At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (38 page)

For needy young women with scant training, alternatives to prostitution were few, limited mostly to toiling as seamstresses or servants. Although many were victimized by violence and venereal disease, prostitutes found a rare measure of autonomy in a trade that defied patriarchal authority. “Freedom is the most precious gem a courtesan possesses and contains within itself everything she desires,” observes a courtesan in Francesco Pona’s
La Lucerna
(1630). No longer was one “subject to the tyranny of husband or parents.” More vulnerable than most women, prostitutes were also more independent, especially nightwalkers, who operated outside a brothel’s strictures. Controlling their own bodies and labor, they were foul-mouthed, boisterous, and outspoken—in short, “insolent.” “A whore is not a woman,” commented a writer, “as being obliged to relinquish all those frailties that render the sex weak and contemptible.”
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To gauge from trials conducted at London’s Old Bailey, prostitutes were prone to violence. While some received protection from male “bullies,” most seem to have been on their own. Not only did they steal coins and watches from clients too drunk or tired to care, but they also resorted to brute force—either stabbing victims or pinning their arms while emptying their pockets. “They opened my breeches, and took my money out,” testified John Catlin in 1743 against two women, one of whom had first “clapped her arms” around his chest. Joseph Lasebee, robbed by two prostitutes in an alley, was forcibly detained by one as the other fled. “She d
—
—d me, and would not let me go: it struck such a terror upon me, I did not know whether she would cut my throat.”
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Often, too, violence erupted at night in exhibitions of bravado by gangs of young men. Capitals and provincial towns, cities from Padua to New York, all suffered, to varying degrees, nocturnal tumults led by males flexing their muscles, their numbers far in excess of the aristocratic libertines out and about. Apprentices and laborers, their spirits leavened by youth, dominated bands, joined some evenings by servants and, in the colonies, by slaves and free blacks. Fairly typical was the early-eighteenth-century complaint of the Leipzig city council: “Late in the evening many apprentices, boys, maids and such unmarried folk are found idly in the streets, where they practice many improper things,” shouting and “running about.” In the French city of Laval, disturbances during the eighteenth century occurred in different neighborhoods “almost every night.”
Coureurs de nuit
(night ramblers), they were called. In Italian cities, such gangs were known as
nottolónes
. Residents of Coventry, fretted an official in 1605, “are afraide almost to lye in their owne howses in safety” due to “lewde youthes.” Remonstrances spoke of “nightly riots and disorders,” and “tumultuous companies of men, children and negroes.” In the Pyrenean village of Limoux, a dozen youths were said to assemble “in one particular house, where they decide what disturbance they will create each night.”
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For maximum impact, noise, the louder the better, was a critical element. Angry curses, obscene ballads, and random gunshots proclaimed the sovereignty of youth at night, daring respectable households to contest their reign. German youths grew infamous for yodeling (
Jauchzen
), while in Denmark running amok through towns (
grassatgang
) was a favorite ritual. Even in a small Swiss village, a person complained in 1703, “The young unmarried fellows rush around the lanes emitting horrible yells and yodels, whistling and shouting.” Often, horns, trumpets, and other musical instruments magnified the cacophony, as did town bells, which slumbering citizens sometimes mistook for fire alarms. In Philadelphia, “great numbers of Negroes & others” each night sat about the courthouse, with milk pails for drums. Bolder still was the reaction of slaves on a Jamaican sugar plantation after the accidental drowning of the overseer’s nephew. In his diary, Thomas Thistlewood, the overseer, recorded, “Last night between 8 and 9 o’clock heard a shell blow on the river, and afterwards in the night, two guns fired, with a loud huzza after each, on the river against our negroe’s houses, for joy that my kinsman is dead I imagine. Strange impudence.”
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Vandalism often followed. Dwellings received the brunt of the damage—walls splattered with mud and excrement, brass knockers torn from their hinges, and windows shattered by stones. A dead cat might be hung on the front door. Street lanterns were especially vulnerable. Besides the destructive delight that could be derived from broken glass, the faint glow of lamps threatened a band’s anonymity. Manchester youths on a March night in 1752 stole numerous doorknockers only after first destroying “a great number of lamps in most of the principal streets.” Soon after the installation of overhead lamps in Paris in 1667, an ordinance threatened to punish “pages, lackeys, and all other persons of bad life and disturbers of public peace and security who would break any lanterns.” Alternatively, when a Laval merchant left his house to investigate a street disturbance, a youth urged his compatriots to “shoot anyone who has a candle.”
