While idly sketching an inn for a fantasy realm I occasionally play in it first occurred to me that I had made no provisions at all for heating in the winter. So I added a fireplace to one of the rooms. Then it occurred to me - in a medieval/Middle Ages/whatever you call it inn would they have a fireplace in every room or not? Or in none? Maybe just a big room for eating in, next to a kitchen, that was heated and the rest of the time you just shivered or slept under a bazillion wool blankets?
Not that I have that much idea of what, exactly, was an inn in the Middle Ages in regards to the size of the room, the bed, and anything else about it, really. So I’d be interested to know more about them in general.
Life in a Medieval City doesn’t make any mention of inns, but it does describe in detail a “Burgher’s Home” - a house for a well-to-do family. I would imagine an Inn wouldn’t be too far off.
No mention is made of fireplaces in every bedroom. However, the bedrooms are on the second story, as is the kitchen, and the kitchen has a big fireplace that is lit pretty much constantly. I’m guessing that any bedroom on the same floor as the kitchen will be warm, if not hot. Even in a cold climate, even in a drafty building, a big fireplace going 24/7 will generate a huge amount of heat.
Even without heat, as long as a room is shielded from rain/snow/wind, you can sleep pretty well, especially if there’s a bed, blankets, and another person or two. My Dad tells stories of sleeping in a covered porch as a young teen; there was no heat, and when he woke up in the morning, any water left in the room would be frozen. But he had blankets and a bed and never felt like he was cold at night. This is in the far north of Michigan - we are in a very cold climate.
There probably wouldn’t be a fireplace in every room. Heating was done by using bedwarmers – a brick or stone that was heated in the fireplace, wrapped in cloth, and put under the blankets.
Travelers would also share beds on cold nights.
Note that in Medieval times, people slept in the nude. They’d climb into bed, remove their clothes under the blankets, and then hang them on a stick nearby.
Inns are a pretty modern invention so Athena’s note is pretty much right on. Medieval inns are what I consider Tolkienisms - he put certain 18/19th Century conventions (a postal system included) in a supposedly Medieval world. If you want to stick with Tolkien-style conventions, look inns/hotels/boarding houses from those periods.
The bulk of actual Medieval travelers were probably pilgrms who could have counted on charitable locals or churches for accommodation, but also did a fair bit of roughing it.
So… I’d say that most travelers would be sleeping on benches, pews or the floor of some common room. They’d use each other, their blankets and perhaps some central fireplace to keep warm (probably in that order). Some probably used things like hot bricks at the foot of a bed for helping to keep warm at night.
Inns are far from a modern invention. There were inns in the middle ages as the Canterbury Tales attest. The Tabard where the pilgrims gather was established in 1307. Indeed there were inns in Roman times.
Inns would not have had a fireplace in every toom. Most likely, there would be one large fire pit in the center of the room, and people would all sleep around it. The functional chimney didn’t come into existence until the 12th century. After that fireplaces took off, as it was just as easy to build back to back fireplaces as it was to build one. Then, as James Burke put it, the upper classes moved upstairs (where it was warmer) and the peasants stayed down below, where it was still very chilly until Ben Franklin vented his stove into a basement, increasing its efficiency and making it worth having.
I would expect considerable variation in accommodations in the Middle Ages - what you’d find in a small, rural hamlet would be considerably different than what you’d find in a major city.
After, these days we have everything from pod hotels to hostels to budget motels to luxury hotels where one can rent a suite of rooms with as much space as many houses for lots of money per night.
From what I’ve been able to find out, Middle Ages accommodations ranged from spending the night in a peasant hut with said peasants plus most/all of their livestock to space at monasteries to, as mentioned, folks sleeping in a common room to semi-private rooms to, if you were wealthy enough and in a large enough town/city, something more like a private room such as we’d know today, plus various services for said travelers.
Depends on the size and wealth of the clientele. If the inn was big enough to have two stories, then probably yes. But I don’t think there was such a thing as a “typical” inn. Too much local variation.
The key to back to back fireplaces is that they could share** one **chimney.
I can’t speak for medieval places, but I stayed in a number of travellers’ inns (‘tea houses’) in Nepal in the 1990s. These places are high in the foothills of the Himalayas and look medieval even if they don’t necessarily resemble European ones.
They had stone walls with tiny windows to the first story, then one more story of wood, and a wooden roof. Downstairs was a dining area and a kitchen which was in a separate room.
