Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2015

Word of the Month: Lit

The recent windy Welsh weather has certainly made staying in bed an attractive proposition this week! That got us wondering about what the Anglo-Norman Dictionary could tell us about where people slept in the Middle Ages. Beds and bedding aren’t normally things that are described in the types of sources the AND used – there's never much discussion of home furnishings in literary texts or in administrative documents. Two other types of texts do provide some clues about medieval beds: inventories and wills. These tend to be related to wealthy individuals, so the goods described certainly wouldn’t be typical for the average medieval person. They do provide an interesting glimpse at how the 1% of the population furnished their bedrooms during this period! Talbot Shrewsbury Book The bedroom was known as the chambre , from whence we get the Modern English chamber , though you can occasionally find the word closet used in Anglo-Norman (and in Middle English ) to refer to a pri