At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (27 page)

Among a farmer’s final labors was taking his crops or stock to market, arriving hours before daybreak to haggle with vendors. Along with carts laden with vegetables and fruit, small herds of cattle passed in the darkness, their collars strung with bells lest any stray. At night, the countryside moved to the city. In Venice, beginning at 3:00
A.M.
, peasants arrived in boats “loaded with every produce of nature,” while a visitor to Lyons was awakened at four o’clock “by the braying of asses, and a busy hum of people” loaded with baskets. The timing of such trips depended upon market days and the availability of moonlight. Fortified towns needed to open their gates well before dawn. The largest urban centers had an insatiable appetite for foodstuffs, with public markets open daily from early morning until dusk, if not later. In a single week, farm animals alone brought to London, according to an estimate in 1750, included one thousand bullocks, two thousand calves, six thousand sheep, three thousand lambs, thirty-five hundred hogs and pigs, and nearly twenty thousand fowl. “How many labour all day, and travell, nay wake att night to bring provisions to this town,” wondered Sarah Cowper. Peasants traveled to Paris from distant towns like Gisors and Aumale. “At one in the morning six thousand peasants arrive, bringing the town’s provisions of vegetables and fruits and flowers,” Mercier wrote. At the central market of Les Halles, he noted:

The noise of voices never stops, there is hardly a light to be seen; most of the deals are done in the dark, as though these were people of a different race, hiding in their caverns from the light of the sun. The fish salesmen, who are the first comers, apparently never see daylight, and go home as the street lamps start to flicker, just before dawn; but if eyes are no use, ears take their place; everyone bawls his loudest.
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Once temperatures began to fall, frequent evenings found rural families working inside their homes. The French saying “To the fire in winter, to the fields and woods in summer” applied to night as well as day. As early as the first century, Columella wrote in
Res Rustica
of the “many things which can be properly done by artificial light.” As in urban households, there was weaving or spinning. A visitor to Sweden thought nearly every peasant at night a weaver, some so poor that they relied upon moonlight to card wool. Often, too, rural women produced cloth for regional textile markets once commercial links penetrated the hinterlands. “In many parts of
Yorkshire
,” Josiah Tucker wrote in 1757, “the woolen manufacture is carried on by small farmers and freeholders. These people buy some wool, and grow some; their wives, daughters, and servants spin it in the long winter nights.”
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Families used evenings to mend shoes and clothing or to repair and sharpen tools. There could be flax to beat or grain to thresh. Apples might be stamped for cider, or malt ground for ale and beer. One February, Parson Woodforde rose at 3:00
A.M.
“to brew a hogshead of strong beer.” Three nights later, he was up again, this time before 1:00
A.M.
to brew two batches. In the short story “The Ploughman’s Wife,” Restif de la Bretonne recounted winter evenings when “lads prepared stakes for the vines whilst they talked, and the girls stripped flax or spun.” Sanger, in addition to tasks at his own farm, performed odd jobs at night for friends and neighbors, from husking corn to splitting wood, standing by an open door to catch the moonlight. “I help Tilly boil sap all night,” he wrote one early April.
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In the Chesapeake colonies, planters occasionally kept slaves at work stripping tobacco and husking corn by moon- or candlelight; on South Carolina plantations, slaves often spent winter evenings pounding rice, prompting more than a few, evidently, to flee despite the season.
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No doubt, other rural laborers at night, even some farmers, thought of doing the same.

IV

Night-worke and day-worke is not all one.

