At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (23 page)

With good reason, men and women gave thanks. Misfortune might strike even seasoned travelers. Nighttime could be cruelly unpredictable. Some scrapes defy understanding, at least by modern minds. John Pressy of Amsbury, Massachusetts, around the year 1668 embarked upon a three-mile trip to his home “near about the shutting in of day light.” Taking a familiar path, he “steered by the moone w’ch shone bright” but repeatedly became “wildered.” Encountering a series of odd lights, one of which he struck with his staff, Pressy fell into a pit. Finally, after finding a woman “standing on his left hand,” he reached home “seazed with fear”—as, from his appearance, was his family. Other misadventures, despite travelers’ well-laid plans, were more foreseeable. In the Irish village of Dereen, probably few residents were as cautious as John “of the moon” O’Donoghue when picking times to tread abroad. He was well known for going home after nightfall by moonlight—“I’ll go home with the light of the moon,” he frequently declared. But returning from a tavern on an October night, he stumbled into a ditch and drowned. For earlier that evening John had indulged another habit, drinking large quantities of whiskey and beer. And to human frailty, nighttime often proved unforgiving. “Though the moon was full, and he had the benefit of its light,” grieved an acquaintance, “there was no light in his eyes.”
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PART THREE

BENIGHTED REALMS

PRELUDE

I curse the night, yet doth from day me hide.

WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF
HAWTHORNDEN,
1616
1

I
N THE SHARP
glare of daylight, privacy was scarce in early modern communities. Face-to-face relationships predominated in urban as well as rural settings, with most inhabitants intimately familiar with their neighbors’ affairs. Affording persons moral and material assistance, communities also upheld common standards of public and private behavior. In theory, vigilance in the spirit of combating sin was every good neighbor’s duty. “If any in the neighbourhood, are taking to bad courses, lovingly and faithfully admonish them,” urged New England’s Cotton Mather. “The neighborhood,” as the historians David Levine and Keith Wrightson have written, “was not only a support network, but also a reference group and a moral community.”
2

For reasons rooted in self-interest as well as public morality, personal misbehavior courted exposure—more often from prying eyes and loose tongues than from constables and churchwardens. The transgressions of a single household, feared residents, could harm the wider community by its corrupting influence. Had neighbors been less dependent upon one another, this danger would have mattered less. In cases of sexual misconduct, burdening the local parish with an illegitimate child threatened financial hardship and invited punishment from the Almighty. In 1606, a set of petitioners in Castle Combe, Wiltshire, condemned a woman’s “filthy act of whoredom” for, among other reasons, provoking “God’s wrath” upon “us the inhabitants of the town.”
3
In short, social oversight was essential. “In England,” a German visitor commented in 1602, “every citizen is bound by oath to keep a sharp eye at his neighbour’s house.”
4

Close quarters, whether at home or the workplace, lessened the likelihood of misbehavior. In most dwellings, rooms were few and cramped. During their trip to the Hebrides, James Boswell and Dr. Johnson, whose tastes ran to plusher quarters, often conversed with one another in Latin “for fear of being overheard in the small Highland houses.” Secrets large and small fell victim to servants, who ranked among the most notorious rumormongers.
5
Making matters worse were the narrow lanes separating early modern dwellings, with their thin walls, revealing cracks, and naked windows. Not until the eighteenth century did curtains adorn many urban portals, while in the countryside they remained a rarity. In towns, closing them invariably aroused suspicion in daytime. A New England colonist called them “whore curtains” when he detected a pair drawn at a neighbor’s home.
6
And while forests and fields afforded natural refuges, they, too, were vulnerable to surveillance. A writer in the
Westminster Magazine
averred in 1780, “A person in a country place cannot easily commit an immoral act without being detected or reproved by his neighbours.”
7

The good opinion of neighbors was not a trifling concern, especially in small, close-knit communities. “A man that hath an ill name is halfe hangd,” stated an English proverb. Bonds, personal as well as financial, depended upon one’s honor and reputation, which any number of misdeeds, from domestic quarrels and drunkenness to promiscuity and theft, could imperil. “Bad fame” often constituted the basis of presentments at court, and trials frequently invoked “the report of the neighborhood.” A damaged reputation was usually irreparable, an indelible stain reviled by the community. “He is not look’d upon to be an honest man in the neighborhood, for they say he buys stolen goods,” Ann Parfit noted of a London neighbor in 1742. Of his Inveresk parishioners, a Scottish minister commented, “There is no censorial power half so effectual as the opinion of equals.”
8

