One of the great insights I gleaned from studying history was the realization that everyone throughout history, no matter when or where they lived, was basically the same as us if you learned enough about them. This is probably fairly basic for most people but came as a great surprise to a poor dumb ol’ country boy.
That doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally be surprised by some alarming differences, however. I just discovered something about the people of medieval Europe that is so strange it makes you want to rethink that first paragraph. Those weirdos.
While we take it for granted that a perfect night’s sleep is eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, until about the late seventeenth century, people engaged in something called biphasic or segmented sleep. Depending slightly on the time of the year, people went to bed around 9:00 PM, slept until about 11:00, then woke up for two hours before going back to sleep until dawn.
The two periods of rest were commonly called first and second sleep. During those two waking hours, people might finish chores, talk with their family, or—if they listened to the urgings of the church—engage in prayer. And I suppose for some people, that holy suggestion was actually true. For most married couples the most obvious activity was engaging in sex, particularly since it was widely believed that the healthiest children were conceived after first sleep.
People worked hard and usually came home too exhausted to make love, so a brief nap first made sense. It also explains the high birth rate of Medieval Europe. (Thirty-five years ago, when I was doing research in Tegucigalpa, the city turned off the water supply for more than twenty hours a day. The water was turned back on at 4:00 AM, the air escaping from the pipes created a moaning sound all over town. Locals said this resulted in an incredibly high birth rate because it was too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.)
This segmented sleep pattern was not just a social convention, it occurred naturally. Long term experimental studies where people lived in environments without clocks and no access to natural lighting have been conducted. The subjects slept or worked when they wanted to and were free to set their own schedules. Over time, they developed a form of polyphasic schedule with some of the subjects developed a midday siesta and others developed the segmented schedule described above. They also slowly evolved into a 25-hour day, a phenomenon for which I have no explanation.
While there are sufficient references to first and second sleep in medieval records for us to be certain about their sleeping patterns, whether this pattern extends to other cultures is still not clear. When people set down to record the events of their daily lives, there is a tendency to only record the unique events, not the prosaic. As an inveterate journal writer, I’ve filled countless Moleskin notebooks, but I doubt that I have ever described how I sleep at night. We tend to only record the out of the ordinary, and nothing is more routine or boring than our bedtimes.
Pliny left us hints, so it is likely that the Romans had similar biphasic sleep patterns. About the earlier Greeks—we don’t have a clue. As for other cultures and times, it seems that some pattern of segmented sleep periods, such as divided nocturnal sleep or a daily siesta seems to be the norm. Much more research is needed and I expect we will hear more about this in the years to come.
The biphasic sleep patterns of Medieval Europe came to end with the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of artificial lighting. The invention and increasing availability of affordable candles, oil lamps, and later gas and electric lights allowed people to extend their evening activities, allowing people to stay up later and to slowly consolidate the first and second sleep periods into a single uninterrupted period.
Urbanization and industrial schedules required a more regimented approach to time, with fixed work hours making consolidated nighttime sleep more practical and necessary. At the same time, the industrial revolution made clocks cheaper, which regimented daily routines further, eroding the natural segmented sleep habits.
The Industrial Revolution also changed society. Evening activities such as theater, social gatherings, and reading gained popularity, leading people to stay awake later and skip the earlier phase of segmented sleep. Over time, society came to believe that an interrupted eight-hour sleep period was the healthiest. Even today, most people believe the single long period of sleep is the best choice, despite the lack of conclusive medical studies supporting that view.
This was all new information to me, and the evidence for biphasic sleeping during medieval times still seems to be making its way through the various academic disciplines. This made me wonder if this relatively new information would made any changes in art history. Have we interpreted medieval depictions of sleeping people correctly? Should certain paintings be reinterpreted?
The painting at right is The Land of Cockaigne, by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder. The painting shows a peasant, a soldier, and a clerk asleep under a tree. I won’t bore you with all the competing—and totally contradictory—interpretations of the painting, but I can assure you that none of the competing theories take in the possibility that these are people in their first sleep period. This was just the first medieval painting depicting sleep that occurred to me, there are countless others.
How will this realization change our interpretations of paintings like this? How many paintings will need to be reexamined? I’m looking forward to reading some new interpretations.
I find that now at the age of 70, I've drifted into a biphasic sleep pattern. Me and the Missus fall asleep watching TV in the evening, wake up again between 1 and 2 am. I get up, lock up the house, maybe take a shower or change clothes and get into bed, hook up the CPAP to counteract the apnea and then sleep till 9:30 in the morning. I've fallen into a rhythmic kind of old geezer circadian rhythm. It's out of sync with the rest of the world, but it's in sync with me, so I don't much care. Getting old You lose that need to keep time with the herd. I'm pretty sure going back to the old circadian rhythms is a good idea.
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