At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (45 page)

Even a well-constructed mattress could not always comfort multiple bedmates. “Packed like herrings,” David Beck described a night in 1624 between two other sleepers. Entitled “One Sleeps Better than Two,” a French song complained: “One coughs, one talks; one’s cold, one’s hot; / One wanting to sleep and the other one not.” Worst were the gyrations of unaccustomed bedmates. Forced to lie one evening with a friend in his chamber, Pepys “could hardly get any sleep all night, the bed being ill-made and he a bad bedfellow.” Similarly, the Scottish-American physician Andrew Hamilton, trying to sleep one night in Delaware, shared a room with two bedfellows, one of whom, an “Irish teague,” constantly tossed and turned while “bawling out, ‘O sweet Jesus!
’
”
35

In moist night air, chamber pots reeked. “So barbarous a stink” engulfed two women sharing an inn room that they first “accused each other for some time,” only to discover a latrine at the head of their beds. The Restoration melody “Aminta One Night had Occasion to Piss” describes in Rabelaisian detail a conversation between two companions when both awaken to use the chamber pot, concluding with one scolding the other, “That tempest broke out from behind ye; / And though it was decently kept from my eyes, / The troubled air offends my nose.” As a chambermaid informed a traveler when asked about the chamber pot and privy, “If you see them not you shall smell them well enough.”
36
Embarrassing accidents often ensued, with pots overturned and broken. Riskier still was reliance on a urinal, often in the shape of a small flask.
37
Alternatives, particularly for the lower classes, included urinating outside the front door or, more commonly, in the fireplace. Protested Thomas Tusser, “Some make the chimnie chamber pot to smel lyke filthy sinke.” Lacking a pot, Pepys “shit in the chimney” twice one night, whereas the Yorkshire laborer Abram Ingham used his “clogg” [shoe] to “make water in.” If all else failed, an Italian adage instructed, “You may piss a bed, and say you sweated.”
38

IV

How is it possible to be well, where one is kill’d for want of sleep?

COLLEY CIBBER AND SIR JOHN VANBRUGH,
1728
39

In affluent households, perfume-burners became popular to disguise septic smells, and privies could always be secreted from bedchambers. Cosimo, Duke of Tuscany, appears to have placed his close-stool, a portable toilet, inside a servant’s chamber.
40
But, then, in this, as in many respects, the lower orders were peculiarly disadvantaged in their sleep. If noxious aromas more commonly afflicted their quarters, so, too, did discordant noises, cold temperatures, and voracious pests. Plainly, lower-class households lay more exposed to unwanted intrusions. In Paris, due to the high cost of obtaining quiet quarters, Boileau remarked, “Sleep like other things is sold, / And you must purchase your repose with gold.”
41
Feverish individuals, capable of affording two beds, could “find great luxury in rising, when they awake in a hot bed, and going into the cool one,” advised Benjamin Franklin. And should a spouse’s illness or pregnancy prove unsettling, a husband like Pepys could always retire to another room. In fact, by the eighteenth century, aristocratic couples in France typically kept separate chambers. Neither did indigent families enjoy curtained beds to block drafts or the option exercised by a gentleman in colonial North Carolina who, tormented by bugs, exchanged beds with his servant.
42

Perhaps for the laboring population, as poets and playwrights often claimed, fatigue and clear consciences alleviated the hardships incurred at bedtime. The Virginia tutor Philip Fithian studied many evenings to the point of exhaustion to render his sleep “sound & unbroken” and immune to “cursed bugs.”
43
But probably more realistic than most pieces of verse, if less well known, was a passage from
The Complaint
s of Poverty (1742) by Nicholas James:

And when, to gather strength and still his woes,

He seeks his last redress in soft repose,

The tatter’d blanket, erst the fleas’ retreat,

Denies his shiv’ring limbs sufficient heat;

Teaz’d with the sqwalling babes nocturnal cries,

He restless on the dusty pillow lies.

Similarly, George Herbert wrote in 1657 of “manie” who “worke hard all day, and when night comes, their paines increase, for want of food or rest.” The author of
L’État de Servitude
(1711) complained, “In an attic with no door and no lock, / Open to cold air all winter long, / In a filthy and vile sort of garret, / A rotten mattress is laid out on the ground.”
44

Sleep, the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release? Not, it would seem, in any conventional sense, except for allowing a sometimes troubled respite from what was likely an even more onerous day. If most people in bed did not experience prolonged bouts of wakefulness, merely a series of “brief arousals” of at most several minutes apiece, unknown even to the sleeper, could impose an enormous burden on the mind and body in terms of physical repair.
45
Far from enjoying blissful repose, ordinary men and women likely suffered some degree of sleep deprivation, feeling as weary upon rising at dawn as when retiring at bedtime. All the more arduous as a consequence were their waking hours, especially when sleep debts were allowed to accumulate from one day to the next and superiors remained unsympathetic. Returning to his London quarters one evening to find his “man” asleep, William Byrd II delivered a prompt beating, as did the Yorkshire yeoman Adam Eyre to a maidservant for her “sloathfulnesse.” Late hours of merriment, some nights, could only have compounded the fatigue of apprentices, servants, and slaves.
46

Thomas Rowlandson,
Haymakers at Rest
, 1798.

