At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (10 page)

Often, however, arson arose from other hands. Across Western Europe, fire was used against landowners by bands of peasants and vagabonds. Arson was a “weapon of the weak”—inexpensive and accessible, with small chance of prevention at night. Used during the Middle Ages, “fireraising” first reached epidemic proportions in the sixteenth century. Within Germany, for example, during the
Bundschuh
disturbances in 1513 and 1517, homes were fired, as were many more following the Peasants’ War of 1524–1526. In the Black Forest, an abbey was torched to avenge the death of a peasant leader. From Austria to the Low Countries, bands of incendiaries terrorized country villages. A gang near Salzburg in 1577 supposedly contained eight hundred members. That appears unlikely, but such exaggerations reflected the depth of rural fears. In the Netherlands, the Estates General in 1695 imposed new penalties against “the large bands of gypsies travelling in these areas, carrying arms and threatening arson.”
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And though fireraising was less prevalent in the British Isles, agrarian rioters in eighteenth-century Ireland routinely employed arson at night. In 1733, rumors circulated of a band of incendiaries in western England, whereas in Sussex, residents of Horsham, disgruntled over a ban on bonfires, posted a notice on the town hall vowing to fire the homes of local officials. “We should desire no better diversion than to stand at a distance and see your houses all in flames,” they declared. In the American provinces, some fires were attributed to discontented slaves, for example in Boston in the early 1720s and in New York City twenty years later.
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In most instances of arson, personal, not social or political, grudges were responsible, although these impulses occasionally dovetailed when servants or slaves were involved. In Germany, the community of Dutz burned in 1538 after a former prisoner in the town gaol set his own house ablaze. “Tonight I have to pay back the Dutz people’s friendship,” he first informed his family. The late-night burning of a Gloucestershire barn in 1769 resulted in the arrest of a servant girl, whose apron was used to hide a fire-stick. Upon confessing, she admitted that she disliked her “place,” from which she wished to be discharged.
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Yet the final agony attending blazes came in their waning hours. After managing in the dead of night to escape both smoke and flames, survivors faced the pilfering of what few goods they could salvage. Fireside thefts were endemic, committed less often by arsonists than by onlookers nicknamed fire-priggers, notorious for stealing valuables on the pretense of helping distraught victims retrieve their belongings. So routine was this form of larceny that Parliament legislated in 1707 against “ill-disposed persons” found “stealing and pilfering from the inhabitants” of burning homes. A generation later nothing had changed, with thefts common on both sides of the Atlantic. “There was much thieving at the fire,” reported the
Pennsylvania Gazette
in 1730 of a nighttime blaze that destroyed stores and homes along the Philadelphia waterfront.
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Such was the early modern nightscape, a forbidding place plagued by pestilential vapors, diabolical spirits, natural calamity, and human depravity, the four horsemen of the nocturnal apocalypse. Of these were the darkest nightmares composed. Unlike such recurrent perils as war, famine, and plague, these dangers were a pervasive source of anxiety for most households.

Not that violence, fire, and other nightly terrors spared daily life, for plainly lives and property stood at risk during all hours in such a precarious age. There need be no doubt, however, that nightfall occasioned the gravest threats to personal safety. Darkness gave free rein to the most threatening elements in the natural and supernatural worlds. Dangers that by day remained sporadic multiplied both in number and in severity. “The terrors of the night,” explained Thomas Nashe, are “more than of the day, because the sinnes of the night surmount the sinnes of the day.”
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Never before in Western history, at least since the time of Christ, had night appeared more menacing. With crime a persistent threat, both evil spirits and the terror of fire posed heightened dangers in the centuries following the Middle Ages.

It is a wonder that with the initial shades of darkness men and women did not flee to their beds, warily banking their fires first. And yet, for all of night’s terrors, for all the dangers from demons, rogues, and poisonous damps, many persons retreated neither to their chambers nor even to their homes. Instead, they worked and played into the night. Complained a Swiss pastor in 1696, “In the evening, when the sun is setting, the cattle returning from the field home to the stall, and the birds in the wood are falling silent, man alone in his foolishness acts against nature and the general order.”
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PART TWO

LAWS
OF NATURE

PRELUDE

If there was no obscurity, man would not sense his own corrupt state.

