Fig. 25.—HUT, TREWORTHA MARSH, WITH STONE BED.
(By kind permission of “The Daily Graphic.”)
Indeed, the two ideas of bed, the open and the closed, go back a long way. I have mentioned in the preceding article the exploration of an ancient settlement—date early but unfixed—on the Cornish moors. One hut had in it both types of bed. We saw in the article on “Ovens” how that in the Hebrides, in the bee-hive huts to this day, a portion of the floor is marked off by curb stones, and this portion is converted into a bed at night and a seat by day. So was it in one of the stone huts on Trewortha Marsh. A set of granite blocks in a curve parted one portion of the earth floor from the rest. That was the bed according to the Keltic ideal. But, and this was curious, in the depth of the wall at the farther end of the hut, was a hole seven feet deep in the thickness of the wall, with a great slab of granite at the bottom smoothed to serve as mattress. It was about 2 feet 3 inches wide at the foot, as much at the head, but widened to 3 feet 4 inches in the middle. The height above the floor was 4 inches. It adjoined the oven—it was a bed according to Scandinavian ideas, with this sole difference, that access to it was obtained at the foot, which alone was open, and not at the side.
Fig. 26.—A RUINED HUT, TREWORTHA.
a. Chamber, 11½ ft. × 10 ft.; b. Bed; c. Locker; d. Entrance, 2 ft. 3 in. high; e. Sunkenway leading to the door and beyond to water.
Do those two types of bed in one hovel 10 feet square signify that men of two nationalities occupied it, each with his bed-ideal, which he would not abandon? We cannot say; probably it means no more than this, the confluence of two streams of tradition.
The wooden coffin is neither more nor less than the wooden four-poster or rather closed bed reduced to the smallest possible dimensions. Among the megalithic people the stone grave was gradually reduced in dimensions from the mighty dolmen to the small kistvaen. The great tumulus or cairn is now represented by the little green mound in the churchyard, and the menhir or long stone, rude and uninscribed, has its modern counterpart much altered in the headstone. The enclosed box-like stone tombs that were erected during last century were survivals of the kistvaen, as were also the sarcophagi of the ancients. The wooden coffin is but in small the wooden chamber of the dead of our Norse ancestors, which was itself but a reproduction of the closed bedchamber.