Most text books will tell you that the first recorded beds date back to prehistoric times. While this is true, the kinds of beds they talk about are entirely different from anything we would consider to be a bed today – they were merely defined sleeping areas that were marked out with rocks and stones. The only protection these beds would have offered from the cold or discomfort would have been from animal pelts that would have been draped over the stones and over the people who were sleeping in it. This type of arrangement was the ancient mans equivalent of a modern day Englander mattress, albeit they hadn’t just bought their bed from the local mattress store!
In fact, nothing even closely resembling a modern day mattress is ever documented until we get into the 11th or 12th century. It’s around this time that Crusaders set off to the Holy Land in order to restore Christian control – when in Arabia the Crusaders were intrigued by the local Arabs custom for sleeping on large cushions known as a materas. These cushions were used to make an uncomfortable floor more tolerable to sleep on – the idea was obviously a good one, because it was taken back to Europe by the Crusaders when they returned home. It’s from these events that the modern mattress can trace its roots, and it’s from the old Arabic word materas that we get our word for mattress.
This new way of sleeping wasn’t used widely for a few hundred years after the idea was originally imported from the Arab world. To understand why that was, you must realize that most people lived a peasant lifestyle and had no means to afford themselves any luxuries – there were no bed stores selling cheap mattresses back then, if you wanted an item like this, you would have to have it specially made for you, or have the necessary skills to make your own.
