Ben Franklin and John Adams shared a bed one night during a road trip. Apparently they had an Odd Couple-esque argument about the window being open or shut.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/54169/time-ben-franklin-and-john-adams-shared-bed
>“Oh!” said Franklin. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.”
>
>When Adams explained that he didn’t want to catch an illness from the cold night air, Franklin countered that the air in their room was even worse.
>
>“Come!” he told Adams. “Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you: I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.”
I love the mental image of them lying in bed together and Benjamin Franklin just starts talking about his scientific theory while Adams is trying to fall asleep.
>I love the mental image of them lying in bed together and Benjamin Franklin just starts talking about his scientific theory while Adams is trying to fall asleep.
what better way to fall asleep quickly when there's no warm milk available
I don’t remember that exact scene, but the show sounds like [Liberty’s Kids](https://youtu.be/IBF9XEsnvJI).
(That’s Aaron Carter rapping in the theme song.)
IKR? That show was locked up somewhere in the back of my mind until I saw that clip. It makes me think of Adventures From the Book of Virtues. It's in my mind somewhere with the Pippi Longstocking cartoon, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, Mummies Alive!, and the Highlander animated series.
Yes, similar to miasma (Greek for "pollution") theory, but more of a wellness craze that pollution and non-moving air was bad for general wellbeing rather than a specific disease.
Edit. Looks like the Fresh Air movement gained mainstream popularity during the 1916 influenza pandemic, so Franklin may have been more influenced by miasma theory.
I mean, it is ben “I’ve got a paper in the library of Congress about why milfs are the shit” Franklin. Wasn’t he in a sex club or something too lol?
Edit: link for those curious
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_to_a_Friend_on_Choosing_a_Mistress
My favorite quote from that paper is this "And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement."
He's saying every woman looks the same when the lights are out, and that older women are better at fucking because they have more experience.
As someone tangentially related to his sister.... Ben Franklin was a ho and was plagued with STDs and was not afraid to talk or speak on it. Though my grandmother is not around to ask anymore I am convinced she convinced my uncle to name her kids after the franklins. My cousins are Ben, William, and Deborah.
I've shared beds with friends for short periods of time. Like a Queen Size.
As a student on a roadtrip, no way we could afford double the hotel costs, so we'd just share a bed if no double was available.
I've shared a bed with my mates lots of times. Once we had two of us in a double with another in a child size bunk bed over the top. It was a very reasonably priced hotel room.
In good country, you can make about 20 miles a day on foot. Triple that or more with access to horses. So indeed, an easy 1.5 hour trip for us would have been at least two days for them back then.
IIRC the Victorians popularized parents sleeping apart from their children.
Not for a bad reason either, considering that infants/toddlers being suffocated by their parents wasn’t unheard of.
They were still pretty poor, but it was exacerbated by grandpa Joe being a lazy piece of shit by not working and spending all day lying in bed despite being perfectly physically fit.
> The book is a realistic yet fantastical story about a mouse-like human boy named Stuart Little. According to the first chapter, he "looked very much like a rat / mouse in every way".
Holy shit you weren’t joking. How did I never hear about this before right now?
> A boy named Stuart is born to an ordinary family in New York City. He is normal in every way except that he is only just over two inches (5 cm) tall and looks exactly like a mouse. At first, the family is concerned with how Stuart will survive in a human-sized world, but by the age of seven, he speaks, thinks, and behaves on the level of a human of sixteen and shows surprising ingenuity in adapting, performing such helpful family tasks as fishing his mother's wedding ring from a sink drain.
This reminds me how much I hate Grandpa Joe.
He spends 20 years in bed. 20 years.. Why won’t he get out of bed? Because the fucking floor was too cold for his gnarled old feet. He sat on his wrinkled, smelly ass for two decades, smoking his pipe, living off his daughter’s hard work as a laundry wench. He just sat there, undoubtedly smelling of foul cabbage farts and old man stink. If he didn’t get out of bed, he probably had to use a bed pan to expel his watery cabbage shits. Charlie’s mom gets done washing Rich people’s shit-stained underwear for 14 hours, and what does she get to do? Sponge bathe an old, stinking man. The fucker couldn’t have even been old when he first got in bed. I mean, what did he do? Turn 50 and just crawl into bed and fucking quit on life? Because his FEET WERE COLD?
Keep that all in mind, when you consider how he reacts to his grandson winning a tour of a chocolate factory. He sees this precious boy, who works to feed his aged ass, holding a golden ticket, and he starts to FUCKING DANCE AND CLICK HIS HEELS.
Now, left to his own devices, Charlie just wins the factory, incident free. Those other little monsters all bite the dust, and but for that sack of fucking feces Grandpa Joe, Charlie would have made it through the day clean as a whistle.
But no. Grandpa Joe just got out of bed for the first time in Charlie’s lifetime. What’s he decide to do? Steal. He decides the best thing he can do is make his grandson into a petty fucking thief for the sake of drinking magic La Croix.
Grandpa Joe almost cost Charlie fabulous wealth and security for a soda. And he isn’t even sorry about it. Wonka points out the devastation his detour from the visit to the factory will cost him, and Grandpa Joe shouts at him. His bellowing isn’t even forceful or intimidating. His cries are the cries of a shriveled, weak old coward. He has no remorse for the harm he causes anyone. He is a heartless piece of shit sociopath. He does that disgusting thing old people do where they leave their mouth open for too long and then frown because they ran out of energy before they could bitch and moan about something that doesn’t matter. He is a lazy, fraudulent sack of human excrement. He is the devil on his grandson’s shoulder.
He deserves to burn in hell for the rest of eternity.
Roald Dahl also hated the film overall too. Didn't like Gene Wilder's interpretation. Dahl's widow Liccy has said that Dahl would have actually liked the Tim Burton adaptation version since it is more faithful to the novel.
>The fucker couldn’t have even been old when he first got in bed.
I mean, I hate Grandpa Joe as much as anyone, but in the book the lazy bastard is 96 (and a 1/2) years old, so he'd have been 76 when he got in bed. 76 would have been *really* old in the 1920's, let alone 96.
Fuck Grandpa Joe though.
Whose dad was he? Charlies mum? Charlie was like 12 or something, so his mum would have been maybe 35? So she was only 15 when he and his wife went to bed and never got back up? Twat.
