How did people sleep in the Middle Ages?

It seems normal that people go to sleep for seven to nine hours (or at least we hope we can sleep that long), straight from evening to morning, but was that always the case? A recent book on the history of sleeping shows that during the Middle Ages people typically slept in two periods during the night.

Roger Ekirch’s book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, reveals that until modern times, when artificial lighting allowed us to stay awake longer, most people would go to bed around sunset. The actual time spent sleeping was split into two phases – known as first sleep and second sleep.

Ekrich writes:

Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest. Not everyone, of course, slept according to the same timetable. The later at night that persons went to bed, the later they stirred after their initial sleep; or, if they retired past midnight, they might not awaken at all until dawn. Thus, it ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales, Canacee slept “soon after evening fell” and subsequently awakened in the early morning following “her first sleep”; in turn, her companions, staying up much later, “lay asleep till it was fully prime” (daylight).

In between the first and second sleep the person would be awake about an hour – enough to say prayers during Matins, which would typically fall between 2 am and 3 am, study or even have sex. The French physician Laurent Joubert (1529-1581) even advised that couples have intercourse during this period, because “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better.”

Ekrich adds:

Although in some descriptions a neighbor’s quarrel or a barking dog woke people prematurely from their initial sleep, the vast weight of surviving evidence indicates that awakening naturally was routine not the consequence of disturbed or fitful slumber. Medical books, in fact, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries frequently advised sleepers, for better digestion and more tranquil repose, to lie on their right side during “the fyrste slepe” and “after the fyrste slepe turne on the lefte side.” And even though the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie investigated no further, his study of fourteenth-century Montaillou notes that “the hour of first sleep” was a customary division of night, as was ‘the hour halfway through the first sleep.” Indeed, though not used as frequently as expressions like “candle-lighting,” the “dead of night”, or cock-crow,” the term “first sleep” remained a common temporal division until the late eighteenth-century. As described in La Demonolatrie (1595) by Nicholas Remy, “Comes dusk, followed by nightfall, dark night, then the moment of the first sleep and finally dead of night.”

Not everyone slept in two periods – Ekrich cites some people from the pre-modern period who note that they would sleep throughout the night. But does seem to have been common practice for people, dating back to ancient times. In this interview on The Agenda, the author reveals more about the practice.

Meanwhile, Jean Verdon, author of Night in the Middle Ages, notes that some medieval people had different sleeping patterns. Children, for instance, were advised to sleep the entire night, for nine or ten consecutive hours. However, for the very young, this task might be tricky. The fifteenth-century story La Farce du Cuvier, offers this verse on the troubles of getting one’s child to sleep – something that every parent nowadays can relate too:

At night, if the child awakes
As they do in many places,
You must take the trouble
To get up to rock him,
To walk, carry, and feed him
In the bedroom, even at midnight.

Medieval monks were also required to sleep differently – according to the Rule of St.Benedict, they would go to bed about 7:00 pm, and then wake up for Matins around 2:00 in the morning. While other monastic rules allowed for a second sleep, the Benedictine monks would continue to stay awake (they might be allowed to have a nap during the day). Some monks were tempted not to get out of bed – Raoul Glaber, who lived during the 11th century, wrote that he was plagued by a demon, who whispered to him:

I wonder why you are so eager to jump so quickly out of bed, as soon as you’ve heard the signal, and to interrupt the sweet rest of sleep, while you could give yourself up to rest until the third signal.

Verdon adds that medieval people could have the same problems related to sleeping that we do, including insomnia, sleeping too much, and even sleep-walking. The chronicler Jean Froissart heard the story of a noble named Pierre de Béarn who had a traumatic experience when he killed an exceptionally large bear in hand-to-hand combat. Afterwards, during his sleep he would rise, grab a sword and swing it around at the air. If he could not find his weapon, Pierre “created such noise and clamor that it seemed like all the demons of hell were there with him.” Eventually, his wife and children would leave him over the problem.

https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in-the-middle-ages/

The Neolithic Star Chart of Tal-Qadi in Malta

 translated from an article of “Archäologie Online” by Peter Kurzmann 25.7.2014

http://www.archaeologie-online.de/magazin/fundpunkt/sonstiges/2014/die-neolithische-sternkarte-von-tal-qadi-auf-malta/

In the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta, in glass case No.21 is a 2cm thick limestone tablet about the size of a postcard. It is carved with gradients, stars and an almost half-moon figure. The description reads: “Broken globegerina limestone slab which shows five sections separated with incised lines. Four of these sections have star-like incisions whereas the middle one has a semi circular incision which could represent the moon. Provenance Tal-Qadi”

 

The tablet was found on the site of the Tal-Qadi temple. The dig lies about 0,5 km south of Bugibba, on the road to Burmarrad (Triq Burmarrad). The temple built in the period between 3300 to 3000 BC was of importance until the end of the Tarxis phase around 2500 BC. The badly preserved structure was excavated by Th. Zammit and L, Upton in 1927. J. von Freeden published a layout of the structure, showing only the remnants, although enough to recognize the basic form. However, given the poor stratigraphic state of the site, the date of the tablet could only be roughly estimated as 3000 BC.

Visible is an entrance in the west that proceeds to a entrance in the east. On the far left is a small recognizable portion of the temple enclosure. According to von Freeden, the existence of a second doorway and the alignment of its mantle stones suggests a possible second enclosure; for the top area there is little evidence, at most a few spolia stones. The main axis of the temple has an east-west orientation.

