At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (28 page)

One is struck by the prevalence of such gatherings. The predominant type of social work, especially during winter months, was the spinning or knitting bee, of which there were numerous variations—for example,
veillées
in France,
Spinnstuben
,
Rockenstuben
, and
Lichstuben
in Germany, Russian
posidelki
, and
veglia
in Tuscany. On Guernsey, spinning parties known as vueilles assembled, as did, dating to the thirteenth century,
kvöldvaka
in Iceland. In the British Isles, almost everywhere there were similar occasions, from
céilidhe
or
áirneán
in Ireland and
rockings
in Scotland to the Welsh
y noswaith weu
, or “knitting night.”
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As early as the mid-fifteenth century, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II (1405–1464), while traveling in northern England, observed a large company of women sitting all night by a fire, conversing and cleaning hemp. Less common elsewhere in England, spinning sessions, even in the nineteenth century, remained widespread in the north. Of villagers in Yorkshire and Lancashire, William Howitt remarked, “As soon as it becomes dark, and the usual business of the day is over, and the young children are put to bed, they rake or put out the fire; take their cloaks and lanterns, and set out with their knitting to the house of the neighbour where the sitting falls in rotation.”
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Assembling one or more nights a week, work parties could last until one or two o’clock in the morning. Most, however, began after the evening meal and concluded well before midnight. Up to a dozen or more close neighbors customarily attended, though some were known to travel several miles, following beaten paths with lanterns on dark nights. Peasants in the Irish countryside, wrote an observer, “would often go a distance of three or four miles, through swamps and bogs.” Stables and barns afforded shelter along with homes and workshops. On frigid nights, the presence of farm animals generated warmth, as did steaming manure. Often, a cottage hearth supplied small quantities of both light and heat. There was no shortage of tasks. In addition to beating hemp and stripping corn, men turned their hands to shelling nuts or weaving baskets. Requiring the sharpest sight, women normally sat up front, spinning, knitting, weaving, and carding wool either for themselves or for one another. At night, hands and forearms replaced shoulders, legs, and backs.
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Along with the normal run of gossip, there were jokes at the expense of local officials, especially religious leaders. Seethed a critic of the
Spinnstuben
in German villages, “Nothing else happens but exposing people and destroying their honour.” Popular were tales of magic. As a youth in the Swiss town of Hittnau, the writer Jakob Stutz listened by the hearth to the folk wisdom of a “spinner” named Barbara Ott, who claimed she had once been able to fly. As voices softened, storytelling often afforded the night’s principal entertainment—legends, fables, and tales of evil spirits—eternal stories recounted again and again by seasoned narrators with well-trained memories. “So pass the tales of old, along my soul, by night,” declared the Scottish poet James Macpherson. So attentively did Irish audiences in Dungiven listen to ancient poems that errors in narration were queried on the spot. “The dispute,” remarked an observer, “is then referred to a vote of the meeting.”
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For preindustrial peoples, obscurity suited storytelling. In both Western and non-Western cultures, the recitation of myths and folktales long enjoyed the aura of a sacred ritual, traditionally reserved for night’s depths. Darkness insulated hearts and minds from the profane demands of ordinary life. Any “sacred function,” averred Daniello Bartoli in La Recreazione del Savio, “requires darkness and silence.” Within early modern households, ill-lit rooms gave added force to the resonant talents of storytellers. These men in much of Ireland bore the title of
seanchaidhthe
, and in Wales,
cyfarwydd
. The spoken word, in the absence of competing distractions, acquired unique clarity at night. Darkness encouraged listening as well as flights of fancy. Words, not gestures, shaped the mind’s dominant images. What’s more, sound tends to unify any disparate body of listeners. Not only is sound difficult to ignore, but it promotes cohesion by drawing persons closer together, literally as well as metaphorically. Coupled with the dim light of a lamp or hearth, the act of storytelling created an unusually intimate milieu.
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And, too, nighttime lent a dramatic backdrop to local tales, many of which dwelled on fears of the supernatural. Of childhood stories in Lancashire, Moses Heap recalled, “No wonder the awful tales told in the wide-open firegrate on a cold winter’s night with the wind from the moors howling round the house had its affect on the young ones.” There and elsewhere, witches, spirits, and apparitions were standard fare, as were perilous encounters with robbers and thieves. “Nothing is commoner in
country places
,” observed Henry Bourne in 1725, “than for a whole family in a
winter’s evening
, to sit round the fire, and tell stories of apparitions and ghosts.”
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Violence, poverty, and natural disasters were persistent motifs. But there were also proverbs, moral precepts, and clever tricks one could master—useful lessons for confronting life’s dangers, including magical beliefs and practices. In
My Father’s Life
, Restif described hearing instructive tales on long winter evenings that contained “the loftiest maxims of the ancients.” Probably more typical was a laborer’s story recounting a “nighted traveller’s” encounter with a will-o’-the-wisp. Drawn to its light, the traveler narrowly escapes drowning “by knowing well the brook that wimpered down the vale.” While everyday events could be, at best, capricious, there were inspirational stories to “gild the horrors of the winter night,” as a Scottish pastor remarked. If, in some legends, rich and powerful men fell from glory, so in others the poor triumphed over adversity. During evening gatherings at his home, the French laborer Robin Chevet drew from a trove of tales, designed both to educate and amuse. As related in the
Propos Rustiques de Maistre Léon Ladulfi
(1548) by Noël du Fail:

Jean Jacques de Boisseau,
Evening in the Village
, 1800.

