At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (21 page)

SIR ROGER L’ESTRANGE,
1699
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Embodying the distilled wisdom of past generations, popular conventions governed nearly every aspect of night journeys, both long and short—from treading ancient sheep-tracks to traversing unfamiliar woodlands and meadows. In spite of the critical role that human senses played in surmounting night’s obscurity, there were still other challenges to mind, body, and soul. Custom governed not only people’s mode of lighting but also their dress and form of travel, their companions, what they did or did not carry, and when and where they went. So, too, did unwritten protocols exist for encountering fellow travelers as well as for seeking help when lost. As Thoreau later reflected, “What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine.”
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Before embarking outside, travelers usually dressed with care. During the day, neat clothing suitable to class and calling was customary, as was cleanliness, regardless of station. Many working men and women took pride in their garments. “The people of England, from the highest to the lowest,” wrote Tobias Smollett, “are remarkably neat in their attire.” The
London-Spy
spoke of the “abundance of rubbing, scrubbing, washing and combing” men performed to make “tolerable figures to appear by day light.”
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But at night, appearance mattered less, and standards changed. For some persons, darkness disguised garments too dirty or torn to be worn by day. A drunken squire returned home from a London alehouse at night because he “was too dirty to go home by day-light.” “In the night,” affirmed an Italian saying, “any cap will serve.”
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Outer clothing, in general, became less varied and more functional. Colors were plainer. Because manure and mud lay everywhere, leather boots and shoes were favored by those who could afford them, along with leggings by the end of the seventeenth century. For protection from wet and cold weather, men and women wore buttoned capes or cloaks made from felt. “Great cloaks,” predominantly used by men, were thick, heavy garments that hung loosely—to mid-calf for pedestrians, whereas riders required a shorter design. In Rome, a visitor discovered that the “great cloak” was “worn by all when walking the streets.” By the late 1600s, “great coats” or “watch coats” also grew popular, featuring a turned-up collar for foul weather. In
The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
(1762), Smollet wrote of a man “muffled in a great coat.” Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe saves from his shipwreck “a great watch-coat to cover” him. For added comfort, Dutch women affixed small pots of hot embers or smoldering turf beneath their petticoats. Sicilians, when the “night air was sharp,” tied similar devices to their wrists. Among the poor, with neither cloaks nor coats, multiple layers of clothing lent a measure of warmth.
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Heads, too, required protection. Of the “damps of the night air,” a traveler wrote that the English “take more precautions here against a cold, than they do in the Eastern countrys against the plague.” Pepys attributed a bad cold to not wearing his periwig more often. Shawls, hoods, and scarves among women were customary. Others placed atop their heads linen “night-mobs” with lappets on the sides tied beneath the chin. Indifferent to fashion, some men wrapped scarves around their heads and “uncocked” (turned down) the brims of their three-cornered hats. “Cover your head by day as much as you will, by night as much as you can,” advised a proverb. Fearful of the night air, Romans drew cloaks close to their mouths “as to enclose a space for breathing.” “This they do in order that they may respire the air of the chamber in walking the streets, and not be exposed to the natural element.”
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Plain apparel at night served to conceal wealth and rank, an advantage when traveling alone. Samuel Johnson claimed never to have been robbed, “for the rogues knew he had little money, nor had the appearance of having much.” Donning tattered garments, gentlemen might even masquerade as laborers. A Scottish saying declared, “A raggit coat is armour against the robber.” Other precautions included carrying little money or jewelry. Asked why she walked late one night through London’s suburbs—“for it was very dangerous”—Mary Hicks replied “that she fear’d nothing, having left her money and rings” at the home of a friend. Some persons, when traveling, secreted money in the fabric of their cloaks or the soles of their shoes or hose. A Polish gentleman in 1595, crossing the Italian countryside, was attacked at nightfall by two bandits from behind a clump of bushes. Not only had he covered his shoes in rags, but he had also sewn eighty Hungarian florins into his stockings. “It was difficult to guess by looking at me, because of my bad shoes and because I was traveling on foot,” he noted. One robber, taking pity on the Pole, gave him two coins before absconding!
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Apart from disguising one’s gentility, there was another advantage to journeying on foot. Because horses in the dark could be skittish, mishaps were fewer. “How can the best horse be sure of his foot-steps,” queried John Byng, a seasoned rider by day.
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Families occasionally shunned riding in coaches, despite their greater refinement. “Too dark for a carriage,” Parson Woodforde concluded before returning home from playing cards at the estate of a local squire. “Myself and nephews put on our great coats and walked home to supper.” What’s more, it was easier, thought some, to protect oneself on foot. With robberies rising, London’s hackney-coach drivers complained in 1729 about their declining trade. “People, especially in an evening, choose rather to walk than ride in a coach, on account that they are in a readier posture to defend themselves.”
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Any mode of travel by land was preferable to water. Amid shoals and sandbanks, restricted visibility rendered river navigation perilous. Moreover, if a boat capsized, there was less likelihood of rescue. All these dangers of travel combined near Leeds on an August evening in 1785 when the young driver of a carriage paused by a riverbank to water his horses. Due to the river’s swift current from recent flooding, the horses lost their footing, dragging the carriage and its doomed driver into the water. According to a report in the
London Chronicle
, “The night being very dark, it was impossible to render him any effectual service.”
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Time, too, mattered to travelers. Preindustrial societies divided evenings as well as days into well-defined intervals. Ancient Romans partitioned their nights into as many as ten different periods, which, unlike modern hours, varied in length. Extending from dusk (
crepusculum
) to the break of day (
conticinium
), each was identified with either a natural event or a human activity, such as bedtime (
concubium
). So, also, did the medieval Church institute canonical hours for prayer.
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For households in early modern Britain, sundry intervals at night were commonplace. The most familiar chronology consisted of sunset, shutting-in, candle-lighting, bed-time, midnight, the dead of night, cock-crow, and dawn. Despite the growing regimentation of time by the seventeenth century into hours and minutes, traditional intervals afforded members of all social ranks a frame of reference for calibrating the darkness. Even men and women able to afford clocks or other timepieces found these temporal categories convenient. Natural transitions marked some intervals, making nights easier to chart. Roosters, for the regularity of their habits, were hailed as the “peasant’s clock.”
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For other nocturnal times, such as midnight, rural families often depended upon the stars and the moon. Asked the time in the play
Rhodon and Iris
(1631), the shepherd Acanthus replies that it is the eleventh hour, for “Orion hath advanced very high.” Famed for their accuracy were the Pleiades, a cluster of stars in the constellation of Taurus—“called by the vulgar, the hen and chickens,” wrote Samuel Purchas in 1613. Claimed a Boston writer in 1786, “The poor peasant, who never saw a watch, will tell the time to a fraction, by the rising and setting of the moon, and some particular stars.” In contrast, many urban residents relied upon clock towers and the cries of the nightwatch. Despite their erratic performance, church clocks could be found by the sixteenth century in a growing number of cities and towns. On a dark winter morning in 1529, the Cologne student Herman Weinsberg wakened and left home for school, unaware that it was barely past midnight. When the clock tower struck one o’clock, he “thought the clock was not working right.” Finally realizing his error, yet locked outside, he “wandered up and down the streets to stay warm,” nearly dying from the cold.
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All hours after sunset were perilous, but some were thought particularly threatening. A visitor to Scotland commented that travelers, “so ’fraid of riding in the dark at nights, should be so courageous in the mornings, when it is equally dark.” Most feared of all was the “dead of night.” Also called the “dead time” or the “dead hour,” reputedly it was the darkest time of the evening, falling between midnight and cock-crow (around 3:00
A.M.
). At no other juncture were roads and fields so deserted, or dangers so great. Ancient Romans called this interval
intempesta
(without time). “The dead vast and middle of the night,” Shakespeare wrote. In
The Rape of Lucrece
(1594), he related:

