The Great Bed of Ware
1590 to 1600
An oak bed so big that it has been a joke for more than four hundred years. It is over three metres wide, tall enough to walk under the canopy, and carved from headboard to bedposts with columns, arches, lions, satyrs and swags of fruit. Traces of the original bright paint survive in the panels, and the whole thing was once even gaudier than it is now. It was made in the late fifteen hundreds, probably for an inn in the town of Ware in Hertfordshire, a day's ride north of London on the road to Cambridge, where it was already a tourist attraction by the sixteen hundreds.
Look closely at the carving and you will see two kinds of decoration. The headboard has inlaid panels of coloured woods showing arches and townscapes in the manner of German and Dutch Renaissance furniture, and the posts and canopy carry heavy figures in the English fashion of the time. The bed was assembled from more than two dozen pieces, and the museum's number includes all of them. All over the surfaces you will find initials and dates scratched by guests who slept in it, and traces of red wax seals that some of them pressed into the wood as proof of their visit, a tradition going back centuries.
Shakespeare mentions the bed in Twelfth Night, when Sir Toby Belch says a sheet of paper is big enough for the bed of Ware, and Ben Jonson and Byron refer to it too. Legend says that twelve couples once slept in it together, and that four couples did so for a wager in 1689. The bed passed between inns in Ware until 1870 and was sold to a country house, and the museum bought it in 1931. It is the most famous piece of furniture in Britain, and children still ask whether they may climb in.
Did You Know? A local legend holds that the ghost of the carpenter who made the bed pinches anyone who sleeps in it without his permission.
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