The Great Bed of Ware

The Great Bed of Ware is a carved oak four-poster bed measuring 267 cm high, 326 cm wide and 338 cm deep, roughly three and a third metres on each horizontal side. No other bed of comparable scale from the period is known to survive, and no source consulted for this record identifies a rival. It is built in at least twenty-eight separable numbered parts, which is reflected in its own museum number, W.47:1 to 28-1931, a sign that whoever built it expected it to be taken apart and put together again, which is exactly what happened to it for more than three centuries.

The headboard is the most worked surface. Two arched marquetry panels show architectural perspective scenes with swans, flanked by three carved human figures, two male and one female, each carrying a basket of fruit, with a pair of satyrs, part man and part goat, standing guard at the outer edges. The figures still show traces of the bright paint that originally covered them, now largely worn away. Baskets of fruit are a standard Renaissance shorthand for abundance and fertility; satyrs are a standard shorthand for drink and appetite. Nothing about the carving asks to be read as anything other than what it plainly is: an advertisement, worked in oak, for a bed built to be looked at, talked about, and slept in by as many people as would fit.

The marquetry's arched perspective panels derive from ornament engravings published by the Dutch designer Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527-1604), whose pattern books of architectural perspectives, strapwork and grotesque ornament circulated across northern Europe in the late sixteenth century and were used directly by English carvers and joiners of the period. The Victoria and Albert Museum's own catalogue record states plainly that a precise source print has not been identified: the panels are in Vredeman de Vries's idiom, not a traced copy of one surviving sheet.

That distinction matters. It means the bed's headboard is evidence of an English workshop working fluently in an imported continental vocabulary, adapting rather than copying, which is exactly how Vredeman de Vries's own engravings say they were meant to be used: as templates for designers of architectural perspective and inlay work, not as patterns to be reproduced line for line.

The name most often attached to the bed's maker is Jonas Fosbrooke, a Hertfordshire carpenter said to have built it around 1590. No source consulted for this record can trace that name to any document from the bed's own century. It surfaces instead in an early Victorian pantomime called The Great Bed of Ware, in which Fosbrooke appears as a fictional character, a ghost who haunts the bed and torments those who sleep in it unfaithfully. Sources consulted for this record disagree on the exact year of that pantomime, giving both 1839 and 1849, and on which London theatre staged it; this record does not resolve that disagreement and flags it as open.

What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: a nineteenth-century entertainment supplied a name that later writers then repeated as sixteenth-century fact. Whether a real carpenter named Fosbrooke ever existed at all is genuinely doubted by the sources this record could verify. The honest position is that the bed's maker is not known, and that the popular name for him is a piece of Victorian theatre wearing the costume of history.

A second, separate question is why the bed was made at all. For a long time the assumption ran that a bed this large and this richly worked must have started life in a nearby great house, commissioned by a wealthy family and only later moved into an inn. The Victoria and Albert Museum's own curatorial position, attributed to Nick Humphrey, the museum's curator of furniture and woodwork covering this period, now runs the other way: the bed carries no family heraldry, is mentioned in no surviving family papers, and there is no obvious explanation for why a bed made for a private household would have been moved into an inn so soon after it was made. On that reading, the bed was built from the outset as a curiosity, meant to draw paying custom to whichever Ware inn first displayed it, consistent with a documented Tudor practice of putting notable beds, including former royal beds, on show to guests once their original owner no longer needed them.

Both positions are stated here because both have been argued. What this record will not do is present either as settled fact. The absence of heraldry is real and is the strongest single piece of physical evidence either way, and it points toward the inn-built reading; it does not prove it.

The earliest documented reference to the bed identified by the V&A's own catalogue comes from 1596, when a travelling German prince, Ludwig of Anhalt-Kohten, recorded seeing it at the White Hart Inn in Ware in a verse account of his journey through England. That places a working, famous bed at Ware within six years of its probable construction date, already notable enough for a foreign visitor keeping a travel diary to write it down.

This record does not quote the prince's verse directly, because no source consulted here could be verified against the original text closely enough to reproduce it with confidence. The fact of the 1596 reference itself, however, is stated by the V&A's own catalogue and is treated here as documented.

By 1601 the bed was famous enough to be used as a punchline without explanation. In Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 2, Sir Toby Belch goads Sir Andrew Aguecheek into writing an outrageous challenge letter with the line: "As many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England, set 'em down." The joke depends entirely on the audience already knowing what the bed of Ware was and how large it was. Shakespeare does not explain the reference, which is itself the evidence: a play written for a paying London audience could name the bed the way it might name a well-known street, and expect to be understood.

This is the single most secure fact in the bed's early reputation, because the text of the line can be checked directly against a modern reading edition of the play, and because it requires no further corroboration to prove the bed's fame: the joke only works if the fame was already there.

The name by which the bed is known today, the Great Bed of Ware, is first attested in Ben Jonson's comedy Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, performed in 1609, which refers to it as the great bed at Ware. Shakespeare's earlier line calls it simply the bed of Ware; Jonson's slightly later one is the earliest surviving use of the fuller, more formal name that stuck. This record has not been able to verify the exact act, scene and surrounding dialogue of Jonson's line against a scholarly edition of the play, and flags that as a gap for the editor to close, but the fact of the 1609 reference and its wording, the great bed at Ware, is corroborated independently by the V&A's own account and by secondary literary-historical sources.

