Would you sleep in a medieval home? (There'd be no privacy and it might smell of bacon)

For most people in 14th-century England, home meant a smoky, crowded hall where eating, working and sleeping all happened in the same shared space. Historian Ian Mortimer reveals what a night under your medieval ancestors’ roof would really have been like

Medieval illustration showing a noblewoman dining in a great hall, surrounded by attendants, musicians, servants and other members of the household.

Published: September 4, 2026 at 4:44 PM

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"If you imagine going to stay with your ancestors during the 14th century, you'd like to think you might stay with the wealthy ones: in a castle with a high chamber and a nice bed, a chest in the corner, a perch for your favourite hawk," says historian Dr Ian Mortimer.

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In 14th-century England, perhaps four-fifths of the population still lived in rural communities, and most households depended in some way on agriculture. Society ranged from wealthy nobles and prosperous landowners to tenant farmers, craftsmen, servants and landless labourers. Their homes varied enormously, but, as Mortimer explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra Academy, “of course, the vast majority of the population does not live in castles."

Instead, your destination would probably be an ordinary house – and the centre of your evening would be a single large room: the hall. And, Mortimer argues, understanding that hall is essential to understanding what home meant to a medieval person.

Castles were primarily military, administrative and elite residences. But they were never representative of how most people lived. Even within them, the enormous stone towers and battlements visible today tell us little about the homes occupied by most medieval people. Ordinary domestic buildings were much more likely to be built from materials that survive far less readily in the archaeological record.

"[Most people] live in ordinary houses," says Mortimer. "These houses vary up and down the country, frequently built of local stone and other materials."

"But they all have one thing in common. They are all built around the hall: the open space in the middle of the house, where you have the central fire and where most of your indoor living experience would take place."

Step inside a 14th-century hall

The word "hall" can sound misleading. It didn’t mean a corridor or entranceway. In many medieval homes, it was the principal living room of the house – often the largest and most socially important space, where the household ate, worked, entertained visitors and gathered around the fire. This fire was the hall’s anchor.

"There would have been a central hearth where the family would gather to sleep at night," says Mortimer, on “a floor that would have been packed earth with rushes on it.”

Rushes were spread across beaten-earth floors, and they helped provide insulation and a softer, cleaner surface underfoot. They could be swept out and replaced, sometimes together with fragrant herbs. In wealthier homes, floors might instead be tiled or boarded, but an earth-and-rush surface would have been common lower down the social scale.

Reconstruction of a medieval great hall furnished with a large wooden table, high-backed chairs, pottery and wall hangings.

The hall formed the heart of many medieval homes, providing a communal space for eating, working and socialising. Furniture such as tables and benches could be moved aside when the hall was needed for sleeping | Credit: Getty Images

Mortimer also explains that the room itself would have been “open to the rafters. The smoke from the hearth would rise into the rafters, where bacon filchers would be hanging about the room."

Purpose-built chimneys weren’t yet standard features of ordinary English houses, making the hall smokier than a modern room. Hanging meat high in the smoky roof space could help dry and preserve foods such as bacon, extending their usefulness at a time when households had no refrigeration. Preserving food through salting, smoking, drying and pickling was fundamental to surviving the agricultural year, particularly through winter.

What would you sleep on?

This is where the experience might be particularly alien to modern ideas of domestic comfort. We tend to think of a room according to its designated purpose. The medieval hall was instead defined by the different things that happened there over the course of a day.

"[In the hall] you'd have had a trestle table and benches for eating, which would be packed away to sleep at night," says Mortimer.

At night, this flexibility of space meant that the hall would be used to sleep in.

The precise sleeping arrangements naturally depended on the household. Medieval society contained enormous disparities of wealth, and better off people had access to private chambers that poorer people did not.

But the important point is that sleeping remained a communal experience. That meant spending the night in close proximity to other people, rather than behind the closed door of a private bedroom.

Married couples slept together, but so might siblings, servants or travellers. Inns and guest accommodation could likewise expect strangers or near-strangers to share sleeping arrangements that many modern travellers would find startling. For poorer people, bedding might consist of straw-filled mattresses or sacks, blankets and cloaks laid on benches or the floor. Wealthier people could own feather mattresses, sheets, bolsters and elaborate bed hangings. Beds were valuable possessions – sometimes among the most expensive objects recorded in household inventories – and could be inherited from one generation to another.

Why did rich people start abandoning the hall?

But as the century ended, trends began to change.

"It starts to decline toward the end of the 14th century," he says.

This shift coincided with wider social changes following the Black Death. Labour shortages increased the bargaining power of many surviving workers, precipitating larger social changes. One of those was an alteration to some people’s domestic arrangements.

One clue comes from Piers Plowman, the great Middle English poem generally attributed to William Langland. Written and revised during the second half of the 14th century, the poem offers a powerful critique of the religious and social world of its age.

Medieval manuscript illustration showing men and women harvesting and binding sheaves of grain in a field.

Medieval agricultural workers harvest grain in a manuscript illustration. The late 14th-century poem Piers Plowman evokes a society structured around communal labour and living, while also lamenting how wealthy households were beginning to abandon the shared hall for greater privacy | Credit: Getty Images

"In the poem, the poet laments that the important people in society – the lords and gentry – are withdrawing from the hall," says Mortimer.

But why should it matter where a medieval lord ate his dinner? This, in fact, represented an important change in the relationship between elite people and the households around them.

"They're no longer eating there with their servants, guests and family members," Mortimer explains. "They're going off to the separate parts of the house, to the solar to eat."

The solar was a private chamber, often in the upper levels of a medieval house. For those who could afford such spaces, it provided an opportunity to escape from the crowded hall.

But this withdrawal had social implications. A lord dining in the hall ate in the presence of servants, dependants, guests and other household members. A lord retreating into a separate chamber put a wall – sometimes quite literally – between himself and those people.

The fact that the author of Piers Plowman apparently regarded the change as something worth lamenting is worth reflecting on.

But this didn’t mean that the hall suddenly vanished at the end of the 14th century. Far from it. "Still, it is the main focal point for virtually everybody," Mortimer stresses.

Instead, what was changing was the relationship between that communal centre and the increasingly specialised spaces surrounding it. Over time, houses could accommodate a greater separation of activities and people. The domestic world was gradually becoming more compartmentalised; a process that would continue through the later Middle Ages and into the early modern period.

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Dr Ian Mortimer was speaking on his HistoryExtra academy series, A-Z of Medieval Life. Watch the full episode.

Authors

James OsborneSenior content producer

James Osborne is a senior content producer at HistoryExtra

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