Men and women on the lower rungs of society attracted the greatest scrutiny. Common laborers, servants, vagabonds, and slaves all bred deep suspicion among social superiors. The truly indigent were not even subject to the authority of a master—“nobody to govern them,” observed John Aubrey. “The lower class of people,” spewed the
British Magazine
, “are in England the meanest, dirtiest, wickedest and most insolent creatures of all the human species.” The mobility of vagrants, possessing neither “fire nor place,” fueled apprehension. Of the typical beggar, the Elizabethan Nicholas Breton wrote, “Hee is commonly begot in a bush, borne in a barne, lives in a highway and dyes in a ditch.”
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In some regions, social pariahs such as Jews, prostitutes, and heretics had to wear badges of shame tagged to their clothing. In Augsburg, beggars bore the
Stadtpir
, a civic symbol, on their garments. Prostitutes wore a green stripe and Jews, a yellow ring. An English statute in 1572 required that vagrants be “grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron.”
10
Marked already by their tattered garments and physical infirmities, the lower orders reputedly exhibited a roguish demeanor, the product of years of hardship and insecurity. Of thieves like himself, an Irishman remarked, “If we go abroad in the day, a wise man would easily find us to be rogues by our faces, we have such a suspicious, fearful and constrained countenance, often turning back and slinking thro’ narrow lanes and alleys.” Not surprisingly, vagrants fantasized about magical hats that could render them invisible to their tormentors. One German adolescent spoke of a white powder that, with the devil’s assistance, shielded him from human sight.
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It would be wrong to conclude that privacy is a modern priority neither known nor valued by earlier generations. While its importance has varied by period and place, the appeal of privacy has been an enduring characteristic of Western culture. Common throughout the classical world, concern for privacy seems to have intensified during the late Middle Ages with the increasing accumulation of personal possessions and greater interest in their safekeeping. First used in the 1400s, the words “privacy” and “private” became part of popular parlance by the time of Shakespeare, as his plays reflect. Clearly, for early modern folk, the close scrutiny of communities did not diminish privacy’s appeal. Quite the contrary. Local oversight coupled with the threat of sanctions only fostered a heightened appreciation for seclusion. Especially at nighttime. “Be private as the night is,” counsels one character to another in the play
The Bastard
in 1652. “Night makes me bold,” wrote George Herbert, “and I dare doe that in the dark and in privat, which in companie I forbeare.”
12

There were, of course, institutionalized occasions for personal gratification and social license. Catholic lands had a variety of outlets for festive behavior, such as Carnival, the Feast of Fools, and other annual holidays. Popular diversions were marked by large quantities of food and drink and ample opportunities for sports and rough play. On the occasion of Carnival in the days approaching the observance of Lent, townspeople teased, tricked, and tormented friends and animals alike. By donning disguises, revelers delighted, too, in the ritual of role reversal, parading as clerics and civic officials. “It is sometimes expedient,” a sixteenth-century French lawyer wrote, “to allow the people to play the fool and make merry, lest by holding them in too great a rigor, we put them in despair.”
13

In Protestant countries like England, the number of saints’ days and other religious holidays steadily decreased in the wake of the Reformation. Condemned for their intemperance and frivolity, some festivals gave way to secular or Protestant substitutes, but on a more modest scale. “Our holy and festival days are very well reduced,” reported the Elizabethan William Harrison.
14
Even in Catholic communities, cathartic interludes among the common people were of limited duration, confined, as holidays, to special times of the year. And over time, carnal excess declined, with mounting efforts by clergy and town councils to impose greater order. Significantly, only after darkness fell did opportunities for merriment occasionally enter a more violent, at times anarchic stage. So in the Auvergne, weddings typically climaxed in evening violence, and May Day festivities, in parts of Italy, grew more disorderly at night. During Carnival season, anxious authorities in much of Europe forbade masks after dark, lest they incite rioting and bloodshed. “None are suffered to carry swords or arms, while they go masked thus; nor to enter into any house; nor to be abroad masked after it grows dark,” reported a foreign visitor to Rome.
15

Routinely
, the darkness of night loosened the tethers of the visible world. Despite night’s dangers, no other realm of preindustrial existence promised so much autonomy to so many people. Light was not an unalloyed blessing, nor darkness inevitably a source of misery. “In the day,” observed the Restoration satirist Tom Brown, “’tis
constraint
, ’tis
ceremony
, ’tis
dissimulation
, that speaks.” Appearances were often deceiving, because they were meant to be. “All’s restraint,” echoed a contemporary. It was after sunset that opportunities expanded and intensified for behavior otherwise forbidden. Night alone permitted the expression of man’s inner character. “Night is conscious of all your desires,” stated a writer. A London song described how “many a face, and many a heart, / Will then pull off the mask” to sin “openly at night.”
16

Nighttime had deep symbolic value, its appeal owing much to its traditional association with licentiousness and disorder. In the popular mind, nocturnal darkness lay beyond the pale of the civilized realm.
“’
Tis only daylight that makes sin,” wrote John Milton. Dusk represented a borderland between civility and freedom—freedom in both its benign and malignant qualities. “Metaphors matter,” as Bernard Bailyn has reminded us, for “they shape the way we think”—all the more when they make sense in the light of actual experience.

On a practical level, the sources of night’s allure were considerable, including the natural mask it afforded persons in lieu of the façades often adopted during the day. “Dark enough,” affirmed a London writer in 1683, “to come back to one’s house without being taken notice of by the neighbours.” Even on clear nights, danger of public exposure receded owing to fewer pedestrians. With most persons confined to their dwellings, public behavior invariably became more private—all the more, observed the playwright Aphra Behn, once “mortal eyes are safely lockt in sleep.” Then, too, personal associations at night were the product of choice, not circumstance—trusted friends and family rather than workmates or inquisitive superiors. Darkness, as a late eighteenth-century writer noted, created “little separate communities” quite apart from one’s diurnal relationships.
17

The immensity of night, for some, conferred a pronounced sense of personal sovereignty. “Everything belongs to me in the night,” declared Restif de la Bretonne. In his famed poem
The Complaint
; or
Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality
(1742–1745), Edward Young echoed, “What awful joy! What mental liberty! / I am not pent in darkness; / . . . in darkness I’m embower’d.” For all of the fear engendered by pestilential damps and celestial spectacles, the outdoors invited mortals’ grandest visions. “We can fix our eyes more comfortably on the heavens,” observed Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle—“our thoughts are freer because we’re so foolish as to imagine ourselves the only ones abroad to dream.” Night knew no bounds. Goethe, on a moonlit evening in Naples, was “overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.” And not just poets and philosophers. Exclaimed an English grazier treading home from an evening’s merriment, “Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars.” To which, replied his companion, “With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.”
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