If complaints are to be believed, the work of laborers was erratic and their behavior lethargic—“deadened slowness” was one description of rural labor. “At noon he must have his sleeping time,” groused Bishop Pilkington of the typical laborer in the late 1500s. While previous historians have explained such behavior as the product of a preindustrial work ethic, greater allowance must be made for the chronic fatigue that probably afflicted much of the early modern population. Indeed, napping during the day appears to have been common, with sleep less confined to nocturnal hours than it is in most Western societies today.
47
No doubt exhaustion occasioned other symptoms of sleep deprivation, including losses in motivation and physical well-being as well as increased irritability and social friction. “Whether due to sleeping on a bed fouler than a rubbish heap, or not being able to cover oneself,” a Bolognese curate observed of insomnia among the poor, “who can explain how much harm is done?”
48

CHAPTER TWELVE

SLEEP WE HAVE LOST:
RHYTHMS AND REVELATIONS

I

For the waking there is one common world only; but when asleep, each man turns to his own private world.

HERACLITUS,
ca. 500
B.C.
1

“
I
AM AWAKE
, but ’tis not time to rise, neither have I yet slept enough. . . . I am awake, yet not in paine, anguish or feare, as thousands are.” So went a seventeenth-century religious meditation intended for the dead of night. As if illness, foul weather, and fleas were not enough, there was yet another, even more familiar source of broken sleep in preindustrial societies, though few contemporaries regarded it in that light. So routine was this nightly interruption that it provoked little comment at the time. Neither has it attracted scrutiny from historians, much less systematic investigation. But as a vital commonplace of an earlier age, country-folk yet knew about it in the early twentieth century.
2
Some probably still do today.

Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. In the absence of fuller descriptions, fragments in several languages in sources ranging from depositions and diaries to imaginative literature give clues to the essential features of this puzzling pattern of repose. The initial interval of slumber was usually referred to as “first sleep,” or, less often, “first nap” or “dead sleep.”
3
In French, the term was
premier sommeil
or
premier somme
,
4
in Italian,
primo sonno
or
primo sono
,
5
and in Latin,
primo somno
or
concubia nocte
.
6
The succeeding interval of sleep was called “second” or “morning” sleep, whereas the intervening period of wakefulness bore no name, other than the generic term “watch” or “watching.”
Alternatively, two texts refer to the time of “first waking.”
7

Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest. Not everyone, of course, slept according to the same timetable. The later at night that persons went to bed, the later they stirred after their initial sleep; or, if they retired past midnight, they might not awaken at all until dawn. Thus in “The Squire’s Tale” in
The Canterbury Tales
, Canacee slept “soon after evening fell” and subsequently awakened in the early morning following “her first sleep”; in turn, her companions, staying up much later, “lay asleep till it was fully prime” (daylight). William Baldwin’s satire
Beware the Cat
recounts a quarrel between the protagonist, “newly come unto bed,” and two roommates who “had already slept” their “first sleep.”
8

Men and women referred to both intervals as if the prospect of awakening in the middle of the night was common knowledge that required no elaboration. “At mid-night when thou wak’st from sleepe,” described the Stuart poet George Wither; while in the view of John Locke, “That all men sleep by intervals” was a normal feature of life, extending as well to much of brute creation.
9
For the thirteenth-century Catalan philosopher Ramón Lull,
primo somno
stretched from mid-evening to early morning, whereas William Harrison in his
Description of England
(1557) referred to “the dull or dead of the night, which is midnight, when men be in their first or dead sleep.”
10

Customary usage confirms that “first sleep” constituted a distinct period of time followed by an interval of wakefulness. Typically, descriptions recounted that an aroused individual had “had,” “taken,” or “gotten” his or her “first sleep.” An early seventeenth-century Scottish legal deposition referred to Jon Cokburne, a weaver, “haveing gottin his first sleip and awaiking furth thairof,” while Noel Taillepied’s
A Treatise Of Ghosts
(1588) alluded more directly to “about midnight when a man wakes from his first sleep.” “So I tooke my first sleepe,” states the protagonist in the play
Endimion
(1591), “which was short and quiet”; and the servant Club in George Farquhar’s
Love and a Bottle
(1698) declares, “I believe ’tis past midnight, for I have gotten my first sleep.” “I am more watchful,” states Rampino in
The Unfortunate Lovers
(1643) “than / A sick constable after his first sleep / On a cold bench.”
11

Although in some descriptions a neighbor’s quarrel or a barking dog woke people prematurely from their initial sleep, the vast weight of surviving evidence indicates that awakening naturally was routine, not the consequence of disturbed or fitful slumber. Medical books, in fact, from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries frequently advised sleepers, for better digestion and more tranquil repose, to lie on their right side during “the fyrste slepe” and “after the fyrste slepe turne on the lefte side.”
12
And even though the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie investigated no further, his study of fourteenth-century Montaillou notes that “the hour of the first sleep” was a customary division of night, as was “the hour half-way through the first sleep.” Indeed, though not used as frequently as expressions like “candle-lighting,” the “dead of night,” or “cock-crow,” the term “first sleep” remained a common temporal division until the late eighteenth century. As described in
La Démonolâtrie
(1595) by Nicolas Rémy, “Comes dusk, followed by nightfall, dark night, then the moment of first sleep and finally the dead of night.”
13

