Chapter Seven Colonizing the rural night?
On the night of Thursday, January 13, 1603, “early in the morning, roughly between two and three o’clock,” the innkeeper Barthel Dorfheilige of the Hessian town of Wanfried awoke to the sound of splintering wood.1 He quickly discovered two young noblemen, Hans Werner von Eschwege (c. 1581–c. 1624) and his cousin Eberhard von Alten (c. 1583–?), smashing in the window of the main room of his inn. Dorfheilige reported that he “hastily lit a lamp and ran into the room in his nightshirt, and shined his light out the broken window to see the malefactors.” He recognized “Hans Werner, son of Reinhard von Eschwege zu Aue” and then Eberhard von Alten. Hans Werner greeted him and apologized for the broken window while Eberhard demanded that Dorfheilige open the door. Hans Werner said he would vouch for his cousin’s good conduct, so Dorfheilige let them in and called for one of his servants to see to their horses.2
Once inside, the two young “Junkers” (as Dorfheilige called them) continued their harassment of the innkeeper, breaking another window from the inside and assaulting Dorfheilige’s wife, children, and servants. The two young men then forced the innkeeper to accompany them on a similar visit to awaken the local miller, then returned to the inn for more wine and a meal. When the servants of the noblemen began to beat one of Dorfheilige’s children, the innkeeper defended his son with a bread knife: the two noblemen and two more of their servants joined the fray and Dorfheilige fled into the streets of the town. Hans Werner and Eberhard mounted their horses and followed him. Several neighbors came out of their houses to aid the innkeeper, but paid the price as the young noblemen fired at them, broke out more windows, and screamed threats. “Finally the Schultheiss [village administrator] and soldiers came to town and sounded the bell,” and the noblemen and their servants rode off, shouting abuse behind them.3
This violent incident, in which the “Junkers” shoved Dorfheilige’s pregnant wife into a pile of manure, beat one of his children bloody, and unleashed terror on his “house and home,” reveals several fundamental aspects of the early modern rural night. We see the association of violence with the night, and importance of the public house to the life of a village, both day and night. Towns like Wanfried had no regular night watch and Hans Werner and Eberhard had plenty of time to lash out at the villagers before any local authorities appeared. From the perspective of the local authorities, the rural night was simply much harder to police.
But the assault on the inn led by the young Hans Werner von Eschwege was no random act of nocturnal violence. His father Reinhard von Eschwege zu Aue (d. 1607) was entangled in several bitter legal disputes with the peasants of Wanfried over grazing, hunting, and fishing rights.4 Early modern German law insisted on the daytime character of all legal proceedings. One could not convene a court, prepare a will, or pronounce a verdict at night.5 Parallel with the legal disputes of the day, this rural conflict was carried into the night by the actions of young men. Hans Werner said as much while drinking in Barthel Dorfheilige’s inn in the middle of the night. The complaint recorded his words in direct discourse:
In particular he [Hans Werner von Eschwege] said: “You peasants of Wanfried or Bürger – whatever you want to be – last summer you gave my father some trouble. If I had known, I had some good fellows with me back then … You’ll get very little out of it [i.e., the lawsuit], and I’ll pay back each one of you, one after the other. It’s your Vogt [county administrator] who’s leading you into this. If I run into him, I’ll put a bullet through his hat.”6
By day the lawsuits worked their way through the courts; at night – the domain of young men – other pressures were brought to bear. This incident at Wanfried suggests that despite broad attempts to regulate nocturnal disorder, in the villages of early modern Europe young “guardians of disorder” ruled the night.7 More often than in cities, their “order” prevailed over that of the church or the state when the sun went down.
The ungovernable aspects of the rural night became more prominent after 1650 as a new contrast between urban and rural night emerged. The preceding chapters on the night at royal courts and in cities have shown a series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments I describe as nocturnalization: an ongoing expansion of the symbolic and respectable social uses of the night. As we saw in the previous chapter, nocturnalization in cities evoked significant resistance from the young people who had made the night streets their domain. This dialectic of nocturnalization and resistance is best described as a colonization of the urban night. By 1700, contemporaries observed that this colonization was reshaping everyday life in the cities of Northern Europe.
Nocturnalization affected daily life in the villages of early modern Europe as well, but with a different set of priorities and outcomes. The agents of nocturnalization were church and state, but the development was less tied to commerce and consumption than at court or in major cities. As in cities, young people resisted incursions into a time that had traditionally been theirs. Because neither church nor state could intervene in rural daily life as effectively as they could in cities, villagers young and old more successfully defended their traditional night life. City and countryside were both sites of nocturnalization, but this process unfolded very differently in rural areas.