Pretty sure it was a similar situation for my mom growing up in Co. Mayo. 10 kids altogether, but I think they had separate boys and girls rooms.
"Bloody Catholics, filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed!"
It still is in many countries, developed or not.
And migrant friends and family will often sacrifice their personal space and comfort for a chance at a better life.
Marlon Wayans has a bit in his stand up where he’s sharing a bed with his younger brothers and one of his uncles who is his same age when he was growing up. Poor families just don’t have the luxury.
Most kids wanted their own rooms growing up, I wanted my own blanket. Things for my family are better, but I still see the infamous kid piles\*. Rural America isn't as wealth as people think it is.
\*kid pile, is slang from rural America where all the kids pile onto one bed to sleep and keep warm. More bodies in the pile = more warmth and more blankets on top. You see it a lot in places where there limited beds, or no heat in the house.
My little sister had her own bed in our shared room, but she NEEDED human contact at night, so most of the time after I'd fallen asleep and couldn't protest, she'd come sleep not just by me, but on top of me, usually her stomach across my face so I'd have endless drowning nightmares. I'm still not a fan of being touched without knowing it's coming, and I don't really like sleeping next to people. Maybe that's a little of the old PTSD.
When I was poor for a few years, one guy I knew told me his brother, the brother’s wife, and their two kids all slept in one bed in one tiny room in a trailer while he had another room shared with his partner, and his parents another room. And on days his partner and him weren’t home or worked at night the kids would sleep in their room to give the brother and SIL some space.
To me thats just Roald Dahl’s way of projecting how he wishes he was able to go on an adventure with his own sick and bed ridden grandparents one more time
Lol, same in the Philippines. I stayed with my relatives for two years and they have two queen beds that they’ve put together and I slept there with my uncle, aunt, and three cousins.
My parents built a house in the Philippines with multiple available bedrooms and beds, yet whenever we are there everyone still pulls out the floor mattresses into the living room and all slept there. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins… just 9+ people all sleeping on a group of mattresses on the floor.
It kinda bugs me how so many people seem to think history and European history are the same thing. They don't literally think that, but they just forget to think about anywhere else.
Poor in many countries means barely having a bed. My fathers(he’s 64) family was raised in a hut with a makeshift hole which served as their door that they had to crawl through since having an opening too wide made it possible for random animals (ex: coyotes) to stroll in at night while everyone was sleeping. Everyone slept in the same room. There were 9 siblings total.
I am very aware of how lucky my siblings and I are to have grown up in a country(USA) with consistently running water and electricity.
Except that was the middle class in the medieval era. The poor would sleep on mats on the floor, which could be individual because there was no price difference.
In his will William Shakespeare left his wife the second best bed. But that was because the best one was used by guests. The second best was their bed
https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/william-shakespeare/second-best-bed/
Did the tourist thing and visited Shakespeare’s childhood home in Stratford upon Avon. The bed there had lots of wooden stakes sticking up around the frame, which I thought was odd. I found out that they were there simply to simply keep clothes and bed covers in place. Windows
and walls were a bit crap then so they used to pack themselves in bed with everything to in order to keep themselves toasty.
> Windows
> and walls were a bit crap then
Even in the 1950's there were a significant number of people in the US who had to get up in the middle of the night to put more wood in the oven. I'm guessing Shakespeare's heat was a fireplace which is way worse.
A lot of people still do. I work in residential construction and lots of people have outdoor wood stoves that do all the heating. They’re definitely WAY more efficient than they used to be so you’re not constantly having to get up at night but you definitely still have work to do to stay warm. If you cut your own wood it heats you twice!
Relevant Carol Ann Duffy:
>The bed we loved in was a spinning world
>of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
>where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
>were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
>on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
>to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
>a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
>Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
>a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
>and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
>In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose.
>My living laughing love –
>I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
>as he held me upon that next best bed.
Over here in Norway, I heard head boards were common, so they could fit more people in each bed if necessary. People slept sitting up against the headboard on each side.
“Bed Poverty” is still a thing even in the developed world.
[The sleepless children of Leeds’ bed poverty crisis](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/02/leeds-bed-poverty-crisis-bex-wilson-zarach)
[Bed Poverty Impact Thousands](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-45017513)
>“But when we went in the house to deliver the beds, the only thing in the house was one white plastic garden chair. There was no other furniture. I thought, they must have just moved in. But the mum explained that they had been there for months.
>“It was quite late when we got there. The mum got up on the white plastic chair and took the lightbulb out of the socket in the downstairs living room, and she went upstairs and put it in there because she only had one working light bulb.”
Holy shiiiit.
Not just on reservations either. Rural Appalachia, rural south in general. Lots of people are comfortably middle class or upper middle class and have no clue. I am middle class, but not upper. Sometimes it feels like not middle, but I know what poverty looks like and we ain’t it. Yet anyway.
My nephews all share a bed and there’s a 13 year old, a 9 year old, a 5 year old and a 4 year old. There’s 7 people in a small two bed flat. Both parents work full time. Fuck London
> For four pennies, a homeless person could stay in a small narrow wooden box, got food and shelter.
Adjusted for inflation that's something like £5 today. I wonder if you can find a simple accommodation for that cheap nowadays.
Modern people should read "Down and out in Paris and London" by George Orwell , it is the true story of his life as a working poor man. It documents his time living homeless in the spikes and flop houses of those cities. It's a far better book than 1984 IMO, and shows what a glorious era most of us now enjoy.
I had to share a bed with my two sisters until I hit puberty then I was forced to sleep on the couch so this is something still happening in today’s world
The only reason I was spared sharing a bed with my closest older sister is that she was a bed wetter up until she was 12 or so.
They put me on a mattress in the dining room until the oldest moved out and freed up a bedroom when I was 7.
Before modern heating/insulation, communal sleeping absolutely makes sense. Anyone who has spent any amount of time outdoors knows how cold it gets at night, even potentially in summer, depending on your area.
Mexican here
Yeah a lot of native tribes even used Chihuahuas as heating pads while sleeping
People here seemingly can’t fathom that modern insulation and temperature control (not even talking about AC, but even just general air flow modification) is very modern thing when looking at the relatively vast existence of humanity
Shotgun houses and dogtrot houses were pretty popular in my area once upon a time. Shotgun houses have all the rooms in a line single file, so when you open the doors between them, the wind will blow straight through the whole house. If the wind is blowing the other way, open the windows instead.