BLAISE PASCAL,
1660
1

F
OR MOST
OF THE
early modern era, night’s perilous domain escaped the normal vigilance of church and state. Much of the scaffolding of civic and religious institutions so vital within European communities to the preservation of social order fell dormant each evening—courts, councils, and churches to which ordinary men and women looked to settle local disputes and help protect life and property. Magistrates, aldermen, and churchwardens returned home, shedding robes and responsibilities. “The still village lies dissolv’d in sleep,” wrote the poet Thomas Foxton.
2

Nightfall, in the view of secular and ecclesiastical officials, commanded a close to hours of daily toil. On a practical level, to avoid the risks of both fire and poor craftsmanship, most tradesmen were required to snuff candles and bank hearths. But there was also a heavenly imperative to obey. Darkness mandated that the profane demands of the visible world be forsaken. In their stead, authorities expected men and women to embrace their deity through prayer and meditation. Such early Church Fathers as Ignatius, Jerome, and Cyril of Jerusalem all stressed the value of prayer at night, as did, in the sixteenth century, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. In the poem “On a Dark Night,” he proclaimed, “O you my guide, the night, / O night more welcome than dawn.” By closing eyes and ears, darkness and solitude opened hearts and minds to the word of God. In the evening, related Bishop James Pilkington, “the senses are not drawn away with fantasies, and the mind is quiet.” And no time made prayer more essential than night, the time of Satan’s reign, when persons retired to their beds, entrusting themselves to their creator’s care.
3

Most of all, darkness was intended for rest. “The day sees work and labor; the night sees rest and peace,” wrote the seventeenth-century Jesuit Daniello Bartoli in
La Ricreazione del Savio
(1656). Nocturnal slumber strengthened the faithful for their daily duties. Admonished a Puritan minister, sleep should never be taken “out of season” so “that we may the better serve God and our neighbours.” To spurn rest defied divine providence, but it also endangered personal health. By turning night into day, stated Reverend John Clayton, men imperiled both their “principles” and their “constitutions.”
4
Equally alarming, venturing abroad put persons at needless risk, exposing them to all the “troubles and dangers that continually ensue.” “Except in extreme necessity,” warned Monsignor Sabba da Castiglione, “take care not to go out at night.”
5

Nighttime’s final importance for authorities lay in drawing heightened attention to the glory of God’s earthly paradise. How better to appreciate the wonder of daily life than by contemplating the black obscurity of night? For the people of this age, there was no more useful way, in fact, to understand any subject than by studying its antithesis. By providential design, observed writers, the horrors of darkness set life’s blessings in sharper relief. “Safe from the dangers” of “the night season,” men and women awakened each morning to the “beauty and order of the creation.” Asserted
Piers Plowman
, “If there were no night, I believe no man / Should really know what day means,” a sentiment routinely echoed by later generations. A New England clergyman declared, “God sends our
night
upon us, to make us
children of the day
.”
6

Fundamentally, then, night’s paramount value, apart from encouraging devotion and rest, lay in its negation of the waking world. It should not surprise us that the established order viewed “nightwalkers” with trepidation or took few steps after dark to make common thoroughfares safer and more accessible. Not that its attitude was one of indifference or inaction, for night remained a source of profound concern. But rather than seeking to render darkness more habitable, authorities resorted instead to restraint and repression. The fewer persons abroad the better. Night was a no-man’s-land, or so, at least, civic and religious officials prayed.

CHAPTER THREE

THE FRAGILITY OF
AUTHORITY:
CHURCH AND STATE

I

The gates of the citty were shutt, and the streetes chayned at dinner tyme, as if it were in tyme of warr.

FYNES MORYSON,
1617
1

A
CROSS THE
preindustrial countryside, fortified cities and towns announced the advance of darkness by ringing bells, beating drums, or blowing horns from atop watchtowers, ramparts, and church steeples. In Catholic lands, the hum of daily life slowed to a soft murmur as men and women of faith recited the
Ave Maria
, a prayer of thanks for divine mercies. With the return of peasants and peddlers to the countryside, townspeople hurried home before massive wooden gates, reinforced by heavy beams, shut for the evening and guards hoisted drawbridges wherever moats and trenches formed natural perimeters. “When Ave Maria you hear, see that your house be near,” advised a customary saying. The daily intercourse between town and country abruptly halted at nightfall, as households took shelter behind walls of earth, brick, and stone, some more than fifty feet in height and ten feet in width. During the summer, gates might not be barred until eight or nine o’clock, but in winter, when darkness came on quickly, they could shut as early as four o’clock. At no other time was the contrast more evident between urban and rural life. Town folk eagerly abandoned the surrounding countryside to frightening perils, as armed sentinels with torches patrolled the ramparts. In Italian towns, guards were obliged to ring a small bell every five minutes to signal that none had fallen asleep.
2
For anyone caught and convicted of either defacing or scaling urban walls, penalties were harsh, including, in Stockholm, the loss of one’s head. Just to approach ramparts without warning at night constituted a crime. After all, a Milanese scholar pointed out in 1602, it was for the offense of vaulting the walls of Rome that Romulus slew his brother Remus. “So perish all who cross my walls,” Romulus had allegedly exclaimed.
3