Goodman Robin, after imposing silence, would begin a fine story about the time when the animals talked (it was just two hours before); of how Renard the fox stole a fish from the fishmongers; of how he got the washer-women to beat the wolf when he was learning how to fish; of how the dog and the cat went on a voyage; about Asnette’s hide; about fairies and how he often spoke with them familiarly, even at vespers as he passed through the hedgerows and saw them dancing near the Cormier fountain to the sound of a red leather bagpipe.
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Many stories, rooted in generations of past strife, recounted the familiar deeds of heroic warriors. Everywhere, it seems, listeners took epic legends to heart, from Icelandic sagas to
bylini
in Russia. Noted Howitt of knitting-nights in Yorkshire, “Here all the old stories and traditions of the dale come up.” Amid the darkness, superior storytellers spirited suggestible minds to realms of wonder, far removed from daily hardships. In Brittany, according to Pierre-Jakez Hélias, his grandfather, a sabot-maker, was well known for his ability to “transform a gathering of peasants in a farmhouse into so many knights and ladies.” Only then, reflected Hélias, might rural folk have stopped worrying about “the price of suckling pigs, or daily bread, or Sunday meat soup.” Such a story is recounted in
The Old Wive’s Tale
(1595), a comedy by George Peele. Urged one winter evening to share a fireside tale, Madge, the blacksmith’s wife, begins:

Once upon a time there was a King or a Lord, or a Duke that had a faire daughter, the fairest that ever was; as white as snowe, and as redd as bloud; and once uppon a time his daughter was stollen away, and hee sent all his men to seeke out his daughter. . . . There was a conjurer, and this conjurer could doo anything, and hee turned himselfe into a great dragon, and carried the King’s daughter away in his mouth to a castle that hee made of stone. . . .
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It was not uncommon in some regions for small clusters of women to assemble, bringing their spinning wheels or distaffs to a neighbor’s home. In parts of France, makeshift huts called
écreignes
(little shelters) were constructed each winter for this purpose. Some, such as those in Burgundy described by Etienne Tabourot during the sixteenth century, were little more than tents. Too poor to afford their daughters fires by which to spin, winemakers used poles to construct outdoor enclosures overlaid with manure and dirt, “so well mixed that it was impenetrable.” By contrast,
écreignes
in Champagne, according to a later observer, were “houses dug out below ground-level,” though these too were covered with dung. A lamp, supplied by one of the women, hung in the middle. “Each one arrives, carrying her distaff, with the spindle in the distaff, with her two hands on her sewing-kit, and her apron over her hands, enters hurriedly and takes her seat.”
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These occasions offered women an opportunity to work and socialize apart from the presence of men. During the day, such encounters were limited—women’s paths might cross at markets and wells, or at communal events like births and wakes. Spinning bees gave rise to prolonged, often intense conversations. Amid animated banter, the jests and ballads, women gave and gathered news. “The winter’s night is for the gossips cup,” opined Nicholas Breton. According to another contemporary, “One talked intimately of one’s babies, of a cousin, of a neighbour, of flax, spinning; of geese, ducks, chickens, and eggs; of making cheese and butter, and probably had a word about blue milk, a dried up cow, caused by a wicked neighbour.” Gossip shaped local perceptions of people and events. Through the spoken word, ordinary women exercised extensive influence within their communities, independent of the institutionalized power of males. “Words are women, deeds are men,” stated an Italian proverb.
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Often, too, women drew emotional support from workmates whose empathy provided a welcome counterweight to the patriarchal household. “Many a stone,” we are told, “which lay heavy and long on the heart, would be lifted” as a result of the “experience, interpretation, explanation, and expertise of the many women present.” Where inspiring stories recounted the deeds of biblical heroines like Judith and Esther, more mundane information included magical charms for domestic happiness. Among the revelations contained in
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
, drawn from the fifteenth century, was a spell to soften the temperaments of abusive husbands. Wives bent on vengeance, on the other hand, could resort to another formula in the collection: “When a woman gets up in the night to piss before the cock has crowed for the third time, and she straddles her husband, be it known that, if any of his limbs are stiff, they will never relax if she does not return to her place by way of the same place.” In addition, women learned ways to deter demons and to encourage conception—at night, should one wish to have a baby girl (in the morning for a boy).
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These seedbeds of subversion made men uneasy. In the sixteenth century, an Italian moralist railed against women for “telling dirty stories all evening,” and a German writer noted “the jealousy of the men when their faithful partners leave the four walls.” Worse, spinning sessions by their very nature kindled fears of witches’ sabbaths. Some communities, in vain, tried to forbid such “scandalous” gatherings. Still, male intruders risked being sternly reproached or even assaulted. In 1759, upon visiting a
Spinnstuben
, the journeyman Conrad Hügel suffered a severe beating at the hands of women armed with distaffs. For three weeks, he lay close to death. Claiming the punishment was their “good right” because of Hügel’s indecent flirtations, the women later declared that “they should have injured him even more.”
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Night saved the day. As neighborhood forums, work parties gave vent to a day’s most pressing events. News and gossip were brooded over and discussed before becoming disseminated on public streets. To a large degree,
veillées
and like gatherings not only reflected the communal consciousness, they also shaped and refined it, apart from the opinions and tastes of social elites. More broadly, these occasions provided a vital conduit for age-old traditions, preserving and protecting the oral legacy of preindustrial communities. “Round every fire-side, the entertainment of the evening was rehearsing tales of former times,” observed a Highlands minister. Most obviously, winter gatherings helped to soften the rigors of nocturnal tasks, permitting neighbors to share past glories and present privations. “Labor ceased to be a toil,” wrote a visitor to Ireland. As fires burned low, lucky listeners might be transported by a storyteller’s wizardry to some distant time or place. For a few precious hours, in a dim and drafty cottage, peasants too might become rich, or even lords and ladies. Of the common sort, remarked a contemporary, “Popular tales, the stories heard during the
veillées
, make a greater impression on them than the lessons of their pastors.”
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