Anon.,
The Labourer’s Clock, or a Very Easy Method of Telling the Time at Night by the Stars,
eighteenth century.

Now stole upon the time the dead of night,

When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes:

No comfortable star did lend his light,

No noise but owls’ and wolves’ death-boding cries;

Now serves the season that they may surprise

The silly lambs: pure thoughts are dead and still,

While lust and murder wake to stain and kill.
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In most localities, though crimes were more numerous in the hours preceding midnight, pedestrians likely faced a higher risk of robbery and assault afterwards. Clearly that was the conventional perception. Thus, a London gentleman, between the hours of 1:00 and 2:00
A.M.
, counseled a drinking companion “how dangerous it would be” to return home “at that time o’night”; and a newcomer to London wrote, “If one does not travel either very early or very late, there is no fear of being attacked.” Following an assault on a Paris street just before midnight, the glazier Ménétra steadfastly “refrained from coming home so late.”
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Then, also, evil spirits, according to common lore, were more likely to prowl during those hours. It was “aboute the dead of the night” that John Louder of Massachusetts imagined in his bed “a great weight” from a demon straddling his stomach. Not just boggarts and witches but the devil himself freely roamed, his reign on earth lasting until cock-crow, when, warned of day’s approach, demons took flight, much as the ghost in
Hamlet
(ca. 1601). “Then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,” observes the character Marcellus. This belief was at least as old as the fourth-century writings of the Spanish poet Prudentius. According to the Newcastle antiquary Henry Bourne, centuries later, “Hence, it is, that in
country places
, where the way of life requires more early labour, they always go chearfully to work at that time; whereas if they are called abroad sooner, they are apt to imagine every thing they see or hear, to be a wandring ghost.” Worse was to frequent those hours on certain nights of the year. All Hallows’ Eve and the Eve of St. John (Midsummer Eve) in the British Isles, for example, reportedly endowed spirits with heightened powers. “The risk is never so great as on St. John’s Eve,” observed an early nineteenth-century visitor to Ireland.
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Along with time, place mattered. Night dramatically transformed the communal landscape, investing innocuous landmarks with sinister portent. In a Yorkshire valley, for example, the decayed ruins of a small chapel were a “perfect paradise for boys” by day, but “not to be approached for the world by night, being haunted by a variety of strange ghosts,” as William Howitt noted. Bourne wrote, “Stories of this kind are infinite, and there are few
villages
, which have not either had such an house in it, or near it.” Indeed, he observed, “The common people say now and then, such a place is dangerous to be passed through at night.” Often, such spots were thought impassable, and pedestrians took alternate paths. The late eighteenth-century folklorist Francis Grose estimated that the typical churchyard contained nearly as many ghosts at night as the village had parishioners. “To pass them at night, was an achievement not to be attempted by any one in the parish, the sextons excepted.”
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