How did people sleep in the Middle Ages? | Hacker News Reader

How did people sleep in the Middle Ages?

medievalists.net

110 pointspepys42 comments

At my school from 6-12, we did indeed have to get up at 2am for matins. We went to bed at 8, woke at 2, went to chapel, back to bed, up at 6.

This practice hasn't entirely died out.

My principal memories of it consist of biting cold. Our dorms were unheated, so getting up in the freezing night was pretty unpleasant, and getting back to sleep was hard to say the least. While we were out the moisture in the room would condense on the iron frames of the bunks, and freeze.

Needless to say these days I do the standard 3am-8am God I feel fuck-awful "sleep" propped up with plenty of coffee.

Fascinating. Where were you in school?

UK. This was '88-'94. Small prep school in Hertfordshire that has since modernised and gone co-ed.

It's almost a shame. Our lives there bordered on abusive in many regards, but it was brilliant - we were allowed to run around with rifles, go off exploring the countryside unsupervised, play with explosives, and the education was ridiculously good in hindsight. We had a lot of freedom within the rules - but if you broke them... Corporal punishment! Usually just a birch to the hands, and oh boy did it work - never got caught the same way twice!

I went to a Christian Brother's High School in the 80's. 2 of the best, 4 of the best or God forbid 6 of the best. It was a tougher all boys school in the inner city. I think for the most part it kept us in line. My total for the entire year was 6 while the "worst" of the boys were at 60 or 70 in total by the end of a year.

As a UK citizen who attended a straightforward city primary school and secondary boys school your experience is completely alien and fascinating to me.

I had no idea such schools existed, even 20 years ago.

So I've seen a number of articles about Segmented Sleep and the idea that we used to sleep in two phases based on historical evidence, etc. However, this set of circumstances applies rather uniquely to Western Europe. None of the articles I've looked at have explained, then, why the continuous sleep pattern we see now seems to hold true for the Middle East and Asia as well.

Some recent research suggests that normal human sleep has always been in one continuous block in places near the equator. Then segmented sleep developed after humans migrated to places like Europe where sunrise/sunset times vary more. According to this hypothesis, segmented sleep was only a temporary phenomenon, before electric light caused a return to continuous sleep.

https://athensscienceobserver.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/the-s...

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/112251/

Thank you for this. There's always this huge elephant in the room never addressed in these articles on sleep - particularly prior to the use of internal electrical lighting; the time of year. Your amount of sleep and how you sleep would change substantially based on whether there was 4 hours or 14 hours of darkness. Yet it never comes up in these catch all types of articles.

The fantastically great podcast, backstory, did a piece on it as well. There was supposedly a stage of the us temperance movement against second sleep.

http://backstoryradio.org/2014/11/02/sleep-well/

> None .... continuous sleep pattern .... Middle East

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_Chatzot (Jewish prayer said about an hour after midnight).

I don't know if Jews had a different sleep pattern than their neighbors, but I can't imagine they would.

At the time the prayer was instituted Jews mostly lived in what is now Iran/Iraq and in Israel. They were expelled and ended up in Europe only later.

For some reason the following caught my eye in this interesting article:

"In between the first and second sleep the person would be awake about an hour – enough to say prayers during Matins, which would typically fall between 2 am and 3 am, study or even have sex."

Why the even :-)? Shouldn't those three items be listed in the reverse order? Does this point to a fact about the medieval mindset or just to the sensibilities of the writer?

It's neither, it's a joke.

There's a lot of talk about different sleep patterns like this, called "polyphasic sleep". There's even a society for it. There's different types of polyphasic sleep, ranging from the "siesta" popular in many Latin nations, to the "Dymaxion" which Buckminster Fuller tried to promote which has four equal waking periods throughout the day and only 2 hours of total sleep. (There's also an "Uberman" pattern that's similar, with 6 equal waking periods.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

This article touches on the religious obligation issues but I feel it doesn't go far enough.

In the middle ages, you were religiously required to get up in the middle of the night to say a set of prayers. This practice was mandated by the authorities and failure to comply was not regarded well.

Articles about medieval first and second sleep tend to present this practice as if it is a natural human practice found in all cultures before the modern world.

