At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  Not that every society since the dawn of time has viewed night with similar revulsion. To underscore man’s instinctive fear of the dark, originating somewhere in the primordial past, does not preclude the fact that night has aroused greater dread in some cultures than in others. Ancient Greek cults staged all-night religious festivals called pannchídes. And while, according to Juvenal, pedestrians prowling the streets of early Rome after sunset risked life and limb, the city, at the inception of the second century a.d., enjoyed a rich night life. In Antioch, wrote Libanius, residents “shook off the tyranny of sleep” with the aid of oil lamps—as did societies like the Sumerians and Egyptians, similarly blessed with this early source of artificial illumination that permitted greater freedom after dark. Nor were they the first. In France, the remains of some one hundred lamps from the late Paleolithic period have been unearthed in the vicinity of the Lascaux cave paintings.7

  All forms of artificial illumination—not just lamps but torches and candles—helped early on to alleviate nocturnal anxieties. “Evil spirits love not the smell of lamps,” declared Plato. Still, technological innovations only played a partial role. Cultural differences no doubt help to explain, for example, why some peoples avoided military engagements at night, while others did not. The Vikings appear to have relished nocturnal assaults, as European coastal communities sadly learned. Rather than access to lighting, perhaps habitual exposure every winter to Scandinavian darkness steeled Norsemen to its terrors. Equally stark were the contrasting reactions of Indian tribes along the eastern seaboard of North America that English settlers encountered centuries later. In New England, William Wood advised fellow colonists not to fear Indian assaults at night: “They will not budge from their own dwellings for fear of their Abbamocho (Devil), whom they fear especially in evil enterprises.” Still, a visitor to North Carolina, John Lawson, reported that the members of a local tribe “are never fearful in the night, nor do the thoughts of spirits ever trouble them, such as the many hobgoblins and bugbears that we suck in with our milk”—for which, like Locke, he blamed the “foolery of our nurses and servants” who “by their idle tales of fairies and witches makes such impressions on our tender years.”8

  Sundry influences have shaped the reactions of past cultures to nighttime, including, for that matter, the ways in which children have been acclimated at an early age to the dangers of darkness. These, the genuine hazards that night has posed across time, have in their own right colored perceptions, often more profoundly than other circumstances. Equally apparent, the past does not reveal a chronological pattern to our fears. Instead of any simple linear evolution, the tides of human adrenaline have ebbed and flowed over the course of many years. With the modern age, man’s aversion to darkness has, of course, progressively diminished, particularly in industrialized societies owing to electric lighting, professional police, and the spread of scientific rationalism. Yet in the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution, evening appeared fraught with menace. Darkness in the early modern world summoned the worst elements in man, nature, and the cosmos. Murderers and thieves, terrible calamities, and satanic spirits lurked everywhere.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TERRORS OF THE NIGHT:

  HEAVENS AND EARTH

  I

  So when night in her rustie dungeon hath imprisoned our ey-sight, and that we are shut seperatly in our chambers from resort, the divell keepeth his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.

  THOMAS NASHE, 15941

  IT WAS AN era of dire apocalyptic visions. “This abominable age, where of the Scripture so clearly speaks,” bewailed Jean-Nicholas de Parival, a French writer in the 1600s. Dearth, disease, death, and damnation. As European paintings and literature beginning in the late fifteenth century grimly suggest, the natural world seemed as merciless as it did cruelly unpredictable—a perpetual struggle, to paraphrase a later writer, between the whims of the heavens and the wants of the earth. “A man’s destiny is alwayes dark,” rued a seventeenth-century proverb. Only salvation—the Kingdom of God, not of man—offered mortals certain sanctuary from fear. These were not faint tremors born of timidity but tangible anxieties rooted in danger and uncertainty, as subsequent generations appreciated. “Our ancestors,” recalled a London newspaper in 1767, “spent one half of their life in guarding against death . . . they dreaded fire, thieves, famine, hoarded up their gains for their wives and children, and were some of them under terrible apprehensions about their fate in the next world.”2