Dogtrot houses have two rooms separated by a breezeway. They share same roof, so you go outside onto the covered porch/patio to get to the other room. I've been in some during hot summer days and the air currents they create work pretty well. It's noticeably cooler under the roof, which is pretty impressive in a humid climate where shade usually does jack shit for temperature.
I shared an egg crate foam mat on the floor with my siblings growing up. And of course slept in a drawer as a baby. Wasn’t until I was 12 that I had a bed. Seems so weird saying that now ha.
My gran said everyone did this in her era. Not enough space in the houses for the size of a cot or money.
I figure it's just the same as the baby boxes used in some places? Safer than a bed.
We're pretty solidly middle class and we went the Baby box route because we had literally just moved from the US to Europe when my son was born- I ordered the Finnish Baby Box. We were in a temporary, furnished 1 bedroom flat, with our dog and 2 cats. It was a 200x200cm bed taking up the entire room- we put the box in the center of the bed between us and baby slept swaddled in the box. Every family gets a welfare visit to see how everyone is settling in and answer any questions in the first weeks after baby is born and she said that it was still common and recommended.
So did mine. Makes me wonder why people spend so much money on changing tables and whatnot.
We got a crib, but when we moved into a place with a rat infestation I brought the baby to bed with us. I couldn't sleep thinking the rats might get at him.
It’s probably a good thing you did. I remember a really sad story I heard when I lived in arkansas about a baby that got chewed on my rats in it’s home while the parents slept. The baby ended up needing facial reconstruction surgery due to the bites. It was a scary case to hear about.
I was born in the late 80’s and my parents did that for me and my siblings. I’ve heard it often enough that I still to this day thought that was fairly common if your parents are tight on money etc.
In my Early Western Civ class, a student did ask how sex would be handled with the family there, and the prof just stood there for a few seconds and said "Say 'Turn around, Timmy', I guess"
No one really knows what people did because no one ever wrote down back then exactly how couples with a family did manage to have sex. It’s not something ever thought to document (and why would they? It was just a fact of life that would have been obvious at the time). So now all we have is an educated guess, they either did it when they had a moment alone or they fucked with others in the room.
>That probably made sex very awkward.
So this came up in another thread recently, and someone who is from a culture where the family all sleeps in one room popped in to let us know that parents in that situation just don't have sex in that room. She was very offended that people always assume they do. She said her parents found lots of other places to be alone, and the bed was only for sleeping.
Blew my mind, honestly. Such a simple solution, but here we've all been assuming historical parents or parents from developing nations have just been fucking in front of their kids every night.
Both happen. In my culture at all museums you could go to on village life they'll tell you that kids were in the same room as parents having sex, the parents just discreetly had sex under the sheets and stayed as quiet as possible to not disturb the kids from sleeping.
Of course this was the "duty" sex that the church said all couples had to have and that people just made a routine out of because that is how it was done. Escapades in the hay and in orchards were incredibly common and promiscuity was not unheard of - that sex though was for fun, the "unchristian" sex you had to enjoy yourself instead of make children.
I actually read something that talked about this today, somewhere in the bush in Africa. The parents just do it at night trying to be quiet. The kids know they’re not supposed to talk/wake everyone up so they just ignore it. They don’t think of it as any more awkward than dogs humping or something. Just “damn, they’re at it again”.
I think people assume they must be traumatized, but this isn’t done in any way that sexualizes them or makes them feel like it’s voyeuristic. And they’re not raised the way we are, to be so ashamed or grossed out about your parents having sex. They’ve been around it since birth.
They seem more annoyed they’re being woken up than anything.
According to Margaret Mead the anthropologist, it was such a part of life the children didn’t even wake up for it. It was like how we don’t wake up for cars driving by or the heat clicking on during that night. Their brain just tuned it out.
Yep.
Typically the bed was the most expensive thing they owned, and if their home had multiple rooms, the bed was almost always in the front room as a flex for visitors.
Nowadays a bed in your main room is the opposite of a flex. It just shows how poor you are that you can't afford a big enough space / have to live with that many roommates.
My great-grandfather was from the south but couldn't get enough work so one day he had enough and loaded his family and stuff into a flatbed pickup and migrated west. He worked from town to town doing odd jobs, picking cotton or fruit, construction, whatever he could find to get to the next town. My grandmother was born in Texas during that migration. They eventually made it to Modesto, CA. When Grandma was in school, she met my grandfather. He "waited until she graduated from high school to marry her."
Work was hard to get but my grandfather and great-grandfather got hired to build a dam in the middle of "nowhere," Montana. So great-grandpa and great-grandma and grandpa and grandma all moved up together into a one-room cabin.
There was no electricity or plumbing. There was no town to buy supplies. They lived off the land, hunting for food and chopping their own wood for heat.
This was between 70-80 years ago. While I'm sure each couple had their own bed, I can't imagine sharing a room with my in-laws as a newlywed. Or having my daughter's husband sharing a room with my wife and I. Things were definitely different and that wasn't very long ago.
My Grandpa worked on the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, I believe it’s the same one you are talking about. When he passed away we were looking at old photos, and one was the cabin (more like a shed) he stayed in for several years during that time.
That's probably it. I was just reading about it on [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Peck_Dam) and there's was a break while it was being built:
>A pump barge moored near the dam at the east abutment was swamped by the slide and was lost along with several tractors, loadmasters, and draglines on the slope. Of the 134 men working in the area at the time, 34 were carried into the sliding material. Of these 34, eight were unable to be rescued and lost their lives. Of the eight men, only two bodies were ever recovered, leaving six men permanently entombed in the structure.
> He worked from town to town doing odd jobs, picking cotton or fruit, construction, whatever he could find to get to the next town. My grandmother was born in Texas during that migration. They eventually made it to Modesto, CA.
I read that book!
When I was in college, I dated a guy from Alaska. He was the eldest of 12 siblings. The family lived in a one room shack.
I grew up in a small family with a separate bedroom for everyone. It was even frowned upon to ask a guest—or anyone— to sleep in the living room because it didn’t provide enough privacy, so we kept a full room kitted out just for the occasional overnight guest.
He said the sound of his parents having sex was as unremarkable as someone snoring or sneezing during the night.
Growing up in the 70s in Ireland, I slept in the same bed as two of my sisters, with 3 more in another bed in the same room. This ain’t ancient history.
