If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Page B
Authors: Lucy Worsley
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Instructions written for a medieval pageboy describe how he should undress his master and get him ready for bed. (They have the amusing effect of making the master/king/lord in question sound rather like a doll.) When your sovereign lord wants to go to bed, the page is told, you must spread out a foot sheet for him to stand upon, and take off his robe. Then you put a cloak on his back, before pulling off his shoes, socks and hose. (‘Hose’, or leg coverings, consist of ‘upper hose’, or breeches, and ‘nether hose’, or stockings.) You should throw the hose over your shoulder before combing his head and putting his kerchief upon it, then putting on his nightgown.
This kerchief, wrapped around the head, would develop into the nightcap. The thought of sleeping with an unprotected head was abhorrent in an age when sickness was thought to travel through the air in a cloud of evil ‘miasma’. People really believed that they might die from sitting or sleeping in a draught. They were paranoid about keeping their heads warm (but without overheating: some nightcaps had a hole in the crown, so that‘the vapour may go out’). My own mother wasn’t allowed by my grandmother to leave the house with wet hair even in the 1950s.
Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s minister, was the son of a humble Ipswich innkeeper and butcher, yet rose through the ranks of the church, one of the few careers open to young men of modest means. He revelled in his rich cardinal’s robes of red, but during his frequent work binges he stayed in his nightclothes all day. His talent at statecraft and his industry under pressure were both enormous: during negotiations with the French in 1527, Wolsey worked for twelve hours continuously from four in the morning, yet ‘never rose once to piss, nor yet to any meat, but continually wrote his letters with his own hands, having all that time his nightcap and kerchief on his head’.
Most people slept in a shirt (men) or shift (women) just like the one they wore as underwear in the daytime; sometimes even the very same one. A family forced from their beds by a fire in their house on the old London Bridge in 1633 took to the street with ‘nothing on their bodies but their shirt and smock’. Those with the money bought special nightshirts with slightly fuller sleeves and a deeper neck opening than those worn during the day.
A surprising number of daytime fashions started out as bedroom wear. Anne Boleyn was bought nightgowns by Henry VIII, notably one of black satin bound with black taffeta and edged with black velvet. Something like a modern dressing gown, ‘nightgowns’ such as Anne’s were warm, loose and often hooded garments. They were worn over other clothes, and taken off at the point of getting into bed.
Being snug and practical, nightgowns made their way out of the bedchamber and into public areas (rather like ‘housecoats’ in the twentieth century). Count Egmont wore a ‘red damask’ nightgown to his own execution in 1568, while in 1617, Lady Anne Clifford even went to church in her ‘rich night gown’. Intime, the nightgown evolved into the smartest and most formal dress ever invented: the eighteenth-century court mantua, a dress with an enormously wide hooped skirt. The mantua began as bedroom wear, but developed into a stylised and strangely fossilised uniform for formal occasions. In the slow-moving world of the court it was still worn in the 1760s, but looked like an extreme parody of the off-duty outfits of nearly a century earlier.
The nineteenth century saw the development of specialist nightgowns, and voluminous white cotton was the textile of choice in the age when Britain’s mills dominated the world. No woman would have worn pyjamas until after the First World War. In the 1920s, the influence of Hollywood films brought about a revolution in bedroom wear. When the stars appeared in scenes set in bedrooms, they were put into satin so that they’d shimmer in the studio
This kerchief, wrapped around the head, would develop into the nightcap. The thought of sleeping with an unprotected head was abhorrent in an age when sickness was thought to travel through the air in a cloud of evil ‘miasma’. People really believed that they might die from sitting or sleeping in a draught. They were paranoid about keeping their heads warm (but without overheating: some nightcaps had a hole in the crown, so that‘the vapour may go out’). My own mother wasn’t allowed by my grandmother to leave the house with wet hair even in the 1950s.
Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s minister, was the son of a humble Ipswich innkeeper and butcher, yet rose through the ranks of the church, one of the few careers open to young men of modest means. He revelled in his rich cardinal’s robes of red, but during his frequent work binges he stayed in his nightclothes all day. His talent at statecraft and his industry under pressure were both enormous: during negotiations with the French in 1527, Wolsey worked for twelve hours continuously from four in the morning, yet ‘never rose once to piss, nor yet to any meat, but continually wrote his letters with his own hands, having all that time his nightcap and kerchief on his head’.
Most people slept in a shirt (men) or shift (women) just like the one they wore as underwear in the daytime; sometimes even the very same one. A family forced from their beds by a fire in their house on the old London Bridge in 1633 took to the street with ‘nothing on their bodies but their shirt and smock’. Those with the money bought special nightshirts with slightly fuller sleeves and a deeper neck opening than those worn during the day.
A surprising number of daytime fashions started out as bedroom wear. Anne Boleyn was bought nightgowns by Henry VIII, notably one of black satin bound with black taffeta and edged with black velvet. Something like a modern dressing gown, ‘nightgowns’ such as Anne’s were warm, loose and often hooded garments. They were worn over other clothes, and taken off at the point of getting into bed.
Being snug and practical, nightgowns made their way out of the bedchamber and into public areas (rather like ‘housecoats’ in the twentieth century). Count Egmont wore a ‘red damask’ nightgown to his own execution in 1568, while in 1617, Lady Anne Clifford even went to church in her ‘rich night gown’. Intime, the nightgown evolved into the smartest and most formal dress ever invented: the eighteenth-century court mantua, a dress with an enormously wide hooped skirt. The mantua began as bedroom wear, but developed into a stylised and strangely fossilised uniform for formal occasions. In the slow-moving world of the court it was still worn in the 1760s, but looked like an extreme parody of the off-duty outfits of nearly a century earlier.
The nineteenth century saw the development of specialist nightgowns, and voluminous white cotton was the textile of choice in the age when Britain’s mills dominated the world. No woman would have worn pyjamas until after the First World War. In the 1920s, the influence of Hollywood films brought about a revolution in bedroom wear. When the stars appeared in scenes set in bedrooms, they were put into satin so that they’d shimmer in the studio
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