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Nor was the countryside exempt. Rural homes fell prey to nocturnal assaults, as did orchards, barns, and small outbuildings. In one seventeenth-century village, a set of youths routinely visited a farmer’s well-kept yard “to discharge their bellies.” Pranks included masquerading as werewolves and fixing candles onto the backs of animals to give the appearance of ghosts. Worse, fishponds might be poisoned, trees uprooted, and ricks of hay set ablaze. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Washington Irving’s rustic character Brom Bones and his gang of “rough riders” vandalize Ichabod Crane’s schoolhouse one night “so that the poor schoolmaster began to think all the witches in the country held their meetings there.”
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As tests of daring and physical strength, gangs occasionally battled one another in the streets, proudly displaying their wounds the next morning. Night was their proving ground. The sudden sighting of a band from a neighboring parish or village invariably mobilized youths. On Guernsey, ministers complained in 1633 of young men running “in great companies from parish to parish and place to place, as a consequence of which there often occur various assaults, excesses and debauchery.” In 1673, a small group of Northamptonshire servants, returning one spring night with fresh beer, was badly beaten by rival villagers with stakes. “Mr. Baxter’s man,” reported Thomas Isham of Lamport, “has had his skull laid bare in several places and almost fractured.”
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Passersby also fell victim to bloodshed. One night in 1513, a company of Munich adolescents resolved “to beat to death the first man they met in the street.” After sparing a poor soul with just one arm, they fell upon a servant of the Duke of Wirtenberg in a “test of courage.” Students in Padua “take a barbarous liberty in the evenings,” John Evelyn discovered. His party was forced to arm themselves with pistols to “defend” their doors. Most persons understandably gave wide berth to marauding bands. Pepys, in fear of apprentices “abroad in the fields,” made certain, early one evening, to reach home by dark.
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Usually, gangs displayed greater discrimination. Favorite targets included travelers and other outsiders. “It was not safe for any stranger, much lesse for an Englishman,” Fynes Moryson found in Hamburg, “to walke abroade after dinner, when the common people are generally heated with drinke.” Adolescent girls made easy prey, with most attacks limited to jostling and tousled hair, acts charged with sexuality. Aggravated assaults, however, were not unknown. In Dijon during the fifteenth century, artisans and laborers grew notorious for gang rapes. As many as twenty assaults occurred each year, with perhaps one-half of the city’s adult male population having participated as adolescents. In The Hague, David Beck and a married couple, strolling at night, were beset by six or more servants, who, mistaking the woman for a prostitute, tried to tear her away for themselves. Attacks upon servant girls were frequent occurrences in London, whereas a young woman in seventeenth-century Massachusetts had a lantern stripped from her hands before being molested by a “company of rude boys,” of whom one repeatedly “put his hand under” her “apron & spake filthey beastly words.” Deflowering young women, at its heart, savagely mocked the established order sworn to upholding their good name before marriage—an ever-graver affront when men of marginal status were the assailants.
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At risk each night were the pillars themselves of that order, including merchants, shopkeepers, and local officials. Night exposed society’s fault lines. “There is no insult that I have not received,” a salt-tax collector in Limoux bewailed. In the rural community of Ötelfingen, the treasurer, having incurred “the Night Boy’s revenge,” had his fence torn down and eight cords of wood scattered on the ground. Clerics of all habits found themselves bedeviled by bands. “Like looking for Easter eggs,” was how Swiss laborers in 1529 described plans for driving “trashy priests” from “their hiding places.” Few targets were spared, no matter how sacred. A small band of adolescents in 1718 invaded a Norfolk church just after midnight. Besides ringing the bells, drinking strong beer, and vandalizing pews, they built a fire in the belfry for cooking beefsteaks. In Dijon, armed bands—
malvivantz
—were blamed for breaking the windows of “persons of quality,” including “Messieurs du Parlement.” Married men made equally tempting targets. Paragons of middle-class propriety, they incited cries of “Go to bed! Go to bed!” when caught on public streets in a French village. Shouted an angry youth, “I will not listen to you. You are married. On to sleep with your wife.”
