Today, even the cheapest roadside motel generally comes with one luxury we barely think about: a bed of our own. For travelers a few centuries ago, however, paying for a night at an inn didn’t necessarily mean renting a room—or even a bed. In Europe and colonial America during the 17th and 18th centuries, travelers routinely shared sleeping quarters with complete strangers, and when an inn was crowded, that could mean climbing into bed beside someone you’d never met.
The arrangement was largely a matter of economics and space. Beds were expensive pieces of furniture, mattresses and linens weren’t cheap, and roadside inns had to accommodate an unpredictable stream of travelers arriving on horseback, by wagon, or on foot. Instead of turning customers away, an innkeeper might put several guests in one chamber, two or three in a bed, and additional travelers on pallets, benches, or the floor. In especially crowded rural inns, accounts suggest as many as six people might be assigned to a single bed.
To people accustomed to modern ideas of privacy, the thought of waking up beside a stranger sounds almost unbelievable. But personal space simply meant something different in the preindustrial world. Families commonly slept together, servants might share sleeping quarters with other members of a household, and travelers were accustomed to communal accommodations. Beds could also provide something particularly valuable before central heating: warmth. Sharing one was often practical rather than intimate.
That didn’t mean everyone enjoyed it.
Travel diaries are filled with complaints about noisy, drunken, snoring, or otherwise unpleasant bedfellows. British merchant Robert Hunter Jr., traveling in colonial Virginia, described spending a night in a tavern room with eight other people. Three men were packed into one bed and spent part of the night arguing over the unenviable question of who had to sleep in the middle. Another traveler, Francis Baily, observed that a guest could go to sleep alone only to wake up and discover an unfamiliar person lying beside him—the innkeeper having quietly filled the vacant half of the bed during the night. Complaining didn’t necessarily get you anywhere; Baily noted that travelers were essentially told it was simply the custom of the country.
Even famous men weren’t exempt. In September 1776, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams stopped at a crowded inn in New Jersey while traveling on a diplomatic mission. With only one room and one small bed available, the two Founding Fathers became bedfellows for the night. According to Adams’ later account, instead of immediately going to sleep, the pair got into a lengthy argument over whether the bedroom window should remain open. Franklin favored fresh air, while Adams worried about the cold night air.
And your fellow traveler wasn’t necessarily the worst thing waiting beneath the blankets. Inn beds could consist of mattresses stuffed with straw, corn husks, wool, or—if you were fortunate—feathers. Cleanliness varied considerably, and travelers regularly complained about dirty bedding, fleas, lice, and bedbugs. Add the sounds of a busy tavern downstairs, late-arriving guests, thin walls, drunken conversations, and a stranger snoring inches from your face, and a peaceful night’s sleep was hardly guaranteed.
Those with enough money sometimes had better options. Wealthier travelers could seek private chambers or negotiate with an innkeeper for more exclusive accommodations. Social status, sex, and local customs could also determine who slept with whom; bed-sharing wasn’t a universal free-for-all. In early modern England, for example, suitable bedfellows were preferably of similar sex, age, and social standing. Circumstances on the road, however, could quickly make those niceties secondary to simply finding somewhere warm and dry to sleep.
Perhaps the most spectacular reminder of the era’s communal sleeping culture is England’s famous Great Bed of Ware. Built around the end of the 16th century and associated with inns in Ware, Hertfordshire, the enormous bed became something of a tourist attraction. Stories circulated about astonishing numbers of people squeezing into it at once; one 18th-century account claimed that 26 couples had occupied the giant bed together. Whether every such tale was true hardly mattered—the bed had become famous precisely because sharing sleeping space was something people of the period immediately understood.
By the late 18th and especially the 19th century, things gradually began to change. Purpose-built hotels offered increasing numbers of private rooms, furniture became more affordable, and changing attitudes toward hygiene, respectability, and personal privacy made sleeping alone—or at least only with family or a chosen companion—more desirable. America’s early hotels helped establish a new expectation: paying for lodging could mean purchasing private space rather than simply purchasing somewhere to lie down.
The old custom didn’t disappear overnight. Herman Melville could still use the prospect of sharing a bed with an unknown stranger as the setup for one of the most memorable episodes in Moby-Dick in 1851, when Ishmael discovers that his promised bed is already shared with the mysterious Queequeg. Contemporary readers would have recognized the situation immediately.
Today, handing a hotel clerk your credit card and being told that some guy named Ezekiel is already asleep on your side of the bed would probably result in a very quick one-star review. A few centuries ago, it might simply have meant the inn was busy.
And if Ezekiel snored, hogged the blankets, or showed up drunk at two in the morning, well—that was between you and Ezekiel.
