At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (37 page)

For some desperate sorts, sorcery offered a means of punishing their persecutors—or smiting neighbors who had turned a blind eye to one’s misfortune. When a farmer in Worcestershire, one night, apprehended an elderly woman, her arms filled with stolen wood, she immediately fell upon her knees and prayed with uplifted hands that “he might never more be warm, nor ever know the warmth of a fire.” Other practitioners pierced wax images with thorns or called directly upon Satan’s assistance. Slaves, by resorting to magic, sought to escape their oppression. In Kentucky, Henry Bibb, having “great faith in conjuration and witchcraft,” learned to make a magical concoction from an older slave. After heating a mixture of fresh cow manure, red pepper, and “white people’s hair,” he ground the substance into a fine powder, which he sprinkled at night about his master’s chamber—all for the purpose, Bibb later wrote, of preventing “him from ever abusing me in any way.” Still more ambitious was a plan hatched by the German servant Johannes Butzbasch. Too scared to abscond from his master on foot, he instead considered visiting “an old hag,” hoping he might receive a “black cow upon which he could escape through the air.”
32

John Quidor,
The Money Diggers
, 1832.

Sorcery was employed at all hours, but its power was thought most potent when spirits roamed. Common belief held that some curses and spells worked solely at night, making wary neighbors all the more suspicious of single women found abroad after dark. It was not unusual in colonial New England for women to be warned that their “nightwalking” could fuel suspicions of witchcraft. Seventeen-year-old Lydia Nichols, questioned during the Salem witch hunt in 1692 “how she darst lie out a nights in the woods alone,” replied that “she was not a fraid of any thing” for “she had sold her selfe boddy & soull to the old boy.” In 1665 a Connecticut colonist named John Brown was alleged, late one night inside a neighbor’s home, to have drawn a satanic symbol for his brother. According to a witness, “He went to the doore & called his brother out to looke upon ye stars, then hee told him he [Satan] was there in ye stars, then he comes in & burnt his paper & sd if he had not burnt ye paper, the divell would have come presently.”
33

None of these nocturnal pursuits, however—neither black magic nor other misdeeds—ever attracted the large numbers given to pilfering. Servants, slaves, apprentices, laborers, husbandmen, all engaged in petty theft. “They steal every thing they can lay their hands on,” exclaimed Arthur Young of the Irish poor. Of Italian peasants, a poem, “De Natura Rusticorum,” railed: “At night they make their way, as the owls, / and they steal as robbers.” In eighteenth-century Paris, laborers, apprentices, and journeymen committed two-thirds of petty thefts.
34
Along with theft at urban worksites, pilfering by domestic servants was rife. Samuel Pepys one evening discovered half the wine in his cellar missing, which he attributed to midnight frolics among his servants—“after we were in bed,” he groused. Servile larceny prompted Parliament in 1713 to enact a draconian law rendering a capital offense, without benefit of clergy, the theft of goods valued at more than forty shillings from a dwelling.
35

In rural regions, crops and livestock made tempting targets. Vulnerable, too, were beehives, fishponds, and the week’s wash. “Never let your linen hang out after dark,” advised a writer. Despite surveillance by landowners, fields were too large and nights too dark. In 1709, items stolen by Agnes Park from neighbors in the Scottish parish of Cathcart included peas and beans, bowkail, straw, and malt from a brewhouse. A visitor to Ireland discovered, “Turnips are stolen by car loads, and two acres of wheat pluckt off in a night.” For rural families without land, stolen grass supplied fodder for livestock. Sometimes, too, cattle were grazed overnight in neighboring pastures. Closes were breached to rob cows of their milk—the Virginia planter Landon Carter complained that his slave Criss encouraged her children to “milk my cows in the night.” Perhaps most prized was wood, dead or alive, for cooking in summer and in winter for heat. In addition to fallen branches from storms, green limbs were “brumped” from trees, and estate fences stripped of their rails. “Gates will be cut in pieces, and conveyed in many places as fast as built; trees as big as a man’s body, and that would require ten men to move, gone in a night,” reported Young.
36

