Tudor sleep lessons

0:00Have you ever slept with a cold apple on your head? If not, maybe you should. That's what the Tudors would have done according to Professor Sasha Handley, who is my guest in this episode of Life Lessons from History. Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

0:36Before we start, Sasha, did you sleep well last night? I did, actually. Thank you for asking, Dave. Did you? Are you a terrible sleeper? I am a bad sleeper, actually, which is why I'm so interested in having a conversation with you. I'm one of those people, I can get to sleep quite nicely to start with, but then I always wake up at 2am with my worries on my mind. And I'm sure I'm not unique about that, no. So you have studied sleep in history, particularly in the early modern period. And you've got lots of interesting observations on how people slept and how people approached sleep. Before we kick off the conversation, just give me a sense of the chronological and geographical parameters of your research.

1:18Yes, so the early modern period mainly refers to the 16th and 17th centuries, so roughly 1500 to 1700. My main work has been on England, the British Isles and more recently some early American history. So just sort of top line it then as we've said just now at the start of the conversation a lot of people do suffer with disordered sleep today. Do you think we can learn anything from the people living in your research period that might help us have better sleep hygiene today? I do actually, partly because sleep was a much more prominent concern in day-to-day life in the period that I study. So people's sleeping habits were part of a kind of interconnected ecosystem of lifestyle habits that were meant to keep the body healthy and to prevent illness from happening.

2:13So sleep was actually one of six lifestyle behaviours that were widely identified by physicians, medical practitioners, but also by ordinary people that they had to take regular care of in order to stay healthy in the long term. So it's part of this kind of fantastic preventative healthcare culture that I think we don't really have anymore. So it's quite interesting to look back and see what the different elements of that system were. You said there were six elements of wellbeing. What were they? Yeah, so there's something called the six non-natural things, which is a kind of healthcare advice system that dates back to ancient Greece, but it's very influential still in the period that I study.

2:59And you're meant to take care of the six things in order to stay healthy in the long term. So number one was fresh air, getting enough of it, making sure that you were not taking in fetid or corrupt air. Number two is food and drink. So making sure you're eating and drinking the right kinds of things for your bodily constitution, but also at the right times of day. Number three is exercise and rest. So getting enough of it, fairly self-explanatory. Number four, sleeping and waking. So that sits right in the middle of this list of lifestyle factors. Number five sounds fairly graphic, but number five is excretion and retention.

3:44So it does refer to bowel habits, but also to things like sweating appropriately and keeping the body at the right temperature. And then the very last one is usually called the passions of the mind, which we read today as emotions. So emotional health, making sure that you were not getting too angry, too sad, and keeping your mind and body in a good balance. Temperance of all of those six things is kind of key to long-term good health, according to the wisdom of the time. It's interesting that they were reflecting on it, well, in ancient times as well as in the early modern days. What sort of people were writing about this?

4:23Who was sort of engaging with it? Yeah, so it's a really widespread system of knowledge. So elite physicians are writing about it. But in the period of history that I study, we see the rise of the printed book right at the start of the period. So there's an enormous explosion of medical self-help books that emerge in these two centuries that were much more accessible, some of them very cheap and easy for more ordinary people to purchase. so those kinds of books are full of advice about how to follow the six non-natural things but we also know from manuscript sources that people in their own households are practicing these habits particularly in relation to sleep where they are taking steps to ensure that they have regular bedtimes but also that they have sort of stocks of household soporific medicines that they can use as and when sleep might evade them or in times of illness, because that's often the time when people experience disturbances to their sleep.

5:30I'm sure, you know, we're all very familiar with, as we're coming into flu season now, the havoc that respiratory problems and well, COVID and flu now have, you know, all of those things have their predecessors in the past. So people had this kind of armoury of remedies that they could turn to because they expected some interruptions to their sleep, but they wanted to make sure that they could minimise those as far as possible. So it was really kind of hands-on practices within the household as well as just the advice of the medics. I want to hear more about those remedies in a second, but first I want to hear a little bit about sort of the physical sleep environment that people had in the early modern period.

6:15Basically, I want to know what their bedrooms were like. What can you tell me about that? I mean, there's an awful lot to go at. The word bedroom is not used terribly often, and that's partly because beds could pop up in lots of different places within the household. So depending on how rich or poor you were, you were likely to be sleeping in a room that had multiple purposes. so we find beds for example set into walls or having curtains that could be pulled around them for a bit of privacy from let's say the cooking equipment of the household those who had a bit more money could often afford to separate out a particular room in their house for the purposes of sleep so I guess that's the first thing to say is that people's experiences in terms of space and the location of beds varies hugely across the social scale.

