bedroom

[lirotem]

was there a bedroom in the 14th cen.and if so when did it started?

[dot.hawkes]

In the Royal Households there were Royal bedchambers, the King still owned all land in the country and so there was little substantial building, any builds were likely to be fortifications or religious, i really think that apart from the Royal bed Chambers, there may well have been nothing more than communal sleeping quarters for huge number of the peasantry, which were everyone but the Royals and some Knights/ Earls etc, the merchant class was still only just emerging in Europe in towns like Venice and Antwerp, in those cities they achieved a more civilised abode long before the kingdom of England. (at least that is how I understand it from the Historical studies I have undertaken at degree level, i may of course be well wrong.)

[Peter Pedant]

yeah - look at the history of houses

unfortunatelly the standard house seems to vary depending on the part of the country - Wealden house or Dorset long house and so on.

You have the main hall and the hole in the roof and one side the buttery, and on the other side, oh somethiinng else. And on top of THOSE, the master of the house used to sleep whilst the rest of them used the floors.

Think solarium

This design persisted for a very long time, with a corridor separating the buttery from the hall as seen in most oxbridge colleges,
and the hole in the roof being closed and a great fire place being built just as soon as technology permitted

[jno]

local lords would sleep surrounded by their loyal men, but as houses got grander in the middle ages - this was a slow, gradual process as general wealth increased - some would start to retire to their own room at night, set up as Peter explains. So the answer is sort of yes and no - some people would have had bedrooms by the 14th century, but probably only a tiny percentage of the population. For the vast bulk of the peasantry it was as dot says, communal sleeping and lucky if you didn't have to share space with the cows.

[Octavius]

A typical medieval nucleated village plan consisted of a street with peasant holdings or �tofts� arranged on either side.

The typical toft would include a separate living house, a building for animals (e.g. a byre or sheepcote) and a barn or granary for crop storage grouped around a yard. A living house might be divided into one, two, three or more rooms separated by screens and walls. The hall was the main social space in a house and might serve numerous functions, including eating and sleeping. Chambers were used primarily for sleeping but might also be used for storage. The number of people accommodated within these small buildings can only be guessed at: the average peasant family size was approximately five but actual family size would have varied enormously depending on wealth (wealthier households tended to have a larger number of children), survival and position within the life cycle (e.g. young, old): the poor widow in Chaucer�s Nun�s Priest�s Tale lived in her �narwe� (i.e. small) two-roomed cottage with her two daughters. Kitchens were usually freestanding buildings or, outshuts attached to living houses.