At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  III

  In the night, every cat is a leopard.

  ITALIAN PROVERB33

  In preindustrial societies, violence left few realms of daily life unscathed. Wives, children, and servants were flogged, bears baited, cats massacred, and dogs hanged like thieves. Swordsmen dueled, peasants brawled, and witches burned. Quarrels rose swiftly to the surface. “Their anger seems to overpower their utterance, and can vent only by coming to blows,” a traveler observed of the English. Short tempers and long draughts made for a fiery mix, especially when stoked by the monotony and despair of unremitting poverty. The incidence of murder during the early modern era was anywhere from five to ten times higher than the rate of homicides in England today. Even recent murder rates in the United States fall dramatically below those for European communities during the sixteenth century. While no social rank was spared, the lower orders bore the brunt of brutality, often from the blows of kith and kin. “Animals who live on the same feed,” sneered a Venetian magistrate, “naturally detest each other.”34

  Night witnessed the worst bloodletting. All hours of the day occasioned outbursts of violence, but the threat of physical harm increased markedly after dark—not only from armed robbers but, more often, from street fracases and personal assaults. An Italian proverb warned, “Who goes out at night looks for a beating.” Personal animosities repressed during the day were more likely to erupt in the evening. Thus, in 1497, a foreign visitor, describing the “uncontrolled hatred” of Londoners, remarked, “They look askance at us by day, and at night they sometimes drives us off with kicks and blows of the truncheon.” In sixteenth-century Douai, three in four homicides happened between dusk and midnight, a ratio exceeded slightly in Artois for the period from 1386 to 1660. During the same hours, two in three murders occurred in seventeenth-century Castille.35

  Contemporary accounts, penned by fearful travelers, amplify the hard statistics culled from coroners’ reports and court records. Evening homicides were thought commonplace. Because of a paucity of firearms, assailants delivered their blows at close quarters. All manner of weapons, including crossbows and pikes, were reputedly used in southern Germany, where murders were judged “numerous” in the early sixteenth century by Antonio De Beatis. Daggers and stilettos in Italy were the order of the night and in Spain and Portugal swords and knives. “As soon as night falls, you cannot go out without a buckler and a coat of mail,” a visitor to Valencia declared in 1603; whereas Fynes Moryson discovered, “In all partes of Italy it is unsafe to walke the streetes by night.” Or travel by water. On a night in Venice, a young English lady suddenly heard a scream followed by a “curse, a splash and a gurgle,” as a body was dumped from a gondola into the Grand Canal. “Such midnight assassinations,” her escort explained, “are not uncommon here.” First light in Denmark revealed corpses floating in rivers and canals from the night before, just as bloated bodies littered the Tagus and the Seine. Parisian officials strung nets across the water just to retrieve corpses. According to the glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra, one gang of thieves struck its victims over the head with eelskins filled with lead and then threw “them into the river by night.” In Moscow, so numerous were street murders that authorities dragged corpses each morning to the Zemskii Dvor for families to claim. In London, where murders were less frequent than in most metropolises, Samuel Johnson warned in 1739, “Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.” “The sons of violence,” echoed the Northampton rector James Hervey, “make choice of this season, to perpetrate the most outrageous acts of wrong and robbery.”36

  Some murders, usually premeditated, arose from jealously, revenge, or just the need to repair male honor. In 1494, the father of a young Florentine stabbed in the face could only conclude that the attack had been a mistake—“he has never offended anyone or suspected anyone of having a grudge against him.” On moonless nights in many Italian cities, young men called “Bravos” prowled as paid assassins. Of a conspiracy that went awry, a visitor to Italy recounted:

  A fellow having a quarrell with his brother in law for some words said to his sister, hired a Bravo to kill him, who told him he must be sure not to miss him and loaded a blunder buss soe high with powder and ball that as he was fireing it at him, it did noe harm to the man but burst and struck the Bravo such a stroke on the shoulder that it knocked him down. Upon which the man that had soe narrowly escaped death pulled out his stilleto and stuck the Bravo to the heart.37