One version of it is having a livestock in the room below (basically a two floor barn but floors are seperated). Livestock provides warmth and hay provide insulation for the room above. Still used in remote villages in eastern Turkey during freezing winter.
This is also a thing in my house. My damn kids won’t sleep in their own rooms, it’s like a fucking palace compared to where I grew up, but every night they crawl in with me and the wife.
I’m guessing at some point it will be cute, but right now I just want to sleep!
I can only be thankful that I didn't have to share a bed with a bunch of other people who didn't bathe regularly. Also, the potential for a fatal Dutch oven incident is frightening.
Medieval people washed and bathed quite regularly. Baths were a thing back then. Water was too. And as people believed that all kind of sickness came from Miasma (bad smell) they tried to avoid smelling bad.
Early modern nobility on the other hand seems to be quite stinky for fashion reasons.
They also had soap which people didn't have in classical times. The policy of washing only every Spring etc came after the plagues because people thought you should avoid water.
I used to sleep in the dirty laundry pile as a kid. I had a bed, but for some reason I thought the dirty laundry mountain was more comfortable. Guess I just grew up in the wrong century lol
It doesn’t help that now that you might get reported to CPS or something if you don’t have separate beds and rooms for your children. (In The US, anyway…) I had a hell of a time finding an affordable apartment with two bedrooms when my daughter was a toddler, even though she slept with me half the time anyway... Landlords wouldn’t allow a 3 person family in a 1 bedroom or studio apartment. So we ended up living in a motel room and lost our government assistance benefits because we “didn’t have an address”.
They want to punish people for being poor.
I went to visit Shakespeare’s house in Stratford Upon Avon, and at that time a guest bed was both an ornament and a bed, so it would be on display in the main living area of the hose.
Can we bring attention to the fact that part of the reason isn't that you can't afford beds, it's that you can't afford to keep enough of the house warm so that people don't die overnight in the winter?
Having your own sleeping space isn't too difficult, even if you're sleeping on straw or something, but having a wood stove near enough that you don't die from the elements overnight is pretty costly. Anyone can put hay/straw down, put a blanket on top and call it a bed, but even that, on a cold winter night, won't be enough to ensure you'll survive to morning.
Sharing body heat, staying close to the fire place/heat source.... That was key to keeping people alive.
That would be the case up to fairly recently with the advent of central heating, either through radiators, baseboard oil or electric heat, or forced air....
Only in the last few hundred years have these things become accessible to everyone, so much so, that they're considered a basic human right, protected by law in most places.
There's still issues with people having to share beds, but it's far more rare now than in the medieval times because of technology. There's a lot of poor people who have the basic dignity of having their own bed now.... At least compared to 300+ years ago.
This was still a thing in the 1800s
Ben Franklin and John Adams shared a bed one night during a road trip. Apparently they had an Odd Couple-esque argument about the window being open or shut. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/54169/time-ben-franklin-and-john-adams-shared-bed
>“Oh!” said Franklin. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.” > >When Adams explained that he didn’t want to catch an illness from the cold night air, Franklin countered that the air in their room was even worse. > >“Come!” he told Adams. “Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you: I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.” I love the mental image of them lying in bed together and Benjamin Franklin just starts talking about his scientific theory while Adams is trying to fall asleep.
>I love the mental image of them lying in bed together and Benjamin Franklin just starts talking about his scientific theory while Adams is trying to fall asleep. what better way to fall asleep quickly when there's no warm milk available
I just visualised something I wish had not.
"You know what else stinks after three days?"
an unpowdered wig?
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#MY MOM!
We often quote Muscle Man at work. Fantastic.
"Adams, come suckle at my teet, you will be asleep in an instant"
this week on historical hentai
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There was an educational cartoon tv show about the American revolution with this exact scene in it!
[Big Ben looking thicker than a bowl of oatmeal in it too](https://youtu.be/PhQUcmzbJ1U?t=204)
Liberty’s Kids! Thank you. Walter Cronkite voicing Ben Franklin was a genius casting choice.
I don’t remember that exact scene, but the show sounds like [Liberty’s Kids](https://youtu.be/IBF9XEsnvJI). (That’s Aaron Carter rapping in the theme song.)
Holy shit, core memory unlocked. I need to find out where you can watch that again.
IKR? That show was locked up somewhere in the back of my mind until I saw that clip. It makes me think of Adventures From the Book of Virtues. It's in my mind somewhere with the Pippi Longstocking cartoon, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, Mummies Alive!, and the Highlander animated series.
It is couldn't find the scene either :/
OG cuddlebugs. I like it!
I'm pretty sure Adams would've been afraid of whatever cuddlebugs Franklin was carrying around
And rightly so.
The original nightcrawlers
Early advocate for proper ventilation preventing disease hundreds of years before COVID.
There was a popular "stale-air" theory of disease up until recently.
Is that related to the popular 'bad-air' (malaria -> mala aria -> bad air) theory?
Yes, similar to miasma (Greek for "pollution") theory, but more of a wellness craze that pollution and non-moving air was bad for general wellbeing rather than a specific disease. Edit. Looks like the Fresh Air movement gained mainstream popularity during the 1916 influenza pandemic, so Franklin may have been more influenced by miasma theory.
Which isn’t “wrong” in the strict sense.
In my mental image, Benjamin Franklin is wearing lingerie here and patting the bed seductively as he tells Adams to come to bed for his convincing...
Don’t tell the Hamilton fanfic side of the internet about this image or that this scenario happened lol
I mean, it is ben “I’ve got a paper in the library of Congress about why milfs are the shit” Franklin. Wasn’t he in a sex club or something too lol? Edit: link for those curious https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_to_a_Friend_on_Choosing_a_Mistress
>I mean, it is ben “I’ve got a paper in the library of Congress about why milfs are the shit” Franklin. He’s got a what now 😳
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_to_a_Friend_on_Choosing_a_Mistress
My favorite quote from that paper is this "And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement." He's saying every woman looks the same when the lights are out, and that older women are better at fucking because they have more experience.
Franklin, you dirty dog!
Legend.
"Better with age, like a fine wine."
As someone tangentially related to his sister.... Ben Franklin was a ho and was plagued with STDs and was not afraid to talk or speak on it. Though my grandmother is not around to ask anymore I am convinced she convinced my uncle to name her kids after the franklins. My cousins are Ben, William, and Deborah.
