At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  The prevalence of such extravagant exhibitions should not be overstated. Their splendor, after all, partially derived from their infrequency. Like Protestant faiths, the Catholic Church still viewed darkness, first and foremost, as a sacred time of solitude, prayer, and rest. When cardinals, upon the death of Paul III (1468–1549), approached Cardinal Pool at night to “adore” him as the new pope, he reportedly admonished them that “God lov’d light.” Turning them away, he urged that they wait until morning (they elected Julius III [1487–1555] instead). More common at night were less spectacular assertions of Catholic hegemony. In many parts of Europe, starting in the late Middle Ages, communities illuminated Madonnas next to streets and highways. Set in the walls of homes and churches, illuminated paintings of the Virgin Mary and other sacred images afforded the principal candlelight on urban streets. So rife were shrines on roads in the Low Countries, reported a contemporary, that “it is easier to find a god than a man.” In Spain, small chapels aglow with the light of a single candle dotted the countryside. Officials hoped that shrines, besides inspiring reverence, would inhibit blasphemous acts among passersby. The pious also valued them for warding off evil spirits. As late as the 1700s, Roman authorities, bent on preserving the darkness of night, still opposed alternate means of artificial illumination as a sacrilege against the divine order. “All Rome would be in utter darkness,” noted a visitor, “were it not for the candles which the devotion of individuals sometimes place before certain statues of the virgin.” Nearly as ill lit was Venice. Only in Naples, during the eighteenth century, did the Church sanction a more pragmatic stance. There, a popular Dominican known as Father Rocco encouraged the erection of Madonnas along common thoroughfares, with lamp oil supplied by his large following. “He fixes [them] up in the most convenient places, and thus turns their devotion to public account,” an observer remarked.26

  Gabriel Bella, The Good Friday Procession in Illuminated Saint Mark’s Square, eighteenth century.

  By that time, authorities elsewhere in Europe, in a growing number of cities and towns, had embraced the need for improved lighting. During the second half of the 1600s, large urban areas began taking steps to enhance lighting on major streets at public expense. The underlying reasons for this shift in official attitudes are not hard to find. Technological innovations were influential, particularly street lamps newly fashioned by Edmund Heming in London and Jan van der Heyden in Amsterdam, both of which contained reflectors to magnify light. Such was the popularity of van der Heyden’s oil lamps that their design was adopted in cities across Europe, including Cologne, Leipzig, and Berlin. As important as technology was the emergence of the early modern state, which accelerated the growth of government regulation. Commercialization and urban growth also played critical roles, as did the rising wealth of propertied households, coupled with expanding opportunities for entertainment, including drinking houses, gaming, and organized prostitution. Curfew restrictions, where they remained, were increasingly ignored—“not so much abolished as overwhelmed,” John Beattie has written of London. All of these transformations, converging in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, rendered less tolerable the “many mischiefs and inconveniences in the streets in the dark nights” about which authorities increasingly complained. “Most theft,” warned a Paris official in 1667, “has been done as a result of the darkness in districts and streets where there are no lanterns.” The following year, a proposal to light Amsterdam’s streets cited the perils of crime, fire, and accidental drownings.27

  Whereas not one leading European city before 1650 employed some form of public lighting, increasing numbers of municipalities did by 1700, beginning with Paris (1667), Amsterdam (1669), Berlin (1682), London (1683), and Vienna (1688). National capitals, in particular, felt some urgency not to be outdone by rival metropolises. Funded by tax revenues, street lights included both oil lamps and, as in prior years, lanterns lit by candles. In Paris, hundreds of lanterns were hung from ropes strung high across major streets at approximate intervals of sixty feet. “Archimedes himself, if he were still alive, could not add anything more agreeable or useful,” a Sicilian visitor rhapsodized. The original impetus came from the city’s first lieutenant general of police, Nicholas de La Reynie, who successfully touted the project’s merits to Louis XIV. By century’s end, the annual expense of maintaining more than six thousand lanterns, according to an English estimate, totaled nearly fifty thousand pounds sterling. In addition to lamplighters’ wages, heavy costs arose from employing metalworkers, ropemakers, glassmakers, and tallow chandlers. A traveler to Paris, noting that the lanterns stayed lit at all hours of the evening, thought the expense warranted. Less charitable was his opinion of London officials, who restricted use of the city’s new oil lamps to the darkest winter nights—“as though,” on other evenings, “the moon was certain to shine and light the streets.” Even so, in the half-century after their installation in London, more than fifteen provincial towns followed suit, from Coventry and York in 1687 to Birmingham and Sheffield in 1735.28

