Hallo Mr. Cornwell
I have a frivolous, perhaps daft question pertaining to sleeping habits among the French nobility during the time-frame of the Hundred Years War. Did the nobility sleep sitting up? And if so, why?
My question arises from the experience of a choking nose and throat infection where for a few nights I found relief in sitting up in bed to sleep. At 5.00 am on the first night my wife said bitterly "Are you like that fellow in Lassay-les-Chateaux with the short bed?" That was the only laugh we had that night, but it gave me a line to follow next day.
A few years ago during a visit to the Chateau at Lassay the guide remarked on a very short bed that the nobility associated a full supine position with death, so they slept sitting up. After three nights of sitting up, despite numerous props and pillows I can condemn the practise out of hand, and would take my chance on dying supine!
The internet is vague, to say to best of it, with hearsay, inventive guides, and sites copying one another, but nothing in ms. referring to height or sleeping habits. So, as a man familiar with the period as very few others are, perhaps you could enlighten me, quote a few sources, or supply links to helpful sites?
You quoted Jonathan Sumption's History of the Hundred Years War in the Bibliography of your Grail Quest; Trial by Battle was enthralling, and there are two more volumes to go! Thank you.
Regards
John Rohan
I’ve never come across that! And it sounds unlikely! I do know that 18th Century women with those amazing elaborate hair-dos, often constructed round a wire frame that was woven into the real hair and then festooned with fake hair often slept in a chair to keep a pillow from ruining their do . . . . but in mediaeval times? No picture shows it, and we have plenty of medieval illustrations of sleeping people – all prone!