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.
February 24th, 2012 | 1:47 pm
Regarding: 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.
Ah, but they still had to get out of bed to go to the chapel. Surely that counts as acestical discipline, at least on a cold night.
I have long suspected that the notion that we must have 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a modern notion. Looking foward to reading this book.
February 24th, 2012 | 2:03 pm
[...] How We Used to Sleep – Matthew Schmitz, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
February 24th, 2012 | 2:11 pm
I’m trying to figure out how this worked in a world where artificial lighting was extremely expensive on the relative scale. Monks and nuns had their candles paid for by offerings, but preparing food and mending and spinning require at least some light.
February 24th, 2012 | 2:38 pm
Thank you for this posting. This is just how I sleep nowadays. Go to bed early, wake just after midnight, maybe a few more hours sleep before dawn. I thought I was weird, but now I see its a throw-back to an earlier time.
I still maintain the Carthusians are far more austere than I could ever be. Their rigid schedule is performed out of obedience day after day (night after night). If I ever can sleep through the night, I will.
February 24th, 2012 | 3:12 pm
But what about second breakfast?
February 24th, 2012 | 8:30 pm
The divided sleep is itself interesting, but maybe more so for me is how knowledge of this custom apparently disappeared. It’s interesting to contemplate how a practice which was seemingly the norm throughout all of society could become completely forgotten.
February 24th, 2012 | 8:57 pm
Probably two things made the custom disappear. More importantly, the invention of affordable artificial lighting made it feasible for most people to stay awake after sundown. Less importantly, technology has made it less precarious to live far from the equator. Near the equator, night is about twelve hours in all seasons; at higher latitudes, the night is short in summer and long in winter.
February 25th, 2012 | 12:45 am
I was reminded of when, back in my days as an anthro major, I read an ethnography of the Siriono (I believe) people of South America. They would go to bed with the sun, and wake up about 2 or 3 in the morning, in their hammocks in their communal longhouses, chat amongst themselves for a while and then go back to sleep. Might be more common than we realize!
February 25th, 2012 | 2:52 am
[...] 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/ __________________ Your socks stink. To view links or images in signatures your post count [...]
February 25th, 2012 | 7:14 am
Where I live, in the West of Scotland, in mid-December, the sun sets at 3.47 pm and rises at 8.46 am. Allowing a half-hour of twilight after sunset and before sunrise, this still makes for a long night.
In June, of course, sunset is at 9.07 pm and sunrise at 3.34 am, so, again, deducting an hour of twilight, there would be scarcely time for a “first sleep,” never mind a second one.
As for artificial lights, most burghs had by-laws requiring fires and naked flames to be extinguished an hour after sunset, with a curfew (couvre-feu) bell being rung.
NB I have ignored “Summer Time,” which is a 20th century innovation
February 25th, 2012 | 10:19 am
Another question is why the custom died out so quickly due to “industrialization” when a large proportion of the population remained non-industrialized well into the 19th century, and fairly detached from the cultural pressures of the industrialized culture. Why were the factories of London and Leeds driving the sleep habits of American farm families in rural Ohio? There are a lot of unanswered questions here.
I’m not sure I get Felapton’s point about the equator, since the people discussed in the article were already living about as far from the equator as you could get (Northern Europe, British Isles) in large numbers before the modern era.
February 25th, 2012 | 11:55 am
So how does thus relate to the custom in southern Europe of going home mudday to have a large meal and a siesta, then back to work for several hours followed by staying up visiting tapa bars into the wee hours?
Also, we forget that Europe is much further north than the continental USA, basically the same as Canada, which means very long nights in winter and very short ones in summer. Just living north of the 45th parallel here in southern Washington means sunset around Christmas is at 4:30 PM.
February 25th, 2012 | 12:47 pm
Pentamon
Perhaps, the availability of cheap lighting, in the form of kerosene lamps and paraffin wax candles?
February 27th, 2012 | 9:02 am
“Pentamon
Perhaps, the availability of cheap lighting, in the form of kerosene lamps and paraffin wax candles?”
Rural Americans went to bed with the sun and up with the chickens well into the 20th century, and they were the overwhelming majority of people through the 19th century. “Cheap” isn’t free and people remained quite frugal. I don’t think that answers why people unaffected by industrialization as far as their personal lifestyles (obviously, everyone was indirectly affected) would just stop doing what is purported to come most naturally, when it’s also purported to be most economical and efficient for them.
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