  Personal vendettas were not as common in England and colonial America, where the male cult of personal honor was less entrenched. Moreover, social competition within the upper ranks found other outlets, such as gambling, horseracing, and hunting. When attacks did occur, victims might be bruised and battered, but lives were normally spared. At Oxford, for example, several Fellows of New College in 1692, believing that Anthony Wood had “abused their relations,” vowed “they would beat” him when “dark nights” arrived. In London, according to John Gay, “No Spanish jealousies thy lanes infest, nor Roman vengeance stabs th’ unwary breast.”38

  More prevalent, everywhere at night, were acts of impulsive violence, unplanned and sudden, due to the insecurity bred by darkness. Not only was the likelihood of danger greater, but natural defenses were weaker, in marked contrast to daily life. By the sixteenth century, there arose within most social ranks a protocol of public decorum, first discernible among the nobility toward the end of the Middle Ages. Courtiers took the place of knights, satin and silk replaced chain mail. The growing power of nation states, marked by their monopolization of military force, only broadened the scope of this transformation. Well-understood rules of civility governed social exchanges among friends and strangers. Hence, it was thought inappropriate, if walking on a street, to ask questions of a stranger or to touch, much less jostle, other pedestrians. Above all, persons of quality required respect, lest their dignity be affronted. Besides curtsying or doffing one’s hat, commoners kept their distance along with their place. Deference demanded “giving the wall” by walking next to the street, where, naturally, lay the greatest danger of stepping in dung or being struck by a coach. Declared The Rules of Civility, published in 1685, “If occasion offers to walk with a nobleman in the street, we must give him the wall and remember not to keep up directly by his side, but a little behind.”39

  Yet at night the boundaries of proper conduct grew dangerously blurred. “All shapes, all colours, are alike in night,” observed the early seventeenth-century writer Sir Thomas Overbury. In the absence of clear frontiers, opportunities for altercations expanded, and petty affronts gave way to violence. Not only was offense more easily given, but it was also more easily taken. Being bumped or shoved in a narrow alley unleashed, at a minimum, a volley of sharp words. “In Fleetstreet, received a great jostle from a man that had a mind to take the wall,” fumed Pepys in his diary. Worse, innocent pedestrians risked being stabbed or clubbed amid the confusion. Clashes of all sorts became likely when tempers were shortest, fears greatest, and eyesight weakest. Thus, in Siegsdorf, a Bavarian market town, in 1616, a servant named Wolf crossed paths with another servant, Adam, whom he stabbed in the armpit “without provocation.” The two men, reported the court record, had not known one another. On a Sunday evening in London, two pedestrians, a journeyman and a merchant, jostled one another in the dark near St. Paul’s churchyard. They quarrelled and raised their canes; then one struck the other with his sword, killing him instantly. Even in the sparsely populated countryside, confusion could end in violence. In 1666 near the northern town of Birdsall, Edward Ruddocke, walking through a wood one night, shot at several young men trying to find a Maypole, probably suspecting poachers or thieves. Fatally wounding one, Ruddocke shouted, “Ho rogues! Ho rogues! Have we mett with you. Ile make rogues on you. It’s more fitt you were in your bedds then here at this tyme of night.”40

  Very likely, violent deeds were committed more easil
y against an anonymous foe, whose humanity, let alone identity, was at best obscured. “Faceless people are more likely to harm each other,” psychological research has shown.41 Further, the vicissitudes of human physiology must have soured late-night tempers. Along with losses in alertness and motor skills, persons suffered heightened feelings of irritability from fatigue. From 9:00 P.M. to midnight, humans typically experience the greatest impulse to sleep; and often during that time, moods grow increasingly quarrelsome. Of the typical gallant, Francis Lenton wrote in 1631, “Cursing, swearing, and quarrellings are his nocturnall attendants, which arise from choller, and the losse of coyne, mixed with want of sleepe.” Especially when compounded by tension and anxiety, physical exhaustion exacerbated social interactions.42