7:09The lucky people at the top of that ladder often had very, very lavish beds. And one of the distinguishing features that I often find most interesting is how many mattresses they had. So they would often pile up several different layers on top of each other. I found the Duchess of Lauderdale, for example, had six mattresses stacked up on her bed. Partly that's about comfort, but partly that's also to mark out her status because it was generally accepted at the time that the higher your bed was off of the floor, the more important you were. And beds that were lower to the floor were associated with people catching illnesses from the damp, but also just with a low social status as well.

7:57Something called a truckle bed for example is is the kind of bed that lots of servants slept on it had wheels on so it could be moved around the house often it was stored under a nearby higher bed so that servant could be on hand during the night if their master or mistress needed some assistance in the night but those beds are really low to the floor and the word truckling actually means to be subservient so you can kind of read it in the language those kind of gradations the mattresses themselves kind of fascinating we've done lots of work on what was stuffed into them and it's anything from rabbit fur to feathers of all kinds of different animals through some more simple fillings like wool straw or even a plant called thistle down which grew really generously in places like the the fenlands of lincolnshire and cambridgeshire And we think that that kind of plant matter is probably what the poorer kinds of people were using to stuff their mattresses.

8:57So there's a huge array of different things that people could stuff in there. And the sale of mattresses was also really highly regulated at the time. So we found lots of evidence from the company of upholders about the searches that they conducted amongst the mattress sellers who were stuffing kind of illicit materials into these things that might cause contagion, that might attract pests of various kinds. So I think people took their material environments super seriously. Quite right too. Am I right in thinking you've done a bit of sort of experimental work on this? Have you ever slept on any of these sorts of mattresses?

9:37I haven't slept on them, but I have laid on a few. I've lained on a mattress stuffed with straw and with hops surprisingly comfortable and actually with hops they were pretty commonly stuffed into pillows because the scent of them was thought to help relax people at bedtime and we found lots of evidence of different kind of herbs being used to calm the body down and crucially to cool the body down so key to people falling asleep successfully was achieving the right body temperature. And that is a drop in the body temperature from the normal daytime temp. And interestingly, that's something that is still recognised today by sleep scientists.

10:23I think the body needs to drop by a couple of degrees at night time in order for sleep to take hold. So there are all kinds of ingenious ways that early modern people tried to do that. So they were cognizant of this idea that you're better off sleeping in a slightly colder room. Absolutely, yeah. And with fresh air, ideally. They would use various different things like rose petals to kind of scent bedchambers. Plants that were known or believed to promote a kind of cooling air in the bedchamber were the ones that were especially prioritised. Things like water lilies were very popular, for example, for exactly that reason.

10:58Sounds nice It does doesn't it, sounds quite relaxing Lavender is in there which we all associate with restful sleep now But there's actually a much bigger range of plants that serve similar purposes What truth is there in this idea that we have that they tended to have quite busy beds Like lots of people sleeping in beds, is that true? I think it is And again I think that comes down to questions of social status who you were and what kind of ability you had to choose your bedfellows. I found evidence of whole families sharing the same beds with each other. I found evidence of servants often sharing beds, usually segregated by sex.

11:39Also, when people were traveling to inns and taverns, they very often had to share a bed with some unknown stranger. And we tend to get to know about those episodes when they go horribly wrong. So when people have been robbed in the night by their bedfellow or even more extremely have been assaulted by them. So I think there's a lot of bed sharing that went on but I think the ideal that people strove towards was sharing a bed with somebody trustworthy and familiar. So if you had to share a bed there were certain kinds of behaviours that you would expect from your bedfellow, not to chat too much that you kept them awake all night, but also really nice things like that person being a good sort of calm, merry companion.

12:28So you wouldn't want somebody that was going to sort of put you in the wrong frame of mind as you were trying to settle down to sleep. So it's quite interesting some of the comments that people make in those instances where they are sharing a bed and who they prefer to sleep with and who not so snorers are generally not the ideal bedfellow and they have all kinds of interesting words for people who make too much noise in bed so they were striving for sort of calm cool distraction free spaces by the sounds of things how common was it that they were actually able to achieve that do you think because i'm sure there were lots of distractions that might have come across an early modern bedchamber yeah i think there were there were lots of distractions and you know the nature of the evidence that we have to use to reconstruct these kinds of practices is patchy so we tend to know about sleep when it's gone wrong so we tend to hear more about the things that wake people up in the night so that was often animals who were either in the house or close to the house cows that had escaped from their fields for example were falling into a moss pit, something like that.

