How We Used to Sleep in Medieval Days

Christine Baumgarthuber of the delightful Austerity Kitchen blog has a column on how people slept in pre-industrial societies. Instead of a single eight-hour interval, most people had a “first” and “second” sleep:

The idea of first and second sleep derives from a form of life that disappeared with the onset of industrialism. “Until the close of the early modern era,” writes Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), “Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.” When an individual took her first sleep depended, like it does today, on disposition and life circumstances. Most, however, went to bed with the sun. Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” mentions that Canacee slept “soon after evening fell” and awoke again during the early hours of the morning. The thirteenth-century Catalan philosopher Ramón Lull characterizes first sleep as stretching from mid-evening to early morning, while the French writer Noel Taillepied maintains that it is “about midnight” when a person wakes from it.

My first reaction to this is mild disappointment. I’ve long been impressed at stories of the monks and nuns of medieval Europe rising in dead of night to pray matins and lauds. It would seem they were much more conventional, and less austere, than I had supposed.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/02/24/how-we-used-to-sleep/

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~Charles Dickens

I tend to go to sleep and wake up about four hours later; then I can't shut my head off (the PTSD I'm told), so I lay there and read for three to four hours, then go back to sleep for another three to four----if I can sleep that long. Usually I have to get up and get the kid ready for school, so my prime sleep time (the second four-hour block) is always interrupted. As a result, I'm usually either somewhat dopey during the day, or if it's really bad I'll got back to bed for a while later in the morning, but I won't sleep deeply---it's more of a doze, enough so that I can function properly.

I've read this before, and since then I've noticed the casual references to first and second sleep in classical reading. It's pretty interesting.

You might like this short Ted talk:

Jessa Gamble: Our natural sleep cycle | Video on TED.com

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