Sasha Handley’s Objects, Emotions & an Early Modern Bed-Sheet gives history and background to a particularly unique bed sheet held in the Museum of London, and an overview of bed sheets with their context and meaning to both individuals and households of the Georgian era.
The Georgian Bed Sheet
Bed linen of Georgian times may seem to be an ordinary and dull subject, yet the context and symbolism behind these pieces of linen shows the true importance and value of these items in a historical context. To begin with, most bed sheets were proudly crafted by hand, often from home-grown cotton. After the process of making the sheet itself, women would then begin work to embroider them. This was an important role for a woman- it was a showcase of her domestic skills if she was able to complete complex and beautiful embroidery for her sheets. These sheets were kept for the home, but also given as gifts for important life events such as births, baptisms or marriages, and so the quality of the embroidery on the sheets represented the virtue, domesticity and thoughtfulness of the household it had been made by.
More than being a display of skills however, the embroidering of a sheet was one of few opportunities a woman had to sit and contemplate. The emotional aspect of a creative outlet was invaluable for many women who had no real way of expressing themselves otherwise. In this way, the woman of the house could sit in silent thought for hours, often finally able to escape the anxiety of everyday life’s pressing urges such as household chores, crying children or expecting husbands.
Because of the hard work, time, dedication and skill that went into making these bed sheets, their value to a household was enormous. In fact, bed steads and their furnishings usually accounted for up to one third of the estimated value of the entire house. Bed sheets would be used, washed, wrung dry and reused until literally falling apart. Heavy economic and personal investment in their purchase, creation and maintenance was a marker of their practical and symbolic significance. Marriage was usually when a couple would hasten to purchase their own new or second-hand bed, and to make or make use of new bed linens. From here, the life-cycle of these items would begin, or begin anew.
Besides these perhaps obvious facts about the bed sheet, we know that they held to a family a greater value than a monetary one. There was a huge value in the comfort and safe space that the sheets provided nightly to a household- the tactile and familiar feeling, the familiar sensation of being in one’s own bed. The value here lay in physical comfort, but also a psychological ease. The emotional and physical comfort provided by sheets was one that those who lived in times before never would have known. But bed linen provided a ‘material stage’ for not just sleep but almost all important life events. A marriage was consummated on the sheets, a child was born on them, a family member taken ill on them and later die on them, and they could be used as the final sheet, a burial shroud. This was the stage for love, physical and psychological comfort, bodily and spiritual transformation, vulnerability, loss and crisis. The sheets acted as a bridge between many things- life and death, young and old, conscious and unconscious. They were a physical item that stood for the physical and imaginative gap between daily life and the spiritual life beyond the grave.
In terms of Christianity, the bed sheet held a lot of charged symbolism and connected life and death with Christianity in many ways. Linen sheets were associated with cleanliness and spiritual purity- they were to wrap sacred items, burial shrouds or for ecclesiastical vestments, as a link between natural and supernatural. Family members said their prayers over their linen beds each night. When people died at home, it was in their bed. At night, they would lay under their pure white sheets- symbolic of covering a body with a sheet- and they would change states of consciousness. It all sounds quite spiritual and spooky when you look at it from this sense, right?
Linen Bed Sheet 34.63
Handley spoke about the common bedsheet as it was in the 1700s, the century of origin for the bedsheet in question- ‘Linen bed-sheet 34.63’.
It was embroidered by Anna Maria Radcliffe, countess of Derwentwater, after 24 February 1716 – the date on which her partner James Radcliffe, third earl of Derwentwater, was beheaded on Tower Hill at the age of twenty-six. James was the eldest son of Edward, second earl of Derwentwater, and Lady Mary Tudor, who was the natural daughter of King Charles II and actress Mary Davies.