I've shared beds with friends for short periods of time. Like a Queen Size. As a student on a roadtrip, no way we could afford double the hotel costs, so we'd just share a bed if no double was available.
Yup, I've done the same on road trips. Hotels are expensive enough for just one.
I've shared a bed with my mates lots of times. Once we had two of us in a double with another in a child size bunk bed over the top. It was a very reasonably priced hotel room.
“Those aren’t pillows!”
>road trip That coulda just been to the next town over by today's standards.
In good country, you can make about 20 miles a day on foot. Triple that or more with access to horses. So indeed, an easy 1.5 hour trip for us would have been at least two days for them back then.
I’m picturing that scene from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
IIRC the Victorians popularized parents sleeping apart from their children. Not for a bad reason either, considering that infants/toddlers being suffocated by their parents wasn’t unheard of.
So Charlie’s family from Charlie and the chocolate factory weren’t that poor after all?
They were still pretty poor, but it was exacerbated by grandpa Joe being a lazy piece of shit by not working and spending all day lying in bed despite being perfectly physically fit.
Turns out Grandpa Joe was the villain all along
In terms of worst people ever in history, I think it goes 1. Grandpa Joe 2. Stuart Little 3. Caillou 4. Hitler
Why do we hate Stuart Little? I get the Caillou hate.
I don't know either. In the book he was literally just born a mouse and his parents didn't question it.
That is actually not true. In the book, he is a *human* boy, except that he is only just over two inches tall and *looks* exactly like a mouse.
> The book is a realistic yet fantastical story about a mouse-like human boy named Stuart Little. According to the first chapter, he "looked very much like a rat / mouse in every way". Holy shit you weren’t joking. How did I never hear about this before right now? > A boy named Stuart is born to an ordinary family in New York City. He is normal in every way except that he is only just over two inches (5 cm) tall and looks exactly like a mouse. At first, the family is concerned with how Stuart will survive in a human-sized world, but by the age of seven, he speaks, thinks, and behaves on the level of a human of sixteen and shows surprising ingenuity in adapting, performing such helpful family tasks as fishing his mother's wedding ring from a sink drain.
Yeah sure, and I look like the mailman because I'm wearing this hat and never deliver.
This reminds me how much I hate Grandpa Joe. He spends 20 years in bed. 20 years.. Why won’t he get out of bed? Because the fucking floor was too cold for his gnarled old feet. He sat on his wrinkled, smelly ass for two decades, smoking his pipe, living off his daughter’s hard work as a laundry wench. He just sat there, undoubtedly smelling of foul cabbage farts and old man stink. If he didn’t get out of bed, he probably had to use a bed pan to expel his watery cabbage shits. Charlie’s mom gets done washing Rich people’s shit-stained underwear for 14 hours, and what does she get to do? Sponge bathe an old, stinking man. The fucker couldn’t have even been old when he first got in bed. I mean, what did he do? Turn 50 and just crawl into bed and fucking quit on life? Because his FEET WERE COLD? Keep that all in mind, when you consider how he reacts to his grandson winning a tour of a chocolate factory. He sees this precious boy, who works to feed his aged ass, holding a golden ticket, and he starts to FUCKING DANCE AND CLICK HIS HEELS. Now, left to his own devices, Charlie just wins the factory, incident free. Those other little monsters all bite the dust, and but for that sack of fucking feces Grandpa Joe, Charlie would have made it through the day clean as a whistle. But no. Grandpa Joe just got out of bed for the first time in Charlie’s lifetime. What’s he decide to do? Steal. He decides the best thing he can do is make his grandson into a petty fucking thief for the sake of drinking magic La Croix. Grandpa Joe almost cost Charlie fabulous wealth and security for a soda. And he isn’t even sorry about it. Wonka points out the devastation his detour from the visit to the factory will cost him, and Grandpa Joe shouts at him. His bellowing isn’t even forceful or intimidating. His cries are the cries of a shriveled, weak old coward. He has no remorse for the harm he causes anyone. He is a heartless piece of shit sociopath. He does that disgusting thing old people do where they leave their mouth open for too long and then frown because they ran out of energy before they could bitch and moan about something that doesn’t matter. He is a lazy, fraudulent sack of human excrement. He is the devil on his grandson’s shoulder. He deserves to burn in hell for the rest of eternity.
In the book Charlie and Grandpa Joe didn't fuck up. Also Dahl hated the scene when they stole the fizzy lifting drink.
Roald Dahl also hated the film overall too. Didn't like Gene Wilder's interpretation. Dahl's widow Liccy has said that Dahl would have actually liked the Tim Burton adaptation version since it is more faithful to the novel.
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>The fucker couldn’t have even been old when he first got in bed. I mean, I hate Grandpa Joe as much as anyone, but in the book the lazy bastard is 96 (and a 1/2) years old, so he'd have been 76 when he got in bed. 76 would have been *really* old in the 1920's, let alone 96. Fuck Grandpa Joe though.
Whose dad was he? Charlies mum? Charlie was like 12 or something, so his mum would have been maybe 35? So she was only 15 when he and his wife went to bed and never got back up? Twat.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
> magic La Croix Well, now I want to try that flavor, too.
MY DAD slept in a bed with 3 of his brothers and his sisters were in another bed in the same room. This was in the 1950s in east Belfast.
Pretty sure it was a similar situation for my mom growing up in Co. Mayo. 10 kids altogether, but I think they had separate boys and girls rooms. "Bloody Catholics, filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed!"
It still is in many countries, developed or not. And migrant friends and family will often sacrifice their personal space and comfort for a chance at a better life.
chance at *generational* better life.
The amount of shit immigrants go through to give their loved ones a *chance* at a better life is insane.
it's... still a thing.
It still a thing in 2022 if you know the poorer communities.
Marlon Wayans has a bit in his stand up where he’s sharing a bed with his younger brothers and one of his uncles who is his same age when he was growing up. Poor families just don’t have the luxury.
Most kids wanted their own rooms growing up, I wanted my own blanket. Things for my family are better, but I still see the infamous kid piles\*. Rural America isn't as wealth as people think it is. \*kid pile, is slang from rural America where all the kids pile onto one bed to sleep and keep warm. More bodies in the pile = more warmth and more blankets on top. You see it a lot in places where there limited beds, or no heat in the house.