  It would be difficult to exaggerate the suspicion and insecurity bred by darkness. “We lie in the shadow of death at night, our dangers are so great,” remarked the author of The Husbandmans Calling in 1670. Numerous Shakespearean characters plumbed the depths of night’s “foul womb.” “O comfort-killing night,” Lucrece exclaims after her rape, “image of hell! / Dim register and notary of shame! / Black stage for tragedies and murders fell! / Vast sin-concealing chaos! / Nurse of blame!”3 Just as heaven glowed with celestial light, darkness foreshadowed the agonies awaiting transgressors after death. Often likened to hell (“eternal night”), nighttime anticipated a netherworld of chaos and despair, black as pitch, swarming with imps and demons. Declares the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), “Black is the badge of hell, / The hue of dungeons, and the suit of night.” Indeed, it was the conviction of some divines that God created night as proof of hell’s existence. “Like the face of hell,” was how a seventeenth-century Venetian described the advance of evening.4

  Night brutally robbed men and women of their vision, the most treasured of human senses. None of sight’s sister senses, not even hearing or touch, permitted individuals such mastery over their environs.5 Were early modern communities not so dependent upon personal interaction, the power of sight would have been less critical. But these were small-scale, traditional societies in which face-to-face encounters predominated, in urban as well as rural settings. Vision allowed people to gauge character and demeanor, vital aspects of identity in the preindustrial world. Carriage and posture revealed inner qualities, as could the expressiveness of a person’s eyes. Claimed a seventeenth-century Polish aristocrat, “When a rustic or cowardly person wants to say something seriously, what do you see? He squirms, picks his fingers, strokes his beard, pulls faces, makes eyes and splits every word in three. A noble man, on the contrary, has a clear mind and a gentle posture; he has nothing to be ashamed of.”6 Dress sharpened social contrasts. Some cities, by virtue of sumptuary legislation, permitted just the gentle classes to wear silk or satin. Fashion and color, whether clothing appeared plain or extravagant, bespoke age and occupation as well as rank.7

  But at night, lamented the Scottish poet James Thomson, “order confounded lies; all beauty void; distinction lost; and gay variety one universal blot.”8 Friends were taken for foes, and shadows for phantoms. Natural landmarks—hedges, coppices, and trees—acquired new life. “When men in darknesse goe, /” Humphrey Mill wrote in 1639, “They see a bush, but take it for a theefe.” Hearing, too, played tricks. Passing noises during the day demanded to be heard in the darkness. “The night is more quiet than the day,” observed the Jacobean writer George Herbert, “and yet we feare in it what we doe not regard by day. A mouse running, a board cracking, a dog howling, an owle scritching put us often in a cold sweat.”9

  By day, safety was found in numbers. In large towns and cities, the “multitude effectually guard and protect individuals,” a London newspaper correspondent noted. After dark, with families forced to fend for themselves, yet deprived of the protection of sight, threats to body and soul multiplied. When else but in the black of night might evil thrive unmolested—unbridled by the customary restraints of the visible world? “Here never shines the sunne of discipline,” moaned Thomas Middleton. “At night,” allowed Dame Sarah Cowper, “I pray Almighty God to keep me from ye power of evil spirits, and of evil men; from fearfull dreams and terrifying imaginations; from fire, and all sa
d accidents . . . so many mischiefs, I know of, doubtless more that I know not of.”10

  II

  There is no doute, but that almost all those things which the common people judge to be wonderfull sightes, are nothing lesse than so. But in the meane season it can not be denied, but that straunge sightes, and many other suche lyke things, are sometymes hearde and also seene.

  LEWES LAVATER, 157211

  At night, bizarre sights and queer sounds came and vanished, leaving widespread anxiety in their train. On some evenings, deafening bangs and strange music broke the silence. In the English village of Wakefield, a tenant reported hearing “a great noyse of musicke and dancinge about him,” followed another night by the “ringinge of small bells.” The sound of “deepe groneing” could also be heard. The evening before a woman at Ealand died, servants grew terrified by “a great knocking and variety of music.” Common omens of ill-fortune included loud thunder and the cries of screech owls.12

  For people steeped in biblical wonders and supernatural lore, alterations in the night sky, including the aurora borealis in northern latitudes, carried even greater portent. “Terrible sights were in the sky all night,” George Booth of Chester recorded in 1727. “All my family were up and in tears, or there prayers, the heavens flashing in a perpetual flame.” As in the Middle Ages, comets, meteors, and lunar eclipses inspired awe and trepidation, as either omens of God’s will or marks of his wrath. Known as “blazing stars,” comets, it was said, foretold “destruction & corruption of earthly things,” whether from tempests, earthquakes, wars, plagues, or famine. In 1618, an entry in the parish register of Nantwich noted, “Many times there appeared eastward a blazing star, betokenninge godds judgements towards us for sine.” “Gods preaching visibly from the heavens by a late astonishing comet,” the Yorkshire minister Oliver Heywood wrote of a marvel—most of which were vastly more visible than celestial phenomena today owing to “light pollution” from the glare of modern street lamps.13