James and Anna were both from Catholic families, and met in Paris before being wed in 1712. Three years later, James took part in the failed Jacobite uprising of 1715. He was captured, charged with high treason, imprisoned in the Tower of London and executed four months later. It was during his imprisonment at the tower that Radcliffe likely slept beneath the bed-sheet. This is the claim made by the object itself, which bears the following cross-stitched inscription: ‘The sheet off my dear x dear Lord’s Bed in the wretched Tower of London February 1716 x Ann C of Darwent=Waters †’
As a prisoner in the Tower, James Radcliffe was required to furnish his own room, making it certain that the sheet was taken from his own home for him to use while imprisoned. For a time, his wife was permitted to stay with him in the tower, and they would have shared the sheet while there. These pieces of information show that this sheet was likely the one James rested on in his final months of life, the one he shared with his wife at home and while imprisoned, possibly the one under which Anna Maria fell pregnant the second time, and because of this held strong physical and emotional connections to James for a grieving Anna Maria.
The embroidered words that Anna sewed on the sheet are not only touching because of the sentiment- the material used for the embroidery itself also plays its part. Her needle was threaded with human hair- hers and her dead husbands, intertwined.
The use of hair in mourning and remembrance is usually only seen with Victorian mourning jewellery, but here the subject was instead something that had tangible connection with the dead. The sheet would have smelled of her husband, she would have had memories of sleeping on it and possibly conceiving their children on it, and so she felt the need to commemorate him with it. Using his hair, she was able to create a kind of DNA portrait of her husband, standing as the part of his body that she remained in contact with. It symbolically connected them even after death. Using her hair along with his showed the distress she felt- hair was only lost in old age, sickness or severe distress, and by cutting her hair off she showed this distress outwardly. By sewing their hair into the bed sheet, Anna Maria showed her longing for her departed husband, created a bridge by which she could maintain a connection with him, and in a Christian context, created a means by which to reunify with her husband in heaven.
She spent the last years of her life embroidering the words and pattern into the bed sheet. This long emotional process would have helped to comfort her and aid in her mourning over her husband- providing her with sensory connection, time to think and reflect, and a dedication to their religious beliefs. She kept the sheet with her until her death in 1723, but did not choose to have it used for her burial shroud, as would have been tradition. Instead, she wanted it to continue its life. It did this in the St Monica’s convent, which both James and Anna Maria were closely linked before their deaths. Evidence shows the bed sheet was likely folded and placed on an altar, with candles surrounding it. This gave it yet another meaning- one of memory, devotion, contemplation and political resistance.
While James Radcliffe’s heart became a relic to the Paris Augustinians, the bed sheet he and his wife had shared and she had embroidered with their hair became a relic to those he had helped in both life and death. Venerating the sheet allowed the nuns to sanctify the earl’s memory, to support recognition of his martyrdom, and to contemplate the rewards that awaited those who sacrificed the most for their faith. By the early 1900s, James Radcliffe was considered a national hero – a Catholic martyr, who died for the Jacobite cause. Owning any relic by somebody so revered was coveted. Profits could be made from selling items that had any connection with a figure like James Radcliffe, and a renewed interest could be sparked in the neo-Jacobite movement. The bed-sheet was now an agent of romantic nostalgia and one of few remains of a Jacobite hero. It also held artistic value, as one of very few examples of embroidered hair. In 1934, it was acquired by the Museum of London, where it remains in its final stage of life- an item of antiquity and history.
The story of the sheet follows its shift between values and meanings: it started as a domestic item, valuable to a family for emotional and personal reasons. It became an item of comfort and security for the young couple in the Tower of London. It was transformed into an object of mourning and grief, sewn with the hair taken from her dead husband’s decapitated head. It became venerated as a holy relic and commemorative political item as the Radcliffe family’s story became well-known. It was then sold, an item of commodity for those chasing such valuable relics and antiques connected to well-known names like Radcliffe’s. And now it is an object of historical memory and significance.
What other forms of grief and mourning have you seen expressed within art?
Can you think of any daily or household representations of mourning that we take part in now?
Death Imitates Art 
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