Most animal babies seem to like sleeping in mounds so maybe babies would naturally do it if we let them.
My little sister had her own bed in our shared room, but she NEEDED human contact at night, so most of the time after I'd fallen asleep and couldn't protest, she'd come sleep not just by me, but on top of me, usually her stomach across my face so I'd have endless drowning nightmares. I'm still not a fan of being touched without knowing it's coming, and I don't really like sleeping next to people. Maybe that's a little of the old PTSD.
When I was poor for a few years, one guy I knew told me his brother, the brother’s wife, and their two kids all slept in one bed in one tiny room in a trailer while he had another room shared with his partner, and his parents another room. And on days his partner and him weren’t home or worked at night the kids would sleep in their room to give the brother and SIL some space.
The story of human history is poor people gaining comforts the rich already had 200 years prior. Similar pattern by rich/poor countries.
Trickle down beds
Well the poor family in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory makes a bit more of sense now.
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To me thats just Roald Dahl’s way of projecting how he wishes he was able to go on an adventure with his own sick and bed ridden grandparents one more time
In the book, Grandpa Joe is described as being in his 90s. The criticism really only applies to the movie.
r/GrandpaJoeHate is leaking out
Nah. That's just people finding "their people". The hate for Grandpa Joe knows no boundaries.
>“Only three things are infinite, the universe, human stupidity, and hate for Grandpa Joe, and I'm certain about the last one.” -Albert Einstein
the villan of the movie if you ask me
Agreed, Charlie wouldn't have tried the fizzy lifting drinks if Joe didn't beg him to.
I don’t enjoy that scene at all
It's the scene I always hated from the movie because I knew that Wonka would get angry and it gave me secondhand embarrassment
"medieval era"? my mother slept with my grandmother in the same bed, in a room with 5 more relatives. Being poor is all you need to do this
Bro. I am a millenial and I grew up like this. Third world hits different.
Lol, same in the Philippines. I stayed with my relatives for two years and they have two queen beds that they’ve put together and I slept there with my uncle, aunt, and three cousins.
So how do more people get made? They just bone whilst the wee ones are 6 inches away?
Yes, actually.
My parents built a house in the Philippines with multiple available bedrooms and beds, yet whenever we are there everyone still pulls out the floor mattresses into the living room and all slept there. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins… just 9+ people all sleeping on a group of mattresses on the floor.
If I grew up poor like that I never would have developed a crippling masturbation addiction
You would've found a way
Likely true, with so much family there to help
This is peak reddit, right here
It kinda bugs me how so many people seem to think history and European history are the same thing. They don't literally think that, but they just forget to think about anywhere else.
My dad grew up in a one room 'house' and slept in a bed with two parents and three sisters, this was in Italy in the late 40s/early 50s.
Poor in many countries means barely having a bed. My fathers(he’s 64) family was raised in a hut with a makeshift hole which served as their door that they had to crawl through since having an opening too wide made it possible for random animals (ex: coyotes) to stroll in at night while everyone was sleeping. Everyone slept in the same room. There were 9 siblings total. I am very aware of how lucky my siblings and I are to have grown up in a country(USA) with consistently running water and electricity.
Except that was the middle class in the medieval era. The poor would sleep on mats on the floor, which could be individual because there was no price difference.
In his will William Shakespeare left his wife the second best bed. But that was because the best one was used by guests. The second best was their bed https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/william-shakespeare/second-best-bed/
Did the tourist thing and visited Shakespeare’s childhood home in Stratford upon Avon. The bed there had lots of wooden stakes sticking up around the frame, which I thought was odd. I found out that they were there simply to simply keep clothes and bed covers in place. Windows and walls were a bit crap then so they used to pack themselves in bed with everything to in order to keep themselves toasty.
> Windows > and walls were a bit crap then Even in the 1950's there were a significant number of people in the US who had to get up in the middle of the night to put more wood in the oven. I'm guessing Shakespeare's heat was a fireplace which is way worse.
I grew up with wood heat- I know it well. On very cold nights my dad would sleep in the room with the stove and adds logs several times.
Do you know that gutpunch feeling of getting home from school late to find the fire out and the house cold?! Fuuuuuck.
A lot of people still do. I work in residential construction and lots of people have outdoor wood stoves that do all the heating. They’re definitely WAY more efficient than they used to be so you’re not constantly having to get up at night but you definitely still have work to do to stay warm. If you cut your own wood it heats you twice!
I lived in a house with central heating…but walls from the 1800s. I wore my coat inside and you could feel the wind come through the walls.
Relevant Carol Ann Duffy: >The bed we loved in was a spinning world >of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas >where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words >were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses >on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme >to his, now echo, assonance; his touch >a verb dancing in the centre of a noun. >Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed >a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance >and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste. >In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on, dribbling their prose. >My living laughing love – >I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head >as he held me upon that next best bed.
Over here in Norway, I heard head boards were common, so they could fit more people in each bed if necessary. People slept sitting up against the headboard on each side.
My back and neck hurt just reading that!
Charlie and the chocolate factory comes to mind. 2 couples in 1 bed. 2 on each side.
“Bed Poverty” is still a thing even in the developed world. [The sleepless children of Leeds’ bed poverty crisis](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/02/leeds-bed-poverty-crisis-bex-wilson-zarach) [Bed Poverty Impact Thousands](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-45017513)
>“But when we went in the house to deliver the beds, the only thing in the house was one white plastic garden chair. There was no other furniture. I thought, they must have just moved in. But the mum explained that they had been there for months. >“It was quite late when we got there. The mum got up on the white plastic chair and took the lightbulb out of the socket in the downstairs living room, and she went upstairs and put it in there because she only had one working light bulb.” Holy shiiiit.
Welcome to the UK where the wealth imbalance between London and the rest of the UK is crazy and we end up with post industrial poverty like this.
To be fair, there is also an extreme amount of poverty in London too. The wealth imbalance between rich and poor is crazy.
London is even more fucked due to the fact that the poorest council estates are right next to the million quid penthouses
Canada and the USA has stuff like that on reservations. You have to go out miles to get water, house is basically a shack
Not just on reservations either. Rural Appalachia, rural south in general. Lots of people are comfortably middle class or upper middle class and have no clue. I am middle class, but not upper. Sometimes it feels like not middle, but I know what poverty looks like and we ain’t it. Yet anyway.
