A four-poster bed with some stories to tell…

If the history of travel tells us one thing, it is that – broadly speaking – the standards of accommodation we expect for overnight stays have steadily improved. We all know about the trials of Mary and Joseph 2,000 years ago and, until the modern age, it was perfectly normal for a traveller on the road to have to share a room – or often even a bed – with a stranger. In the 17th century Samuel Pepys’ diaries reveal that – on occasion – he had to sleep with his servant when travelling (I’m talking about the male one, Will, not the various house and kitchen maids who fell into his clutches). And there is a famous scene in a French inn in Dickens’ Little Dorrit where the goodhearted John Baptist Cavalletto finds himself lodged with the murderous Rigaud and has to escape in the night.

But was the Great Bed of Ware, which was made for the White Hart inn in the Hertfordshire town in the 1590s, and is now one of the most famous exhibits in the V&A, really made for multiple occupancy? At more than 10ft wide and 10ft long, it is certainly big enough to accommodate six or eight people – as long as one couple sleeps sideways. Though the story that 26 butchers and their wives once spent the night in it for a bet in 1689 seems extremely farfetched. Each of them would have had less than 2 sq ft of mattress.

While it surely did accommodate more than two at a time on a regular basis, the great bed was – according to the curators at the V&A – probably commissioned as a classic marketing stunt to attract attention to the inn. The White Hart was one of several rivals in a town that was a convenient overnight stop a day’s ride from London for those headed north to Cambridge and beyond. So popular was it with travellers that Water Row (the south side of the town’s high street) was lined with at least six “great and sumptuous hostelries”.

The four-poster, oaken bed, was commissioned from a Dutch architect, painter and garden designer, Hans Vredeman de Vries, and its four columns, headboard, and the underside of its wooden canopy are richly carved with flamboyant patterns, acanthus leaves and other motifs such as satyrs (symbolising virility). It would have been a sight in its own right, especially since it was once painted in bright colours and hung with rich fabrics (the current hangings are replacements). What better way to attract business from your rivals?

The stunt certainly seems to have worked. Very soon after it was installed, it was famous enough for Shakespeare to make a reference to it in a gag in Twelfth Night. And eight or nine years later Ben Jonson mentioned it in his play Epicoene. After that, the bed had a chequered history being traded between different Hertfordshire inns, its carvings defaced by the many guests who carved their names and initials into the wood. It was finally acquired by the V&A in 1931 for £4,000 – at the time, by far the most expensive single piece of furniture ever bought for the museum.

Resting place: the Great Bed of Ware has had a few homes but was finally acquired by the V&A in 1931