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Bed

The great bed of Ware. A bed twelve feet square, and capable of holding twelve persons; assigned by tradition to the Earl of Warwick, the king-maker. It is now in Rye House.

“Although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England.”—Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, iii. 2.

To make the bed. To arrange it and make it fit for use. In America this sense of “make” is much more common than it is with us. “Your room is made,” arranged in-due order. To make it all right.

As you make your bed you must lie on it.

Everyone must bear the consequences of his own acts. “As you sow, so must you reap.” “As you brew, so must you bake.”

To bed out.

To plant what are called “bedding-out plants” in a flower-bed. Bedding-out plants are reared in pots, generally in a hot-house, and are transferred into garden-beds early in the summer. Such plants as geraniums, marguerites, fuchsias, penstemons, petunias, verbenas, lobelias, calceolarias, etc., are meant.

You got out of bed the wrong way,

or with the left leg foremost. Said of a person who is patchy and ill-tempered. It was an ancient superstition that it was unlucky to set the left foot on the ground first on getting out of bed. The same superstition applies to putting on the left shoe first, a “fancy” not yet wholly exploded.

Augustus Caesar was very superstitious in this respect.

Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894

Bed of Justice

Becket's Assassins