At Day's Close Read online

  For their valuable aid, I express my warm appreciation to my exceptional editor, Alane Salierno Mason, along with Alessandra Bastagli, Mary Helen Willett, Janet Byrne, Eleen Cheung, Neil Hoos, Evan Carver, and so many others at Norton. I am indebted to Ede Rothaus for her knowledgeable help with the artwork. Georges and Valerie Borchardt were critical to the book’s progress. I am deeply appreciative to Georges for his wisdom and good will. I would also like to pay tribute to several old friends: Clyde and Vickie Perdue, John and Mary Carlin, Mary Jane Elkins and her late husband, Bill, and Carolyn and Eddie Hornick. Tobie Cruff was a bulwark for both my wife, Alice, and me.

  In 1697, the French expatriate Thomas D’Urfey wrote that “night, love and fate rule the world’s grand affairs.” Certainly, for the better part of two decades, “night” and family have ruled mine. My late parents, Arthur and Dorothy Ekirch, were enormously supportive, as were my sisters, Cheryl and Caryl, and their husbands, Frank and George. My parents-in-law, Keun Pal and Soon Lee, opened their home—and their hearts—during my frequent forays to the Library of Congress. I should also like to thank Anna, Don, Annette, David, and their families. I relied shamelessly upon Don and David for their medical insights. Alice, who does so much good in her own work, repeatedly came to my rescue in the course of this book. For that and so much more, I am profoundly blessed.

  Shortly after my arrival in Blacksburg nearly thirty years ago, a wise senior colleague reflected that most academics, as they advance in age, think not of their books but of their children. This book is dedicated with love to Alexandra, Sheldon, and Christian, ever in my thoughts, past, present, and for all tomorrows to come.

  PREFACE

  Let the night teach us what we are, and the day what we should be.

  THOMAS TRYON, 16911

  THIS BOOK sets out to explore the history of nighttime in Western society before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. My chief interest lies in the way of life people fashioned after dark in the face of both real and supernatural perils. Notwithstanding major studies on crime and witchcraft, night, in its own right, has received scant attention, principally due to the longstanding presumption that little else of consequence transpired. “No occupation but sleepe, feed, and fart,” to quote the Jacobean poet Thomas Middleton, might best express this traditional mindset. With the exception of enterprising scholars in Europe, historians have neglected the primeval passage from daylight to darkness, especially before the modern era. Nighttime has remained a terra incognita of peripheral concern, the forgotten half of the human experience, even though families spent long hours in obscurity. “We are blind half of our lives,” observed Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Emile (1762).2

  Rather than a backdrop to daily existence, or a natural hiatus, nighttime in the early modern age instead embodied a distinct culture, with many of its own customs and rituals. As a mark of its special nature, darkness in Britain and America was frequently known as the “night season.” Night and day, of course, shared qualities in common, and many differences were a matter of degree and intensity. But along with alterations in diet and health, dress, travel and communication, significant changes arose in social encounters, work rhythms, and popular mores, including attitudes toward magic, sexuality, law, and hierarchical authority. Not only, then, does this book challenge longstanding assumptions about the past scale of nocturnal activity, but it also seeks to resurrect a rich and vibrant culture very different from daily reality, an “alternate reign,” as an English poet put it. More than that, darkness, for the greater part of humankind, afforded a sanctuary from ordinary existence, the chance, as shadows lengthened, for men and women to express inner impulses and realize repressed desires both in their waking hours and in their dreams, however innocent or sinister in nature. A time, fundamentally, of liberation and renewal, night gave free rein to the goodhearted as well as the wicked, forces both salutary and malignant in ordinary existence. “Night knows no shame,” affirmed a proverb. Despite widespread dangers, multitudes drew fresh strength from the setting sun.3

  At Day’s Close consists of twelve chapters, divided into four parts. Part One, “In the Shadow of Death,” focuses on night’s perils. Threats to body and soul expanded and intensified after dark. Probably never before in Western history had evening appeared more menacing. Part Two, “Laws of Nature,” is devoted to both official and popular responses to nighttime. I begin by examining a variety of repressive measures, from curfews to watchmen, designed by church and state to curb nocturnal activity. Only toward the eighteenth century did cities and towns take half-steps to render public spaces accessible at night. By necessity, ordinary folk, at home and abroad, relied upon magic, Christianity, and natural lore to counter the darkness in urban and rural areas. This complex matrix of popular conventions and beliefs sets the stage for the remarkable undercurrent of activity in communities after sunset. Part Three, “Benighted Realms,” probes the haunts of men and women at work and play. Shrouded interiors weakened social constraints, creating spheres of intimacy among family, friends, and lovers. If evening, for most, was a time of personal freedom, it exerted special appeal for classes at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Successive chapters examine night’s multi-faceted importance for both patricians and plebeians. After dark, power shifted from the mighty to the meek. Sleep, the farthest refuge from the throes of daily life, forms the basis of Part Four. “Private Worlds” analyzes bedtime rituals and sleep disturbances, as well as a pattern of slumber, dominant since time immemorial, whereby preindustrial households awakened in the dead of night. Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Many others made love, prayed, and, most important historically, reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness. Finally, the book’s epilogue, “Cock-Crow,” analyzes the demystification of darkness under way in cities and large towns by the mid-eighteenth century. The foundation, even then, was laid for our modern “twenty-four/seven” society, with profound consequences for personal security and freedom.