  Frequent outbursts of hysteria followed these sensations, with reverberations felt for days afterward. Early modern woodcuts bear witness to their impact. In England, the descent on a March night in 1719 of a great “globe of fire” reportedly “struck all that saw it into a strange terror.” According to the Wiltshire vicar John Lewis, “Many who were in the open air fell to ye ground, & some swooned away; & the children & some of ye common people imagin’d the moon was dropt from its orb, & fallen to ye earth.” A colonist in Connecticut, viewing a bright light in the sky, reportedly sacrificed his wife to “glorify God.”14 Such exclamations as “dreadful,” “remarkable,” and, most commonly, “strange” colored the testimony of eyewitnesses; even more when fantastic apparitions flooded the sky, whether images of coffins, crosses, or bloody swords. These, by all accounts, were horrifying to behold. On a summer night in Prague, residents saw a horrendous scene that included a marching column of headless men. Elsewhere, sightings occurred of shimmering clouds and streams of blood. Shortly after the Great Fire of 1666, terror seized the people of London upon viewing gleams of light one evening—“their apprehensions,” observed Samuel Pepys, being that “the rest of the city” was “to be burned, and the papists to cut our throats.” These marvels never grew commonplace. No less ghastly than wondrous, they constituted the most spectacular of night’s mysteries.15

  Georg Mack the Elder, Comet Seen at Nuremberg during November, 1577, seventeenth century.

  Most evenings, if seemingly serene, required vigilance against other celestial perils. Best-known of the many “planets” said to influence the rhythms of everyday life was earth’s closest neighbor, the moon. While a welcome source of light, the moon reputedly affected the internal workings of the human body much as it did the flow and timing of ocean tides and the course of the weather. France’s “first philosophe,” Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, was one of many learned authorities to perpetuate the medieval theory stressing the moon’s importance to physical health: “As it passes through its phases, it exerts a great influence for better or worse over the course of illnesses.” So potent was its power that the moon could alter the amount of moisture within a person’s body, including the brain, thereby driving some individuals insane or “moon-struck.” Observed the authors of Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme (1616), the moon was the “governesse of all such humidities as are in earthly bodies.” When the moon was full, women were thought at particular risk to become “lunatics.” Some victims died on the spot. In London’s St. Botoloph’s Parish between 1583 and 1599, as many as twenty-two deaths were attributed to planetary influence.16

  The moon also impregnated the night air with pestilential damps, widely deemed an even graver menace to human health. Darkness signified more than the temporary absence of light. According to popular cosmology, night actually fell each evening with the descent of noxious vapors from the sky. Night, wrote Richard Niccols in 1610, “did powre grim darknesse downe.” Kept at bay by daylight, descending mists reportedly contributed, no less than the sun’s departure, to the onset of darkness. In Herefordshire, nightfall was known as “drop night.” Some individuals described themselves “within night,” as if enveloped by a mammoth black cloud; in fact, criminal prosecutions in Scottish courts routinely referred to offenses having been committed “under cloud of night.”17

  Certainly, educated elites, well versed in the principles of Renaissance astronomy, by this time knew better. “Night,” wrote one person, “is nothing, but th’ absence of the sun; and darkness, but the privation of light.” In his essay “On Nightfall, What It Is, and Whether It Falls on Us,” the sixteenth-century French physician Laurent Joubert derided popular fears. Convinced of the moon’s ability to affect the brain, Joubert kept one foot squarely in the past. But he disputed the prevailing notion that “nightfall is a certain rheumatic quality in the evening and night air that falls from the sky.” “There is no evil quality in nightfall air,” he insisted, with night itself being “nothing more than the obscurity or darkness of the air as a result of the absence of the sun.”18 All the same, the traditional wisdom about nightfall persisted for many years. The night “demitting unwholesome vapours, upon all that rest beneath,” wrote the seventeenth-century moralist Owen Feltham.19

  Anon., The Influence of the Moon on the Heads of Women, seventeenth century.

