How People Slept Inside a Medieval Castle in Winter

On the longest night of 1317, around eighty people inside an English castle have sixteen hours of dark to get through, and all of them have to sleep somewhere. This is that night, reconstructed: the hall turned into a dormitory of straw pallets, the lord's curtained bed and why its hangings were worth more than its frame, who shared a bed with whom, what people wore (or did not wear) to sleep, why they slept half sitting up, the kitchen boys on the warm floor by the ovens, the groom in the straw beside the horses, the fleas, the "first sleep" and the waking hour after midnight, and the fire that every household feared. This is a reconstruction. Where historians disagree, we tell you, on screen. The same castle, the winter the boy fell sick: https://youtu.be/EuGbEY4kNc4 The same castle, the winter the bread ran out: https://youtu.be/Sqi8mZjR3HY The castle in an ordinary winter: https://youtu.be/qB4S5rXfMjk Chapters: 0:00 The Longest Night 1:12 Sixteen Hours of Dark 2:55 The Hall Makes Its Beds 4:34 A Map Made of Heat 6:05 The Great Bed 8:01 Almost No One Sleeps Alone 9:57 What They Wore to Bed 11:36 Half Sitting Up 13:38 The Cradle 15:05 The Kitchen Floor 16:28 The Stable 17:39 The Ones Who Do Not Sleep 18:37 The Coldest Walk in the Castle 20:06 What Else Is in the Bed 21:48 First Sleep 24:05 What Lives in the Dark 25:38 Smoke 27:49 Dawn 29:08 Your Bed Tonight 29:37 A Reconstructor's Note Sources & further reading: - A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005) - C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (Yale University Press, 1999) - Margaret Wade Labarge, A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (1965) - Jean Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages (2002) - Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (1986), on the coroners' rolls - Geoffrey Chaucer, The Squire's Tale and The Miller's Tale (late fourteenth century) - William Langland, Piers Plowman (B-text, c. 1377) - Le Ménagier de Paris (c. 1393), on fleas in the bedchamber - English synodal statutes of the thirteenth century, on infants in their parents' bed - The Eltham Ordinances (1526), on the king's kitchen boys - Thomas Wehr, "In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic", Journal of Sleep Research (1992) How this was made: every script is researched and written for this channel, every scene is designed for the sentence it illustrates, and the castle you see is a composite built from the records above. Images and narration are AI-generated from our scripts. If we got something wrong, tell us in the comments. The best corrections end up in the next reconstruction. New immersive history every week.