The specific manifestation of first and second sleep in this era in europe though is clearly a result of authoritarian mandates of behavior that should not be neglected.

> In the middle ages, you were religiously required to get up in the middle of the night to say a set of prayers.

Citation required.

I was fascinated with sleeping patterns in college, and I came across that book. I decided to try out the sleeping pattern, and it's really an incredible experience. The time between first sleep and second sleep is really cool. Very meditative. Incredible lonely, yet peaceful. I'd recommend that people try it out.

Sounds cool, but falling asleep takes me 1-2 hours on a good day. If I had to go through that any more often than once a day, I might stab myself.

I used to battle this, and still do if I'm not careful. What have you tried? I find exercise (even light yoga), watching what I eat in the hours before sleep, and breathing exercises help greatly

I used to have this issue and while I'm not totally cured, I improved things a lot by waiting until I was at or near the point where I could barely keep my eyes open before getting in bed and trying to read. You don't need to do it every night, but if you do it often enough, eventually it becomes easier to get in bed, start reading, and find yourself falling asleep even if you aren't already almost there.

I've cut out all sources of caffeine completely, except for a glass of tea right after I wake up where I pour away the first steep.

I use NRR 33 earplugs and at least one white noise machine going, sometimes two, to avoid any noise pulling me back from near-sleep. The room is dark, but I wear a sleep mask just in case.

I'm averaging 1-2 hours with those. I'm doing the sleep hygiene thing, where I don't do anything in bed except (try to) sleep and sex. I think you're also supposed to just get up if you can't sleep, but if I do that, I just never sleep. I come back even more exhausted, and I'm still looking at the same damn wait.

Mental activity can definitely make it worse, but I haven't found a meditation/visualization sort of trick that really helped. The best I can do is psyche away the frustration and just... wait.

Alcohol/pot help maybe a little, but then I don't sleep deeply at all, always wake up really tired. I haven't tried prescription drugs. I'm told they have the same effect on sleep quality, and I don't want that. I do get much-needed good sleep once I'm there. It just takes too damn long.

I'd love to hear if anything's worked for you.

For me it's all about stress. Typically I can't get myself to fall asleep before 1am. Whenever I go to bed it just takes 1-2 hours to fall asleep. I just can't get my mind to shut off. I struggle to get up at 9:30am and need coffee to be functional in the mornings.

If I go out on a long camping trip I'll often not even bring a book. This means that once the sun goes down there is basically nothing to do. After a day or two I find myself easily falling asleep and sleeping through the night. When I come back home, if I still haven't begun to go back to work, it persists. I can easily just go to bed at 11:00 and get up at 8:00. It generally lasts until I go to work.

It's the anxiety of needing to get things done and maintain my appearance to others and to myself that really seems to keep me up. As I lie in bed there's a part of me that says I should have accomplished more during the day and that I should be doing something "productive". I'm working hard on meditation, mindfulness and self-awareness to reduce the anxiety, but what works best is to really remove myself from the stressors and go to a place where I really just can't do anything so my mind gives up.

I went camping near the end of December and had another week off for the new year. It was great. I was well slept and relaxed. Now in my first week back to work I've already fallen back into less than 7 hours of sleep per night.

I guess I need to go camping again.

This rings true for me too... in winter if I go to sleep when the sun sets I'll wake up around 12-4am and stay awake for an hour before being able to fall asleep again.

This is what I have begun to wonder about this interest in the old sleep pasterns. They're usually put forward as healthier or the way we evolved to sleep. It seems to me it is more simply a symptom of going to sleep very early because the sun went down.

The sun is setting here at around 5:15 pm and rising at around 7:30. Twilight times are about half an hour more light around those times. If you're going to sleep around 6pm because the sun has gone down, you're probably not sleeping through until dawn which is 14 hours away. So you got up, did some stuff, it still wasn't light out, so you just went back to bed.

It's not because it's healthier, or because you evolved to do so, it's because your source of light hasn't shown up yet. That changed with cheap electricity, because even candles weren't quite as convenient or cheap.

Well in fairness the process of evolution would have had millions of years to optimize body cycles for the former scenario rather than the latter.

Humans didn't live at high latitudes until only tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. We might be better tuned to Equatorial cycles.