JOHN TAYLOR,
1643
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For after a full day’s labor, night work could be grueling. Prolonged toil exhausted both body and spirit. In medieval France, clothworkers declared that late hours were “dangerous for them and greatly to the peril of their bodies.” Of the typical rural laborer, a London writer, much later, claimed, “Although he wants rest and subsistence, he perseveres, whereby he is much hurt; it wears him out, and brings on sickness and untimely old age.” Each fall in the Auvergne during threshing, peasants barely got “even a few hours of sleep” at night. Given such rigors, accidents inevitably followed, resulting in the loss of limbs and lives. Standard equipment at a Jamaican sugar works toured by Lady Nugent was a hatchet used to sever the forearms of slaves who, from falling asleep, caught their fingers in the mill—the sole means, she noted, of saving their lives.
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Nearly as bad was the lot of laborers for whom nighttime comprised their “working day.” Among modern workers on night shifts, research has found high levels of insomnia, fatigue, and gastrointestinal disorders. During the small hours of the night, the human body is not intended to remain awake or to consume significant quantities of food. To do either defies circadian rhythms and countless years of human evolution. None better understood this than night workers themselves. In 1715, an anonymous pamphlet by journeymen bakers in Paris complained, “We start our days in the evenings, we kneed the dough at night; we have to spend all night in captivity,” with no chance to nap. “Night, the time of rest,” the pamphlet declared, “is for us a time of torture.” Indeed, night work was one of the reasons that contemporaries offered to explain the irascibility of bakers and their proclivity for violence on and off the job.
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And yet, despite severe hardships, the rigorous labor and physical exhaustion, nighttime did offer workers advantages. For one thing, during hot summer months, evenings were less oppressive for fieldwork. Laborers gladly slept during the midday heat in order to toil after dark. Smiths and ironworkers benefited from cooler evening temperatures.
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In certain callings, there was less supervision at night, making hours less regimented and discipline more lax. In 1728, the servant Francis Biddle, instructed “to sit up every other night” to protect the goods of his London master, seized the chance to steal three barrels of beer, two bushels of malt, and three firkins of ale. Darkness routinely made it easier for laborers to pilfer from worksites. Favorite targets in towns and cities included lumberyards and wharves. Vulnerable to watermen were ships anchored in London and other ports. The Navy Board in the early eighteenth century sought to restrict work at royal dockyards to daylight in order to curb “the roguery and villainy” laborers “commit when it is beginning to grow dark.” At the Venetian Arsenal, not only at night did guards defy regulations against fraternizing but they also carried away large quantities of goods, passing them to conspirators in boats.
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Opportunities for sexual misconduct were also greater. In Nuremberg, where laundresses relied upon a small number of wash-houses bordering a stream, these in 1552 had to be locked at sunset so that “the laundresses have no place for their indecent behavior.” Similarly, the apprentice John Dane was alone in his master’s shop in Berkhamsted, “when most folke was a bead,” when a “mayd” visited for a sexual tryst. Though they “jested togetther,” he reluctantly declined her entreaties. The Massachusetts colonist Esay Wood, on a moonlit evening in 1662, lay outside with Mary Powell, after she had been sent by her mother to help husk his corn.
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At the same time, night often meant working for oneself rather than a master. With the day’s tasks complete, many hired laborers turned instead to tilling their own fields, typically small leaseholds. Tenants and cottagers, who worked the lands of substantial landowners by day, cultivated private plots by moonlight. Discontented with tending goats, the Swiss shepherd Ulrich Bräker purchased a small tract to clear by himself. “During the day,” he noted, “I worked for my father; as soon as I was free, for myself; even by moonlight there I was, making up the timber and brushwood I’d chopped down while it was still light.” Many no doubt looked forward to the day when they could work just their own land. A writer in an English agricultural magazine complained in 1800, “When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings . . . the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work.” Household dependents, too, labored at night for personal gain. Thomas Platter’s future wife, the Swiss servant Anna, “frequently spun late in the night,” producing cotton yarn for her mistress but also making “quite good clothing” for herself. When Bräker was still a child living at his grandparents’ home, his mother, “to earn a secret penny behind” his “grandparents’ backs” at night, “would surreptitiously spin by lamplight.”
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Equally industrious were African-American slaves who occasionally received provision grounds on which to plant gardens or raise hogs and poultry. Nights when plantation regimens did not interfere were a favored time. In size, plots could range from small patches of dirt to extensive tracts of wasteland. In 1732, an observer in the Chesapeake remarked that gardens enabled slaves to plant potatoes, peas, and squash, either on Sundays or at night. Besides adding variety to otherwise bland diets, these enterprises provided slaves with goods to sell in public markets, which in the Carolina Lowcountry and much of the West Indies they regularly supplied. A market in Antigua, according to one report, drew “an assemblage of many hundred negroes and mulattoes,” selling “poultry, pigs, kids, vegetables, fruit and other things.” Hunting and fishing also occupied slaves’ evenings, notwithstanding the need to cross miles of difficult terrain. In South Carolina, the naturalist William Bartram witnessed slaves returning “home with horse loads of wild pigeons” caught “by torch light” in a swamp. In Jamaica, land crabs, captured at night, furnished a source of income for workers whose provision grounds were poor. “Crowds of negroes from the neighbouring plantations pass my house every evening with their torches and baskets, going to a crab wood on the other side, and return before midnight fully laden,” a white resident recorded.
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Jan Asselijn,
Crab Catching in the Night,
seventeenth century.

Above all, nighttime commonly blurred the boundaries between labor and sociability. More than any time during the day, work and play intersected. Many tasks became collective undertakings, marked by a spirit of conviviality and companionship. Social superiors in Italy faulted peasants for attending “licentious threshings and prohibited games.” Women joined one another in clothes washing. At the Drinker household in Philadelphia, Elizabeth and other women had “a washing frolick” one summer night in 1760. In southern Scotland, herring fishing, despite winter darkness, drew “men and women of all ages, and in different companies . . . carrying lamps of flaming charcoal . . . accompanied with the mixed cries of emulation, merriment, and hope.” No different in spirit were early American corn “huskings,” which, like “shuckings” on southern plantations, customarily took place after dark. As a servant in colonial New Jersey described, “The neighbours assist one another in stripping the corn from the husks, and are treated with rum and punch.” In Massachusetts, due to their festive nature, the Puritan patriarch Cotton Mather condemned “the riots that have too often accustomed our
huskings
.” Vainly, he admonished local farmers, “Let the
night of your pleasure
be turned into
fear
.”
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No doubt, many people derived satisfaction from sharing tedious tasks with neighbors and family—their feelings of camaraderie occasionally intensified by alcohol. More important still, nighttime, by its very nature, connoted freedom from the constraints of daily life, the innumerable rules and obligations that repressed gaiety and playfulness. Night, on top of everything else, was a state of mind. Amid familiar countenances and helping hands, formalities fell by the wayside, along with feelings of fear and degradation. Inhibitions receded in the darkness, as friends laughed and toiled together. Affirmed a Welsh adage, “John” in the morning became “Jack” at night. Among other benefits, communal labor allowed families to conserve precious fuel, sharing the light from a lone torch or lamp. Indoors, men and women, hoping to escape the biting cold, assembled around the soothing glow of a hearth. Just to catch the warmth, let alone complete one’s tasks, made it necessary to close ranks. Under such ill-lit, cramped conditions, night could be a time of profound intimacy and companionship. “Evening words are not like to morning,” attested an English proverb.
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