At first glance, it is tempting to view this pattern of broken sleep as a cultural relic rooted in early Christian experience. Ever since St. Benedict in the sixth century required that monks rise after midnight for the recital of verses and psalms (“At night we will rise to confess to Him”), this like other regulations of the Benedictine order spread to growing numbers of Frankish and German monasteries. By the High Middle Ages, the Catholic Church actively encouraged early morning prayer among Christians as a means of appealing to God during the still hours of darkness. “Night vigils,” Alan of Lille declared in the twelfth century, “were not instituted without reason, for by them it is signified that we must rise in the middle of the night to sing the night office, so that the night may not pass without divine praise.” Best known for this regimen was St. John of the Cross, author of
The Dark Night of the Soul
(ca. 1588), though in England voices within both the Catholic and Anglican churches still prescribed late-night vigils in the seventeenth century. Where the Puritan divine Richard Baxter thought it “a foppery and abuse of God and ourselves, to think that the breaking of our sleep is a thing that itself pleaseth God,” more widespread was the conviction expressed by the author of Mid-
Night Thoughts
(1682) that the “regenerate man finds no time so fit to raise his soul to Heaven, as when he awakes at mid-night.”
14

Although Christian teachings undoubtedly popularized the imperative of early morning prayer, the Church itself was not responsible for introducing segmented sleep. However much it “colonized” the period of wakefulness between intervals of slumber, references to “first sleep” antedate Christianity’s early years of growth. Not only did such figures outside the Church as Pausanias and Plutarch invoke the term in their writings, so, too, did early classical writers, including Livy in his history of Rome, Virgil in the
Aeneid
, both composed in the first century
b.c.
, and Homer in the
Odyssey
, written in either the late eighth or early seventh century
b.c.
And while the Old Testament contains no direct references to first sleep, there are several suggestive passages, including Judges 16:3, in which Samson arises at midnight to pull down the city gate of Gaza.
15
Conversely, as recently as the twentieth century some non-Western cultures with religious beliefs other than Christianity still exhibited a segmented pattern of sleep remarkably similar to that of preindustrial Europeans. In Africa, anthropologists found villages of the Tiv, Chagga, and G/wi, for example, to be surprisingly alive after midnight with newly roused adults and children. Of the Tiv, subsistence farmers in central Nigeria, a study in 1969 recorded, “At night, they wake when they will and talk with anyone else awake in the hut.” The Tiv even employed the terms “first sleep” and “second sleep” as traditional intervals of time.
16

Thus the basic puzzle remains—how to explain this curious anomaly or, in truth, the more genuine mystery of seamless sleep that we experience today. There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind. As suggested by recent experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the explanation likely rests in the darkness that enveloped premodern families. In attempting to recreate conditions of “prehistoric” sleep, Dr. Thomas Wehr and his colleagues found that human subjects, deprived of artificial light at night over a span of several weeks, eventually exhibited a pattern of broken slumber—one practically identical to that of preindustrial households. Without artificial light for up to fourteen hours each night, Wehr’s subjects first lay awake in bed for two hours, slept for four, awakened again for two or three hours of quiet rest and reflection, and fell back asleep for four hours before finally awakening for good. Significantly, the intervening period of “non-anxious wakefulness” possessed “an endocrinology all its own,” with visibly heightened levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for stimulating lactation in nursing mothers and for permitting chickens to brood contentedly atop eggs for long stretches of time. In fact, Wehr has likened this period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation.
17

On the enormous physiological impact of modern lighting—or, in turn, its absence—on sleep, there is wide agreement. “Every time we turn on a light,” remarks the chronobiologist Charles A. Czeisler, “we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep,” with changes in levels of the brain hormone melatonin and in body temperature being among the most apparent consequences. Preindustrial peoples, the subjects in Wehr’s experiments, and non-Western societies still experiencing broken slumber are all linked by a lack of artificial lighting, which in the early modern world fell hardest on the lower and middle classes.
18
Interestingly, allusions to segmented sleep are most evident in materials written or dictated by all but the wealthiest segments of society and sparse among the ample mounds of personal papers left by the upper classes—especially, beginning in the late seventeenth century, when both artificial lighting and the vogue of “late hours” grew increasingly prevalent among affluent households. The prolific diarists Pepys and Boswell, by their own admission, seldom woke in the middle of the night. Both, if not conspicuously wealthy themselves, circulated within the upper echelons of London society, patronizing genteel nightspots and homes. Complained Richard Steele in 1710, “Who would not wonder at this perverted relish of those who are reckoned the most polite part of mankind, that prefer sea-coals and candles to the sun, and exchange so many cheerful morning hours for the pleasures of midnight revels and debauches?”
19

II

It is of no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main outlines of the forms previously studied, or of other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.

LEONARDO DA VINCI,
n.d.
20