  Yet it is important to keep these improvements in perspective. On most nights, cities and towns remained predominantly dark. In spite of public funding, urban lighting early in the eighteenth century was poor. With the exception of major thoroughfares, most streets stayed unlit. Rare were those neighborhoods that enjoyed adequate illumination by which one pedestrian could easily identify another. And, as in London, streets in a majority of cities and towns were illuminated just on the darkest nights of winter, and then only until midnight. Some major cities, such as Stockholm, Lisbon, and Florence, continued to make no provisions for public lighting. Lamps in Dublin, as late as 1783, were spaced one hundred yards apart—just enough, complained a visitor, to show the “danger of falling into a cellar.”29 Even in Paris, where lanterns burned all night, myriad problems arose, from a shortage of lighters to an epidemic of vandalism and theft. Lantern lighters themselves pilfered candles. Critics groused about not only the high cost but also the poor quality of light, especially for pedestrians shunted to the sides of streets. Claiming that lighting in Paris and other French cities was designed for the “interests of the higher classes” in coaches, a traveler testified, “The pedestrian must stumble on his way as he can, through darkness and dirt, by the sides of the road or street.” Moreover, lanterns in Paris burned just during the winter months, as had lanterns in European cities ever since the late Middle Ages. Not surprisingly, as late as 1775 a visitor to Paris noted, “This town is large, stinking, & ill lighted.” Louis Sébastien Mercier thought the city’s lanterns valuable only for “making darkness visible.”30

  Old habits of mind persisted. Within the conclaves of church and state, there lingered the conviction that darkness represented an inviolable period of time, an interval as sacred as it was dangerous. Manifested in its purest form in Rome, this mentality resonated among Protestant as well as Catholic functionaries. Notwithstanding its embrace of public lighting, the Leipzig city council in 1702 instructed residents to “keep their own [family] at home in the evening.” Of the mindset in Geneva, Rousseau wrote, “God does not agree with the use of lanterns.” Except for urgent circumstances or special ceremonies, reputable citizens, in theory, were expected to confine themselves to home, devoting evening hours to prayer and rest. Equally, there would be less chance of a fire being ignited by some besotted pedestrian carrying a lit torch. Illuminated streets were designed to aid people on essential errands, not mischievous souls bent on revelry. “We ought not to turn day into night, nor night into day,” wrote a London pastor in 1662, “without some very special and urgent occasion.” Otherwise, from the vantage of established authorities, the chief contribution of artificial lighting lay in assisting members of the nightwatch, lone guardians of law and order in communities large and small.31 The protection of life and property rested squarely on their shoulders, however faint their silhouettes invariably appeared amid the shadows.

  II

/>   I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen, bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants.

  TOBIAS SMOLLETT, 177132

  In all likelihood, the nightwatch, not prostitution, is the world’s most ancient profession, originating as soon as men and women first feared the darkness. In early cultures, sentries remained vigilant at all hours, as soldiers on foot and horse patrolled urban streets. But it was at nighttime that cities and towns most relied upon watchmen’s eyes and ears. “Rulers that are watchful by night in cities,” observed Plato, “are a terror to evil-doers, be they citizens or enemies.” Of the nightwatch, the Roman prefect Cassiodorous wrote in the fifth century, “You will be the security of those who are sleeping, the protection of houses, guardian of gates, an unseen examiner and a silent judge.”33 Medieval communities, too, employed guardians of the peace. As early as 595, the Frankish king Chlotar II (584–628) required towns to post gardes de nuit. Centuries later, guilds occasionally assumed this responsibility. By 1150, merchants and artisans supplied men each night to keep watch in Paris. Within England, the Statute of Winchester in 1285 created the framework for regular watches in every city, town, and borough. The law decreed that officers patrol at night around the clock. Watchmen had the power to arrest suspicious wayfarers and, if necessary, to raise the community by “hue and cry.”34

