What might it have been like to wake up in a late medieval English chamber? The eleven-year-old narrator of a lament on the loss of childhood pleasures in the anonymous collection of fifteenth-century vulgaria in London, British Library, Arundel MS 249 provides an evocative glimpse of a chamber:

The nature of the purpose of the text, as an exercise in translation from English to Latin for the scholars of Magdalen School, Oxford, means that this description is almost certainly not a representation of an actual chamber. Instead, we can take it as a literary imagining of the late medieval idea of what a chamber should be. As such, we could take from the text that the ideal chamber, in the late medieval cultural imagination, is richly hung, light and airy, with more than one window and a ceiling open to the roof. The ideal bed would have been comfortable, so that one would wish to stay there late into the day, would not be completely enclosed and, if the pre-pubescent narrator were to have his own way, would have been entirely to himself. Could such a chamber have existed in late medieval England, and if so, would it have been at the disposal of a small child? Is this what a late medieval person imagined when thinking of a bed? The aim of this chapter is to explore the composition of both real and imaginary beds and chambers, to discern what real chambers would have contained and how real beds were constructed, as well as what ‘bed’ and ‘chamber’ meant in the late medieval English consciousness.