7.1 Patterns
How was the night understood and experienced in the villages of early modern Europe? Some scholars have emphasized that “The night is no man’s friend,” as a French proverb put it, and the unfortunate innkeeper of Wanfried might agree.8 But historians of popular culture and daily life such as Norbert Schindler and A. Roger Ekirch have argued that far too many common people were active at night – by choice or necessity – to allow us to characterize the early modern night as universally threatening.9 Early modern women and men did much more at night than sleep or fear for their lives and goods. As Alain Cabantous has shown, the first hours after sunset do not reveal the expected retreat into the home. In the city and in the countryside work continued, entertainment and socializing began, and groups of young people regularly disturbed the settling calm.10 The literary formula of nocturnal fear and insecurity must be balanced by an understanding of actual nocturnal activity – although this kind of rural “night life” is more difficult to assess.
When we survey the material from Ekirch, Cabantous, and others, several patterns emerge. Night life in the early modern countryside was shaped by the tensions between necessity and leisure, and between order and disorder. Here we will consider the necessities of sleep and labor, then survey a range of activities extending from leisure and sociability to disorder and crime: it is between these poles that the distinct features of the rural night emerge. Village spinning bees and public houses, as well as the courtship customs of the youth, characterized the rural night as its contrast with the night in the city began to emerge in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
7.1.1 Necessity
Labor and rest shaped the rural night. The age-old pattern of segmented sleep documented by A. Roger Ekirch (described in chapter 1) appears in rural and urban sources alike until the end of the seventeenth century. At that point, as we will see below, rural and urban sleep patterns began to diverge. Labor at night was ubiquitous. Despite the comment in the Gospel of John (9:4) – “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work” (King James Bible) – some forms of work at night were unavoidable. Blacksmiths worked at night, in part because they could.11 And as Alain Cabantous has shown, rural labor at night was on the rise at the end of the seventeenth century, encompassing a range of tasks, including fishing, sowing, or harvesting by moonlight, and spinning, weaving, sewing, or knitting by firelight.12 In winter, the hearth might provide enough light for the indoor tasks; otherwise common people would use rush lights or oil-lamps, the rich candles.13 Casual labor on long winter evenings was, as we will see below, a key feature of rural night.
The regulation of labor and rest was recognized as an importa
nt aspect of household management. The Protestant Austrian nobleman Wolfgang Helmhard von Hohberg (1612–88) explained in his well-known Georgica curiosa (1682, editions through the eighteenth century) that “The father of the house is like the clock of the house, which everyone must follow when rising, going to sleep, working, eating and all other business.”14 The immensely popular Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557, editions through the eighteenth century) of Thomas Tusser (1524?–80) advised masters to “Declare after supper, take heed thereunto / what work in the morning each servant shall do.” This guide gives us some idea what hours of sleep were expected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
In winter at nine, and in summer at ten
to bed after supper, both maidens and men.
In winter at five a clock servants arise,
in summer at four it is very good guise.15
The Tyrolean physician Hippolyt Guarinoni (1571–1654) recommended that adults retire between 8 and 9 p.m. and wake at 5 a.m.16 Across Northern Europe, the traditional curfew hour was 9 p.m., but it is difficult to say anything conclusive about the bedtimes of early modern people in the countryside. Prescriptions are common, but their relation to practice is not clear. The limited evidence we have from diaries and legal records suggests that, in practice, most country folk went to bed between 9 and 10 p.m.17 But, as we will see below, when the household of John Wright of Brixworth, Northamptonshire was thrown into confusion by an errant dog at “eleven or twelve o’clock” on the night of December 13, 1672, the servant maids were still awake washing dishes, though the master of the house was already in his nightshirt and most rooms were no longer lit.
Those with leisure and light might extend the day. Mary Jepp Clarke described long winter evenings at Chipley, the Clarkes’s Somerset estate, in a letter of April 1700: “we have had all this winter our proper times for everything in our chamber, which is good, and in the evening while Nanny and I did work she [Elizabeth] read plays and what else diverted us which made the long nights pass a way the more pleasantly to us all.”18
7.1.2 Sociability
Making long winter nights pass more pleasantly was a common desire in the early modern countryside. Beyond small gatherings in private homes, two sites emerge as especially important for “night life” in the countryside: the spinning bee and the public house. Spinning bees were a peripatetic but vital place for the nocturnal courtship customs of early modern rural youth, while public houses were more fixed locations for the adult sociability of the village. Rural night life was shaped by the contrast between the mobile sociability of the young and the relative stability of mature socializing in the public house.
