At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  So it was. At that late date, most persons at night still remained on their own, confronting crime and other dangers with, at best, the aid of family and close neighbors. Despite the steadily rising powers of the state, nighttime defied the imposition of government authority. Acknowledging this reality, early modern laws vainly sought to deter criminals from exploiting night’s natural advantages. Without the support of daily institutions and controls, authorities relied upon repressive penalties and procedures to keep the worst excesses of criminal violence at bay.

  All to little effect. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, a Londoner complained of the “armies of Hell” that “ravage our streets” and “keep possession of the town every night.” So, too, in Paris, observed a lawyer in 1742, “no one was out past 10 P.M.,” even though a professional garde by then supplemented the city’s watch. Instead, criminals with clubs, assommeurs, roved the main streets. The best that can be said is that, in the absence of watchmen and rudimentary lighting, urban conditions would have been worse. Ultimately, night lay beyond government control, a natural law that neither courts nor constables could change. A tenacious fatalism, grounded in an awareness of God’s omnipotence and man’s frailty, undergirded the official mindset. Hence the well-known psalm, inscribed on an ancient building in the Danish town of Aalborg, “Unless the Lord watches over the city, in vain the watchman stands on guard.”65

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A MAN’S HOUSE IS HIS CASTLE:DOMESTIC FORTIFICATIONS

  I

  Thro God’s great mercy we were safe at my house before the day light was gone.

  EBENEZER PARKMAN, 17451

  WELL BEFORE TOWNS barred their gates, nature signaled day’s retreat. For many families, the rural environment, not watches or clocks, kept life’s daily pulse. Only parish church bells, periodically rung during the day, rivaled nature’s precision. Innumerable omens foretold evening’s advance, many of them routinely decipherable, others intuited by the received wisdom of bygone generations. Toward sunset, marigold petals began to close. Flocks of crows returned to their nests, and rabbits grew more animated. The pupils of goats and sheep, normally oval in shape, appeared round. “The goats’ eyes were my clock,” recalled Ulrich Bräker of his labors as a young Swiss shepherd.2

  No time of the day aroused greater anticipation than the onset of darkness. Nor did any interval merit more careful calibration. On clear days, guidance came from the heavens—the sinking course of the sun, leaving streaks of light across the sky. Wrote a seventeenth-century Neapolitan, “The sky was darkening to the colour of a wolf’s snout.” Still, nature’s most reliable timetable lay in shadows cast by the sun’s descent. As daylight dimmed, darkness to the human eye advanced in stages. Day in, day out, fields fell to the shadows in unerring succession. Brune, a French term for dusk, testified to the altered hue of the evening landscape. In contrast to Mediterranean latitudes, twilight in northwestern Europe was prolonged. The typical countryman, Thomas Hardy remarked in The Woodlanders (1887), “sees a thousand successive tints and traits in the landscape which are never discerned by him who hears the regular chime of a clock.”3

  Rarely did preindustrial folk pause to ponder the beauty of day’s departure. In contrast to the praises sung of dawn, neither in literature nor in letters and diaries did contemporaries marvel at the sun’s decline. Feelings of insecurity more often than awe swept the terrain. “Begins the night, and warns us home repair,” wrote a Stuart poet. Eager to avoid nightfall, numerous men and women hastened homeward, hoping to return in “good season.” Some, tarrying too long, lodged at the house of a relation or friend rather than brave the night. Detained by a court hearing, Matthew Patten, a farmer in colonial New Hampshire, observed, “It was so near night when it was done that we could not come home.”4 As evening blanketed the countryside, tardy travelers wrote of being “covered” or “overtaken.” “Night overtook us, and made the remainder of the journey disagreeable and dangerous,” recounted one. Sometimes night’s miasmic atmosphere seemed impenetrable to sight. “Come, thick night,” implores Lady Macbeth, “And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.”5

  II

  Theeves, wolves, and foxes now fall to their prey, but a strong locke, and a good wit, will aware much mischiefe.

