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to smell. Wool often became infested with moths, too. The only certain remedy was to take the wool out and boil it, a tedious process. In poorer homes, cow dung was sometimes hung from the bedpost in the belief that it deterred moths. In hot climates, summertime insects coming through the windows were a nuisance and hazard. Netting was sometimes draped around beds, but always with a certain uneasiness, as all netting was extremely flammable. A visitor to upstate New York in the 1790s reported how his hosts, in a well-meaning stab at fumigation, filled his room with smoke just before bedtime, leaving him to grope his way through a choking fog to his bed. Wire screens to keep out insects were invented early—Jefferson had them at Monticello—but not widely used because of the expense.

For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned. In William Shakespeare’s day a decent canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. Because they were such treasured items, the best bed was often kept downstairs, sometimes in the living room, where it could be better shown off to visitors or seen through an open window by passersby. Generally, such beds were notionally reserved for really important visitors but in practice were hardly used, a fact that adds some perspective to the famous clause in Shakespeare’s will in which he left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne. This has often been construed as an insult, when in fact the second-best bed was almost certainly the marital one and therefore the one with the most tender associations. Why Shakespeare singled out that particular bed for mention is a separate mystery, since Anne would in the normal course of things have inherited all the household beds, but it was by no means the certain snub that some interpretations have made it.

Privacy was a much different concept in former times. In inns, sharing beds remained common into the nineteenth century, and diaries frequently contain entries lamenting how the author was disappointed to find a late-arriving stranger clambering into bed with him. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were required to share a bed at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1776, and passed a grumpy and largely sleepless night squabbling over whether to have the window open or not.

Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed. The records make clear that King Henry V’s steward and chamberlain both were present when he bedded Catherine of Valois. Samuel Pepys’s diaries show that a servant slept on the floor of his and his wife’s bedroom, and that he regarded her as a kind of living burglar alarm. In such circumstances, bed curtains provided a little privacy and cut down on drafts, too, but increasingly came to be seen as unhealthy refuges of dust and insects. Bed curtains could also be a fire hazard—no small consideration when everything in the bedroom, from the rush matting on the floor to the thatch overhead, was energetically combustible. Nearly every household book cautioned against reading by candlelight in bed, but many people did anyway.

In one of his works, John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century historian, relates an anecdote concerning the marriage of Thomas More’s daughter Margaret to a man named William Roper. In the story Roper calls one morning and tells More that he wishes to marry one of More’s daughters—either one will do—upon which More takes Roper to his bedroom, where the daughters are asleep in a truckle bed wheeled out from beneath the parental bed.* Leaning over, More deftly takes “the sheet by the corner and suddenly whippes it off,” Aubrey relates with words that all but glisten lustily, revealing the girls to be fundamentally naked. Groggily protesting at the disturbance, they roll onto their stomachs, and after a moment’s admiring reflection Sir William announces that he has seen both sides now and with his stick lightly taps the bottom of sixteen-year-old Margaret. “Here was