This book has so far shown that part of what made the chamber meaningful in late medieval England was the fact that it was considered to be the most appropriate space for certain activities. As evidenced by didactic texts such as the precepts upon which this book is structured, it was understood that there was a time and a place for all activities, including the appropriate expression of sexual desire. To date, scholarship on sex in late medieval England rarely focuses on the locus of sexual intercourse, often focusing instead on the way authorities tried to regulate sexual activity. This chapter will explore the notion that the bed and chamber were at the heart of the late medieval English understanding of both licit and illicit sexual encounters, despite the exclusive nature of the chamber.

The sexuality of the bed

The pursuit of ideas associated with sex in late medieval England is problematic, not least because the term ‘sex’, in the sense of sexual intercourse or activity, did not exist until the mid eighteenth century. Instead, terms used ranged from the crude to the euphemistic, both of which could have been misconstrued by reading audiences at the time, and certainly by post-medieval audiences reading medieval texts. The lack of socially appropriate terms with which to name sexual organs and activities is highlighted and exploited in the fabliau De la damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre, in which a young woman cannot hear someone say ‘fuck’ without feeling sick and does not have the vocabulary to talk about genitalia or sexual acts. Instead, she overcomes her modesty by providing her own euphemistic names so that, for example, her vagina becomes ‘une fontenele’ (a fountain) in the middle of her ‘praiel’ (meadow, used to denote the mons pubis), while her bedfellow refers to his penis as ‘mes poulains’ (a horse). Elsewhere, euphemisms for sex refer to the perceived location of a sexual act, namely the bed and chamber. These expressions are evidence that the bed and chamber had a strong linguistic and physical association with sexuality in the late medieval English collective imagination.