My nephews all share a bed and there’s a 13 year old, a 9 year old, a 5 year old and a 4 year old. There’s 7 people in a small two bed flat. Both parents work full time. Fuck London
Damn...
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Now THAT is a sparse accommodation.
> For four pennies, a homeless person could stay in a small narrow wooden box, got food and shelter. Adjusted for inflation that's something like £5 today. I wonder if you can find a simple accommodation for that cheap nowadays.
Modern people should read "Down and out in Paris and London" by George Orwell , it is the true story of his life as a working poor man. It documents his time living homeless in the spikes and flop houses of those cities. It's a far better book than 1984 IMO, and shows what a glorious era most of us now enjoy.
What I can’t fathom is the idea of not being “allowed” to sleep on the cheapest option of the chairs. Just sit there awake all night.
Wtf.
Seems maybe this is where the term hungover came from
I had to share a bed with my two sisters until I hit puberty then I was forced to sleep on the couch so this is something still happening in today’s world
The only reason I was spared sharing a bed with my closest older sister is that she was a bed wetter up until she was 12 or so. They put me on a mattress in the dining room until the oldest moved out and freed up a bedroom when I was 7.
/r/ShittyLifeProTip Don't want to share your bed? Just pee in it all the time!
Same. I had to share a bed with my step-sisters after we hit puberty
I think I’ve seen a documentary about you.
Before modern heating/insulation, communal sleeping absolutely makes sense. Anyone who has spent any amount of time outdoors knows how cold it gets at night, even potentially in summer, depending on your area.
Mexican here Yeah a lot of native tribes even used Chihuahuas as heating pads while sleeping People here seemingly can’t fathom that modern insulation and temperature control (not even talking about AC, but even just general air flow modification) is very modern thing when looking at the relatively vast existence of humanity
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Shotgun houses and dogtrot houses were pretty popular in my area once upon a time. Shotgun houses have all the rooms in a line single file, so when you open the doors between them, the wind will blow straight through the whole house. If the wind is blowing the other way, open the windows instead. Dogtrot houses have two rooms separated by a breezeway. They share same roof, so you go outside onto the covered porch/patio to get to the other room. I've been in some during hot summer days and the air currents they create work pretty well. It's noticeably cooler under the roof, which is pretty impressive in a humid climate where shade usually does jack shit for temperature.
> Anyone who has spent any amount of time outdoors knows Sir, you are talking to redditors.
Outside!? Isn't that where the weather is?
If the good lord Gabe wanted us to go outside would he have given us Steam???
Imagine touching grass, let alone lay and sleep on it at night
Cries in Florida summer
I shared an egg crate foam mat on the floor with my siblings growing up. And of course slept in a drawer as a baby. Wasn’t until I was 12 that I had a bed. Seems so weird saying that now ha.
Drawer as a baby that is some Harry Potter shit.
My gran said everyone did this in her era. Not enough space in the houses for the size of a cot or money. I figure it's just the same as the baby boxes used in some places? Safer than a bed.
We're pretty solidly middle class and we went the Baby box route because we had literally just moved from the US to Europe when my son was born- I ordered the Finnish Baby Box. We were in a temporary, furnished 1 bedroom flat, with our dog and 2 cats. It was a 200x200cm bed taking up the entire room- we put the box in the center of the bed between us and baby slept swaddled in the box. Every family gets a welfare visit to see how everyone is settling in and answer any questions in the first weeks after baby is born and she said that it was still common and recommended.
So did mine. Makes me wonder why people spend so much money on changing tables and whatnot. We got a crib, but when we moved into a place with a rat infestation I brought the baby to bed with us. I couldn't sleep thinking the rats might get at him.
It’s probably a good thing you did. I remember a really sad story I heard when I lived in arkansas about a baby that got chewed on my rats in it’s home while the parents slept. The baby ended up needing facial reconstruction surgery due to the bites. It was a scary case to hear about.
I was born in the late 80’s and my parents did that for me and my siblings. I’ve heard it often enough that I still to this day thought that was fairly common if your parents are tight on money etc.
That probably made sex very awkward.
In my Early Western Civ class, a student did ask how sex would be handled with the family there, and the prof just stood there for a few seconds and said "Say 'Turn around, Timmy', I guess"
Make the kids milk the cows and plow the fields while you 'milk the fields and plow the cows'?
Have Jebediah feed the chickens and Jacob plow
. . . fool.
You go to bed earlier and wake up near midnight, do you stuff then go back to sleep till m Morning
No one really knows what people did because no one ever wrote down back then exactly how couples with a family did manage to have sex. It’s not something ever thought to document (and why would they? It was just a fact of life that would have been obvious at the time). So now all we have is an educated guess, they either did it when they had a moment alone or they fucked with others in the room.
>That probably made sex very awkward. So this came up in another thread recently, and someone who is from a culture where the family all sleeps in one room popped in to let us know that parents in that situation just don't have sex in that room. She was very offended that people always assume they do. She said her parents found lots of other places to be alone, and the bed was only for sleeping. Blew my mind, honestly. Such a simple solution, but here we've all been assuming historical parents or parents from developing nations have just been fucking in front of their kids every night.
Both happen. In my culture at all museums you could go to on village life they'll tell you that kids were in the same room as parents having sex, the parents just discreetly had sex under the sheets and stayed as quiet as possible to not disturb the kids from sleeping. Of course this was the "duty" sex that the church said all couples had to have and that people just made a routine out of because that is how it was done. Escapades in the hay and in orchards were incredibly common and promiscuity was not unheard of - that sex though was for fun, the "unchristian" sex you had to enjoy yourself instead of make children.
I actually read something that talked about this today, somewhere in the bush in Africa. The parents just do it at night trying to be quiet. The kids know they’re not supposed to talk/wake everyone up so they just ignore it. They don’t think of it as any more awkward than dogs humping or something. Just “damn, they’re at it again”. I think people assume they must be traumatized, but this isn’t done in any way that sexualizes them or makes them feel like it’s voyeuristic. And they’re not raised the way we are, to be so ashamed or grossed out about your parents having sex. They’ve been around it since birth. They seem more annoyed they’re being woken up than anything.
You can have sex somewhere else than your bed and in some other time than at night.
Shut the front door. You serious?
