The previous chapter explored how communication with God was understood to happen most frequently in bed because of the tradition of the bed as a metaphor for the relationship between the believer and the divine. However, the bed as a space for honest, intimate communication was not reserved solely for encounters with God. In late medieval England, the bed was a symbol of power and intimacy. As such, the chamber's meaning as a space which was appropriate for a particularly deep level of communication unavailable elsewhere relies upon the physical or implied presence of the bed. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the bed's role as ‘emblem of two people being honest’, and how that affected the ways in which people used and thought about the chamber.

Being open in a closed space

The chamber's physical seclusion and the bed's connotations of intimacy lent themselves to a role as the centre for private discourse. As Felicity Riddy argues, within Middle English romance, the chamber is ‘a feminine place of intimacy, love and a different kind of speech’.

This sense of intimacy and trust, though it is often expressed through romance narratives, is not confined to the romance genre. Instead it was present in a wider cultural understanding of the bed and chamber. The ‘different kind of speech’ to which Riddy refers is most apparent in romance when the conversation takes place in bed. Romance regularly demonstrates that the bed was seen to be a leveller in oral communication. Characters of different gender and social status are able to talk with a semblance of equality when they are in bed together. A very clear example is in Havelok the Dane, where the chamber and the bed give the protagonists the freedom to converse, which had hitherto been denied to them. Goldeboru, the rightful heir to the throne of England, is dominated by her evil guardian Godrich in the first half of the romance and her voice is never heard directly.