Bed, Bedstead, an article of furniture to sleep or rest on. The term bed properly is applied to a large flat bag filled with feathers, down, wool, or other soft material, and also to a mattress supported on spiral springs or form of elastic chains or wirework which is raised from the ground on a bedstead. The term, however, sometimes includes the bedstead or frame for supporting the bed. The forms of beds are necessarily very various—every period and country having its own form of bed. Air-beds and water-beds are much used by invalids.
Bed, in geology, a layer or stratum, usually a stratum of considerable thickness.
Beda. See Bede.
Bédarieux (bā-där-i-eu), a thriving town, Southern France, department Hérault, situated on the Orb. Pop. 6186.
Bed-bug. See Bug.
Bed-chamber, Lords of the, officers of the royal household of Britain under the Groom of the Stole. They are twelve in number, and wait a week each in turn. In the case of a queen regnant these posts are occupied by ladies, called Ladies of the Bed-chamber.
Beddoes (bed´ōz), Thomas, physician and author, born 1760; educated at Oxford, London, and Edinburgh. After taking his doctor's degree, and visiting Paris, he was appointed professor of chemistry at Oxford. There he published some excellent chemical treatises, and essays upon such subjects as the calculus, sea-scurvy, consumption, catarrh, and fever. His expressed sympathy with the French revolutionists led to his retirement from his professorship in 1792, soon after which he published his Observations on the Nature of Demonstrative
Evidence, and the exceedingly popular History of Isaac Jenkins. In 1794 he married a sister of Maria Edgeworth; and in 1798, with the pecuniary aid of Wedgwood, opened a pneumatic institution for curing phthisical and other diseases by inhalation of gases. It speedily became an ordinary hospital, but was noteworthy as connected with the discovery of the properties of nitrous oxide, and as having been superintended by the young Humphry Davy. Beddoes' essays On Consumption (1779) and On Fever (1807), and his Hygeia (3 vols., 1807) had a high contemporary repute. He died in 1808.
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, poet, son of above, born 1803, died 1849; published The Bride's Tragedy while a student at Oxford, studied medicine, and lived long abroad. His work was largely fragmentary, but his posthumous Death's Jest-book, or The Fool's Tragedy (1850), received the high praise of such judges as Landor and Browning. His Poems, with memoir, appeared in 1851.
Bede, Beda, or Bæda, known as the Venerable, English historian and theologian, born in 672 or 673 in the neighbourhood of Monkwearmouth, County Durham; educated at St. Peter's Monastery, Wearmouth; took deacon's orders in his nineteenth year at St. Paul's Monastery, Jarrow, and was ordained priest at thirty by John of Beverley, Bishop of Hexham. His life was spent in studious seclusion, the chief events in it being the production of homilies, hymns, lives of saints, commentaries, and works in history, chronology, grammar, &c. He was the most learned Englishman of his day, and in some sense the father of English history, his most important work being his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (or Ecclesiastical History of England), afterwards translated by King Alfred into Anglo-Saxon. Besides his familiarity with Latin, he knew Greek and had some acquaintance with Hebrew. Most of his writings were on scriptural and ecclesiastical subjects, but he also wrote on chronology, physical science, grammar, &c., and had considerable ability in the writing of Latin verse. He died in 735, an interesting record of his closing days being preserved in a letter by his pupil Cuthbert. His body was after a lapse of time removed from Jarrow church to Durham, but of the shrine which formerly enclosed them only the Latin inscription remains, ending with the verse—'Hac sunt in fossa Bedæ venerabilis ossa'. On 13th Nov., 1899, Leo XIII decreed that the feast of the Venerable Bede should be celebrated in the Church on 27th May. An edition of the whole works of Bede (12 vols.), with an English translation, was prepared by Dr. Giles (1843-4).—Bibliography: Gehle. De Bedæ Venerabilis Vita et Scriptis; Browne, The Venerable Bede; C. Plummer's introduction to his edition of the Historia Ecclesiastica.