  The Tuscan city of Siena, by the early 1300s, also maintained a small force, but not until the sixteenth century did many European cities do so, relying instead upon sentries and fixed barriers. The Famile de Guet, a citizens’ guard, emerged during these years in France, where it remained an urban institution throughout the years of the ancien régime. Across Switzerland, Moryson discovered “armed citizens keepinge the watch in divers streetes.” Typical, perhaps, of large towns and cities in England, York in the mid-1500s relied upon a force of six men for each of its wards, with patrols scheduled from 8:00 P.M. until 5:00 A.M. Of London, Thomas Platter reported, “Since the city is very large, open, and populous, watch is kept every night in the streets.”35 In colonial America, the largest towns, from Boston to Charleston, instituted watches during the first decades of settlement. The earliest was Boston’s, created in 1636 to patrol after sunset during summer months, but New York’s was the most imposing. By the mid-1680s, it numbered forty men, divided into companies of eight apiece, each assigned to patrol one of New York’s five wards.36

  Not all communities relied upon watchmen. In Berlin, regular patrols did not commence until the seventeenth century. Dublin waited until 1677 to employ a guard, modeled after the Statute of Winchester’s blueprint. Frankfurt offered private citizens cash bounties to apprehend criminals.37 Many small localities, with at most a constable or two, refrained from utilizing watchmen unless roused by a sudden crisis. In the Essex village of Maldon, only a spate of burglaries during the eighteenth century persuaded residents to appoint a modest force of three men. Conversely, urban sites of strategic importance instituted stronger defenses. Whereas Venice by the fifteenth century used professional guards known as sbirri to protect its streets, the city’s famed Arsenal, with its vital shipbuilding industry, formed companies of men from its own workforce. The largest of these, the guardiani di notte, patrolled the shipyards regularly. More unusual was the pack of mastiffs set loose each evening within the walls of Saint-Malo, a garrison town on the northern coast of France with valuable quantities of naval stores. The lineage of this practice dated to the thirteenth century, when the Dominican monk Albertus Magnus commented that the dogs “patrolled well and trustily.” In the early 1600s, a passing observer recorded,

  In the dusk of the evening a bell is rung to warn all that are without the walls to retire into the town: then ye gates are shut, and eight or ten couple of hungry mastiffs turn’d out to range about the town all night, to secure their naval stores etc. from being stollen: and some that have had the misfortune to be drunk, & lie abroad have been found next morning as Jezabel was at Jesreel.38

  Notwithstanding these anomalies, watchmen became a common feature of the urban nightscape. Variations existed in their numbers, appearance, and cost, but their essential duties almost everywhere were the same. Ordinarily, members patrolled circuits on foot—alone or in pairs—within the borders of a single ward or parish, though some forces, like the Guet in Paris, also operated on horseback. Most hours of the night, all nights of the year. “This,” asserted a writer in 1719, “is practis’d, in all countries, in well-governed cities.” Within England, each set of watchmen answered to a constable at a local watch-house. London introduced these structures by the 1640s. Each watch-house served as a guard room in which to assemble by a warm hearth before and after one’s shift.39 Most officers were lightly armed, limited to a lantern and either a staff or a watch-bill, which featured a concave blade at the end of a pole. In Norway and Denmark, watchmen equipped themselves with a spiked mace called a morgenstern (morning-star). Officers in Stockholm wielded a staff with a set of pincers to seize ruffians by the neck or leg. Along with a hand-rattle for sounding alarms, members of the Amsterdam “rattle-watch” each bore a pike or halberd. Only in American towns, near the Indian frontier, were firearms standard before the eighteenth century. In the fledgling settlement of New Haven, watchmen were instructed to report “within an hower after the setting of the sun, with their armes compleate, and their guns ready charged.”40

