At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (36 page)

Under a master’s thumb by day, many fled their domination at night. “Lying-out” was the term reserved for dependents that remained abroad much of the evening, often in defiance of a household curfew. “They can’t bear the orders, the restraints, the seasonable hours, whereto their
parents
or
masters
would have them obliged,” a contemporary observed in 1705. The self-styled “masters of the night,” adolescents provoked fear among urban denizens throughout the early modern world. Just as Cotton Mather condemned “knotts of riotous young men” in Boston, including his own son Increase (“Cressy”), so in Germany, a Protestant synod protested, “Decent people can no longer be sure of anything and must fear the most shameful insults, even physical attacks.” Of London, Sir William Davenant declared in 1673, “Our city fam’d for government, is by / These nightly riots and disorders, grown / Less safe then galleys, where revolted slaves / Inchain their officers.”
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So, too, for bound laborers, night brought uncommon opportunity. So pervasive was servitude in Europe that even poor households sometimes possessed a single maid. Eighteenth-century Paris contained forty thousand domestics, with London having at least as many. Like apprentices, servants were predominantly young, generally from fifteen to thirty years of age. Although they often changed jobs, servitude, unlike apprenticeship, rarely represented a stepping-stone to propertied independence. Working conditions were demanding. By definition, servants were subject to the will of their masters, and to their verbal and physical abuse. Maidservants fell prey to sexual exploitation. Worse were the lives of indentured servants in the American colonies, whose terms averaged from three to five years. If banished from Britain as convicts, they labored for seven years. Still, the lot of colonial servants was superior to that of African slaves, whose miserable material existence, especially on Southern plantations, was compounded by strenuous labor and savage discipline.
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And, yet, once evening’s tasks were done, masters were hard-pressed to curtail their laborers’ jaunts. The General Court of Massachusetts in 1675 condemned the “evil of inferiours absenting themselves out of the families whereunto they belong in the night.” Sarah Cowper complained bitterly of “impudent wretches who go where they will.” In Scotland, a vicar reported, “A farmer must often rise from bed at 3 or 4 o’clock, in a winter’s morning to admit his servants, who have been junketing all night.”
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Equally peripatetic were slaves. “Both sexes are frequently travelling all night,” remarked a white resident of Barbados, “going to or returning from a distant connection.” A correspondent in the Boston Evening-Post railed against the “great disorders committed by Negroes, who are permitted by their imprudent masters, &c. to be out late at night.” In short, as a North Carolina planter remarked, “night” was “their day.”
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Then, also, apprentices, servants, and slaves bent on escape were most likely to abscond after sunset, lurking by day in woods and marshes and navigating at night by the stars. In Germany, two ship’s apprentices in March 1588, having fled their river vessel, escaped to Bonn “with help of the darkness of night,” only to be discovered in the morning. Alerted a colonial newspaper advertisement for runaway servants, “It is supposed they will travel mostly in the night.”
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In certain respects, the members of these four groups—adolescents, servants, slaves, and the poor—had little in common. Some resided on the social margins of early modern communities, while others were partially integrated. The lot of Carolina slaves varied immensely from that of lower-class whites, as did the prospects facing hardened vagrants compared to those of young servants. The groups themselves were fragmented by occupation, ethnicity, gender, and religion. Among slaves, important, too, were their identities as creoles or native Africans. Yet these groups frequently overlapped, and boundaries separating one from another were often blurred. Thus, for instance, apprentice riots in London were rumored to include “forlorn companions” and “masterless men.” Most of all, these men and women, despite their diverse backgrounds, were alike in one fundamental respect. Rather than living in one world, they each resided in two. Days mired in misery and fear often gave way to nights of opportunity and promise. Alienated from daily reality, only in the evening could they work and play with their own kind by their own rules. Recalled a former North Carolina slave, “We hated to see da sun rise in slavery time cause it meant annudder hard day, but den we wus glad to see it go down.” Or, as a New England minister wrote of the young, “Because they are
weary
of the
restraint
, which they have been under in the day time, wherefore when they get liberty, they are apt to run mad, like water, that has been pent all the day.”
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If night posed myriad dangers, the lower orders were well equipped to navigate its darkness. Most were intimately familiar with their physical environs and versed in the mysteries of the natural world. Both servants and apprentices were regularly required to traverse their communities, running errands or retrieving their masters after dark. In colonial Virginia, upon a slave’s overnight death in a meadow after visiting his wife on another plantation, his owner attributed the mishap to drunkenness, “for he must have known every foot of the way so well.” Drink, too, for at least some individuals, must have eased nocturnal fears. So in Somerset, young James Lackington’s father, on a gloomy night, “drank too large a quantity of ale to be much afraid of any thing.” “Night knows no shame,” went a popular saying, “or love and wine no fear.”
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For the lower orders, theirs was a world in motion long past sunset. On mild evenings, friends and relations congregated in small clusters in the open-air past midnight. Laughter and camaraderie, stoked by ale, beer, or wine, animated their hours. “Every evening in every village,” remarked Giovanni Gelsi of Italian peasants during the seventeenth century, “you’ll see them dance into the night as they carouse together. Laughing in our faces, they all make merry.” In Rome, laborers and paupers gathered by the Piazza Navona, while in Paris, parks like the Tuileries and the Luxembourg drew men and women. Jesuits in Bavaria described “night-time gatherings” as “rooted habits among peasants,” and in Lisbon a visitor wrote that revelers “frisk, and dance, and tinkle their guitars from sunset to sunrise.” A London resident complained of an “idle, drunken, dissolute set of miscreants and gamblers” that assembled in an open field each evening.
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Homes, barns, and stables permitted cardplay and dice, stories and gossip, and derisive songs. Constables in Berkshire discovered one night six couples “dancing naked.” Declared a seventeenth-century ballad:

