Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/67

 and Sentiments. 47 ages the fame idea of privacy was not conne6ted with the lleeping-room as at the prefent day. Gaimar has preferved an anecdote of Anglo- Saxon times curioufly illuftrative of this point. King Edgar — a fecond David in this refpe£t — married the widow of Ethelwold, whom he had murdered in order to clear his way to her bed. The king and queen were fleeping in their bed, which is defcribed as furrounded by a rich curtain, made of a fluff which we cannot eafily explain, when Dunftan, uninvited, but unhindered, entered the chamber to expoftulate with them on their wickednefs, and came to the king's bedfide, where he flood over them, and entered into converfation — A Londres ert Edgar !i rels ; King Edgar was at London ,■ En/on lit jut e la raine. He lay in hh bed iv'ith the queen, Entur eh out une curtine Round them ivas a curtain Delge, d'un paille ejcariman. Spread, made of jcarlet faille. Ep-vus Parce-vefque Dunftan Behold archbiftxp Dunftan Tres par matin "uint en la chambre Came into the chamber -very early in the morning. Sur un pecul de -vermail lambre On a bed-poft of red plank S'eft apue eel arce-vefque. The archhifhop leaned. In the account of the murder of king Ethelbert by the inflrumentality of the queen of king Ofta, as it is told by Roger of Wendover, we fee the queen ordering to be prepared for the royal guefl, a chamber, which was adorned for the occafion with fumptuous furniture, as his bed-room. " Near the king's bed (he caufed a feat to be prepared, magnificently decked, and furrounded with curtains ; and underneath it the wicked woman caufed a deep pit to be dug." Into this pit the king was pre- cipitated the moment he trufted himfelf on the treacherous feat. It is clear from the context that the chamber thus prepared for the king was a building apart, and that it had only a ground-floor. It was in the chamber that the child, while an infant, was brought up by its mother. We have few contemporary notices of the treatment children at this eariy age by the Anglo-Saxons, but probably it diftered little from the general praftice of a later period. Towards the clofe of the thirteenth century, an Engliflmian named Walter de Bibblefworth, who wrote, as a great proportion of Englifli writers at that day did, in French