Most goods appear to have been purloined for domestic consumption, but at least a portion resurfaced in local markets. In 1664, for example, a Norfolk court charged three women with the overnight theft of green peas from a neighbor, allegedly having the intention of feeding them to their pigs and selling the rest. In America, slaves and free blacks both engaged in a lively traffic, selling to families and small traders stolen provisions along with those from personal plots. A Moravian visitor to Virginia, discovering blacks one evening “roaming everywhere,” deemed the colony “full of thieves.” George Washington blamed the overnight loss of his sheep on slaves with dogs. “It is astonishing to see the command under which their dogs are.” Of free blacks, a resident of Maryland declared, “It is well known that these free negroes are stealing poultry and fruit in the season in the night, to sell in the market in the towns and cities.”
37

In the countryside, poaching drew added numbers afield—tenants, husbandmen, and servants, armed with snares, nets, and guns. Some, claiming no trade, were vagrants. In 1599, Sir Edward Coke described poachers in Staffordshire as “verie dissolute, riotous and unruly persons, common nightwalkers and stealers of deare.” Not only was hunting forbidden in aristocratic deer parks but also, more often than not, in royal forests. Standard prey included rabbits and hares, partridges, pheasants, and deer. Certain types of nightfishing were also illegal, though widely practiced. Game laws were far less stringent in colonial America than in Europe, although Virginia and the Carolinas enacted legislation prohibiting fire-hunting, a nocturnal technique of Indian origin by which hunters used torchlight to blind their quarry. Besides the risks of fire, cattle and horses were sometimes mistaken for deer.
38

For households in rural England, poaching was a favorite pastime and, often, a valued source of income. Proclaimed a popular ballad, “The Lincolnshire Poacher”: “When I was bound apprentice, in famous Lincolnsheer, / Full well I served my master for more than seven year, / Till I took up poaching, as you shall quickly hear: / Oh! ’tis my delight of a shiny night, in the season of the year.” Certainly, no youths were better trained in woodcraft: mastering shifts in weather and phases of the moon as well as learning the scents and habits of both gamekeepers and game. “Parents take care to instruct their children,” observed a contemporary. Years later, a retired poacher recalled of his boyhood, “We knew every inch of the countryside and darkness was our friend.”
39

As often nighttime was for smugglers. Common throughout the Continent, smuggling reached epidemic proportions in the British Isles in the eighteenth century. With the imposition of import duties on such commodities as brandy, tobacco, and tea, the contraband trade involved thousands. Smugglers unloaded goods, usually at night, all along the British seashore, though the southern coastline acquired the greatest notoriety. The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands served as staging grounds offshore. Through an inland nexus of drop points and distributors, much of the contraband ultimately found its way to cities. Reported a London newspaper in 1738, “The present dark nights being very favourable for the smugglers designs, the gentlemen in that employ have made a diligent use of them, and have run a large quantity of tea and other rich goods in town.” As the adolescent son of a Berkshire horse trader, Joseph Jewell worked for an innkeeper, whose house served as “a resort for smugglers.” “My master followed smuggling on his own account,” Jewell wrote in his autobiography, “so that I frequently had to ride out nights with tea, spirits etc. I used to carry a whip with about 2 pound weight of lead run into the large end of it, made for the purpose of defence if I should meet with excise officers.” To disguise his “goods,” he wore a “long, loose, great coat.”
40

