Just what did people lie on in the past? Probably just the floor to begin with, but from time immemorial it seems that humans have been looking for a comfortable place to spend the night. So here is the story of that long, often uncomfortable, road before we arrived at that destination of refreshment and comfort, the memory foam mattress:

Past Mattresses: The Story of Mattresses
Part 1
As you lay peacefully asleep on your comfortable cheap memory foam mattress, spare a thought for all those poor sleepers in bygone times who were not quite so fortunate as you:
. The Neolithic people of Skara Brae in the Orkneys, Scotland, around 5,000 years ago would’ve had to make do with a ‘mattress’ bag stuffed with bracken ( fern).
. Around the same period in Ancient Greece, mattresses were stuffed with wool, feathers or dried grass (hay).
. In Iron Age Britain, about 2,000 years ago, people would also have used feathers (down, the small soft feathers of birds)) or hay in their mattresses.
. Straw, the dry stalks of cereal plants, left after the grain and chaff have been removed, was a common filling for mattresses in the Highlands of Scotland and elsewhere.
. In Europe and the USA dried seagrass was once used as a mattress filler and this had the advantage of not being flammable and was said to be flea-proof.
. Horse hair, obtained from the manes and tails of horses, has been used for mattresses – the very short hair is first curled.
. The tough and fibrous fibre of the rye plant was, and still is, used as a natural filling in mattresses as is the seed fibre from the balsa tree.
. The kapok tree seed hair fibre has been used for mattresses but it is highly flammable and its use has decreased with the development of foam rubber and synthetic fibres.

As Lawrence Wright has pointed out in Warm and Snug. The History of the Bed , Leonardo Da Vinci objected to ‘ lying upon the spoils of other dead creatures’ and John Locke believed that ‘ being buried every night in feathers melts and dissolves the body’.

Be thankful that today you now have access to a very comfortable, cheap but quality memory foam mattress.

In the Middle East a ‘mattress ‘ was created by piling rugs, one upon the other, on the floor. Arabs also enjoyed sleeping on cushions thrown on the floor and it was from this habit that we get the word mattress, derived from the Arabic word matrah which meant ‘place where something is thrown’ and ‘mat, cushion.’ This lead to the Middle English word materas, first recorded in a work written around 1300. Incidently, this Arabic style of sleeping surface was adopted by the Europeans during the Crusades.

During the Middle Ages, 12th century manuscripts reveal that some of the the well-to-do had embroidered mattresses and these would have been made by medieval upholsterers, skilled in the craft of covering, padding and stuffing of seating and bedding.

In the Tudor period, as Lawrence Wright points out, ‘ beneath the splendour of carved wood and rich hangings, even royal backbones still lay on a base of straw, and a pile of ‘brissel ticks’ or feather mattresses – as warm in summer as in winter, and liable towards dawn to have formed a flat valley enclosed by two hillsides.’ None of the restful and restorative comfort of a memory foam mattress for them.

In the 17th century the new skill of carding wool, rather than just beating it, created a much springier filling and in 1781 the box-shaped mattress that replaced the shapeless bag of straw appeared and brought with it a much greater degree of comfort. Not that it would be any match for the degree of comfort experienced by memory foam mattress owners.

Beech leaves were recommended as a mattress stuffing in 1840, pine shavings were advised in America in the 1880s and, according to Lawrence Wright, a Lady Barker found a mattress in an Irish hotel stuffed with seaweed in which she suspected ‘many curious specimens of marine zoology had been entombed by mistake’. As Wright says, the feather bed, despite its reputation as unhealthy, survived until the spring mattress became really durable.

But neither of these mattress options would compete with the sleep-enhancing qualities of the future memory foam mattress. Cheap good-quality memory foam mattresses would make a refreshing night’s sleep available to the masses.

Sources:
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Lawrence Wright, Warm and Snug. The History of the Bed (New edition 2004).