13:41Dogs that were running around the house were poorly. Fire is a constant concern for people at night time. So before one retires to bed, they would typically do a kind of tour of the house to make sure that all of the candles were out and there wasn't anything that could set a light in the night, which did happen more frequently than I'm sure they would have liked. So there's some of the most common disturbances, I think. Did you have something in mind that you wanted to ask about in terms of those nighttime disruptions well i'm interested in snoring actually as to how they dealt with snoring because that's obviously a thing that people are very concerned about these days did they have any remedies for snoring um so i've done quite a lot of work on the sort of medical therapeutic interventions that people used around sleep and snoring tends not to be one of them but interestingly they do have all sorts of devices that involve the nose so for example i found recipes for nose bags that you would fill with things like anise seeds strapped to the face sort of tie it around your head and sort of sleep with that on your face all night so whether that had a kind of allied effect of clearing the nose if you were sort of snoring in a noisy way.

15:03I don't know, but I tend to think that those things could have multiple functions. So it might've helped you if you had a bit of a cold, but perhaps it also helped people from snoring too much as well. I'm not sure, but I'm sure there were some grumpy elbows and nudges in the night if people did get a little bit too noisy. Okay. So it sounds like they strove for a fairly regimented approach to going to sleep. You You mentioned earlier the idea of having a defined bedtime and trying to keep that at the same sort of time. Today, of course, we struggle with this idea of having our mobile devices and we're sort of advised to step away from them an hour before bedtime to try and get away from that pressure.

15:45Exactly. So tell me a little bit about the approaches that they took to having a healthy nighttime routine. Yeah, so, you know, I think people probably did struggle to get all of their households and agricultural chores done before bedtime. So there were things that probably prevented people from keeping the same bedtime every night. But ideally, you would have some sort of calming routine that preceded bed. so going back to the six non-natural things what you ate and when you ate it was really important so you were advised only to have a light supper at night and to avoid eating and drinking really rich foods like heavy beef dinners and rich sweet wines that was no good for inducing sleep most of the houses in this period of time obviously they didn't have electricity so lighting is much lower than we would certainly be used to.

16:45And that's probably something that we can think about adopting for ourselves, having a lower light as bedtime approaches. But perhaps some of the most interesting things that they did at bedtime involved kind of purposefully meditating. Prayer was really important for people in this period. You know, most of the subjects that I study are Christians, bedtime prayer is an absolutely essential part of their routines. Usually that would be done in silence, either at the bedside or in bed. They might read a set prayer, they might compose their own, they might look around the bedchamber itself and see the bed hangings embroidered with religious motifs that kind of put them in mind of the next life.

17:34and part of the reason that bedtime prayer was so important is that people were genuinely worried about what might happen to them during the night so they knew that the night time was when the devil's power reached its peak and they knew that they needed to ask for protection whilst they themselves were unable to protect themselves and that's essentially what they were doing with bedtime prayer asking for God's protection to wake up the next morning safe and well and so sleep was bookended usually so you prayed at night time but you also prayed in the morning for safe delivery so that period of vulnerability is I think looms really large in the way that people thought about their own sleep and the measures they took to kind of protect themselves Were they actually sort of specifically worried about supernatural intervention in night?

18:31Was that a thing that preyed on their minds? They were, yes. They were worried about having dreams that the devil had kind of implanted into their minds. They were worried about their souls being attacked while they were not able to be vigilant and ward off the attacks of devils and witches and other servants of the devil. But I think they were also more generally concerned about dying unexpectedly during the night because that would prevent them from taking the necessary steps to resolve all of their worldly affairs and enter into what was known as a good death. so to die suddenly and unexpectedly was one of the things that people worried about an awful lot because you didn't have time to put your house in order and you didn't have time to confess your sins and put your spiritual affairs in order as well so it's an array of kind of practical but also existential dangers that they anticipated quite a lot to worry about that actually leads me on to my next question so you know when i wake up at 2 a.m as i said i often do i i wake up because i've got some anxiety some something i'm worried about that's you know some work thing or something or some family thing that's that's bothering me and then i will you know make a little note and maybe it'll it'll go away did they have strategies to cope with those sorts of anxieties and did they do we know whether they suffered from the same source of anxieties that i've just described sort of the everyday life anxieties they definitely did so there's lots of evidence of people having poor sleep when they're especially stressed, when they've got money worries.