Predominantly medieval in origin, urban fortifications dominated the surrounding terrain for centuries afterward. For every city or town cursed by crumbling battlements, there stood another with freshly strengthened façades. In spite of the expenditure of time, labor, and money, more than a few small towns received protection. The Netherlands, according to an estimate in the sixteenth century, contained over two hundred walled towns. Even rural villages occasionally took refuge behind crude bastions. A visitor to Germany reported, “Every village has a wall or ditch around it; few country farmhouses; all are huddled together in towns.” Fearing an attack by water, authorities in Amiens forbade all boat traffic at night on the Somme where the river passed the city’s ramparts. Boatmen were required to bring their skiffs within the walls before sunset “on pain of being punished as enemies of the town.”
4

England’s comparative freedom from foreign invasion by the end of the Middle Ages largely explains its dwindling number of fortified communities, from just over one hundred earlier in the era. Several of the more enduring structures encircled the Great Towns of Norwich, Exeter, and York. Some English towns, in the absence of walls, enjoyed the protection of ditches and earthen banks. In London, despite the ancient city’s decaying bastions, numerous gates separated one neighborhood from another, even in the years following the Great Fire. Along with gates that survived the conflagration, others, such as Ludgate and Newgate, were rebuilt with “great solidity and magnificence.” All the city’s portals, testified William Chamberlayne in 1669, “are kept in good repair, and all are shut up every night with great diligence.”
5

For the sake of social order, communities barred gates in peace as well as war. Long after walls lost their military value, they guarded townspeople against rogues of all stripes, including vagrants and gypsies. Brigands whipped out of a town by day might return by night bent on vengeance, hoping to set homes ablaze. As early as the thirteenth century, Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote of the dangers posed by both “enemies” and “thieves.” Without walls, magistrates in one French city dreaded “entry by every sort of person.”
6

Often, benighted travelers, caught abroad once gates closed, were forced to lie outdoors if lodging could not be had in a
faubourg
. Three times, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to his great anxiety, found himself outside the barred gates of Geneva, a city without suburbs. Of one instance, he wrote, “About half a league from the city, I hear the retreat sounding; I hurry up; I hear the drum being beaten, so I run at full speed: I get there all out of breath, and perspiring; my heart is beating; from far away, I see the soldiers from their lookouts; I run, I scream with a choked voice. It was too late.” Elsewhere, entry occasionally followed the payment of a toll, known in Germany as
Sperrgeld
, or entrance-money. The city of Augsburg featured a special night-gate,
Der Einlasse
(the wicket-gate), which required passage through a series of locked chambers and across a drawbridge. In a French community, the sergeant of the guard, hoping to reap a small fortune from the throngs of citizens attending a distant fair, ordered the town’s bell rung a half-hour early, with tardy souls forced either to pay a penny or remain abroad all evening. Such was the mad crush of panicked crowds as they neared the gate that more than one hundred persons perished, most trampled in the stampede, others pushed from the drawbridge, including a coach and six horses. For his rapacity, the guardsman was broken upon the wheel.
7

To curb nocturnal traffic within town walls, municipal authorities imposed curfews. Only hours after gates closed (or sooner, in the summer), bells warned families to repair to bed once fires were covered. The term “curfew” reportedly originated from the French word
couvre-feu
, meaning “cover-fire.” In 1068, William the Conqueror (ca. 1028–1087) allegedly set a national curfew in England of eight o’clock. Whether his intention was to prevent fires or, as critics later alleged, to avert midnight conspiracies against his reign, similar restrictions found favor throughout medieval Europe. Not only were streets swept of pedestrians, but homes still aglow after the curfew bell ran afoul of authorities. Besides incurring fines, offenders faced the risk of incarceration, especially if caught outdoors.
8
Few exemptions were allowed, mostly for persons on missions of life or death—priests, doctors, and midwives—also scavengers (garbage collectors) and veterinarians, for the loss of domestic stock could be devastating to a struggling family. Night laid bare society’s most pressing priorities. In England at least, mourners were permitted to keep watch all night over bodies of the dead (fearing the Church’s retribution for invoking magic, one guild mandated that none of its members at such vigils “calls up ghosts” or “makes any mockeries of the body or its good name”).
9

Lending weight to curfews, massive iron chains, fastened by heavy padlocks, blocked thoroughfares in cities from Copenhagen to Parma. On moonless nights, these barriers posed a formidable challenge to riders and pedestrians alike. Nuremberg alone maintained more than four hundred sets. Unwound each evening from large drums, they were strung at waist height, sometimes in two or three bands, from one side of a street to the other. In Moscow, instead of chains, logs were laid across lanes to discourage nightwalkers. Paris officials in 1405 set all of the city’s farriers to forging chains to cordon off not just streets but also the Seine. In Lyons, chains blocked the Saône, while in Amsterdam, iron barriers spanned canals.
10