Taken together, the two references bracket a decade, 1596 to 1609, in which an object built for a provincial inn became famous enough in London to be dropped into two of the period's most performed comedies without a word of introduction.

The bed's working life was spent almost entirely inside Ware's coaching inns, a day's journey north of London on the road to Cambridge and beyond, where travellers routinely stopped overnight. The V&A's own account traces it through five successive locations within the town: an early, undated period at the Crown; the White Hart, where it stood by 1596; the George, documented in 1706; a return to the Crown; and finally the Saracen's Head, where it remained from 1765 until 1870. The exact dates of several of these moves, particularly the earliest ones, are not given in the sources consulted for this record and are treated here as unknown rather than guessed at.

Guests paid, in effect, for the story of having slept in it, or slept near it, or simply seen it. That is the entire commercial logic of the object: a curiosity large enough to be worth a detour, working as free advertising for whichever inn currently held it. It did this job for the better part of three centuries before it ever became a museum piece.

The bed's surface carries carved initials and applied red wax seals left by generations of the guests who stayed in it, still visible on the bedposts and headboard. The V&A's own descriptive language treats these marks as part of what the object is, not as damage requiring restoration: they are recorded and displayed alongside the carved decoration rather than removed or concealed.

Read that way, the marks are the most direct surviving evidence of who actually used the bed, across a period for which almost no other visitor record survives. No individual guest's mark has been identified by name in the sources consulted here, and this record does not claim otherwise. What can be said is that the accumulation itself, centuries of ordinary travellers choosing to cut their initials or press a seal into a bed already famous enough to joke about in a London theatre, is itself a form of evidence: proof that ordinary people wanted some permanent trace of having been there.

Somewhere on the headboard a faded date, 1463, was painted onto the bed at some point after its construction. That date is roughly a century too early for the bed's actual manufacture, and the V&A's own catalogue connects it to a tradition, unsupported by evidence, that the bed had belonged to King Edward IV, whose reign began in 1461. This record treats that tradition as a documented curiosity about the object's own later self-presentation, not as evidence of the bed's real date. It sits alongside the Fosbrooke pantomime as a second example of a later story being physically or textually attached to the bed and then mistaken for its history.

In 1870 the bed left Ware for the Rye House Hotel at Hoddesdon, a few miles away, where it was installed as an attraction in a purpose-built garden display alongside other assembled antiquities. It remained there for fifty-seven years, longer than it had spent at any single Ware inn on record, continuing the same basic function it had always had: something large and strange that made a stop worth taking.

In 1865, while the bed was still at the Saracen's Head in Ware, the South Kensington Museum, the V&A's own predecessor institution, was offered the chance to acquire it and declined, describing it as a coarse and mutilated relic in no wise appropriate as a new acquisition. That refusal is worth recording plainly: the museum that would eventually pay four thousand pounds for the bed in 1931 had, sixty-six years earlier, judged it not worth having at any price.

The Rye House Hotel was sold in 1927 to Cannon Brewery, which did not want the bed and moved to dispose of it. It passed to the London dealers Frank Partridge and Sons, of 26 King Street, who exhibited it before sale amid a concern, recorded in the V&A's own account, that it might otherwise be sold abroad. Frank Partridge and Sons agreed to let the V&A have it at cost. The museum bought it in 1931 for 4,000 pounds, with 2,000 pounds of that sum contributed by the National Art Collections Fund, the charity now known as the Art Fund. The V&A's own record states the acquisition was made principally for the bed's historical and literary significance, and to keep it from leaving the country.

No formal export-licensing system existed in Britain in 1931 to force that outcome. The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, whose Waverley criteria now govern that kind of decision, was not established until 1952, following a government committee report of that year. In 1931 the only mechanism available was exactly the one used here: a dealer prepared to sell at cost, and a charitable fund prepared to underwrite the difference, acting before a sale abroad could happen rather than blocking one that had already been agreed.

Four thousand pounds in 1931 is worth roughly 354,000 pounds in current terms, using the Office for National Statistics' composite price index. That single conversion understates what the sum meant to the people actually spending it. A semi-detached house in Edgware, on the edge of London, cost 835 pounds in April 1938, a few years after the sale; a working father's weekly wage in 1939 was around five pounds. Measured against either figure, even allowing for the few years' gap between the bed's purchase and these comparisons, four thousand pounds was not a casual sum. It was, by the museum's own account, four times the entire annual acquisitions budget of the V&A's Furniture Department at the time, spent on a single object that the same museum's predecessor had refused for free sixty-six years before.

The bed has remained on permanent display at the V&A without interruption since its purchase. It moved into the museum's British Galleries, in Room 57, when those galleries opened in 2001. In April 2012, backed by a Heritage Lottery Fund award, it returned to Ware on a one-year loan to Ware Museum, the first time it had been back in the town since 1870; the loan ended in April 2013 and the bed returned to South Kensington, where it remains.