At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  There can be little doubt that alcohol, the lubricant of early modern life, often contributed to accidents. Available at all hours, during work as well as leisure, ale, beer, and wine flowed freely in drinking houses and private dwellings. Despite the expense, the daily consumption of ale was particularly high in England among the lower and middle classes, children as well as adults. Based upon a partial survey in 1577, there were an estimated 24,000 alehouses in the country, approximately one for every 140 inhabitants. Moreover, beer on both sides of the Atlantic became progressively cheaper and more powerful. A New England newspaper in 1736 printed a list of more than two hundred synonyms for drunkenness. Included were “Knows not the way home” and “He sees two moons” to describe people winding their way in the late evening.50

  Then as now, persons at that hour likely grew more susceptible to intoxication. From 10:00 P.M. until 8:00 A.M., according to clinical research, the stomach and liver typically metabolize alcohol less rapidly than at any other time, thereby keeping it longer within the body.51 Not surprisingly, with vision and alertness impaired, accidents followed close on the heels of nighttime revels. A man named Kerry, on his way to Manchester in 1635, paused at an alehouse to drink with friends. Finally refused pints by the hostess, he “swore he would drink 10 dozens that night” and left for another alehouse “far into the night,” only to fall into a pit and drown. Of the “squadrons of drunkards staggering” into Paris late at night from the suburbs, Louis-Sébastien Mercier observed, “In vain the semi-blind leads the blind, each step is perilous, the ditch waits for them both, or rather the wheels.” Besides broken necks, some victims perished from exposure after passing out. In Derby an inebriated laborer snored so loudly after falling by the side of a road that he was mistaken for a mad dog and shot.52

  Drownings of all sorts were unavoidable. Overturned boats and treacherous docks contributed their share of mishaps, by day as well as night. But often in the darkness persons miscalculated the turbulence of a swollen creek or failed to spy debris before it struck their craft. Sometimes, too, they simply found it impossible to follow a well-traveled road. The Duke of Northumberland, for example, nearly died when a servant ran his coach and horses down a steep bank into a nearby river. On a rainy evening in 1733, a young woman near Horsham, Pennsylvania, had an infant swept from her arms while crossing a swift stream on a log. By one report, the horse she was leading pulled mother and child into the water.53 Often, at night, horses were dangerous. Not only were riders tired and roads bad, but mounts spooked. Of a treacherous road along the Italian coast, Johann Wolfgang Goethe commented, “It has been the scene of many accidents, especially at night when the horses shy easily.”54

  No less hazardous than the countryside were the streets of preindustrial towns and cities. By 1700, urban areas with five thousand or more persons comprised some 15 percent of England’s population of five million inhabitants, a proportion slightly above the norm for Western Europe as a whole. The country’s metropolis, London, boasted a citizenry of 575,000, dwarfing provincial centers with between twelve and thirty thousand inhabitants apiece. By then, large-scale urbanization had already transformed much of continental Europe, from the Italian peninsula to southern Scandinavia.55 Most cities and towns resembled a rabbit warren of narrow streets and alleys—cramped, crooked, and dark. Upper façades, by projecting over streets below, obstructed light from both the sun and moon. Already by the 1600s, buildings in Amsterdam towered four stories high. Not until the eighteenth century would linear thoroughfares of ample breadth set the standard in urban design.56

  In the absence of adequate street lamps, darkness reestablished the supremacy of the natural world. On most streets before the late 1600s, the light from households and pedestrians’ lanterns afforded the sole sources of artificial illumination. Thus the Thames and the Seine claimed numerous lives, owing to falls from wharves and bridges, as did canals like the Leidsegracht in Amsterdam and Venice’s Grand Canal. Men and women dodged fast-moving coaches and carts, whose drivers, railed a visitor to Paris, often failed to shout a warning. Keeping to the wall, on the other hand, surprised pedestrians with open cellars and coal vaults, while shop signs menaced strollers from overhead. Only the flash from a sudden bolt of lightning, one “very dark” August night in 1693, kept the merchant Samuel Jeake from tumbling over a pile of wood in the middle of a road near his Sussex home. Dirt and pebble streets contained a labyrinth of ditches for channeling sewage and rainwater to “kennels” running down the center, or, with wider thoroughfares, gutters on either side. The Duchess of Orleans expressed amazement in 1720 that Paris did not have “entire rivers of piss” from the men who urinated in streets, already littered with dung from horses and livestock. Ditches, a foot or more deep, grew clogged with ashes, oyster shells, and animal carcasses. “All my concern is to keep clear of the kennel,” wrote a town resident of his midnight rambles. Poor drainage transformed some streets into swamps.57

