At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (44 page)

Of all mortal emotions, fear most often broke sleep. Among mammals generally, those with the safest sleeping quarters, usually predators, enjoy the most satisfying slumber, while animals at greater risk from their enemies experience lighter sleep. Men and women in early modern communities were no exception. “The secure man sleeps soundly,” remarked Sir Thomas Overbury. People’s apprehensions intensified at night for very good reasons, including peaking adrenal hormones between 4:00 and 8:00
A.M.
, coupled with the loneliness of early morning hours. “Solitude, the night and fear makes all my danger double to appear,” wrote Henry Nevil Payne. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg reflected, “I have gone to bed at night quite untroubled about certain things and then started to worry fearfully about them at about four in the morning, so that I often lay tossing and turning for several hours, only to grow indifferent or optimistic again at nine or even earlier.”
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Not all fears were unfounded. Genuine perils loomed, thereby keeping persons more on edge, some sleeping “with one eye open” and “fists clenched,” according to a French saying. Dudley Ryder tossed in his London bed all evening after leaving his sword downstairs where thieves could steal it. Strange sounds invariably mobilized families from bed. In The Hague, David Beck, hearing “commotion and noises” in the middle of the night, jumped naked out of bed with his bedmate, one armed with a knife, the other with an iron spade, only to discover a set of playful cats.
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Popular dread of demons kept some persons awake. A diary kept by the Connecticut colonist Hannah Heaton, from adolescence to old age, recounts nocturnal battles with Satan, resulting in frequent loss of rest. Of one night, she recorded, “I thot I felt the devil twitch my cloaths, I jump up and run in fild with terror and o how did I look at the winders in the night to see if Christ was not coming to judgment.” “Many cannot sleep for witches and fascinations, which are too familiar in some places,” declared Burton.
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Henry Fuseli,
The Nightmare
, 1781.

Even once sleep ensued, there was always the danger of nightmares, viewed by many not as unpleasant dreams but as attempts by evil spirits to suffocate their prey. In West Cornwall, “nag-ridden” was the common term for victims of nightmares. As late as 1730, a written guide urged servants to repair quickly at night when summoned since “many a life has been lost by the night-mare, for want of momentary assistance; and a person who has just power to ring the bell, may be suffocated, whilst a maid stays to rub her eyes, light her candle, or adjust her cap.” Perhaps because of the frequency of crib deaths among infants, children were thought at special risk. Boasts a witch in Ben Jonson’s
The Masque of Queenes
(1609), “When the childe was a-sleepe / At night, I suck’d the breath.”
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III

He that dwells in a rotten ruinous house dares scarce sleep in a tempestuous night.

