5 - Rest and Security

Summary

We come now to household objects providing rest and security. Just as the sharing of food for sustenance is an important indication of participation in a social group, so also the right to a habitual place of repose grants to the individual a sense of inclusion and security. The affordance of rest also has implication in terms of degrees of comfort, and social and affective associations. (The differentiation of space within the household for retirement, rest and sleep will be examined in detail in Chapter 6). In this chapter we will also examine the objects which facilitate another aspect of security, the ordering and storage of household and personal belongings. As with all of the domestic actions that we have examined thus far, there were a number of objects with different properties which were brought together to enable rest, and the ordering and storage of household goods, and variations within those types of objects subtly altered their agency.

Furnishings of Retirement and Rest

Sleeping Furniture

Sleeping furniture consisted of various types of bedsteads; a wooden structure supporting the items of bedding on which and under which the sleeper lay. The total sleeping furniture of various types numbers 599, a mean of approximately 3.2 per household (ranging from one to sixteen per household). Here we encounter again, as with seating furniture, a considerable variety of objects which all ostensibly serve the same purpose, suggesting that variations in construction and quality address conceptual as well as functional requirements, lending these objects agency. And once again we encounter ambiguous nomenclature; the term ‘bedstead’ and ‘bed’ both occurred in relation to the furniture on which the bedding lay, although the term ‘bedstead’ predominated. ‘Bedstead’ was unambiguously applied to the wooden structure, but the term ‘bed’ was also used for the linen envelope, filled with feathers, flock or straw, placed over the base of the bedstead and on which the sleeper lay. Gloag notes that the term ‘bedstead’ meant literally in its original medieval usage ‘a place for the bed’, being the location of the soft bedding on which the sleeper lay, only subsequently coming to mean the structure supporting that bedding. The bedstead could be a low structure for the bedding alone, or could feature a superstructure so that the sleeping area could be enclosed with curtains, and also covered with a panelled tester or roof (Figure 5.1).