20:08Also at particular points in the family's life cycle. So when young children and babies are in the household, sleep is much more difficult to achieve. So yeah, all of those things preyed on their minds. So they're really not that different from us when we think about sleep in those kinds of terms. And the strategies that they used to calm themselves, they would often have a book on the bedside table, the Book of Common Prayer, for example, and that actually included some set prayers that you could say if you woke unexpectedly in the middle of the night. So it kind of anticipated those moments.

20:46But people also might have a religious object, let's say a set of prayer beads if you're a Catholic, but also you could use other devices to try and not just fall back to sleep, but also promote happy dreams. So I found a few examples where people used or advised putting a cold apple onto your head to help you fall asleep more quickly. Apples are a really common soporific also really strange sounding things like the blood of a lapwing bird rubbed onto the temples was thought to promote wondrous dreams of sort of fanciful animals and interesting things rather than frightening things so there's a few little vignettes like that that give us an insight into the sort of weird and wonderful mental world of the periods but also So, you know, for reasons that we totally understand.

21:44These kinds of practices are really culturally specific, I think. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney+. Let's go! Get ready for a new case.

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23:05although meningitis is uncommon about one in ten who develop it will die ask your teen's doctor about missing meningitis vaccinations learn more at meningitis.com vaccination may not protect all recipients sponsored by gsk so would putting a cold apple on your head actually do it because going back to what we're talking about well well yeah i think we should and listeners i think if anybody does have any experience of putting cold fruit on their head then then let us know Cooling ointments applied to the forehead and temples are the single biggest category of soporific therapy that we used in households of the period.

23:42So anything that was sort of cooling that you could lay onto the head was thought to help promote sleep. Because the way that their sort of medical wisdom about sleep worked is that they thought there were these spirits called the animal spirits that kind of elevated the body during the daytime. And those spirits had to be slowed and calmed for sleep to happen. So one of the ways that you could do that was by applying cooling things to the body's extremities. And usually it's the head that is singled out for special attention. But we have also find evidence of people applying cold compressors to their feet and legs as well, or bathing their feet in things like chamomile water.

24:28so that idea of slowing blood flow and slowing down the animal spirits we think is the sort of underlying medical logic to a lot of the things that they were using at the time that seems pretty reasonable seems reasonable right yeah what about like drinks would they where would they stand on like a hot milk or something like that yeah hot milk is a good thing something called posset was really popular which is basically milk that's boiled up and often different herbs could be added to them so for example I found some examples of hemp possets being used at bedtime by kind of agricultural families so hemp seeds we're all familiar with I imagine that was quite effective actually putting some of those in some hot milk but yeah those sorts of drinks that are you know fairly plain that are not full of sugar or stimulants they are widely used as bedtime approached absolutely one of the things that i find most interesting about foods that are supposed to promote sleep is lettuce lettuce really important again it fits into this whole cooling paradigm because lettuce is you know 80 90 water people are making lettuce soups they're making lettuce compresses to stick on their head if you don't want to use the apple.

25:54Things that you could just go and forage from your garden. And people were growing sleep-friendly plants in their own gardens for precisely that reason. If you got a bit of extra lettuce, maybe you can think about turning it into a sleep aid. Okay, so what about this point that's sort of regularly talked about, this idea of people getting up in the middle of the night, the two sleep model? Yeah. What's that all about? Yeah, so this is the model of pre-modern sleep that historian Roger Ekerch has come up with. He calls it segmented sleep. It's also called biphasic sleep, the idea that one's nightly sleep was split into two distinct cycles rather than just one consolidated seven or eight hour period.

26:40And he's found lots of evidence of people referring to these two segments of sleep as their first sleep and their second sleep. And the idea is that, you know, you would go to bed, let's say nine or 10 o 'clock at night, sleep for about four hours, and then you would wake up for a period of time, let's say an hour, maximum two hours before going back for your second sleep. And he's found evidence of people doing kinds of different activities around the house in that time frame. So some people might get up to finish the beer brewing. They might get up to finish the laundry. They might just stay in bed and read a book.

27:19They might have sex. All kinds of different activities that he has documented from this period. So he thinks that this model of segmented sleep was one that was pretty widespread prior to the arrival of electric lighting and kind of industrialisation. But I guess that sort of thing is quite personal. It depends what your sleep patterns are like, I would imagine. Yeah, I think it does. The evidence base is partial. We tend to know more about the people who had the leisure time and the money perhaps to spend longer in bed. I imagine it would be quite difficult for servants who were always the last to go to bed and the first to get up in the morning to practice segmented sleep in any kind of significant way.

