If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (46 page)

Picture Section

1. The superlative state bed at Kedleston Hall, intended for a visiting king. Disappointingly for Nathaniel Curzon, who commissioned it, his sovereign never actually came to stay.

2. A recreation of Edward I’s bed at the Tower of London (top). Demountable, it would have been carried with the king as he travelled. Most medieval furniture was similarly portable, hence the French word ‘mobiliers’ or ‘removables’.

3. A depiction of the conception of the wizard Merlin (centre). This manuscript illustration showing Merlin’s mother’s bed was one of the sources for reconstructing Edward I’s.

4. Edward I’s oratory at the Tower of London. The forerunner of the closet, his oratory was perhaps the only room in which the king could expect to be alone.

5. This is the bed associated with the story of the ‘warming pan’. It was put about that James II’s son was born dead, and an imposter smuggled in using a warming pan. It’s probably untrue, as there were at least 51 people present at the birth in 1688.

6. Thanks to Shakespeare, the ‘Princes of the Tower’ are perhaps the best known victims of being ‘murdered in their beds’. They’re shown here in Delaroche’s historical painting of 1831.

7. A medieval Caesarian takes place in a woman’s bedchamber (top left).

8. Pregnant Jacobean ladies often had their portraits painted just before giving birth. If they died, their husbands and children would at least have a souvenir of a lost wife or mother.

9. The ‘Man-Mid-Wife’, a caricature of 1793. To the left is the new, masculine face of the birthing profession; to the right, his female predecessor. Before its medicalisation, childbirth was one of the few areas of domestic life where women were totally in charge.

10. Queen Victoria’s split drawers. Ladies first began to wear knickers in the nineteenth century. Early drawers were often split like this to facilitate the use of a chamber pot.

11. A bedroom in a working family’s ‘back-to-back’ house in Birmingham. Perhaps eight or nine family members would have been packed top-to-toe into two beds.

12. ‘Slumberdowns’ or ‘continental quilts’ revolutionised bedding, ending centuries of sheets and blankets. This 1970s Habitat catalogue shows another novelty: children placed at the heart of family life.