Didn't people drink massive amounts of beer during the middle ages?

I can't sleep a full night if I have more than 2 drinks, I imagine this happens to others as well.

Massive amounts of very, very weak beer.

Given everyone sleeps I have no idea why people get suckered in by this two sleeps legend.

Compared to lets say a regular siesta which many societies don't do, but I think we all have had or wanted to have an afternoon nap.

I really don't think it's just a legend. The linked article and Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep) give enough evidence that it seems unlikely to be a complete myth.

And saying "I hate waking up in the middle of the night" doesn't really have much to do with this. If you consistently slept for 12 hours a night, you might find it a lot easier and more pleasant to get up in the middle, and that's exactly what one of the studies in the Wikipedia article showed.

And as anecdotal evidence, even a few people in this 2-hours-old comment section say they've tried it with good results.

I fell into this routine for a few weeks during my OS course in college. Didn't have much social life as I was working on my OS for about 10 hours each day (or catching up in my other classes...), so it was easy. I went to bed when I felt tired, usually around 8 or 9 PM, woke up for an hour or two around 1 or 2 AM, then fell back asleep until morning, 7 or 8 AM.

During the middle hour, I felt the intense relaxation and started writing poetry/drawing during the period. I'd often just stare out the window, enjoying the feelings of tranquility. I even wrote some code once that I'd been struggling with before I fell asleep. The dream recall is intense -- you can remember every detail, rather than fighting as it fades away -- so I also started keeping a brief dream journal.

I'd love to do it again, but it's not feasible given the rhythms of NYC. If I ever move someplace quieter and decide to simplify my life, I'd eagerly return to the segmented sleep schedule.

Fun! I think a lot of students find an optimal sleep pattern, just because they can (depending on schedule).

There was a year that I slept from around 3am to 9am, long-ish siesta in the early afternoon (1pm-4pm). It was the most productive time of my life, and I felt well rested. I really got a lot of work done in those late evenings/early nights; Everything calmed down in the dorm, noise outside was lower. Morning was for chores/part-time job.

I wish I could return to this. I'm more or less 9-5 now and always tired.

In recent years the term segmented sleep has been used to describe the historical practice of dividing your rest into a first and second sleep.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783

I remember reading that farmers would milk cows during this mid-night hour, but I can't locate a source right now.

it would make sense, because you're supposed to milk cows more than once a day.

That depends on a number of factors, but if there are no current nursing babies, and if you are trying to maximize milk production, then yes, a 12 hour separation between milkings should be optimal.

But we make it easier on ourselves by milking at 8 AM and PM.

I swear I read a paper once indicating you get a better milk yield if you do one milking in the middle of the night.

Various frequencies have been tried: http://wdmc.org/1997/MilkingFrequency.pdf

but technology has also advanced to the point where each cow can choose its own frequency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_milking#Advantages

Seems to be down or at least very slow, here's the google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Definitely recommend the book in the post. At Day's Close by A. Roger Ekrich. Beautiful writing. http://www.amazon.com/At-Days-Close-Night-Times/dp/039332901...

> The chronicler Jean Froissart heard the story of a noble named Pierre de Béarn who had a traumatic experience when he killed an exceptionally large bear in hand-to-hand combat. Afterwards, during his sleep he would rise, grab a sword and swing it around at the air. If he could not find his weapon, Pierre “created such noise and clamor that it seemed like all the demons of hell were there with him.” Eventually, his wife and children would leave him over the problem.

Apparently people from the middle ages still suffered from night tremors. Now that these sorts of things are better understood, quotes like this sound rather comical.

Either I didn't look closely enough or I didn't get it how this would work in the winter.

In January, like now, in Germany sunset should be at ~8 am and dusk should be before 5 pm. That's only 9 hours. I'm probably not working hard enough (physically) but how would I ever sleep that much?

In June there's daylight from 5 am to 9 pm, that's still 10 hours of darkness, I see how it would work there.

The question isn't "how would I ever sleep that much"; it's "what am I going to do with my time if it's too dark to see?" That most people in the Medieval era couldn't do anything productive for more than 9 hours a day in winter is a given. The question is just when and how they slept within that 14-hour block of unproductive hours.

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