28:05it would think it would just be hard to find the time to do it but yeah we've you know we've got lots of night workers lots of bedtimes that are varying seasonally because of different agricultural tasks throughout the year and there are some people who think and explicitly say that they regard getting up in the middle of the night as a dangerous thing to do partly because as we've already talked about it is a dangerous time to be out and about but it's also they think something that can open you up to catching cold which might cascade into a range of other kind of illnesses that would that would threaten the body some people do specifically say you know you should absolutely not be out of bed in the middle of the night it's a dangerous thing to do so much like today it's probably a really complex picture big jigsaw of personal patterns that are that way potentially because of biological preferences, but also because of socioeconomic influences in all of our lives.

29:07You know, sleep is often kind of task driven, isn't it? The amount of time that we give to it is the amount of time that we have available. So yeah, I think it's quite hard to generalise and say that's a universal pattern, but it's a very interesting set of evidence. Going on and generalising wildly, would it be reasonable to assume that most people in early modern Britain were more physically active than we are today i.e they were just more tired when it got to the end of the day because they've been doing more physical manual things i think so yeah absolutely it's a very you know until the late 17th or 18th century comes around it's a predominantly agricultural society most people are working in the fields their working days are long often they need a nap in the middle of the day because the work is so physically tiring.

30:01And yeah, people are walking much further to get to work. They don't have the public transport options that we have available. But also going back to where we started, the six non-natural things, exercise and rest is one of those key lifestyle behaviours that people knew was good for them. And being outdoors more, spending more time in the fresh air, I think would have made people very tired at the end of the working day. And even, you know, the people who are in the house, the household chores would have taken much, much longer than they do now. They don't have all the mod cons that we have available at our fingertips.

30:38So housewives and servants would have spent long, long hours baking, making remedies, taking care of the cleaning and the family. So yeah, I think it would be a tiring way of life. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned daytime naps there. That was a question I wanted to ask, actually. So what was the line on that? Did people nap during the day? Sometimes, yeah. So during harvest time, the threshing of the harvest is really very tiring. So you would start at, let's say, 7 in the morning, and by midday, it's time for a nap. So in some farming account books, you can actually see evidence where 12 to 1 o 'clock is nap time for the harvesters.

31:23So they have a little sleep, they get fed and then they continue on with their work. So that's one example where it's totally legit and acceptable to nap in the daytime. It was also pretty widely accepted that young babies and children could nap whenever they needed to nap. Pregnant women, the same, but also old people very often napping during the daytime. There is though I think a general disapproval about sleeping during the daytime unless you have a good reason for it. It's thought to be almost sinful to be napping when you don't have good course. So if you're ill that's fine, if you've just been you know harvesting corn let's say for four hours that's okay.

32:11you know if you're just a bit of a sluggard that's one of the insults they use for lazy people then you know it's a sign that you're a bit of a sinner potentially okay okay well that I mean that okay so we don't want to we don't want to be sinful in our in our approach to sleep so let's sort of let's wrap up I wonder can you take anything from all this that you've you've learned from researching early modern sleep patterns that might help us to sleep today are any sort of hacks that you think we could take from what is clearly a considered approach to sleep that they took? They thought about it.

32:42They considered it deeply. So what might we learn? I think we should learn to put our sleeping lives right at the heart of what we do day to day. We've almost sort of hived it off as something necessary but annoying in the modern world. so I do actually think that the kind of set of behaviors that sleep sort of sits in the middle of is a model that a lot of people would benefit from trying to practice even just a little bit trying to keep roughly the same hours if you're able to get your body in a really good rhythm for sleeping and waking making sure that you know you're doing something away from your phone something that's actually sleep promoting rather than sleep preventing is really good advice from the past so you don't have to sit down and pray but why just read a nice relaxing book or listen to some music or have a have a happy chat with the people in your house all of those things are really widely practiced by my people let's call them my people and yeah I think on the whole they they did pretty well with their sleep that's not to say this is going to work for you know people who have serious kind of pathological sleep disorders absolutely not and those people do exist in the past there are lots of sleepwalkers and insomniacs who have a terrible time but the fact for the vast majority of us you can seriously affect your sleep quality just by making it more important and taking care of it probably a much longer answer than you wanted isn't it no that is a that is a great answer and and on a personal basis, Sasha, is there anything that you kind of do to make sure that you get a good night's sleep?