It is probable that the Scandinavians followed to some extent the usage of the race that preceded them, and used their megalithic monuments, much as we know that tumuli were employed for later interments, and by races different from that which raised the tumuli. That the idea of sleep was connected with death in many cases of burials, is certain, from the position given to the corpse, the hands are folded and the knees drawn up.
We cannot say for certain that the dolmens, as the French call the monuments which we term cromlechs, were reproductions in stone of the closed beds of the men of the polished-stone age, but it is probable. The great family dolmens were cemeterial big Beds of Ware to accommodate a number, and the small kistvaens were single beds for old bachelors. Some of the largest dolmens contain as many as forty sleepers. Under Brown Willy, the highest point of the Cornish moors, is one long kistvaen, and beside it a tiny one for a baby—the mother’s bed and the cradle, side by side, for the long night of death.
Fig. 24.—DOLMEN, GABAUDET, NEAR GRAMAT. DEP. DE LOT.
It has been supposed that the cromlechs, or dolmens, and the kistvaens, represent the ancient dwellings of the neolithic men. I do not think so. The position of the bodies shows that they were intended, not as dwellings, but as beds. If they resembled anything used in life, it was the bed-compartments in the huts, not the huts themselves. These bed-compartments were backed, walled, and roofed with stone.
I was once offered in Antwerp a very beautifully carved oak bed; it was but an oblong box, with an opening on one side only, which could be closed with a curtain, and very much like a berth in an old-fashioned steam-packet.
The reader will remember the graphic description, in “Wuthering Heights,” of a very similar close-bed of boards as used in Yorkshire. That Yorkshire bed was a lineal descendant from the lokhvila of the Scandinavian colonists of Northumbria.
When danger of assassination in bed ceased, men began to sleep easier, breathe freer, and dispensed with the door and its bolts. They shut themselves in with curtains instead; and as there were practical inconveniences in making beds, where the bed maker could not go round to the wall side, cautiously and with hesitation suffered the bed to be pulled out, so that it might stand free on all sides save the head. Then head and top alone remained of board, two sides and foot were left open, or partially open; they could be closed with curtains, and the sleeper could and did convert his bed into a sort of box when he retired to rest.
So beds remained throughout the Middle Ages and to last century. Some ancient beds had gabled roofs over them, and many remained fixed in on all sides save one. But at the same time there was the truckle-bed for the servant; even the iron bedstead without tester, precisely like those turned out by every ironmonger. Viollet le Duc gives an engraving of one such in his “Dictionnaire du Mobilier Français,” from a miniature of the tenth century. He gives also a representation of an iron bed thrust under a roof-like covering, with curtains, and ventilating windows, on which Solomon is shown asleep, from a MS. of the twelfth century. It would almost seem that in the Middle Ages a contest raged between the four-poster and the bed without tester, and in the MS. from which the illustration just mentioned is taken the wisdom of Solomon is represented as combining both fashions.
Anyone who has taken lodgings in Germany is aware of the alcove-bed; the curtains are let fall that conceal a recess, and, lo! the chamber has ceased to be a bedroom and has become a reception-room. This is another adaptation of the Northern conception of a bed. In the London houses of Gower Street, and of streets built at the same period, the same idea is carried out in a somewhat pretentious form. In front, looking out on the street, is the sitting-room, opposite the window are folding doors, and behind them the bedroom. The little back room behind these doors is the lokhvila somewhat enlarged.