The beds of the early middle ages in England had testers with curtains, often of valuable material. These slid on rings on an iron rod. Sometimes the rod, with a frame to sustain it, was on one or on three sides of the bed, and the tester wanting. Sometimes the beds were slung on uprights, as cots are at sea. No great expense was incurred in the framework till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The splendour of state beds, or those of great people, consisted in the curtains, which were occasionally taken down, and hung up in churches on festivals. In the illuminations of manuscripts and in pictures representing scenes in which there is a bed, we find the tester strained by cords to the sides of the room or to the ceiling, as in the accompanying woodcut. The curtains ran round this frame, as in our modern four-posters; but we see them hoisted out of the way during the daytime, not round a post, only raised beyond reach. [Illustration] The finest examples of bedsteads that can be called mediæval are French, and only met with in fragments, or more or less complete. This is unfortunately the case also as regards early English bedsteads. We may refer the reader to the "Mobilier Français" of Viollet le Duc, for an idea of the sumptuous carved oak bedstead of the great palaces and hotels of France. It was a frame panelled down to the ground, often containing chests, drawers, presses, or other safe places under the sleeper. The back resembled more or less the reredos of an altar, or the great panelled presses that filled the sides of sacristies. Four posts supported the canopy. A bedstead of the fifteenth century was long preserved at Leicester, and said to have been slept on by Richard the third. The under part of it formed his military chest, and the discovery of the treasure a century afterwards occasioned a barbarous murder. None of the coin found was of a later mint than his reign. It is also said by Pennant that a stump bedstead still in Berkeley castle is the same on which the murder of Edward the second was committed. Fine examples of Tudor bedsteads are preserved there. In the town of Ware in Hertfordshire is, and has long been, an inn under the sign of the Saracen's head, "In this," says Clutterbuck, "there is a bed of enormous proportions, twelve feet square. The head is panelled in the Elizabethan style of arched panels, and a date is painted on it--1460. [This, however, is not authentic.] It is of carved oak. The top is covered by a panelled tester, supported on baluster columns at the feet. The bases of these rest on a cluster of four arches or supports to each column." Nothing is known of the original history of the bedstead. Shakespeare alludes to it in Twelfth Night. [Illustration]