No 208. The Crofter's Box Bed.

No 208. The Crofter’s Box Bed.

The Crofter’s Box Bed is well known. Even further back is the Neuk Bed, of which I have a photo of one which is in Kirkbister Farm Museum in Orkney. Wonderfully cosy and neat, made with two tall flagstones either side of the opening, two more at either end. Six feet by three at best. Even further back in History was a lean-to bed built outside the stone wall of the house but opening directly into the kitchen of the house. Though built outside the main house wall, it was cosy enough and did not take up any space in the small kitchen. Thick stone and clay walls, sloping roof of flagstone and a thick layer of grassy or heathery turf on top. Grass and heather underneath for a mattress!!!
Well insulated. Nearest thing to Skara Brae which could well have been the original model for them!!! One was still in a house I visited in my very earliest days, though rare, but it was not used any more as a bed, rather as a store for bits and bobs.

The box bed was more common. Opening into the kitchen, warm, often with doors or a curtain. It must have been quite stuffy but I never slept in one so cannot verify that. During the day the bed was usually closed off from the kitchen by the doors where they had them. Whether they closed the doors at night I do not know, I should think not.
They could have been used for “Bundling”, an ancient Orkney custom where the visiting swain and his girl friend could keep warm and “hae a cuddle”. I was told they had to have a folded blanket between them. “No cheating mind, mithers watching” Or Granny!!! Maybe they closed the doors then!!!

Space was at a premium at any time in an old crofter’s house, so well made box beds would sometimes sit side to side making a partition - one opening into the kitchen, one the opposite way into the back room. I have seen two box beds sit side by side both opening into the kitchen. They were not any too large.
Where space was at a premium box beds had room on top for storage, room underneath for more. The chamber pot cum “chanty” would have had pride of place yesterday!!! Now these are at a premium as collectors’ pieces or as flower pots for the annual SWRI Flower Show.

A good reason for shutting off the bed in the kitchen was to stop the hens from nesting or roosting in it during the day. Hens in the kitchen was one of our boyhood things, but not in our house!!! They were not allowed into the crofter’s best room behind the kitchen, the parlour. I was in one crofter’s house in Stronsay, no kidding, where the guid wife took her secky apron and wiped the hen**** off the kitchen table before sitting us down for a cup of strong sweet tea. We lived then closer to nature than now. Organic. Free range before its time. Healthy enough too!!

The box bed would have a chaff or a straw mattress, feathers were too expensive for a crofter to use and were in any case a valuable marketable product. Some croft rents long ago, and farms too, were paid in part in feathers.

Edward Pottinger of Hobbister, at his death in April 1642, had in his estate inventory :-

Item four fedder beddis twa bowsters and ten coddies all estimat to £ 36.00.00 (Scots)

Ordinary estates of that far off time made no mention of feather beds, so they were a valued item. “Bowsters” are bolsters now, though not much mentioned today, “coddies” were cushions or pillows.

The box beds would be cleaned out once a year, the blankets washed, the mattress refilled with chaff or straw, heather or dried grass, even bracken, multiple choice.
Again, linen sheets would be for the wealthy. Woollen felted blankets made at home and a knitted patchwork quilt would complete the furnishings of the box bed. Patchwork quilts were made with bits and pieces of dead clothes, sometimes cadged or given from the big hoos. A painstaking lot of work for the crofter’s wife, taking long over the peat fire on a winter’s evening. There were never idle hands in a crofter’s hoos.

There are still some old photos around showing a crofter with his specs balanced on his nose and his cap on his head, reading a copy of the “ORCADIAN” local paper by the light of a paraffin oil lamp, sitting in an Orkney Chair beside the peat fire, the box bed in the background. Meantime his wife would be knitting, sewing or ironing. And the hoos cat and the ould dog warming themselves at the fireside.