The flaunting of royal authority that led English rebels in 1381 to liberate criminals from their prisons, burn judicial documents, loot the Savoy Palace, and behead the archbishop of Canterbury is well known. What is perhaps less well known is one seemingly minor but meaningful incident during the storming of the Tower of London: rebels defiantly broke into the royal chamber, and depending on which chronicle you read, they either broke the bed belonging to the princess of Wales, or “lay and sat on the king's bed while joking” (99). Why should the rebels' actions in the royal bedchamber be worthy of mention in a list of otherwise much more grievous and provocative offenses? Because, as Hollie Morgan contends in Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England: Readings, Representations and Realities, beds are closely associated with the people who sleep in them. Violating the king's bed is a symbolic violation of the king himself.
Morgan's beautifully produced study of beds and chambers helps the reader to understand how their symbolism shaped relationships in late medieval England. An intensely private space, the chamber permitted its inhabitants to shed their public faces and be honest and sincere in a way that was simply not possible in the outside world. Meetings in the chamber thus provide an opportunity for candid conversations and negotiations between equals. Morgan makes creative use of this concept to further our understanding of medieval domesticity, private devotion, contractual dealings, and power relationships within marriage.
In chapter 1 Morgan sets the scene, providing a material history of the bed and the chamber in order to acquaint her readers with the relevant vocabulary and an appropriate mental imagery. Making plentiful use of probate inventories, Morgan explains what constituted a medieval bed (including numerous useful illustrations), how class defined one's sleeping arrangements and level of comfort, and what other items regularly furnished a chamber. In chapter 2 she focuses on the chamber as a locus for prayer, advancing the argument that the bed is central to “medieval society's understanding of a personal relationship with God” (11). Fear of the vulnerable state of the sleeper, susceptible to both physical and spiritual harm, prompted prayers of thanksgiving before and after sleep. Over time, supplication evolved into a broader sense of the chamber as private chapel, heightened by religious iconography on coverlets, curtains, walls, and ceilings as meditation aids. As a physical symbol of one's soul, the bed took on a greater significance in late medieval society, with the bedding of the dead and the living temporarily lining church walls and Corpus Christi processional routes.
The openness of the chamber leveled the playing field, allowing individuals to meet as equals, regardless of rank or gender. In chapter 3, Morgan examines the chamber as a place of negotiation, judgment, and counsel. The pinnacle of this chapter is an analysis of the king's chambers, his marriage bed a place of peace and reconciliation, as well as a representation of the king's authority and lineage. In chapter 4, she explores the lighter side of the chamber, highlighting its role in group and individual leisure activities among the elite. The chamber was the ideal location for playing chess or cards, reading books, and listening to music. For husband and wife, bed erased the marital hierarchy that dominated public life. In chapter 5, Morgan explains how women were empowered by the openness of the chamber to speak freely with their husbands. Morgan continues this theme in chapter 6, in which she argues that the medieval English saw beds and chambers gendered female. In large part, this comes from the fact that beds belonged to women—they were part of a woman's trousseau or paraphernalia. Chambers also became female-only spaces during childbirth and a woman's lying-in. While the femininity of such a key domestic space led to the usual male anxiety, it did benefit women in one significant means: women could sleep late. When a man did so, he was metaphorically castrated (178).
As a scan of Morgan's bibliography confirms, few scholars have thought to study beds and chambers in history. Such an imaginative topic has been approached in an equally creative manner. Morgan uses a broad array of texts, from probate records to Arthurian literature, from artwork to artefact. In doing so, she makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing field of domesticity studies, very much in the vein of M. Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg's Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England (2008). For scholars of mysticism, she also helps to normalize the bed as place of worship. Not only is the bed the ideal location to receive visions from God, but it also permits the supplicant to approach God with humility. My only complaint about the book has to do with Morgan's failure to address the deathbed. Admittedly, in her preface and acknowledgments, she addresses this omission: “[t]his book is about late medieval life; death will just have to wait” (x). Nevertheless, given the anxiety that death produced in the late medieval English and their general preoccupation with the deathbed, a final chapter on this subject would have rounded the book out quite nicely.
Morgan's Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England is a delightful read that will be appreciated by scholars and students in a wide variety of fields.
