Notes on…interiors

There have already been one or two accuracy-related gripes about the BBC’s summer extravaganza The White Queen, but one anachronism was especially interesting: it was a touching scene of a medieval mother waking her medieval children from their medieval slumber. They were all wrapped together in a lovely bed in lovely sheets and the room was a lovely whitewashed, heavily beamed yet airy attic, the windows of which were diaphanous with linen. It was more The White Company than The White Queen.

The problem is that no one had bedrooms in 1464, not even the King (he had a huge curtained bed, which he often shared with friends as well as anyone he might be having sex with that night, and whoever his friends were having sex with that night, and sometimes his wife, and it came with him around the country). Most people slept on straw palliasses rolled out on the floor around the fire — which itself was usually on stones in the middle of the room so to be as far from the flammable wood and wattle walls as possible. When the eighth bell rang, any furniture the householder possessed would be pushed back and such candles as were lit (not many, because they were so expensive) would be put out, and the fire would be covered in a clay bell-shaped couvre feu (two French words that would be elided into ‘curfew’ in English) to preserve the heat and keep sparks from flying. Then the householder, his family and any live-in servants as well as any dogs and cats would bed down, all gathered in the same room in which they’d eaten their meals. The better-off had sheets; everybody had a blanket or a cloak. They rested their heads on logs rather than pillows, and some had herbs in the straw of their bedding to make it smell nicer.