  NICHOLAS BRETON, 16266

  Easily, the most common idiom in English for nightfall was “shutting-in.” More than other expressions, it captured popular apprehensions. After a short trip, the Puritan minister Samuel Sewall jotted in his diary, “Got well home before shutting in. Praised be God.” In part, this oft-repeated term signified the metaphorical “shutting-in” of daylight—“I returned home on foot, just as day light shut in,” recounted a London resident. But on a practical level, “shutting-in” emphasized the need for households to bolt portals against the advancing darkness. The fifteenth-century poet François Villon instructed, “The house is safe but be sure it is shut tight.” Attested an English proverb, “Men shut their doors against a setting sun.”7

  The saying that “a man’s house is his castle” assumed profound importance at night. This timeworn expression, at least as old as the 1500s, applied alike to turf huts and brick manor homes. According to Sir Edward Coke, the home served as much for man’s “defense against injury and violence as for his repose.” A sacred boundary, the domestic threshold was demarcated by a door and a sill of stone or wood. However exposed during the day, thresholds represented frontiers at night that unexpected visitors were not to cross. The reaction of a rural household in Scotland when approached by a rider would have been a common one: “Upon the trampling of my horses before the house,” discovered Edward Burt, “the lights went out . . . and deafness, at once, seized the whole family.”8

  Despite prevailing fears, families at night were far from powerless. Without the protection afforded by institutions, they relied heavily upon their own resources. Everyone assisted, but care and protection of the family lay with the paterfamilias, the male head of the household. First and foremost, evening saw quarters made fast once laundry and tools were brought inside. Doors, shutters, and windows were closed tight and latched. A London wine merchant observed, “I never keep the door open after ’tis dark.” “Barricaded,” “bolted,” and “barred,” as an English playwright described a Georgian home—“backside and foreside, top and bottom.” Of his Bavarian childhood, the writer Jean Paul reflected, “Our living room would be lit up and fortified simultaneously, viz, the shutters were closed and bolted.” A child, he noted, “felt snugly preserved” behind “these window embrasures and parapets.” The working poor also took precautions, for even the most mundane items—food, clothing, and household goods—attracted thieves. Richard Ginn, who worked for a coachmaker, testified, “My house is constantly locked up half an hour past 8, when I return from my business, for I may be killed as well as another man.” As one who earned her bread from washing, Anne Towers had a “great charge of linen” besides personal belongings in her London home on Artichoke Lane—“I always go round every night to see that all is fast.”9

  In well-to-do homes, large wooden doors, set in frames of stone or wood, guarded the front entrance. Iron hinges and latches gave added strength to the thick wood. All the same, many locks provided scant security. The standard mechanism, common since medieval times, permitted a key to push a bolt into a groove in the frame, thereby fastening the door. Not until the introduction of the “tumbler” lock in the eighteenth century would keyholes better withstand the prowess of experienced thieves. In the meantime, families resorted to double locks on exterior doors, bolstered from within by padlocks and iron bars.10

  More vulnerable were windows. Despite their small size by modern standards, at night windows represented the weakest points in a home’s perimeter. Whereas the lower orders covered openings with oilcloth, canvas, or paper, aristocratic housing began to boast glazed windows by the late Middle Ages. Only in the sixteenth cen
tury, however, did glass panes spread to middle-class dwellings. Besides confining heat, windows lent protection from the wind and rain, and also from the night air. Wooden shutters afforded a safeguard against both intruders and the elements, especially if caulked during the winter with soil or moss.11 Often, in preindustrial homes, iron grates and bars protected windows on the ground floor, prompting frequent comparisons with convents and gaols—“more like prisons,” observed a visitor to Madrid, “than the habitations of people at their liberty.” Even where living conditions were meager, iron bars, in the absence of glass windows, were thought a necessity. A traveler in northern France remarked, “The people are very poor, and live in most dreadful huts, . . . no glass in the windows but iron bars, and wooden shutters.” Although barred windows were most common on the Continent, visitors noted their presence in parts of England and the Scottish lowlands. In London, the magistrate Sir John Fielding endorsed the practice of securing windows with bars in the shape of a cross; he also recommended that each door have double bolts along with a bar and chain.12