Spinning bees were fundamental to rural night life in many parts of early modern Northern Europe, especially in Germany, France, and the Swiss cantons.19 When a fire broke out in the Norman village of Basly late on the evening of February 4, 1684, we learn that most of the women of the village were at a spinning bee, including the unmarried Le Petit sisters and Anne Jouvin, whose homes were destroyed by the blaze.20 Such spinning bees (Spinnstube, veillée) combined labor with socializing on long winter evenings.21 Evidence from the Basle countryside and southern Germany suggests a fixed season for spinning bees, roughly from Advent to Carnival, with special celebrations on the first and last gatherings of the season; in other areas the winter gatherings appear more spontaneous.22 The form of the spinning bee varied: as many as a dozen women young and old would meet to spin wool or flax, knit, or sew by candlelight.23 “When there is a shortage of light,” as a Swabian ordinance of 1651 explained, “neighbors and their families” might gather “by a common tallow candle” to work – but in a very modest circle “not to exceed six or at most eight persons, who keep a reasonable hour and completely avoid all idle chatter and other extravagances.”24 While sharing light, heat, and conversation, the women and girls might be visited by the young men of the village. (See Figures 7.1 and 7.2.)
Figure 7.1 “Kurtzweilige Beschreibung der löblichen Spinn- vnd Rockenstuben,” broadside engraved after Sebald Beham, Nuremberg, seventeenth century.
Figure 7.2 The arrival of the young men at the spinning bee: “Decembre: La Veillée,” engraving by Jean Mariette, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
This – in the authorities’ view – is where the trouble began. In 1661 the bishop of Châlons issued an ordinance forbidding “men and boys” from joining or visiting “the vigils [veillées] when women and girls spin or do other work in the winter.” Likewise, “women and girls are not to let them in, play, or dance with them during the night.”25 In Calvinist Guernsey in 1637, the Royal Court forbade the “vueilles” “because of the regular and scandalous debauchery which is committed at the assemblies of young people … during the night.” Marriageable young people met and courted at these “vigils”; a less judgmental English visitor to Guernsey noted that “from these meetings many marriages are contracted.”26 A contemporary French engraving (Figure 7.2) shows the scene just after the young men have arrived. A hanging oil-lamp illuminates the young women, distaffs in hand, one at a spinning wheel, just interrupted by the swains, who have begun to dance and show their affections. The text below claims that such visits, if handled wisely, transform “the most toilsome labor” into “more even than an amusement.” Images and accounts from Germany (such as Figure 7.1) focus on sexual morality, adding concerns about disrespectful gossip, bawdy songs, rude pranks, and gluttony. At the spinning bees young servants “cook, eat, and drink what they have stolen at home,” as one reported.27 French and German sources record such courting customs as the “brushing off,” in which each unmarried woman gave one of the young men the honor of brushing the stray bits of flax or wool off her lap while she worked.28
From the perspective of the participants, spinning bees combined labor, leisure, and important courtship customs; village elders tolerated them, arguing that “the young must have their diversions and merriment.”29 In Figure 7.1, first printed c. 1524 by Sebald Beham, then copied and reprinted in the mid seventeenth century with new verses, the older “shepherd’s mother Elizabeth” (figure Y) looks at the disarray around her but then “thinks back to the good old days / when she had such fun herself.”30 The spinning bees were denounced by pastors and administrators (outsiders to the village) not simply on moral grounds, but also because the gatherings sustained local nocturnal countercultures. In Figures 7.1 and 7.2 and in many written accounts of spinning bees the authority figures of family, church, and state are absent or obscured by the “rural plebian culture of laughter.”31 In Beham’s print the village administrator (the Schultheiss, figure G) sits asleep beside the stove and “the priest is off taking care of his cook.” Sexual license is everywhere in Beham’s scene: the maid of the Schultheiss (E) is there with her lover Fritz (F); Curdt (L) “wants to sneak behind the stove and sleep with Elßgen,” and Ulrich (W) “so pleases … Appel [Apollonia, figure X] that she is about to put out her light.” The Beham print singles out each these figures for criticism, but offers no hope of any moral improvement.
Figure 7.3 shows a more orderly peasant home at night: the women are working flax while a group of men seated around the table drink. The young woman and man standing at the back converse discretely under more watchful eyes. In Figure 7.4 we see an ideal spinning bee: an all-female scene (an author, far left, looks on) with well-lighted and industrious figures. In the accompanying text the women give their legitimate reasons for gathering to spin. Several say their husbands are out drinking; a maid explains that she has been frightened by a ghost and does not want to stay in her room alone. Other women have come to socialize, leaving snoring husbands home in bed.
Figure 7.3 Spinning bee scene; engraving by Claudine Bouzonnet Stella, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 7.4 An orderly spinning bee: Jacob von der Heyden, “KunckelBrieff oder SpinnStuben,” c. 1620. Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Inventar Nr. XIII,441,8; Neg. Nr. 8685.
Condoned or criticized, and despite its many local variations (it might be more or less focused on productive work, and more or less planned or scheduled) all the evidence agrees that the spinning gatherings were always held on long winter nights.32
These gatherings are richly documented on the Continent.33 In the British Isles, peasants gathered at night for spinning or knitting in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.34 In England – with the exception of Yorkshire and Lancashire – spinning bees do not seem to have been an established practice,35 but their key features – women establishing an evening space for work or socializing, then inviting unmarried men to join them – do appear. In Norfolk in the spring of 1665 we learn that
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