  Only in the eighteenth century did most town fathers take responsibility for street paving, with mixed results. Stone pavements, favored for the protection they offered from dust and filth, became broken and uneven. In continual repair, they were patched, as one Londoner pointed out, by different workmen with different stones at different times. Most cities fared no better. “There is no flat pavement to walk on,” complained a person of Geneva in 1766. Worse, streets and footpaths furnished dumping grounds for rubbish through which pedestrians were forced to wade. A critic wrote of the “dismal accidents” caused by “rough, unequal or broken pavements; especially when these are covered with filth, as to make them scarcely visible to the most cautious passenger by day, and much less so by night.” The nuisance of garbage-strewn streets was pervasive in European towns, with the notable exception of those in the Netherlands, where the Dutch enjoyed a well-earned reputation for cleanliness. In the English town of Prescot, one in every four households in 1693 were fined for not removing piles of rubbish from the front of their homes.58

  Most notorious were the showers of urine and excrement that bombarded streets at night from open windows and doors. The emptying of “piss-pots” was a common hazard. Suffering from crowded populations and inadequate sewage facilities, many cities and towns, some well into the 1700s, appear to have tolerated the practice, at least tacitly. A French saying declared, “It stains like the dirt of Paris”; and of Madrid, a resident remarked in the seventeenth century, “It has been calculated that the streets are perfumed every day with more than 10,000 turds.” Lisbon, Florence, and Venice enjoyed ill reputations, but the residents of Edinburgh achieved the greatest infamy for converting their streets into sewers. Daniel Defoe defended their practice by noting the city’s tall buildings and congested citizenry, who were only permitted to empty their waste after 10:00 P.M., upon the sound of a drum, and only once they had shouted a warning of “Gardy-loo!” (“Mind the water!”) to passersby. In Marseilles, residents were required to give three warnings, though in nearby Avignon the onus was heaped upon pedestrians, “so that,” a visitor grumbled, “you are obliged to cry Gare, Gare [Attention, Attention], when you walk the streets at night.”59

  In the evening, not even one’s home guaranteed safety from accidents. In the absence of adequate light, open doors, stairwells, and hearths became traps for the unwary, especially if prone to drink. In 1675 a Lancashire physician, being “full of drink,” was badly burned after falling backwards into a fireplace, a common mishap, to gauge from contemporary reports. After a similar instance in Boston, Massachusetts, Reverend Samuel Sewall remarked of the victim, “His face so burnt away, that what remain’d resembled a fire-brand”; while a Coventry woman, “her veins” filled “with pure spirits,” became as flammable “as a lamp” after falling from her bed onto a candle. Others tumbled down steps, badly bruising themselves if not breaking their backs. Pepys’s new maid Luce, not yet familiar with the household, nearly cracked her skull one night falling down a flight of stairs. Ya
rds contained not only fences and gates to avoid in the dark but also ponds and open pits. Many people fell into wells, often left unguarded with no wall or railing. If deep enough, it made little difference whether dry. On a winter night in 1725, a drunken man stumbled into a London well, only to die from his injuries after a neighbor ignored his cries for help, fearing instead a demon. As reflected in coroners’ reports, women and servants were particularly vulnerable to falls at night when fetching water. More unusual was the sad fate in 1649 of a five-year-old girl in New England. With her parents visiting a neighbor one evening, she arose from her bed only to plummet through an opening into the cellar. There, she rolled into an interior well and drowned. Her father, having broken the Sabbath the day before, attributed the death to the righteous hand of God.60

  “The night is no man’s friend,” warned a well-known adage. At least in England, ordinary folk each evening no longer worried about one traditional nemesis, as their ancestors often had. For all of night’s hazards, wild animals, except for an occasional fox, no longer bedeviled rural households and their livestock. What bears and wolves once roamed the countryside had been hunted down by the late Middle Ages and destroyed. In contrast, much of continental Europe, while increasingly agricultural, still contained expanses of wilderness, such as the Ardennes Forest, inhabited by a variety of wild predators, as did, of course, the eastern seaboard of North America, where wolves for English colonists caused widespread concern. Cotton Mather warned of “the evening wolves, the rabid and howling wolves of the wilderness.” Residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts, awoke one morning in 1691 to discover the carcasses of more than fifty sheep, with the blood drained from their throats.61

  William Hogarth, Night (pl. 4 of The Four Times of the Day), 1738. A pair of besotted pedestrians, armed with a sword and cane, brave a London lane amid an overturned coach and a shower of human waste. Illuminated windows and a bonfire mark the anniversary of the restoration of Charles II. In the distance, a larger fire burns out of control. The cast of characters includes a crouching “linkboy” and several “bulkers,” fast asleep beneath the shop of a barber. From within the coach, a passenger fires his pistol.

  Yet even the tame English countryside still housed nocturnal pests. Owls, bats, and toads all bred varying degrees of apprehension and were linked, inevitably, with Satan. But, as most people understood, the direct menace these vermin posed paled in comparison to that of other nocturnal predators, including not just vicious beasts but also man himself, who on most nights represented the greatest threat of all to life and limb. Preindustrial England might have been devoid of wolves, but as a proverb declared, “One man is oftentimes a wolf to another.” Of that breed, there was no dearth.62

  CHAPTER TWO

  MORTAL PERILS:

  PLUNDER, VIOLENCE,

  AND FIRE

  I

  The good people love the day and the bad the night.