With the knowledge of other, better preserved temples, this rudimentary map is better understood. Figure 3 shows the layout of the temple of Mnajdra according to von Freeden.

The complex comprises of two temples, and a lesser structure that can be ignored in this case. The North temple has two diagonal tracts, a head and at its front, a terrace that is a modern reconstruction embracing the elevation. The north temple sits on a higher level than the south temple. According to Zammit there was a huge pile of rubble in front of the north temple at the time of excavation.

Together the north and south temples form a concave enclosure, whose space also served as a cult area. Figure 4 shows the north temple in its present form under a protective tent. The present terrace is clearly recognizable.

This rather sparse information to go on, however does allow considerable thought over the meaning of the entrance's engraved limestone tablet. The roughly half-moon engraving in the middle sector provides the key. It doesn't represent a half-moon, rather the frontal concave of the complex, whereas the radials mark off lines of sight to either side of its perimeter. That the temple front lies exactly west, one can readily establish the focal point of these lines of sight. The starry forms carved into the tablet relate as groups of stars that appear in that direction. One call tell from modern star charts what these groups of stars these likely are.

Naturally, one must take into account that individual stars may move independently in space, gradually changing the shape of constellations over the long course of millenia. At the same time, we cannot be sure how these cultures construed such groupings, Furthermore, is the fact that the neolithic people had no optics, thus had to rely on very good eyesight, hence would only take the brightest stars into account.

Figure 5 shows a sketch of the tablet, in which stars of ideal brightness are likely to be part of this configuration. The connecting lines are an educated guess of the constellations these stars form, in comparison to modern star charts (figure 6).

The following image shows what could be seen in the night sky in the west-east direction over Bugibba on January of 2501 BC. This simulation was done using the computer program “Stellarium”, projecting the sky in much the same way as done in planetariums. As geographical coordinates for Tal-Qadi were unavailable, the close proximity of Bugibba was used instead. These are 35°56'57”N and 14°24'42”E. The difference is minimal and barely negligible.

 The constellations Taurus and Perseus with Pleiades appear in the same order from left (north) to the right (south) on the limestone slab. The leftmost star is likely to be Sirius in the constellation Canis Major. Along with Rigel or Betelgeuse, both in the constellation of Orion, these are very bright and conspicuous as seen in Figure 7, left of the constellation Taurus. For accurate identification, it lacks a clear enough indication. The right subsequent formation points to the V-shaped part of Taurus. In the central sector a character identified as a half-moon appears. The shape appears too crude to the author to be anything other than the front of the Tal-Qadi temple, where the stone slab was found. Since the main axis of the temple points west , the east-west orientation of the slab is given by the floor plan drawing.

In the next sector the Pleiades cluster can be seen. Only the arrangement of the "bottom" star (Pleione) is not correctly reproduced - probably for reasons of space. The last sector finally shows a constellation difficult to identify because of the poor condition of the engraving. On the other hand, the neolithic astronomers may have related to quite a different configuration of what we identify as the constellation Perseus, shown here in a modern star chart (Fig. 8). It must have included two further but reasonably bright stars, namely γ And (star almaak from the constellation Andromeda) and β tri (from the constellation Triangulum), making the formation quite unfamiliar to us.

 

The available image of the tablet is not optimal. Other characters (strokes) evident could be smaller stars, but this is uncertain. More important in the comparison is certainly the Pleiades. Figure 9 shows this beautiful, distinctive formation with their blue veils enveloped in the mists of reflected light. The main stars, reproduced as numbers in their order of brightness, is in figure 10. These nine stars are visible under good conditions with the naked eye. Pleione is - as already mentioned - not shown on the calcareous plate in the correct orientation to Atlas, the reason probably lies in the space available by size class …

 It raises the question of the purpose of this Neolithic star map. The author suggested that it is a guide to finding the constellation of the Pleiades in the sky, perhaps as a learning base for new priests, as we would say today. It is known that the Pleiades were used in many cultures of the northern hemisphere as the basis for an agricultural calendar. Schlosser, on the occasion of processing the Nebra Disk, ran calculations for1600 BC and the location of its discovery near Nebra . The Pleiades are only visible in the winter, in other words, the time vegetation is dormant. When they appear, autumn starts, hence harvest time. When they disappear, spring, the growing season starts, hence seed must be sown. The limestone tablet gives an impressive and amazing impression of the astronomical knowledge of the Neolithic people and their ability to document it in images.

Concluding remark

This publication was created following a thesis on a Celtic sword that shows an engraving of the Pleiades on its sheath. As a result, the author, during a visit to the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta, immediately recognized the Pleiades on the limestone tablet exhibited there. As an archaeo-chemist, he found himself in a predicament because he wasn't qualified in astronomy, yet all attempts to coordinate with a suitable astronomer proved in vain. The best that could be offered him was suggesting the use of the Stellarium program- which he did out of desperation. This interdisciplinary pitfall is an indication of how the development of archaeo-astronomy is still in its baby shoes. Archaeo-astronomy is not limited to solar alignments and megalithic circles.

Nonetheless, the author published this article against the advice of many archaeologists and astronomers, with the objective of pointing out this inadequacy in the field of archaeometrics.

He still hopes on finding an interested astronomer or archaeologist to collaborate his work.