Let the lazy great-ones of the town,

Drink night away

And sleep all day,

’Till gouty, gouty, they are grown:

Our daily works such vigour give,

That nightly sports we oft’ revive;

And kiss our dames,

With stronger flames,

Than any prince alive.
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Slaves routinely fraternized on neighboring properties, especially spouses owned by different masters. “Amusements” included “legendary ballads” and “narratives of alternate dialogue and singing,” according to the Richmond lawyer George Tucker—“the night is their own.” A traveler to Virginia reported that the average slave, rather than retire to rest at day’s end, “generally sets out from home, and walks six or seven miles in the night, be the weather ever so sultry, to a negroe dance, in which he performs with astonishing agility, and the most vigorous exertions.” A common precaution, of West African origin, was a kettle or pot. Placed upside-down, it was meant to capture human voices and other sounds. Using traditional techniques to tell time by the moon and stars, slaves returned before dawn. Along with moonlight, burning candlewood provided illumination as well as warmth on cool evenings. “Dem old pine knots would burn for a long time and throw a fine bright light,” a former slave observed.
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Of course, drinking houses, too, catered to the lower orders. Such favorites as Lille’s Savage Man’s Tavern or Eva’s Whores and Thieve’s Bar in Amsterdam left little to the imagination. The Darkened Room in Augsburg provided a refuge in the 1590s to a notorious gang of thieves. Worst, in the eyes of the upper classes, were alehouses that remained open through most of the evening. In England, many of these night-cellars, as they came to be called in the early 1700s, were squalid, ill-lit hovels. In contrast to other drinking houses, they were more affordable as well as less accessible to social superiors. Reeking of tobacco fumes, vomit, and urine, they attracted a steady stream of patrons eager to tipple away the small hours. So at the Three Daggers, a London alehouse, the cellar-man Joshua Travers drank with comrades until 6:00
A.M.
“Here are discharged vollies of oaths and execrations, ribaldry and nonsense, blasphemy and obscenity,” noted a London resident. Often, in Paris, late-night revelers refused to leave cabarets at closing time. “Most cabaretiers,” complained authorities in 1760, “keep their houses open during the night, and receive people of every estate, and often give shelter to debauched women, soldiers, beggars and sometimes to thieves.” In Strasbourg, so-called sleeping houses were faulted during the mid-1600s for “all kinds of wantonness, forbidden dancing, excessive drinking, eating, and carousing.” So, too, in Virginia, the planter Landon Carter denounced the proliferation of “night shops” and their popularity among slaves and poor whites as receptacles for stolen goods. Not only did the shops dispense rum, but proprietors sold “to anybody any thing whatever.” “At best,” chided Carter, “they must steal what they sell.”
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III

Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.

THOMAS HARDY,
1886
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“He that does ill hates the light,” affirmed a Scottish proverb. Numerous folk, besides burglars, robbers, and other hardened rogues, exploited the evening darkness, often for illicit purposes. Petty criminals were far more numerous, if less feared. For poor families, social and legal constraints of all sorts eased. Indigent households buried their dead at night to escape paying parish dues, which had the added benefit of protecting gravesites from thieves, often needy themselves. Where grave robbers at night stole clothing and caskets, “resurrection men” unearthed entire bodies, freshly interred in churchyards, to sell for medical dissection.
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Meanwhile, struggling mothers, after dark, abandoned newborns for whom they could ill afford to care. In London, the Royal Exchange became a favored location for castaways. Mothers in Paris attached tags to their infants, identifying their sex, birth date, and first name. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, approximately two thousand abandoned children were annually admitted to the foundling hospital in Paris, one of numerous such institutions throughout Catholic Europe. Provincial roads, too, received their share. On a dark winter evening in 1760, for example, a new mother, Jane Brewerton, placed her illegitimate daughter beside a byroad in the Yorkshire town of Chapell Allerton, waiting at a distance until a couple discovered the child.
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Impoverished souls too proud to beg by day dotted urban streets after sunset, desperate for bread. As the monk Woulter Jacobszoon described a nun in Amsterdam, “She went out at night when it was dark, because during the day she was ashamed, being respectable at heart.”
28
Likewise, debtors and other fugitives, fearful of arrest, traveled freely. At night, wrote Thomas Dekker, “The banckrupt, the fellon, and all that owed any mony, and for feare of arrests, or justices warrants, had like so many snayles kept their houses over their heads all day before, began to creep out of their shels.” Many a tenant, unable to make their rent, took moon-light flight, “moving house with as little noise as possible.”
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Darkness also offered the indigent an opportunity for squatting, if only overnight, in urban sheds and stables or in barns and other outbuildings in the country. Yeomen, claimed Dekker, from their fear of arson “dare not deny them.” Squatters in parts of western England and Wales laid more permanent claims. A local custom of uncertain origins permitted one to occupy a piece of waste or common land by building a turf cottage overnight, generally known as a
caban unnos
. The work had to be completed between twilight and dawn, though friends and family were permitted to help.
30

And there were opportunities at night for sorcery. On both sides of the Atlantic, members of the poor and dispossessed resorted to magic, especially as private charity in communities declined and poverty rose. “Poverty,” noted a sixteenth-century authority on witchcraft, “is often the source of many evils in persons who do not choose it voluntarily or endure it patiently.” By night, those on the economic margins eagerly participated in a “supernatural economy,” pinning their hopes on magical charms believed to help locate buried gold and silver. The spells used by Hans Heinrich Richter, a disabled blacksmith in eighteenth-century Prussia, had both Christian and pagan roots. The best time for treasure hunting fell after midnight, with some evenings preferred to others depending on the moon’s phase. Silence was critical. As a defense against demons, it was customary to draw one or more circles at the supposed spot. More alarming to authorities, malevolent spirits might be invoked to assist in unearthing the treasure. An English statute in 1542 threatened hunters with the death penalty for “invocacions and conjurations of sprites” to “get knowledge for their own lucre in what place treasure of golde and silver shulde or mought be founde.”
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