  FRENCH ADAGE1

  “ONE CAN BEWARE of the devil but not of man,” declared the Danish writer Ludvig Baron Holberg. Homo Homini Demon, as an Englishman in 1675 defined mankind. As if the nocturnal landscape was not already perilous enough, still greater suffering issued from mortal hands. Neither evil spirits nor natural misfortune gave rise to the chronic fear bred by human malevolence. Thomas Hobbes, who dreaded lying alone at night, claimed not to be “afrayd of sprights, but afrayd of being knockt on the head for five or ten pounds.”2 It was at night, according to common thought, that crime posed the greatest menace. After sunset, rogues and miscreants, like wild beasts, emerged from their lairs seeking fresh quarry. Gatos de noche (cats out of the night) was a Spanish colloquialism for thieves. “With fox and wolfe, by night doe prey,” wrote Samuel Rowlands of malefactors in 1620. Noted another, “Night affords the most convenient shade for works of darkness,” a term employed, literally as well as metaphorically, to describe criminal acts.3

  In England, as early as the reign of Edward I (1239–1307), the Statute of Winchester in 1285 authorized the arrest at night of suspicious persons. In Northamptonshire, John Key of Brigstock, for example, was charged with “wandering at night through the streets and common areas, to the harm of all his neighbors and a dangerous example to others.” Noctivagator, a Latin term coined for such villains during the Middle Ages, gave way by 1500 to “nightwalker” in England, where for centuries the expression continued to enjoy wide currency. Rôdeurs de nuit, they were called in Paris, and andatores di notte in Italy. A London author in 1659 wrote of nightwalkers as “idle fellows who use to sleep by day and walk abroad by night and are suspected to live by dishonest courses.”4

  By then, no longer was it axiomatic that only rogues at night roamed the countryside, and, at least in the environs of London, the appellation of “nightwalker” fell increasingly to describing prostitutes, as it would elsewhere in time. Still, “lying-out” overnight, as opposed to enjoying a few late hours of merriment, continued to invite condemnation. The small hours past midnight, attested a watchman in 1748, were the “time for all honest people to be in bed.” “In my early part of life,” a later writer remarked, “when it was said of any man, he keeps BAD HOURS, it was in effect stamping on him a mark of disgrace.” Moreover, the public’s belief that darkness afforded fertile fields for criminals of all stripes remained deep-seated. “Our time is in the deep, and silent night,” wrote John Crowne in 1681—“The time when cities oft are set on fire; / When robberies and murders are committed.”5 In fact, crimes only seemed to multiply in response to the rising numbers of urban pedestrians at night, who were plentiful enough to make tempting targets though not so numerous to deter armed brigands. Most nights, malefactors enjoyed opportunities for illicit gain at minimal risk.

  II

  The first person I meet shall stand or die, or deliver, for it is now dark nights, and I am resolved to make use of that advantage.

  PHILIP THOMAS, 17276

  Crime in early modern times varied greatly in type, frequency, and location. A single shire, province, or region could experience levels of lawlessness markedly divergent from those of its neighbors, depending upon differences in urban growth, cultural norms, and social stratification. Within heterogeneous jurisdictions like the county of Surrey, bordering London, the incidence of crime sometimes varied enormously between rural and urban locales, just as rates fluctuated from one generation to the next. Two conclusions, nonetheless, are inescapable. Fueled by chronic poverty and social dislocation, crime posed a worrisome concern in most of the Western world, with the exception of America’s fledgling provinces, where for much of the colonial era travelers marveled at the safety of personal property. In Europe, infractions typically included not only such property offenses as shoplifting and pickpocketing but also assaults, homicides, and other acts of violence.7 Moreover, as with many perils, crime appeared to increase in magnitude and ferocity during the hours of darkness. For the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Kyd, night was the “coverer of accursed crimes.” “In the night,” affirmed Isaac Watts, “we are exposed here on earth to the violence and plunder of wicked men, whether we are abroad or at home.”8

  These fears, though prone to hyperbole, were by no means unfounded. To be sure, most nocturnal crime was relatively minor, consisting of nonviolent thefts. Such was the reputed fondness of thieves for darkness that a dictionary in 1585 defined them as felons “that sleepeth by daye” that they “may steale by night.” Pilfering from lumberyards and docks were common offenses in urban areas. All types of property, in the eyes of thieves, were fair game. At London’s chief criminal court, the Old Bailey, Francis Marlborough faced prosecution for ripping lead from the roofs of dwellings in the early morning. Meanwhile, in the countryside, with the growing impoverishment of England’s rural population by the late sixteenth century, larcenies included poaching, robbing orchards, and filching firewood. In December 1681, the Yorkshire nonconformist Oliver Heywood observed in his diary, “Multitudes com
e a begging, theres also much stealing,” including his own loss of three hens one evening, followed two nights later by the theft of money and a “fat goose” from two neighboring homes. In the eighteenth century, nearly three-quarters of thefts in rural Somerset occurred after dark, as did 60 percent in the Libournais region of France.9