lit à couronne with a tester shaped like a crown, a style which appeared under Louis XVI., and was fashionable under the Restoration and Louis Philippe, and lit à l’impériale, which had a curved tester, are a few of their varieties. The lit en baldaquin of Napoleon I. is still at Fontainebleau, and the Garde Meuble contains several richly carved beds of a more modern date. The custom of the “bed of justice” upon which the king of France reclined when he was present in parliament, the princes being seated, the great officials standing, and the lesser officials kneeling, was held to denote the royal power even more than the throne. Louis XI. is credited with its first use, and the custom lasted till the end of the monarchy. From the habit of using this bed to hear petitions, &c., came the usage of the grand lit, which was provided wherever the king stayed, called also lit de parement or lit de parade, rather later. Upon this bed the dead king lay in state. The beds of the king and queen were saluted by the courtiers as if they were altars, and none approached them even when there was no railing to prevent it. These railings were apparently placed for other than ceremonial reasons originally, and in the accounts of several castles in the 15th century mention is made of a railing to keep dogs from the bed. In the chambre de parade, where the ceremonial bed was placed, certain persons, such as ambassadors or great lords, whom it was desired to honour, were received in a more intimate fashion than the crowd of courtiers. The petit lever was held in the bedroom itself, the grand lever in the chambre de parade. At Versailles women received their friends in their beds, both before and after childbirth, during periods of mourning, and even directly after marriage—in fact in any circumstances which were thought deserving of congratulation or condolence. During the 17th century this curious custom became general, perhaps to avoid the tiresome details of etiquette. Portable beds were used in high society in France till the end of the ancien régime. The earliest of which mention has been found belonged to Charles the Bold (see Memoirs of Philippe de Comines). They had curtains over a light framework, and were in their way as fine as the stationary beds. Iron beds appear in the 18th century; the advertisements recommend them as free from the insects which sometimes infested wooden bedsteads, but one is mentioned in the inventory of the furniture of the castle of Nerac in 1569, “un lit de fer et de cuivre, avec quatre petites colonnes de laiton, ensemble quatre satyres de laiton, quatre petits vases de laiton pour mettre sur les colonnes; dedans le dit lit il y a la figure d’Olopherne ensemble de Judith, qui sont d’albâtre.” In Scotland, Brittany and Holland the closed bed with sliding or folding shutters has persisted till our own day, and in England—where beds were commonly quite simple in form—the four-poster, with tester and curtains all round, was the usual citizen’s bed till the middle of the 19th century. Many fine examples exist of 17th-century carved oak bedsteads, some of which have found their way into museums. The later forms, in which mahogany was usually the wood employed, are much less architectural in design. Some exceedingly elegant mahogany bedsteads were designed by Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton, and there are signs that English taste is returning to the wooden bedstead in a lighter and less monumental form. (J. P.-B.)
BED, in geology, a term for certain kinds of rock usually found to be arranged in more or less distinct layers; these are the beds of rock or strata. Normally, the bedding of rocks is horizontal or very nearly so; when the upper and lower surfaces of a bed are parallel, the bedding is said to be regular; if it is thickest at one point and thins away thence in every direction, the bedding is lenticular. Beds may be thick (50 ft. or more) or so thin as to be like sheets of paper, e.g. paper shales, such thin beds being often termed layers or laminae; intermediate regular varieties may be called flags, flagstones or tilestones. In fine-grained rocks the bedding is usually thinner and more regular than in coarser rocks, such as sandstones and grits. Bedding is confined to rocks which have been formed under water or by the agency of wind; these are the “stratified” rocks.
The deposition of rock material by moving water is not as a rule uniform, slight changes in the velocity produce an immediate change in the size of the particles deposited upon a given area; thus a coarse sand layer may be succeeded by a finer sand or a mud, or two sandy layers may be separated by a thin layer of muddy shale. Bedding is most often induced by a change in the nature of the contiguous strata; thus a sandstone is followed by a shale or vice versa—changes which may be due to the varying volume or velocity of a current. Or the nature of the deposit may be influenced by chemical actions, whereby we get beds of rock-salt or gypsum between beds of marl. Or again, organic activities may influence the deposit, beds of coal may succeed layers of shale, iron-stone may lie between limestones or clays, a layer of large fossils or of flints may determine a bedding plane in massive limestones. Flaky minerals like mica frequently assist in the formation of bedding planes; and the pressure of superincumbent strata upon earlier formed deposits has no doubt often produced a tendency in the particles to arrange themselves normal to the direction of pressure, thus causing the rock to split more readily along the same direction.
Where rapidly-moving currents of water (or air) are transporting or depositing sand, &c., the bedding is generally not horizontal, but inclined more or less steeply; this brings about the formation of what is variously called “cross-bedding,” “diagonal bedding”, “current bedding” or improperly “false-bedding.” Igneous materials, when deposited through the agency of water or air, exhibit bedding, but no true stratification is seen in igneous rocks that have solidified after cooling, although in granites and similar rocks the process of weathering frequently produces an appearance resembling this structure. Miners not infrequently describe a bed of rock as a “vein,” if it is one that has some economic value, e.g. a “vein of coal or ironstone.” (J. A. H.)
BEDARESI, YEDAIAH (1270–1340), Jewish poet, physician and philosopher of Provence. His most successful work was an ethical treatise, Behinath ‘Olam (Examination of the World), a didactic poem in thirty-seven short sections. The work is still very popular. It was translated into English by Tobias Goodman.
BÉDARIEUX, a town of southern France, in the department of Hérault, on the Orb, 27 m. N.N.W. of Béziers by rail. Pop. (1906) 5594. The town has a 16th-century church, a board of trade arbitration, a chamber of arts and manufactures, a communal college and a school of drawing. Bédarieux was at one time a notable manufacturing centre. Its cloth-weaving industry, carried on under a special royal privilege from the end of the 17th century to the Revolution, employed in 1789 as many as 5000 workmen, while some thousand more were occupied in wool and cotton spinning, &c. In spite of the introduction of modern machinery from England, the industries of the place declined, mainly owing to the loss of the trade with the Levant; but of late years they have somewhat revived, owing partly to the opening up of coal mines in the neighbourhood. Besides cloth factories and wool-spinning mills, there are now numerous tanneries and leather-dressing works. There is some trade in timber, wool and agricultural produce.
BEDDGELERT (“Gelert’s grave”), a village in Carnarvonshire, North Wales, at the foot of Snowdon. The tradition of Gelert, Llewelyn’s hound, being buried there is old in Wales; and common to it and India is the legend of a dog (or ichneumon) saving a child from a beast of prey (or reptile), and being killed by the child’s father under the delusion that the animal had slain the infant. The English poet, W. R. Spencer, has versified the tale of Llewelyn, king of Wales, leaving Gelert and the baby prince at home, returning to find Gelert stained with the blood of a wolf, and killing the hound because he thought his child was slain. Sir W. Jones, the Welsh philologist and linguist, gives the Indian equivalent (Lord Teignmouth’s Life of Jones, ed. Rev. S. C. Wilkes, editor’s supplement). A Brahmin, leaving home, left his daughter in charge of an ichneumon, which he had long cherished. A black snake came up and was killed by the ichneumon, mistakenly killed, in its turn, by the Brahmin on