In turn, a lively export trade of illegal wool arose, popularly known as “owling” because of smugglers’ penchant for nighttime—just as spirits shipped to the coasts of Sussex and Kent were dubbed “moonshine.” It was along the same shore that large, at times violent bands of smugglers, like the Hawkhurst gang in the 1740s, operated, to the alarm of government authorities. Less troubled were local inhabitants, who generally welcomed the cheaper merchandise. Parson Woodforde, for one, received periodic supplies of gin at night, left on his doorstep by the village blacksmith, himself nicknamed Moonshine. “Busy all the morning almost in bottling two tubs of gin, that came by Moonshine this morn’ very early,” Woodforde wrote in his diary. Jewell, on one of his many “night rides,” traveled fifteen miles to deliver contraband goods to an elderly woman. So little fear did smugglers inspire that burglars adopted that disguise in 1782 upon entering the Suffolk town of Orford. As a consequence, “no notice was taken of them,” and the thieves successfully broke into several homes toward nightfall. Elsewhere, lest villagers dare to interfere, smugglers occasionally masqueraded as ghosts or spread rumors of haunted caves. “Ghosts, warlocks, and witches were the best and cheapest guards against vagrants strolling about at night,” a veteran smuggler later reflected.
41

The vast majority of smugglers came from humble backgrounds. Like Woodforde’s connection, most were bit players, relying upon the trade to augment their meager incomes. Endemic smuggling in France was dominated by day-laborers and peasants, many of them women and children. On a December night in 1775, three hundred people, mostly peasants, assembled on the Brittany coast to take delivery of a shipment of tobacco. Armed with pistols and clubs, they blacked their faces to counter the moonlight.
42

Economic necessity begot most nocturnal license. With subsistence a never-ending struggle, impoverished households naturally turned to poaching, smuggling, or scavenging food and fuel. “All the common people are thieves and beggars,” wrote Tobias Smollett, “and I believe this is always the case with people who are extremely indigent and miserable.” Crime could also be a matter of dignity and self-worth—the ability of men and women to feed and shelter their families while keeping the wolf from the door. Or, as the struggling schoolmaster John Cannon put it, the right for any “poor devil” not to be “piss against.” Before robbing a London coach in 1752, John Wilks informed a friend, “I owe my landlord rent, and you must go with me to rob coaches to pay it, and we shall be made men of in a night or two’s time.” Similarly, the robber Daniel Drummond tried to enlist the aid of a Leeds laborer, swearing that “if they would but get as much money, as would carry them up to London, they might live like men.” Theft helped to mend the psychological damage of being an apprentice, servant, or slave—taking back by night what was extracted by day. Reported an estate steward in the late seventeenth century, “All people break and steal away the fences and prey upon us as if a landlord were a common enemy.” Many years later, in the English village of Bowers Row, the reported credo among poachers was, “He robs us all day, we’ll rob him all night.” Despite the risks of detection, some poachers kept deer antlers as trophies of their “exploits.” In East Sussex, Thomas Bishe bragged to friends in 1641 that “he would have two braces of buckes and two of does out of Sir Richard Weston’s ground yearely. And he had killed fower deere in one night there.”
43

Finally, as an
avocat
of the Parlement de Paris reflected, “Night oftens lends its veil to mercenary loves.” Unlike poaching, pilfering, and smuggling, which normally supplemented livings, prostitution represented a major source of income for many impoverished women between the ages of fifteen and thirty. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it gradually increased as more and more women found themselves forced from customary crafts and trades. A census in 1526 reported that nearly one-tenth of Venice’s fifty-five thousand residents were nightwalkers. Every metropolis and numerous provincial cities and towns contained sizable numbers, some quartered in brothels while most populated streets and drinking houses. A visitor to Norwich in 1681 reported, “This town swarms with alehouses, and every one of them they tell is alsoe a bawdy house.” Already by the late seventeenth century, Boston and Philadelphia were beset by prostitutes, while of New York City in 1744, a friend informed Dr. Alexander Hamilton that the Battery after dark “was a good way for a stranger to fit himself with a courtezan.” London, by that time, according to a conservative estimate contained three thousand nightwalkers. A correspondent to the
Public Advertiser
reported that it was “next to impossible” to go anywhere in the city in the evening “without meeting with some gross insult from them, or being presented with scenes of the most abominable obscenity.”
44