Contents -AUTHOR INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

chapman2017

Trundle-bed–this was the same as truckle-bed, a small, low bedstead, moving on wheels or castors, which ran in under the principal bed. The allusions to the trundle-bed are numerous in old writers. Bp. Hall, in his Satires, says, one of the conditions prescribed to a humble chaplain and tutor in an esquire’s family was,

“First that he lie upon the truckle-bed,
While his young maister lieth o’er his head.”

Warton says, in the Statutes of Corpus Christi Coll. Oxford, given in 1516, the Scholars are ordered to sleep respectively under the beds of the Fellows in a truckle bed, or small bed shifted about on wheels. Similar curious injunctions are given in the Statutes of Magdalen and Trinity Colleges. In an old comedy, “The Return from Parnassus,” acted at Cambridge in 1606, Amoretto says, “When I was in Cambridge, and lay in a trundle-bed under my tutor.”–Act II. sc. 6. It was generally appropriated to a servant or attendant.