  As did alcohol, which figured as prominently in preindustrial violence as it did in nocturnal accidents. Drink made many individuals, including close friends, all the more belligerent. In early seventeenth-century Stockholm, approximately 60 percent of all homicides were committed under the influence of alcohol. “In drunkenness and late hours are bred quarrels,” warned the Domostroi, a sixteenth-century guide for Russian households.43 Squabbles typically broke out on the premises of drinking houses, where large numbers of males gathered at the close of the workday, whether in rural hamlets or cities and towns. During the seventeenth century, Amsterdam alone contained more than five hundred alehouses. A keeper in West Donyland was faulted in 1602 for “such disorder in the nights that there is like to be manslaughter in their company.” The Danish theologian Peder Palladius urged individuals to drink at home to prevent “anyone from killing you in a beer house and you from killing anyone else.” Indeed, in Artois, over one-half of all violent acts took place within cabarets.44

  In the overwhelmingly male atmosphere of drinking houses, violence could follow quickly on the heels of political disputes, ill-chosen words, or cheating at cards. Access to a hearth precipitated a brawl in a South Gosford alehouse. “Booger your eyes, give us one side of the fire,” a newcomer demanded of other patrons. At an Amsterdam establishment, a fatal dispute occurred among four drunken friends over which tavern to visit next. In addition, a host of conventions governed the consumption of drink; to ignore any of them invited derision and contempt. But plainly the intoxicating effects of alcohol, by transforming petty disputes into major altercations, constituted the principal catalyst in this already combustible atmosphere. As a “country clergyman” described:

  Men inflamed with strong drink are not in a capacity to weigh well what they say, or to bear patiently what is said to them. Arguments arise, passion on both sides is stirred up, the whole soul is in commotion, abusive language ensues, oaths and curses are reciprocally hurled at each other, defiance and menaces irritate still farther, a blow takes place, with all the fury of the wildest animal it is returned; and one of the party drops under the hand (not of an enemy but) of a companion, a near neighbour, friend, perhaps a relative.45

  No one was safe in such fights, neither tavern-keepers nor bystanders. Some combatants, of course, wisely resorted to their heels rather than their fists. Then, also, staves and blades usually took the place of pistols. If calmed by an anxious keeper, frays might be halted, at least until smoldering resentments flared anew outdoors. Following a tavern brawl in Alt-Scheitnig, Johnann Dietz and his companions were beset in the dark by laborers with swords and cudgels. “No one knew pot from kettle,” as each struggled in the blackness “to look after his own skin.” Prospects for violence remained alive long into the evening. Drunkards on their way home might cross paths or, worse, cross swords with strangers on guard for trouble. After eluding rogues and robbers, innocent pedestrians could suddenly fall victim to random violence, arising not from greed or revenge but from the delirium of intoxication. Wrote Samuel Johnson, “Some frolick drunkard, reeling from a feast, / Provokes a broil, and stabs you for a jest.”46

  IV

  Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, that these houses may not turn to toast.

  INSCRIPTION ON A RESIDENCE IN ODENSE, DENMARK47

  Fire, a persistent threat after dark, terrified preindustrial populations even more than crime and violence. Not only were precautions weaker at night, but the need for heat and light was greater. A source of anxiety since time immemorial, the peril of fire—“that most terrible and ruthless tyrant”—acquired new urgency in tightly packed urban areas, where for cheapness and ease wood and thatch still dominated new construction, especially in northern and central Europe. Only the plague, which offered greater warning, instilled as much fear. As late as 1769, “Palladio,” writing in the Middlesex Journal, complained, “The English dwell and sleep, as it were, surrounded with their funeral piles.” Congested rows of homes and shops created a maze of narrow lanes and winding alleys highly vulnerable to conflagrations. Iago in Othello (ca. 1604) speaks of fires “spied in populous citties” by night, and Sir William Davenant in 1636 wrote of the horrible dangers “which mid-night fires beget, in citties overgrowne.”48

  A strong breeze could make matters worse. During a fire in 1652 that consumed much of Glasgow, the wind changed direction five or six times. “The fire on the one syde of the street fyred the other syde,” reported the minister of New Kilpatrick parish. A visitor to Moscow found, “Not a month, nor even a week, goes by without some homes—or if the wind is strong, whole streets—going up in smoke.” The sacred suffered with the profane, the rich with the poor. Innocent lives might be lost to flames normally reserved by towns for heretics and witches. Fire, unlike other predators, noted the writer Nicolas de Lamare, “devours all and respects neither churches nor royal palaces.” Within minutes, one’s home and property, the labor of a lifetime, could be destroyed, as could future opportunities for subsistence.49 Among other ill consequences was the damaging impact large fires had on local economies. Beset by as many as four fires from 1594 to 1641, Stratford-upon-Avon was already described in 1614 as “an ancient but a very poore market towne.”50