  Naturally, families took extra pains to protect such valuables as money, plate, and jewelry. Within propertied households, oak chests, fitted with locks and iron bands, were common. Counseled Paolo da Certaldo in the late fourteenth century, “Close up all your day-time things always, whenever you go to sleep at night.” Samuel Pepys concealed valuables throughout the rooms of his house, including his dressing room, study, and cellar, where he stored sundry chests constructed of iron. “I am in great pain to think how to dispose of my money,” he fretted, “it being wholly unsafe to keep it all in coin in one place.” Blessed with one hundred and fifty pounds, Anne Feddon of Cumberland always locked her fortune in a drawer during the day but “took it to bed with her at night.” John Cooper in Yorkshire hid ten pounds beneath a large stone in a corner of his home. As reflected in fairy-tales, hiding places were not restricted to dwellings. In addition to closets, chests, and beds, they included dry wells and hollow tree trunks. Among villagers in eighteenth-century Languedoc, burying the family treasure in a nearby field was a favorite tactic.13

  All these steps constituted a family’s preliminary line of defense. There were also precautions designed to alert slumbering households, such as equipping shutters with bells. Servants, too, knew to sound an alarm. Late one evening in 1672 when three maids, washing dishes in a Northamptonshire home, heard a noise in the yard, they promptly awakened the household—”one beat the bell, another blew a horn, a third put candles in every room.” Wealthy estates occasionally employed guards and, by the late seventeenth century, spring-traps. The author of Systema Agriculturae in 1675 advised placing sharp iron spikes in the ground, surrounded by brass trip-wires, “which wire and spikes are not visible by night.” In 1694, an English inventor even devised a “night engine” to be stationed “in a convenient place of any house, to prevent thieves from breaking in.” The exact nature of the device remains a mystery, but it likely anticipated another “machine,” advertised a century later by William Hamlet of London. A spider’s web of bells and rope stretched across a broad frame, Hamlet’s design promised to sound an alarm against both thieves and fire.14

  Most households were armed, often more heavily than members of the nightwatch. Domestic arsenals contained swords, pikes, and firearms, or in less affluent homes cudgels and sticks, both capable of delivering mortal blows. In the country, sickles, axes, and other farm tools made convenient weapons. Having passed through a cornfield, the Oxfordshire adolescent Thomas Ellwood was attacked at night by husbandmen wielding staves “big enough to have knockt down an ox.” Once a family retired for the night, weapons were kept close. A Middlesex squire, his house invaded by five masked burglars in 1704, immediately snatched a sword “that always lay at his beds-head”—only to be stabbed from behind. Valued as a club was the common bed-staff, a short, sturdy stick used in sets of two on each side of a bed to hold its covers in place. The staff enjoyed a widespread reputation as a handy weapon—hence, in all likelihood, the expression “in the twinkling of a bed-staff.” When a Hampshire apprentice in 1625 attacked his sleeping master with a hatchet, he was quickly beaten off with one.15

  Firearms, owing to advances in accuracy and other technological breakthroughs, grew more prevalent among homeowners after the mid-seventeenth century. Whereas in Kent, guns figured in fewer than 3 percent of all violent deaths between 1560 and 1660, shootings claimed more than one-quarter of such fatalities by the 1720s. Many of these, arising from the protection of home and family, ended at court in acquittals. Anxious to light his candle late one evening, James Boswell desisted from searching for a tinderbox for fear that his landlord—“who always keeps a pair of loaded pistols by him”—would mistake him for a thief. Few London households were as well armed as that of Charlotte Charke, who as a young girl grew fearful that her home would be burglarized. Stashing her parents’ silverware by her bedside, she assembled a personal armory, containing “my own little carbine,” a “heavy blunderbuss, a muscatoon, and two brace of pistols”—“all which I loaded with a couple of bullets each before I went to bed.”16