  Fevers and colds were only a few of the contagious maladies ascribed to the raw fumes of night. By entering the skin’s pores, dank evening air was believed to imperil healthy organs. In Ricordi Overo Ammaestramenti (1554), the Italian priest Sabba da Castiglione warned of the “numerous illnesses that night air is wont to generate in human bodies.” Thomas Dekker wrote of “that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumaticke night throws abroad.” Men and women appeared more likely, after dusk, to fall sick and even die. Thus popular opinion in 1706 attributed the overnight deaths of five men in Hertfordshire to “some pestilential blast of the air.” Particularly dangerous were sultry climates, where malarial fevers, born by mosquitoes, were ascribed to night vapors. A visitor to southern Italy pronounced the air “particularly fatal at night.” But fear of noxious air pervaded most of Europe and, for that matter, colonial America well into the eighteenth century. The sun’s impact on human illness, conversely, was thought salutary, in large measure for dispersing harmful damps. “At her sight,” rhapsodized the Elizabethan Robert Greene of the sun, “the night’s foul vapours fled.”20

  Fears of contagion were intensified by the common perception that illnesses worsened at night. “All sickness,” wrote the Minorite friar Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “generally is stronger by night than by day.” Observed Thomas Amory, “There is never a night passes wherein sickness and death do not afflict and lay waste many.”21 In truth, symptoms associated with many illnesses almost certainly grew worse at nighttime, much as they do today. Deaths themselves, we know, are most likely to occur during the early morning hours, often due to circadian rhythms pecul
iar to such maladies as asthma, acute heart attacks, and strokes brought on by blood clots, accentuated perhaps by reduced blood flow to the brain owing to the position of the body while asleep. In general, we become most vulnerable when the body’s “circadian cycle is at its lowest ebb.” There is no reason to suspect that physiological cycles were significantly different four hundred years ago. A related problem is that immune systems weaken while we sleep, thereby releasing fewer “killer cells” to ward off infection.22 Premodern families typically blamed the dangerous properties of the atmosphere for contributing to respiratory tract illnesses. Two of the most common early modern diseases, influenza and pulmonary tuberculosis (consumption), worsened after dark, whether from constricted airways, heightened sensitivity to allergens, or added stress inflicted upon the lungs while bodies lay prone. Tragically, many persons might have been saved had their chambers been better ventilated at night, especially when occupied by multiple members of a family. A single window, perched slightly open, might have countered the deadly microorganisms spread by coughing and sneezing. The late eighteenth-century reformer Jonas Hanway wrote that the poor, in particular, when sick “imagine that warmth is so necessary to their cure.” As a consequence, “they frequently poison themselves with their own confined air.”23

  III

  The twilight is approaching,

  The night is approaching,

  Let us ask God for help

  and for protection

  From evil spirits,

  Who in darkness practise

  Their cunning most.

  ANDRZEJ TRZECIESKI,

  ca. 155824

  “Night,” cautioned a proverb, “belongs to the spirits.” The uninviting climes of evening—their horrible sights and foreign sounds, their noysome vapors—beckoned a host of demons and spirits, which the Stuart playwright John Fletcher called the “blacke spawne of darknesse.” The sky was their empire, the night air their earthly domain.25 None, of course, was more feared than Satan, the “Prince of Darkness,” whose misdeeds were legion, spread far and wide with the growth of printing by popular tracts and scholarly texts. “One hears daily,” a German clergyman wrote in 1532, “of the hideous deeds effected by the Devil. There many thousands are struck dead; there a ship goes down with many people beneath the sea; there a land perishes, a city, a village.” Because of the millenarian cast of Christian beliefs and prophecies of Armageddon, Satan, now more than ever, was thought on the attack. He was just as feared for scourging sinners as for robbing mortals of their souls—“God’s hangman,” in the words of James I (1566–1625). Naturally dark in color, Satan assumed a range of clever disguises, often adopting the likeness of a black dog or crow. Although rumored to appear at all hours, he was believed to favor the darkness of night. Some writers, like the Elizabethan Thomas Nashe and the Anglican bishop Jeremy Taylor, supposed that God had forbidden his presence during daylight. Of nighttime, Nashe wrote, “Our creator for our punishment hath allotted it him as his peculiar segniorie and kingdome.” “The night, the ways of hell, the time of Satan’s reign,” warned a German evening devotion.26