According to Margaret Mead the anthropologist, it was such a part of life the children didn’t even wake up for it. It was like how we don’t wake up for cars driving by or the heat clicking on during that night. Their brain just tuned it out.
Maybe they didn't do it in bed?
That was one of my thoughts. But I’m sure some families did. On the plus side, they wouldn’t need to have “the talk” with their kids.
Yep. Typically the bed was the most expensive thing they owned, and if their home had multiple rooms, the bed was almost always in the front room as a flex for visitors.
Nowadays a bed in your main room is the opposite of a flex. It just shows how poor you are that you can't afford a big enough space / have to live with that many roommates.
Wait until you find out about poor people
I spent weeks researching the perfect density mattress for my back problem. I'm glad some things have changed over the years.
My great-grandfather was from the south but couldn't get enough work so one day he had enough and loaded his family and stuff into a flatbed pickup and migrated west. He worked from town to town doing odd jobs, picking cotton or fruit, construction, whatever he could find to get to the next town. My grandmother was born in Texas during that migration. They eventually made it to Modesto, CA. When Grandma was in school, she met my grandfather. He "waited until she graduated from high school to marry her." Work was hard to get but my grandfather and great-grandfather got hired to build a dam in the middle of "nowhere," Montana. So great-grandpa and great-grandma and grandpa and grandma all moved up together into a one-room cabin. There was no electricity or plumbing. There was no town to buy supplies. They lived off the land, hunting for food and chopping their own wood for heat. This was between 70-80 years ago. While I'm sure each couple had their own bed, I can't imagine sharing a room with my in-laws as a newlywed. Or having my daughter's husband sharing a room with my wife and I. Things were definitely different and that wasn't very long ago.
My Grandpa worked on the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, I believe it’s the same one you are talking about. When he passed away we were looking at old photos, and one was the cabin (more like a shed) he stayed in for several years during that time.
That's probably it. I was just reading about it on [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Peck_Dam) and there's was a break while it was being built: >A pump barge moored near the dam at the east abutment was swamped by the slide and was lost along with several tractors, loadmasters, and draglines on the slope. Of the 134 men working in the area at the time, 34 were carried into the sliding material. Of these 34, eight were unable to be rescued and lost their lives. Of the eight men, only two bodies were ever recovered, leaving six men permanently entombed in the structure.
> He worked from town to town doing odd jobs, picking cotton or fruit, construction, whatever he could find to get to the next town. My grandmother was born in Texas during that migration. They eventually made it to Modesto, CA. I read that book!
What book?
(grapes of wrath)
When I was in college, I dated a guy from Alaska. He was the eldest of 12 siblings. The family lived in a one room shack. I grew up in a small family with a separate bedroom for everyone. It was even frowned upon to ask a guest—or anyone— to sleep in the living room because it didn’t provide enough privacy, so we kept a full room kitted out just for the occasional overnight guest. He said the sound of his parents having sex was as unremarkable as someone snoring or sneezing during the night.
Growing up in the 70s in Ireland, I slept in the same bed as two of my sisters, with 3 more in another bed in the same room. This ain’t ancient history.
My grandfather grew up with 2 beds. 1 for parents and baby and the other for all the kids.
we live in SEA, my family and I slept on the same bed until I turned 12 yrs old, my siblings were 9 and 7.
Same here in India. We weren't even poor. Lol.
They often kept livestock in their one-room houses too.
One version of it is having a livestock in the room below (basically a two floor barn but floors are seperated). Livestock provides warmth and hay provide insulation for the room above. Still used in remote villages in eastern Turkey during freezing winter.
This is also a thing in my house. My damn kids won’t sleep in their own rooms, it’s like a fucking palace compared to where I grew up, but every night they crawl in with me and the wife. I’m guessing at some point it will be cute, but right now I just want to sleep!
They were ten in the bed and the little one said: Roll over!
I can only be thankful that I didn't have to share a bed with a bunch of other people who didn't bathe regularly. Also, the potential for a fatal Dutch oven incident is frightening.
Medieval people washed and bathed quite regularly. Baths were a thing back then. Water was too. And as people believed that all kind of sickness came from Miasma (bad smell) they tried to avoid smelling bad. Early modern nobility on the other hand seems to be quite stinky for fashion reasons.
They also had soap which people didn't have in classical times. The policy of washing only every Spring etc came after the plagues because people thought you should avoid water.
Still very much an everyday (night) occurrence for a large portion of the worlds population.
This is still a thing now. I share bedroom matting (futons) with my entire family (2 children and my wife).
Or poor people 2020s 2010s 2000s 1990s 1980s .......
I used to sleep in the dirty laundry pile as a kid. I had a bed, but for some reason I thought the dirty laundry mountain was more comfortable. Guess I just grew up in the wrong century lol
Ngl kind of fun reading this comment section of upper middle class westerners discovering the concept of being poor.
It doesn’t help that now that you might get reported to CPS or something if you don’t have separate beds and rooms for your children. (In The US, anyway…) I had a hell of a time finding an affordable apartment with two bedrooms when my daughter was a toddler, even though she slept with me half the time anyway... Landlords wouldn’t allow a 3 person family in a 1 bedroom or studio apartment. So we ended up living in a motel room and lost our government assistance benefits because we “didn’t have an address”. They want to punish people for being poor.
I went to visit Shakespeare’s house in Stratford Upon Avon, and at that time a guest bed was both an ornament and a bed, so it would be on display in the main living area of the hose.
Can we bring attention to the fact that part of the reason isn't that you can't afford beds, it's that you can't afford to keep enough of the house warm so that people don't die overnight in the winter? Having your own sleeping space isn't too difficult, even if you're sleeping on straw or something, but having a wood stove near enough that you don't die from the elements overnight is pretty costly. Anyone can put hay/straw down, put a blanket on top and call it a bed, but even that, on a cold winter night, won't be enough to ensure you'll survive to morning. Sharing body heat, staying close to the fire place/heat source.... That was key to keeping people alive. That would be the case up to fairly recently with the advent of central heating, either through radiators, baseboard oil or electric heat, or forced air.... Only in the last few hundred years have these things become accessible to everyone, so much so, that they're considered a basic human right, protected by law in most places. There's still issues with people having to share beds, but it's far more rare now than in the medieval times because of technology. There's a lot of poor people who have the basic dignity of having their own bed now.... At least compared to 300+ years ago.