On thoughts about medieval camp beds

A medieval bunny-pelt cushion needs a good medieval bed to go with. Now I have been thinking about this a lot recently, because I intend to create a mid-Medieval German-Slavic camping equipment that would also be suitable for Viking camps. In addition, I don't want it to be too heavy-weight, but at the same time can't reckon on setting up a bracken bed on every camp-site. To my knowledge, two extremes are fairly well documented or reckoned on:

1. Beds made of solid wooden boards. These can mostly be (dis-)assembled in few minutes (the two of us took 5-10 minutes for the last bed I set up) but involve a lot of heavy and long wood. The finds and depictions I associate with these beds also usually involve quite well-to-be people, so I don't know how representative these are for normal travelling people
2. It is much more likely that normal travelling people took their pelts and blankets and built a bed from bracken and undergrowth, covered it with pelts, stretched their tentplane above that and slept just between those. Now as mentioned I don't think I can source this everywhere.

Basically this thought prompted me to look at finds and more modern versions and collect thoughts on these.

Restrictions:

• lightweight and compactable, but self-contained
• contains no metal
• can be styled for 12th century German/slavic and 10th century viking
• function over style

As mentioned above, the heavy version of a travel-bed is all-wood. Finds of this type of bed are e.g. the Oseberg Bed (and there are Variants of the Oseberg Bed in modern reconstruction) and the Gokstad bed, as reviewed in this good overview of sources on Oseberg and Gokstad beds. These beds have in common that the sleeper is held aloft through wooden slats that presumably a straw-filled mattress or other bedding lay on. This also seems to be the fashion for contemporary bedroom-beds in Germany (and also later depictions), so travelling with this is basically equivalent to taking your modern bedroom-bed with you - you wouldn't really do this unless you were royalty. Sidenote: Kings in the later Middle Ages and even later often took their entire bedroom with them because they would travel throughout their realm to maintain their power.

Image of the Oseberg Bed

The next type of bed that I looked at are rope-beds. I am not aware of any rope-bed finds for the groups and periods mentioned, but it seems not unreasonable as rope-beds have been used in all sorts of regions and periods of the world, from the mentions in the Odysse (which mentions a rope-woven bed - link) through high medieval/Renaissance Europe (British rope bed from the 16th Century to modern-day South-Asia (called Charpai). So why not?

A friend of mine built a rope bed and realized that the wood that you brace your rope against needs to be quite solid for the bed to not gently sag with time. Admittedly, he did build an extra-wide full-length bed, which is definitely not optimal in the distribution of the pressure. However a rope-bed definitely seems to need at least two very stable full-length poles or boards as the sides. Ideally I want to get around using full-length sides but make them collapsible. So I would need to spread out tension as evenly as possible and maybe be able to support the joins additionally.

Based on this thought I found a third area of bed constructions that I do not know any finds from 1000 years ago for: beds based on stretched canvas. Maybe cotton canvas is best suited for this type of bed, though I would expect linen to work reasonably well. Wool would be a nightmare, if not selected, spun and woven exactly for this intent I would expect wool to be far too elastic.

Canvas beds suitable for camping especially arise in the context of military campaigns. The most interesting concepts I came across are the following three:

WW2 army field cots, found here.

Marcy field cot, found here.

Safari daybed image, cropped, from this source.

1. Second world war field cots are a cool start, they consist mainly of wood and canvas and you can clearly see the principle of using stretched canvas as the lying surface. However the hinges and corners are metal and I cannot see an easy way to substitute them.
   
   
   
   
   
2.  The Marcy field cot is described in a quite interesting book called "The Pairie Traveller". Though modern replicas often use metal hinge and this depiction has the canvas nailed down, these details are easy to substitute through wood pegs for the hinges and sewing a loop instead of nailing down the canvas.
   
   
3. Finally, we have the Safari daybed. This is a modern Scandinavian design that uses the ancient tensioning mechanism of a medieval bow saw. While I love the mechanism in it's elegance I think industrially cut wood helps, as I expect the fit needs to be just right for the legs not to tip.

There are various other forms of canvas field beds that I did not mention, I only listed the ones I find most interesting. Of these, I find the Marcy field cot and the Safari daybed most intriguing, so I sketched out component 'lists' for these.

Honourable mentions: it is definitely worth mentioning this awesome slatted bed-in-a-box concept, though I avoid it because of the metal.