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Less often did slaves or free blacks, risking worse retribution, resort to violence. Assaults on whites were few, though there was striking exceptions. A law passed in Massachusetts in 1703 referred to the “great disorders, insolencies, and burglaries” committed at night by “Indians, negro and molatto servants and slaves.” In Northumberland County, Virginia, a slave named Dick in 1752 took a broad axe to the head of his sleeping master. Less than two years later, in Bridgetown, Barbados, following an “abundance of mischief” for “some time past,” four blacks knocked down, bruised, and cut “a white man, passing quietly along one night.” Nicholas Cresswell, walking one evening with a friend in Barbados, received “a shower of stones from a Mangeneel grove by some Negroes.” Years later, a black man in Boston, upon exchanging insults with several white gentlemen, muttered as he walked away, “If it was night, and I had a good cudgel in my hand, how would I make them rascals run.” Instead, in the broad light of day, he was arrested and punished for his impudence.
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In much of the early modern world, one finds the lower orders in
de facto
control of the nocturnal landscape, putting to flight passersby in their paths. Theirs were not the traditional “weapons of the weak,” such as feigning illness and footdragging, employed during the day to circumvent the established order. Nor were they play-acting, as celebrants sometimes did at ritualistic festivities like Carnival.
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Determined in their purpose, bands aggressively laid claim to the hours of darkness. Francis Place, the “radical tailor of Charing Cross,” recalled how he and fellow apprentices would “go to Temple Bar in the evening, set up a shouting and clear the pavement between that and Fleet Market of all the persons there.” Of one escapade, a contemporary described assaulting “every one we met,” breaking lamps, kicking “strumpets,” and abusing the watch. The slightest challenge to the young’s supremacy invited violence—“knocking down all” who dared “to reprove” them, a person wrote of London apprentices. Students in Padua ranged at will. A visitor observed, “None dare stir abroad after it grows dark for fear of scholars and others who walk up and down most part of the night, with carbines and pistols, 20 or 30 in a company, everyone habited in dark cloaths.” In the colonial city of Charleston, South Carolina, even slaves and free blacks roamed freely some evenings, prompting a grand jury to condemn the riotous behavior of slaves in city streets “at all times in the night.” In urban neighborhoods, where the young and the poor were most concentrated, their power was greatest. But neither did small communities escape violence. When a master tailor in Limoux left the safety of his home to investigate noise from the street, he was met by stones. “You scoundrel,” a youth scolded him, “how dare you venture out against so large a gang! I thumb my nose at you and the whole town.”
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So menacing were the young and dispossessed and so great were their numbers that only the hardiest members of the nightwatch dared to challenge their supremacy, especially when lives were not imperiled. Guards in Laval, according to eighteenth-century reports, frequently retreated in order “to avoid greater danger.” In Boston, when three watchmen came across a young band at 2:00
A.M.
, they desisted from apprehending them after being threatened with a sword—“one of the watchmen being very much affrightened cryed out Murder, the other two having no assistance quitted the young men and they made off.” Outmanned and underarmed, watchmen were themselves favorite targets. Far from restoring public order, they were frequently assaulted, or “scoured,” as gangs boasted. A band of Coventry youths, having “scattered the watchmen,” repaired to “alehouses by way of triumphe.” No braver was the watch in London’s St James’s Park, “over-run” with prostitutes. “What can half a dozen men, that are half starved with cold and hunger, do with forty or fifty abandoned wretches, whose trade makes them desperate?” asked a newspaper correspondent in 1765.
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Some areas, such as London’s Black Boy Alley, authorities avoided at all costs, fearing a shower of brickbats and bottles. Where lamps hung by day, they were knocked down by night. Yet more perilous were night-cellars, which Sir John Fielding declared “a terror to the watchmen.” Of one cellar, the watch complained, “We are afraid to enter at any time upon any occasion, for if we do, the candles are all put out, and the constables are severely beaten.”
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Rural officers fared little better. In southern England, smugglers brazenly assaulted dragoons. “Often times these are attacked in the night with such numbers,” related Defoe, “that they dare not resist, or if they do, they are wounded and beaten, and sometimes kill’d.” In Spain, remarked a visitor, peasants who trembled “at the bayonet in the face of day” grew “bold with the knife in the hour of darkness.”
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