Not until the close of the Middle Ages did urban curfews grow less repressive, with 9:00 or 10:00
P.M.
, rather than eight o’clock, becoming the standard hour for withdrawing indoors. More significant, public rather than private conduct increasingly prompted officials’ concern—wayfarers loitering abroad, not citizens burning late hours at home. An “Acte for Nyghtwalkers,” adopted for the town of Leicester in 1553, condemned “dyvers ryottous and evyll disposed persons” who spent nights “walkying in the strettes” causing “moche truble to the well dyssposyd people that wold take ther naturall rest.” This more liberal policy owed much, not to any diminished sense of nocturnal peril, but to the impracticality of earlier restrictions. In the face of law enforcement’s frailty, the unavoidable fact was that work and sociability occupied many families past the curfew hour. Often, for another hour or more, household windows stayed lit. To be sure, late-night merriment, whether at home or abroad, still provoked officials’ ire. In the words of a London regulation in 1595, “No man shall after the houre of nine at the night, keep any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the night.” Apart from revelry, common sources of disturbance, according to the ordinance, included brawling and beating one’s wife or servants—any instance of which could result in a fine of three shillings four pence.
11

In time, curfews also grew less restrictive for pedestrians. Step by step, more persons enjoyed greater freedom of movement, particularly if they bore honest reputations and sound reasons for travel, unlike nightwalkers, who, by definition, lacked “reasonable cause.” Besides those whose demeanor, looks, or location made authorities wary, several groups were enjoined from circulating at night because of the perceptible threat they posed to public order. These included foreigners, beggars, and prostitutes. In Paris, beginning in 1516, vagrants found themselves at night tethered together in pairs, whereas in Geneva, they were expelled at sunset. No stranger could remain inside Venice for more than a single evening without a magistrate’s approval. According to the medical student Thomas Platter in 1599, Barcelona confined prostitutes to a narrow street, closed each evening by chains. In many communities, they faced sporadic harassment from the nightwatch. The Common Council of London in 1638, for example, instructed constables “to do their best endeavour” to arrest “lewd and loose women wandring in the streetes” at night.
12

Of all marginal groups, Jews, where their numbers were greatest, endured the most systematic segregation, forced either to remain in urban ghettos, with their gates bolted at dusk, or to take refuge in the surrounding countryside. Among the “many detestable and abominable things” for which Jews were blamed at night was consorting with Christian women. Of Jews in Vienna, a seventeenth-century visitor discovered, “They must all depart at night beyond the river into the suburbs.” In Venice, where the late sixteenth-century population numbered a few thousand, ghetto gates, guarded by four Christian sentries, were shut from sunset to sunrise. Notably, an exception was made for doctors, of whom a large number resided in the
Ghetto Nuovo
after its completion in 1516. Because many of these possessed patients outside the ghetto, they were permitted to remain abroad on condition of supplying guards with written reports.
13

Not just prostitutes, but women in general were not to stray at night. Besides compromising their own virtue, they might sully, through low intrigues, the reputations of honorable men. By force of custom if not statute, women of all ranks and ages, save for midwives, risked public disgrace if they did not keep to their homes. They might be mistaken for adulteresses or prostitutes, only to be accosted by strange men or arrested. In Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet
Lanthorne and Candle-Light
(1608), a constable demands of a woman, “Where have you bin so late? . . . Are you married? . . . What’s your husband? . . . Where lie you?” Years later, a band of law clerks in Grenoble justified their assault upon two maidservants by claiming that the girls “had no candles and prostitutes are the only women out of doors at night.”
14

Even males of good repute still faced constraints after dark. In Catalonia, for instance, no more than four men could walk together in a group. Unless licensed by permits, carrying weapons was frequently forbidden—arquebuses, pistols, or other firearms along with swords and knives, despite the prevalence of private arms within early modern households. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, English law prohibited pedestrians at night from wearing “sword or buckler, or other arms for doing mischief.” Italian towns forbade “secret weapons” such as daggers and pocket pistols, easily concealed under a cloak. If caught with a pistol in Rome, an offender might be sent to the galleys. Where nobles first claimed special privileges, laws repealed most of these by the late 1600s, in keeping with efforts by authorities throughout the nation states of Europe to wean subjects from their weaponry. In Paris, by virtue of an ordinance in 1702, not only were men of quality forbidden to carry firearms, but their servants were stripped of canes and staffs. The necessity to maintain order grew all the more urgent after nightfall, when opportunities multiplied for both personal and political violence. By day, armed travelers to Italian cities were instructed, “
Liga la spada
” (tie the hilt to the sheath), but at night swords were confiscated. “They who have license to cary swordes in the cittyes,” noted a visitor to Florence, “yet must not weare them when the evening beginns to be dark.” “The carrying of arms fosters violence,” a Spanish decree explained in 1525, and “many persons take advantage of the cover of darkness to commit all kinds of crimes and misdemeanors.”
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