  Preindustrial towns also posted watchmen in church towers, ready to blow a horn or sound a bell upon the first glimpse of trouble. In the event of fire, a lantern might be hung on the side facing the blaze. Outside the British Isles and the Mediterranean, lookouts were a standard precaution by the sixteenth century. From Bergen to Gdansk, they assisted ground patrols. Typically, the highest steeple, with the best view, was selected for the site, though in a large city like Amsterdam as many as four towers were manned. The Tower of St. Bertin in St. Omer, France, contained more than three hundred steps. In contrast, the skyline of early American towns hugged the horizon, though New England settlers occasionally kept watch from the roofs of meetinghouses. New Haven officials ordered watchmen to scan the town several times a night for fire or Indians. Apart from monotony, frigid temperatures and high winds posed the greatest challenge for lookouts. Danes kept bottles of spirits by their sides. To ward off sleep, watchmen beneath Nuremberg’s towers routinely blew horns.41

  Along with announcing the weather, officers on foot cried the time. This was done every hour on the hour, in contrast to church bells that traditionally tolled at curfew and again at dawn. Verses, sung at the top of their lungs, accompanied watchmen’s reports. Some of these adopted a playful tone. Declared an English verse, “Men and children, maides and wives, / ’Tis not late to mend your lives. / Lock your doors, lie warm in bed— / Much loss is in a maidenhead.” Even so, this verse, like most, imparted a practical message. “Looke well to your locke, / Your fier and your light,” was standard advice. Some cries were meant to be comforting—“Sleep in peace, I am watching” was the chant in Marseilles. Many bore a strong religious character, interspersing calls for prayer with reports of the time. “Rise up, faithful soul, and go down on your knees,” intoned a Slovakian verse. A watchman’s song from northern England implored:

  Ho, watchman, ho!

  Twelve is the clock!

  God keep our town

  From fire and brand,

  And hostile hand;

  Twelve is the clock!42

  The calls of the watch, chanted methodically throughout the night, beg an interesting question. To whom did officers address their cries? Who possibly could have been listening in the late hours of the evening? Perhaps the calls were designed to verify that watchmen had not themselves drifted asleep, slumped in some alley, as critics occasionally charged? But certainly horns or bells could have served that
purpose. In Leipzig, where watchmen blew horns to announce the hour, they still recited pious homilies. It seems obvious, there and elsewhere, that communication was a goal of municipal authorities, no matter how late the hour—hence the didactic content of the watch’s verse for everyone within earshot to hear. As an ordinance explained in the Danish port of Helsingør, residents needed to know “how the night was passing.”43

  The watch’s cries might have served an additional purpose, directed instead at families asleep. If the frequent complaints of urban denizens are any indication, slumber in towns and cities was light and fitful, due, at least in part, to loudmouthed watchmen. The irony of this was not lost upon contemporaries, accustomed to being awakened by paeans to sound slumber. “For though you lay you downe to sleepe, /” fumed an early seventeenth-century poet, “The Belman wakes your peace to keepe.” In the Danish play Masquerades (ca. 1723), by Ludvig Baron Holberg, the servant Henrich complains, “Every hour of the night they waken people out of their sleep by shouting to them that they hope they are sleeping well.” (A London newspaper correspondent named “Insomnius” attributed the watch’s racket to envy.) Still, in the eyes of local officials, broken slumber heightened people’s vigilance to perils of all sorts, including enemy attacks, criminal violence, and fire. The cries of sentries guarding Irish castles reportedly served the same purpose. The late sixteenth-century historian Richard Stainhurst noted, “They shout repeatedly as a warning to the head of the household against nocturnal thieves and vagrants lest he sleep so soundly that he be unprepared to repel his enemies bravely from his hearth.” Whether, in the case of urban watchmen, theirs represented a deliberate policy or an unintended consequence, town fathers rarely heeded complaints about their clamor.44