Second only to the stunning discovery of the body of King Richard III in a Leicester car park, is the dating and identification a couple of months ago of a dismantled medieval bed found in the car park of the Redlands Hotel in Chester. The ornately carved dark oak bed was a wedding present to King Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York (m January 1486) and it is possible that their son, later King Henry VIII, was conceived in it. The find has highlighted just how fascinating this very central piece of domestic furniture can be to our understanding of our ancestors and the past.

For our ancestors, the family bed was a status symbol among household possessions; the more beds you had and the more ostentatious their design, the greater your obvious income. Less wealthy families made do with one bed: the poorest slept on the floor. Beds have also historically been the emotional centre of the family home, the place where the great matters of family history took place – where marriages were consummated, children conceived and born, and where the sick were tended and died.

A short history of beds
The earliest beds used in Britain were shallow chests in which the bedding was placed. Next came timber-framed beds with rope or leather supports across which a ‘mattress’ (a bag filled with straw or wool) was slung. By the mid-18th century well-to-do households were acquiring bedcovers made from quality linen or cotton, and comfier mattresses were filled with coconut fibre, cotton, wool and horsehair.

To combat the major irritant of bedbugs, brass and iron bedsteads were first made in Europe during the 1840s and were soon manufactured on a massive scale. At the same time and for the same reasons, four-poster beds disappeared, bed hangings were removed, mattresses were turned daily and it was advised that bedding was rigorously washed every few weeks, with pillows and mattresses being properly cleaned a couple of times a year.

From 1865, coil spring construction became popular for beds, and as time went on, so sturdy and comfortable were British beds that many brass and iron bedsteads found their way to the outposts of the Empire – places as far away as Africa and India. At the end of the 1920s, mattresses made from latex rubber came onto the market. For more on the importance of the bed as a piece of 19th-century furniture see Judith Flanders: Inside the Victorian Home: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (Harper Perennial, 2004).