  Little wonder that just the alarm of fire at night could strike a person dead with fright, or that a mob in 1680, upon learning that a woman had threatened to burn the town of Wakefield, carried her off to a dung heap, where she lay all night after first being whipped. A worse fate befell a Danish boatman and his wife, upon trying to set the town of Randers ablaze. After being dragged through every street and repeatedly “pinched” with “glowing tongs,” they were burned alive.51

  Despite the introduction of fire engines in cities by the mid-seventeenth century, most firefighting tools were primitive, limited largely to leather buckets, ladders, and “great hooks” to tear down timbers and thatch before sparks could spread. Often, barely a year passed before some town or city in England experienced disaster. From 1500 to 1800, at least 421 fires in provincial towns consumed ten or more houses apiece, with as many as 46 fires during that period destroying one hundred or more houses each. “In some great town a fire breaks out by night, /” wrote Sir Richard Blackmore in 1695, “And fills with crackling flames, and dismal light, / With sparks, and pitchy smoak th’ astonish’d sky.”52 Of course, London’s Great Fire, originating in a bakehouse in the early morning hours of September 2, 1666, still ranks among the worst in human history. At first, the flames appeared manageable, prompting the Lord Mayor to opine that “a woman might piss it out.” But fanned by an east wind, the fire consumed four-fifths of the city over the course of four days. Reduced to ashes were Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, 87 churches, more than 13,000 houses, and such public buildings as the Guildhall, Custom House, and the Royal Exchange. The diarist John Evelyn wrote, “The stones of Paules flew like grenados, the lead mealting downe the streetes in a streame, & the very pavements of them glowing with fiery rednesse, so as nor horse nor man was able to tread on them.” In its wake, the city would endure forty more serious fires in the years before 1800.53

  No other metropolis suffered London’s ordeal, but fires spread terror from Amsterdam to Moscow
, where an early morning blaze in 1737 took several thousand lives. Few cities escaped at least one massive disaster. Paris was unusually fortunate, with a writer in the eighteenth century estimating that at least fifty houses ordinarily burned in London for every five lost in the French capital. But Toulouse was all but consumed in 1463, as was Bourges in 1487, and practically a quarter of Troyes in 1534. The better part of Rennes was destroyed in 1720 during a conflagration that raged for seven days.54 In colonial America, as cities grew, so did fire’s threat. Boston lost 150 buildings in 1679 after a smaller blaze just three years before. Major fires again broke out in Boston in 1711 and in 1760 when flames devoured nearly 400 homes and commercial buildings—the “most amazing fire ever known in this age in this part of the world,” recorded a diarist. While New York and Philadelphia each suffered minor calamities, a fire gutted much of Charleston in 1740.55

  Jan Beerstraten, The Great Fire in the Old Town Hall, Amsterdam, 1652, seventeenth century.

  Rural localities experienced less crowding, but fire still posed a serious menace. Most hamlets, however ordered or haphazard, were sufficiently compact for flames to spread among houses, barns, and other buildings; open fields, both private and common lands, lay outside the village center. Once ignited, a thatch roof, made from reeds or straw, was nearly impossible to save, as is evident from the dramatic paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Egbert van der Poel. In Denmark, noted Ludvig Baron Holberg, “Villages were laid out with the houses so close together that, when one house burned down, the entire village had to follow suit.” Crops, livestock, and stables strewn with straw all stood at risk, particularly when seasons remained dry. One of the most horrific rural disasters occurred on a night in 1727 in the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Burwell. A barn caught fire with more than 70 persons trapped inside watching a puppet show. Because the doors had been bolted, nearly everyone perished. So indistinguishable were the remains that they were interred in a common grave denoted by a tombstone still standing in the Burwell churchyard.56