THOMAS ADAMS,
1629
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Environmental annoyances aggravated mental and physical woes. With few exceptions, sleeping quarters were ill suited to peaceful repose. Most urban dwellings abutted streets, and buildings were badly insulated, even those whose residents could afford shutters and glass windows.
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Not only did poor vision at night make auditory nerves more sensitive, but once asleep, hearing represented one’s principal link to the external world.
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All of this would have mattered less had cities and towns, many nights, not been so noisy, whether from brawling drunkards, toiling craftsmen, or country folk arriving after midnight with produce. Passing bells signaled the death of neighbors. The aural landscape of urban areas amplified these noises thanks to their timbered dwellings. Of evenings in a provincial town, the 1673 play
Epsom-Wells
bore witness: “There are such vile noises all night”; while of Paris, Boileau complained, “What noise is this, good God! What doleful cries / Assaults my ears and keep unshut my eyes?” A resident thought London in 1700 a place “where repose and silence dare scarce shew their heads in the darkest night.”
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If the most frightening sound was a clanging fire bell, with “that peculiar, hurried, monotonous alarm,”
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urban denizens reserved their sharpest annoyance for the nightwatch. Many residents never grew habituated to their cries. An exception was Elizabeth Drinker, who observed in 1794, “I never was much disturb’d by common noises in the night, as many are, if they were such as I could account for, and not exceeding loud.” Sometimes, her sleep suffered too, as Drinker discovered one evening upon hearing “screaming in the street, howling of dogs, and a thumping as I thought in our house,” all of which was later followed “by the cry of fire.” “Did not sleep,” she recorded in her diary, “an hour all night.”
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More cloistered were evenings in the countryside, with dispersed populations, wide-open fields, and far less bustle. “Half its inhabitants wished us at the devil,” grumbled William Beckford when his companion coughed one night upon entering a remote Spanish town. If not human voices, sleep nonetheless remained vulnerable to other branches of the animal kingdom, from frogs and katydids to barking dogs, lovesick cats, and needy livestock, not all of which grew familiar with time. In the dairy region of East Anglia, “bull’s noon” was a common expression for midnight, the hour when bullocks, in full throat, bellowed for their mates. And vice-versa. Complained a Somerset diarist, “Up rather early, a disagreeable cow running and roaring under our window disturbed us much. Our cow makes too much noise, she must be sent to the bull.”
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Within some homes, most notoriously those with wooden frames fixed in the earth, such was the tumult created by rats and mice that walls and rafters seemed on the verge of collapse. “We might have rested,” a traveler in Scotland remarked in 1677, “had not the mice rendezvoused over our faces.” Ill-constructed houses generated their own cacophony, owing to shrinking timber, loose boards, drafty doors, broken windows, and open chimneys. All of which inclement weather made worse. Not only did keyholes whistle, but hinges and bolts gave way, and roofs leaked. “Tiles and thatch are things that storms and tempests have a natural antipathy to,” observed George Woodward of East Hendred. Not surprisingly, once awakened in a storm’s midst, families refused to re-enter their beds until wind and rain had subsided. In 1703, Thomas Naish, his wife, and the maid all arose during a “violent storm of wind” about 2:00
A.M.
, “not being able to lye a bed for the violence of the noise, ratling of the tyles, and for fear that my house would fall down upon me. I went down into [the] parlour for prayers.”
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Frigid temperatures assaulted sleep during the winter, all the more since Western Europe and northern North America experienced a “Little Ice Age” in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Growing seasons were abbreviated, winters unusually raw, and the Thames froze on eighteen occasions. Most mammals, including human beings, appear to sleep best while temperatures hover between 70 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, with 77 degrees optimum. Temperatures much below a person’s thermal comfort zone lead to wakefulness and fragmented sleep, as early modern families, huddled in homes with no insulation from either the ground or the weather, readily understood. So frigid were conditions one January in Massachusetts, according to Cotton Mather, that sap froze as it seeped from the bare ends of burning logs. Even in otherwise comfortable lodgings during winter, inkhorns, water basins, and chamber pots sometimes froze overnight. To the London readers of
Lloyd’s Evening Post
, “Dillenius” railed in 1767: “I have often been kept awake for hours by the coldness of my legs and feet. I have loaded myself with cloaths to no purpose. I have had my bed heated till I could scarce bear the touch. Thus baffled, night after night have I shivered through the winter.” “The cold almost too much for me at going to bed,” remarked Parson James Woodforde. Once there, many must have been loath the following morning to leave their blankets.
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Unless, of course, insects feasted first. Bedding afforded notorious homes to lice, fleas, and bedbugs, the unholy trinity of early modern entomology. Compounding the irritation, in all likelihood, is that the sensitivity of human skin peaks towards 11:00
P.M.
, as does one’s propensity to itching. British sleepers did not have to endure all the pests to which Europeans in warmer climes like Italy were subjected, including tarantulas and scorpions. Nor did they have to contend with the voracious mosquitoes for which England’s colonies in North America most summers were infamous; worse, the Virginia servant John Harrower found a snake one night under his pillow. It is nonetheless telling that people in Britain often referred to bedtime pests in martial terms—for example, “troops,” “detachments,” “a compleat regiment,” and “whole armies” of bugs. Legg in
Low-Life
wrote of “poor people who have been in bed some time, . . . groping about for their tinder-boxes, that they may strike a light in order to go a bugg-hunting.” The street ballad “How Five and Twenty Shillings were Expended in a Week” mentions “a three farthing rushlight every night, to catch the bugs and fleas.” Naturally, hunters had to weigh the cost of artificial lighting; so the caution, “To waste a candle and find a flea.”
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Gerrit van Honthorst,
The Flea Hunt,
1621.

Less often did beds themselves disrupt slumber, at least among the propertied classes. Despite the heavy sums invested, the thickness and composition of mattresses may have mattered less than was imagined—unless, ironically, their softness awakened sleepers by restricting their movements. Some persons complained of hard beds and featherless pillows, but those criticisms often emanated from travelers forced to rest in unfamiliar settings. Though but a “poor man,” so demanding were the requirements of John Byng, the future Viscount Torrington, that he found good bedding (the “first comfort of life”) wanting “in almost every house” he “ever enter’d.” Never did he sleep in another bed like his own, “smooth, deeply mattress’d, and 6 feet wide.” Cultural prejudices mattered most. Attested Montaigne, “You make a Germane sicke, if you lay him upon a matteras, as you distemper an Italian upon a fetherbed, and a French man to lay him in a bed without curtaines.” In 1646, while in Switzerland, John Evelyn bewailed having to sleep on a “bed stuff’d with leaves, which made such a crackling, & did so prick my skin through the tick.” Among the Swiss upper classes, however, mattresses filled with beech leaves were greatly preferred to those made from straw.
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Unfortunately, portions of the preindustrial population confined to the meanest quarters left behind few firsthand impressions of their bedding. Notwithstanding John Locke’s contention that sound slumber “matters not whether it be on a soft bed, or the hard boards,” sleeping on a thin mattress, much less a rigid surface, must have been all the more uncomfortable for emaciated human frames with minimal bodyfat for padding.
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