They had no electricity and only one fire, which was in the kitchen. The kitchen fire didn’t help heat the rest of the building in any way. The main sleeping quarters, which would be upstairs, would be one or two large rooms comprising a large raised wooden platform about 6" off the floor. This was covered in straw mattresses and a large number of blankets.
All travellers (12-15 on some nights) would sleep huddled together on the same platform. This being modern times we carried sleeping bags and put the blankets over them, but I think the locals - guides and sherpas who stayed in a separate room or separate quarters - would just sleep in their clothes under the blankets. It was bitterly cold, probably less than a degree warmer than the outside air, so hats were necessary while in bed.
There would be maybe one sink (in the rare occasions when there was any kind of plumbing) or a place with a basin and a bucket outside, and the toilet was wooden outhouse apart from the building, which was just a plank with a hole in it, suspended over a hillside.
Don’t know about medieval inns, but large houses in the 17th and 18th century usually had a large central hearth with multiple flues. On each floor 4 or more rooms would be adjacent to the hearth with individual fireplaces.
I never really thought medieval inns would actually have a lot of private rooms, much less heated rooms.
Next you’ll tell me they aren’t routinely staffed with the lands’ best minstrels and wise-cracking bartenders with quests of courage to hand out, either. Have video games been lying to me this whole time? :eek:
Medieval inns didn’t have many private rooms. Most patrons would have a space on the floor of the common room or in a loft above the stables. Anything like a fire is a very, very bad idea in a stable. Sometimes blankets would be provided, sometimes not. People would usually sleep in their clothes and if it was really cold, they’d sometimes huddle up for warmth. The idea of a private bed was a bit abnormal in most places in that time period. Even at home, the whole family, which could include 3 generations and occasionally extended relatives, slept in a large bed or two. Travelers would expect to be sharing a bed, or sleeping on a pallet on the floor surrounded by other people unless they were well off, in which case they’d be sleeping with their co-travlers and possibly some of their servants.
The main hall pattern, with a large multi-purpose room, and some satellite rooms appended to the hall, were the common type. Any private rooms might be built on a second or third story around the hearth chimney, which would give off waste heat — good in winter, bad in summer. Braziers using coals from the main hearth, or clay bed-warmers filled hot sand or stones might be provided for heating. Coal was very scarce before pump systems to clear water from the tunnels were practical around the 1500s and later, and charcoal was expensive and used for forging or other uses, so neither fuel would be likely to be used for heating. Even plain wood was pretty hard to come by if it was an urban area.
It wasn’t until later periods that large purpose-built inns with many private rooms became widespread, as far as I know. The plans I’ve seen for most of these (in books, can’t find decent ones online) have a single chimney structure serving rooms built back-to-back. Even these would have more people bedding down in the common room than in the private rooms, and not every private room had a fireplace.
Privacy was expensive in most feudal cultures worldwide. I’ve stayed in a couple of minshuku (民宿) and onsen (温泉) in Japan whose floor plans haven’t changed much in a few hundred years — one had a plaque proudly stating that they’d been in business for around 400 years — and heating in the private rooms didn’t appear to be a real concern. The common room generally has an open hearth in the middle for serving tea and for warmth, with movable furniture (low tables and cushions) around it. The kitchen is usually appended to this hall. Main rooms radiate from halls leading away from the common room. You spend most of your time in the common room eating and drinking, bathe in the hot springs, and go to bed under some comfy blankets. There’s not really a need for external heat unless it’s killing-cold, in which case you’re probably not traveling unless you’re desperate to die or get frostbite.
True.
“and she gave birth to her first-born son, and wrapped Him round, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” Luke 2:7.
Ah, you’re aware I presume the bible wasn’t written in english? The word “inn” seems to have been inserted during the KJV translation, which happened in 1604 when Inn’s were well established. The original greek word in this passage is “Kataluma” which does not mean a public inn in any modern sense.
That. Plus winter travel was (at least in Spain) quite rare, to the point of having things such as a legend about “how and why did King Sancho II invent winter shoes”; most hospitales and posadas closed down complete or partially during the winter.
I’m reading a Twain story right now (The American Claimant, 1892) that cracked me up at the point where one of the main characters gets to a cheap boarding house, remembering the “reasoning” some people use to decide that Lincoln must totally have been gay; there is a guy everybody thinks is “weird in the head” because he refuses to share a bed with another man. Note the date of publication.