The Princess and the Pea: Free Coloring Page Print

The Princess and the Pea: History & Fun Facts

Quick Facts

• Hans Christian Andersen first published 'The Princess and the Pea' in May 1835 in a small booklet of four fairy tales.
• In the original Danish the title is Prinsessen paa Ærten, meaning The Princess on the Pea.
• A typical royal mattress in the Middle Ages was stuffed with wool, horsehair, or goose feathers.
• Garden peas have been cultivated by humans for at least 10,000 years — seeds have been found at Neolithic sites.
• The pea belongs to the legume family, which also includes beans, lentils, and chickpeas.
• Andersen said he heard the story as a child, suggesting it may have older folk-tale roots before his 1835 version.

The idea that a true princess could feel a single pea through twenty mattresses has delighted readers for nearly two centuries. Hans Christian Andersen published the story in 1835 as part of his very first booklet of fairy tales, and it quickly spread across Europe in translations. At its heart, the tale is about sensitivity as a mark of royalty — only someone truly noble, the logic goes, could be so delicate that a tiny legume through layers of bedding would leave her black and blue. Behind the whimsical premise lies a real history of elaborate royal bedding, the ancient cultivation of the garden pea, and a tradition of fairy-tale tests that separate true heroes and heroines from pretenders.

Hans Christian Andersen's 1835 Test for a True Princess

Hans Christian Andersen published The Princess and the Pea on May 8, 1835, in a slim pamphlet called Fairy Tales Told for Children alongside three other stories. He claimed to have heard the tale as a boy, which suggests it may have circulated as oral folklore before he wrote it down. In Andersen's version, a prince wants to marry a real princess but struggles to find one. When a soaking-wet girl arrives at the castle door claiming to be a princess, the queen tests her by hiding a single pea under twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. The next morning the girl says she barely slept and is covered in bruises — proof, by the story's logic, of her genuine royal sensitivity. The tale was an immediate hit and has never gone out of print.

What Royal Beds Actually Looked Like

In the picture, the princess climbs a ladder to reach the top of nine striped mattresses piled on a four-poster bed — and medieval royal sleeping arrangements really were elaborate. Wealthy households stacked multiple mattresses to signal status and to lift sleepers off cold, damp stone floors. A great lord's bed might include a straw mattress at the bottom, a wool-stuffed layer in the middle, and a soft feather top. The wooden four-poster frame held curtains that could be drawn to keep out drafts, and the whole structure was often the most valuable piece of furniture in a castle. Servants called grooms of the bedchamber were responsible for making and inspecting the royal bed each night.

Peas: From Ancient Crop to Royal Prop

The humble pea that hides at the bottom of the mattress stack has one of the longest cultivation histories of any vegetable. Archaeological finds show that people were growing peas in the Middle East and Greece as far back as 8,000 BCE. By the medieval period, dried peas were a staple food across Europe — cheap, easy to store, and high in protein. Fresh green peas were a seasonal delicacy enjoyed by wealthy households in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 1860s, Gregor Mendel famously used garden peas for his genetics experiments, discovering the laws of heredity that now underpin modern biology. Andersen's choice of a pea as the test object was perfect: small enough to seem absurd, yet firm enough to bruise through all that bedding.