Bedding- A Brief History
10 October 2008
How has bedding developed over the years?
We tend to take our bedding for granted. Most of the bedding we buy is good quality and good value and it’s easy to replace when we need to. People haven’t always had access to comfortable bedding, however, because the richest and most luxurious bedding was reserved for the wealthiest people.
People have been sleeping on beds for over 10,000 years, but, like many developments, the biggest leaps in bedding technology have taken place in the last 100 years. It’s around 6,000 years since the Egyptians discovered that it was more
comfortable to sleep in a platform that was raised off the ground, and even then, bedding was a luxury that was only reserved for the elite. Over the years, bedding has evolved to include:
Roman bedding – the Romans have been credited with inventing a luxury lifestyle that we’ve only recently started to emulate – think about underfloor heating. They loved luxury and used soft, comfortable fabrics for their bedding.
Tudor bedding – although we wouldn’t consider the beds of the Tudor period to be particularly comfortable because of the way the mattresses were constructed, the people of this period did pay attention to their bedding. Again, the use of luxury fabrics was commonplace amongst the wealthy, with silk and brocade helping to keep people warm during winter nights.
Georgian and Victorian bedding – as Britain continued to trade with countries across the world, and seized ideas from the countries it colonised during its Empire-building, bedding began to benefit from the use of different fabrics and the construction of new types of bed, including cast iron beds and
new mattress construction.
20th century bedding – over the 20th century, bedding changed substantially. The advent of better production techniques and washing techniques as meant that bedding can be kept cleaner and is more durable than ever before. Towards the end of the 20th century, most people adopted duvets as their main
bedding, rather than the older bedding of sheets and blankets.
Fabrics can be used together to create beautiful bedding that lasts. If you go to museums where they reconstruct life in an earlier period, the bedding is one of the things that often fascinates people – they just can’t imagine having to sleep under rough blankets or on top of lumpy mattresses. But today’s bedding has evolved from that historical bedding, and it’s important that we can appreciate how lucky we are to be able to sleep in comfort and style every night.
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