  This narrative of nocturnal life covers Western Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The British Isles form the heart of my inquiry, but extensive material is included from across the Continent. In addition, I have incorporated relevant information from early America and Eastern Europe. The book’s time period is equally broad, stretching from the late Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century, though the principal focus is the early modern era (ca. 1500–1750). That said, I make occasional reference to both the medieval and ancient worlds, drawing comparisons as well as contrasts to earlier practices and beliefs. Although many developments explored in this book were unique to the early modern era, some clearly were not. Seen from that perspective, this study represents a more extended exploration of nocturnal life in preindustrial times than ever I anticipated.

  By the same token, my research has occasionally benefited from the ground-level insights of Humphrey O’Sullivan, Émile Guillaumin, and other close observers of rural life in the nineteenth century. I strongly subscribe to the historical viewpoint that the values and traditions of many agrarian regions in Europe and America did not significantly change until the late 1800s, with the expansion of transportation and commerce. As Thomas Hardy wrote in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), “a gap of two hundred years” separated the worldviews of Tess and her mother—“when they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.”4

  Uniformities in nocturnal life, across time and space, often outweighed variations during the early modern period. Nocturnal culture was by no means monolithic, but people were more alike in their attitudes and conventions than they were different. Just as preindustrial folk, after dark, shared common fears, so did many act in similar ways. Besides persuading me to structure the book thematically, this realization reinforced my view of night’s fundamental importance. Such was the impact of this natural cycle that it frequently transcended differences in culture
and time. When significant deviations did arise, such as in forms of courtship or artificial lighting, I have explored these in the text. But not until the eighteenth century would nocturnal life anywhere be markedly transformed, and then only in cities and towns. In fact, often more influential in preceding years than temporal or regional differences were differences rooted in social position and gender, in addition to divisions between town and country.

  My research draws from a broad range of sources, as one might suspect for such a ubiquitous subject. Most valuable have been personal documents—letters, memoirs, travel accounts, and diaries. Despite its breadth, the book, in large measure, is constructed around the lives of individual men and women. Diaries, especially, have permitted this for members of the middle and upper classes. For information regarding the lower orders, I have mined rich veins of legal depositions along with a small number of diaries and autobiographies. An unparalleled source for urban street life has been the Old Bailey Session Papers, eighteenth-century pamphlets that chronicled trials at London’s chief criminal court. For traditional beliefs and values, wide use has been made of glossaries, dictionaries, and, most of all, collections of proverbs. “There’s the peasant’s creed,” observed a French priest of proverbs—“the learning he has ripened and assimilated to the innermost recesses of his soul.”5 To help explore different strata of thought, I have examined a wealth of both “high” literature and “low,” not just poetry, plays, and novels but also ballads, fables, and chapbooks. All of these I have tried to employ with caution, pointing out instances when imaginative works diverged from social reality. Didactic writings have been useful, primarily sermons, religious tracts, and handbooks of advice. Revealing, too, are eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines, medical, legal, and philosophical treatises, and agricultural tracts. And, for illustrative and explanatory purposes, I have drawn upon studies from medicine, psychology, and anthropology. Other recent works, on topics ranging from popular culture to blindness, have been instructive, as have monographs focusing on selected aspects of nocturnal life (for thematic unity, I have not examined sources relating to warfare at night).

  A last point deserves special emphasis. While I take up, on several occasions, the question of night’s impact upon daily life, including whether darkness in the main was a source of social stability or disorder, that issue has not been my foremost concern. Hopefully, the material contained in these pages will afford justification enough for studying nighttime on its own terms.

  ROGER EKIRCH

  Sugarloaf Mountain

  Roanoke, Virginia

  November 2004

  All dates are rendered in new style, with the new year beginning on January 1. Quotations, for the most part, are in the original spelling, though capitalization has been modernized and punctuation added when necessary.

  SHUTTING-IN

  Shepherds all, and maidens fair, fold your flocks up, for the air gins to thicken, and the sun already his great course hath run.

  JOHN FLETCHER, ca. 16101

  RATHER THAN FALLING, night, to the watchful eye, rises. Emerging first in the valleys, shadows slowly ascend sloping hillsides. Fading rays known as “sunsuckers” dart upward behind clouds as if being inhaled for another day. While pastures and woodlands are lost to gloom, the western sky remains aglow even as the sun draws low beneath the horizon. Were he guided by the firmament, the husbandman might keep to his plough, but the deepening shadows hasten his retreat. Amid reappearing rooks and lowing cattle, rabbits scamper for shelter. Screech owls take wing over a heath. Whistling like conspiring assassins, they inspire equal alarm in mice and men, both taught at an early age to fear this high-pitched harbinger of death. As daylight recedes, color drains from the landscape. Thickets grow larger and less distinct, blending into mongrel shades of gray. It is eventide, when, say the Irish, a man and a bush look alike, or, more ominously, warns an Italian adage, hounds and wolves.2

