This one is history, not advice. But it changes how you picture a bedroom 400 years ago.
Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech, spent 16 years in the archives. In 2001 he published a paper, and in 2005 a book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. In diaries, court records, medical books and literature, he found more than 500 references to two separate sleeps in one night.
As the BBC described his findings, the first sleep began about two hours after dusk. Then came a waking stretch of an hour or two. Then a second sleep until morning.
What filled that gap? Some people got up to relieve themselves, smoke tobacco, even call on the neighbors. Most, by the BBC’s account, stayed put and prayed, read or wrote, and prayer manuals as far back as the late 1400s offered prayers written for those hours. And plenty of people simply talked with whoever shared the bed.
Ekirch found the phrases start disappearing in the late 1600s, first among the urban upper classes of northern Europe. He links the change to better street and home lighting and the rise of coffee houses. Paris lit its streets in 1667, and by the end of that century more than 50 major European towns and cities had followed. By the 1920s, according to the BBC’s account, the idea had faded from everyday memory.
There’s a modern echo, too. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr ran an experiment in which eight healthy men spent 14 hours a night in darkness. As reported by Scientific American, they eventually settled into two bouts of sleep separated by a stretch of quiet wakefulness.
Not everyone is convinced. In 2023, the journal Medical History published a paper by Niall Boyce questioning how widespread segmented sleep really was in early modern England. Ekirch published a response defending his work the next year. The debate is live.
One more caution: none of this means you should sleep in two parts, and it says nothing about how you personally sleep best. That’s a conversation for a doctor, not a history magazine.
Sunday Home
Try this at home
Next time you pick up an old novel, a diary or a collection of letters, watch for the phrase “first sleep.” Once you know it, you start to notice it.
Did your grandparents have any sayings about sleep or nighttime that nobody uses anymore?
The carousel — scroll sideways
Sources
Everything above is checked against these. Open any of them.
- Built on: BBC News Magazine, “The myth of the eight-hour sleep” (Hegarty, Feb 22, 2012), archived copy (500+ references, timing, activities, prayer manuals, late 17th-century decline, Paris 1667, 50+ towns, 1920s)https://people.uncw.edu/imperialm/uncw/PLS_506/BBC_Myth_of_8_hour_sleep_2_22_12.pdf
- Scientific American, “Ancient Sleep in Modern Times” (Dec 1, 2006) (Ekirch 2005 book, Virginia Tech, Wehr’s eight healthy men, 14 hours of darkness)https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sleep-in-modern-t/
- Boyce N., “Have we lost sleep? A reconsideration of segmented sleep in early modern England,” *Medical History* 67(2), 2023https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2023.14
- Ekirch A.R., “Reflections on ‘Have we lost sleep?’,” *Medical History* 68(3), 2024https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.20
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