cold was much more intense. Roger Ekirch, famous professor of history at Virginia Tech University in the United States and author of At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, explains that between the 14th and 14th centuries. In the 19th century, Europe and parts of North America experienced the Little Ice Age. In London, the River Thames froze 18 times, an event that had not happened since 1963. “The newspapers talked about the sap from the logs burning in the chimneys freezing… inkwells freezing overnight,” says he.