  The darkness of night appears palpable. Evening does not arrive, it “thickens.” Wayfarers are “overtaken” as if enveloped by a black mist, not only seen but felt as the Old Testament recounts of the darkness that befell Pharaoh’s Egypt. With the sun’s flight, noxious fumes are widely thought to descend from the sky—“night fogges” and “noysom vapours”—cold, raw, and dank. In the popular imagination night has fallen. No longer is the day’s atmosphere transparent, odorless, and temperate—washed by welcome beams of light. What Shakespeare describes as “the daylight sick” spreads contagion and pestilence, laden with malignant damps that infect the prostrate countryside. “Make haste,” warns Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure (1604), “the vaporous night approaches.”3

  Gloaming, cock-shut, grosping, crow-time, daylight’s gate, owl-leet. The English tongue contains a vast corpus of evocative idioms for day’s descent into obscurity, with Irish Gaelic possessing four terms just to chart successive intervals of time from late afternoon to nightfall. No other phase of the day or night has inspired a richer terminology. Before the advent of industrialization, certainly none mattered more to the lives of ordinary men and women. For most persons, the customary name for nightfall was “shutting-in,” a time to bar doors and bolt shutters once watchdogs had been loosed abroad. For night—its foul and fetid air, its preternatural darkness—spawned uncertain perils, both real and imaginary. And, oddly, no age in Western history other than that bounded by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment has ever had more reason to dread its offspring.

  PART ONE

  IN THE

  SHADOW OF DEATH

  PRELUDE

  Never greet a stranger in the night, for he may be a demon.

  THE TALMUD1

  NIGHT WAS man’s first necessary evil, our oldest and most haunting terror. Amid the gathering darkness and cold, our prehistoric forbears must have felt profound fear, not least over the prospect that one morning the sun might fail to return.

  No environs more distant from the Paleolithic age might be imagined than the Georgian chambers of Edmund Burke in London. Concerned with the relationship between obscurity and aesthetics, Burke, a young Irish émigré, took a keen interest in mankind’s age-old fear of darkness, to which even London’s enlightened citizenry still succumbed. It was a topic last visited in England with any clarity by John Locke in his famous philosophical treatise An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). To Locke’s explanation for childhood fears of the dark, Burke, however, gave short shrift. Whereas Locke had blamed nurses for spinning ghost stories among impressionable infants, Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), insisted that darkness remained, as always, “terrible in its own nature.” “It is very hard to imagine,” he concluded, “that the effect of an idea so universally terrible in all times, and in all countries, as darkness, could possibly have been owing to a set of idle stories.”2 In short, terror of the dark was timeless.

  One can only speculate about when an inherent fear of darkness might first have taken root in the human psyche. In view of the terror that must have struck our earliest ancestors, very likely this most ancient of human anxieties has existed from time immemorial, much as Burke contended. Some psychologists, however, have surmised that prehistoric peoples, rather than naturally fearing darkness in its own right, may have first feared specific perils arising in the dark. Only then, as night grew increasingly synonymous with danger, might early populations, across a span of many generations, have acquired an instinctive terror.3

  Whatever its exact source, whether this fear originated at the outset or over time, certainly later cultures stood to inherit a pronounced aversion to nocturnal darkness. Everywhere one looks in the ancient world, demons filled the night air. Nyx, born of Chaos in Greek mythology, was the goddess of “all-subduing” night who, in the Iliad, makes even Zeus tremble. Among her fierce brood numbered Disease, Strife, and Doom. In Babylon, desert denizens suffered from t
he depredations of the night-hag Lilith. Ancient Romans feared the nocturnal flights of the strix, a witch that transformed itself into a screeching bird preying upon the entrails of infants, while to the east of Jerusalem, an “Angel of Darkness” terrorized Essene villagers in the arid environment of Qumran.4 So, too, many early civilizations, including Egypt and Mesopotamia, equated darkness with death, as would Christian Europe. The Twenty-third Psalm speaks famously of the “valley of the shadow of death.” Christianity, from its birth, revered God as the source of eternal light. His first act of creation, the gift of light, rescued the world from the domain of chaos. “And the light shineth in darkness,” declares the Book of John, “and the darkness comprehended it not.” The Bible recounts a succession of sinister deeds—“works of darkness”—perpetrated in the dead of night, including the betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Following his crucifixion, “there was darkness over all the land.”5

  In more recent times, in lands far removed in longitude and age from the ancient world, nighttime has continued to inspire intense apprehension. Paul Gauguin discovered in Tahiti, for example, that Kanaka women never slept in the dark. As late as the twentieth century, the Navaho recoiled from nocturnal demons, as did the Pacific natives of Mailu. In African cultures like the Yoruba and Ibo peoples of Nigeria and the Ewe of Dahomey and Togoland, spirits assumed the form of witches at night, sowing misfortune and death in their wake. Significantly, where day-witches were believed to exist, such as among the Dinka, their conduct was thought less threatening.6