I Tried Sleeping Like a St Andrews Student from 1426

If you’re a student awake at midnight in St Andrews, it’s likely that you’re either hard at work studying or enjoying the town’s distinct nightlife. It’s probably less likely that you’ve just woken up, after a ‘first sleep,’ in order to continue your evening — in keeping with the practice of ‘biphasic’ sleeping, commonly associated with the medieval period. According to historian Robert Ekrich, up until the Industrial Revolution, people would have slept in two stages each night, with the first lasting from 8pm to around 11:30pm and the second stretching from around 1am until dawn. This means that if you lived in St Andrews 600 years ago, you probably would have spent the interval between the two sleeps praying, studying, socialising, or getting up to mischief. This week, to better understand what life might have been like for students when the university was founded, I decided to abandon the modern eight-hour sleep cycle in favour of a medieval-style night, to see whether segmented sleep could offer anything more than an excellent excuse to be awake at midnight. 

Night One

On the first night of the experiment, after a long day of studying, I was more than ready to go to bed at 8pm. I fell asleep quickly and was surprised when I woke up naturally at 11:30pm, feeling shockingly clear-headed and ready to work. Interestingly, my natural awakening echoed findings from sleep researchers David Samson and Thomas Wehr, who found that, without artificial light, humans naturally sleep in the aforementioned two phases. It did feel remarkably easy to stay awake; during the two-hour period between sleeps, I was able to do readings for class, book my flights for reading week, and manage my inbox. It was a very peaceful, productive time, and it felt like I’d discovered a magical extra few hours in the day where I could work while feeling unusually rested. However, while the freedom to work felt wonderfully liberating, as the night wore on, the initially peaceful quiet grew isolating, and I was more than ready to return to bed at 1:30am. 

Night Two

After the loneliness of the previous night, I decided to invite others to join me between my sleeps, and lean into the more sinister side of the biphasic model. According to Ekirch, medieval court documents prove that the hours between sleeps could be a particularly crime-ridden time, and, in the Middle Ages, a university town like St Andrews probably would have seen its fair share of drunken brawls, illicit meetings, petty theft, and other acts of roguery. So, at 11:30pm, when I woke up, I texted five friends to meet me at Aikman’s to see what sort of appropriately sinister deeds we could get up to. After a brainstorming session, we decided to write pub-goers ominous notes, including one to the bartender (who was thankfully a friend) which read: “Act natural. This is a robbery.” But because that threat exists within a grey area of Scottish law, we finished the note with “just kidding” and a bunch of hand-drawn hearts, which effectively undercut any real sense of menace and kept everything legal. 

Night Three

For the third and final night of the experiment, I wanted to find a happy medium between the overly peaceful first night and the chaos of the second. I decided to call my academic wife Sophia, and ask her to (platonically) share our marital bed in the name of research. During the medieval period, communal sleeping was common, even among nobles, who often shared beds with close friends to talk intimately, discuss dreams, and exchange stories. When Sophia arrived, we promptly fell asleep in my blanket-laden double bed, and when I woke her at 11:30pm, she groggily admitted, “I didn’t think I’d actually sleep,” before adding, “I need a cigarette SO badly” and “How are you so chipper?” However, she quickly adjusted to the strange liminality of being awake in the night, and we ended up talking until 3:30am with the covers pulled up to our chins. We had an excellent conversation, unburdened by the stress of our days, and it certainly gave me a better understanding of the ways in which hours between sleeps might have strengthened relationships, whether between friends, spouses, or university students sharing a bed. 

Final Thoughts

While three nights of medieval sleeping haven’t convinced me to abandon the eight-hour block, they have made me question our modern tendency to treat the night as time lost to sleep rather than time in its own right. I can see how, if I had been a student in St Andrews in 1426, those strange hours in the night would have been necessary to the rhythms of medieval life — and perhaps, once I got used to them, something to look forward to. Perhaps the experiment’s lesson isn’t to return to biphasic sleep, but to occasionally embrace the night as intentional time for conversation, creativity, community, and mischief.

Illustration by Eve Fishman