  Accidental fatalities at night were a common hazard. Any strange noise or unfamiliar light put households on edge. In a Cumberland village, the son of a blacksmith was shot for a burglar after he whistled outside a home to signal a servant maid. When an aged man suffering from senility entered an unfamiliar house in Pontrefract, a maid shouted “thieves,” causing her master to “cut him in pieces” with a sword. Colonists in early New England were occasionally mistaken at night for Indians and shot.17

  Watchdogs prowled inside and out. In the countryside, they did double duty, guarding against thieves as well as predators. “Bandogs,” for their ferocity, were chained during the day. According to William Harrison, the mastiff, or “master-thief,” received its name for its prowess against intruders. Dogs everywhere were prized for their vigilance, from the feared Kalmuk dogs in southern Russia to rural France, where the nineteenth-century author George Sand observed that even the meanest peasant possessed one. It was the rare night that early modern villages did not echo with sporadic barking. Failing to find shelter late one evening, a traveler in rural Scotland lamented, “None made reply but their dogs, the chief of their family.” In towns and cities, dogs guarded shops as well as homes. In Harp-Alley, a London brazier kept “a crass, crabbed” mutt that barely tolerated customers in the day, “much less in the evening,” according to a wary neighbor.18

  Thomas Rowlandson, Housebreakers, 1788.

  Of the proper qualities for a watchdog, a sixteenth-century writer recommended an animal that was “big, hairy, with a big head, big legs, big loins, and a lot of courage”—“big,” of course, being the cardinal qualification. Harrison suggested a “huge dog, stubborn, ugly, eager, burdenous of body (and therefore of but little swiftness), terrible and fearful to behold.” All the better, commentators agreed, if the dog was black, so that it could surprise a thief in the dark. A watchdog’s worth lay in its bark as much as its bite. Owners, just from the pitch and intensity of their dog’s bark, could determine the presence of an intruder. In England, these dogs were called “warners” or “watchers.” Equally important was their value as a deterrent. “Whenever I went upon any such expedition, we immediately desisted upon the barking of a dog, as judging the house was alarm’d,” one burglar claimed. The Florentine Leon Battista Alberti urged in the mid-1400s that not just dogs but also geese patrol inside homes—“one wakes the other and calls out the whole crowd, and so the household is always safe.” Experienced thieves poisoned watchdogs, but such efforts were fraught with risk. In London, an impatient burglar, after throwing poisoned food over a wall, entered the property too quickly and was badly mauled.19

  III

  To whom but night belong enchantments?

  THOMAS CAMPION, 160720

  Thus the array of common-sense measures families adopted to protect their homes
from intruders: locks, dogs, and weapons. Across the social spectrum, defenses varied more in degree than in kind, with most households, however modest, taking steps to safeguard lives and property. In addition to these rudimentary precautions, a family’s religious faith provided an important sense of security. While many households remained ignorant of basic tenets of Christian theology, God to most believers was not a lifeless abstraction confined, in word and deed, to the impersonal pages of scripture. For Protestants and Catholics alike, his presence affected every sphere of daily existence, including one’s physical and mental well-being. “Were it not for the providence of God,” asked Sarah Cowper, “what security have we?”21

  Seldom was God’s protection more valued than at night. Dangers were greater and less predictable. The venerable salutation “good night” derived from “God give you good night.” “By night,” affirmed the poet Edward Young, “an atheist half-believes a God.” Locks and latches, by themselves, afforded little protection from Satan’s minions. Special prayers existed not only for bedtime but also for sunset and evening. Of his Lutheran childhood in Germany, Jean Paul recalled that his family, “at the toll of the evening bell,” joined hands in a circle to sing the hymn, “The Gloom of Night with Might Descends.” With hosts of angels at his command, God, in his infinite mercy, kept night’s terrors at bay. A seventeenth-century meditation “for the night season” implored “that thy guardian angel may both guide and protect thee.” A French priest advised, “Upon hearing any strange noise or crack in a house let us fervently recommend ourselves to God.”22