At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  At first glance, it would seem that residents responded in the same spirit to acts of crime. In England, each citizen possessed the authority to raise a hue and cry in pursuit of dangerous offenders. According to Sir Thomas Smith in De Republica Anglorum (1583), “He that is robbed, or he that seeth or perceiveth that any man is robbed doe levie hue and crie, that is to say, doe call and crie for aide.” Certainly, victims, when attacked at night, either at home or abroad, knew to shout for aid, loudly and repeatedly. Dire cries of “Murder, murder” constituted the customary alarm, no matter the assault’s severity. In My Father’s Life (1779), Restif de la Bretonne recounted a childhood incident in which villagers, upon the cry of “murder” late one evening, wrongly feared that his father, a well-to-do peasant, had been attacked. Immediately, “everyone left their supper, picked up whatever they could find near at hand, and rushed along the main road,” only to find the man unharmed. Victims of crime often addressed calls for help to “neighbors,” rather than to members of the nightwatch. Mortally wounded in the head, John Eckles in the Yorkshire hamlet of Brighton lived long enough to appeal, “Help neighbours for Christ’s sake!” Exclaimed a naked woman from her window in Rome, “Neighbors, help. Help me. I’m being attacked.”68

  At a minimum, urgent pleas drew families to their windows. Some of stouter heart rushed outside. In response to a midnight alarm in a Northamptonshire home, a small mob poured into the street with “forks, sticks and spits,” demanding “the cause of the uproar.” In 1684, the entire village of Harleton, “excepting one,” pledged their aid to Henry Preston, a yeoman who feared a nocturnal attack by robbers. If heard from outside a dwelling, cries of murder gave neighbors the right to enter private premises at night. In 1745, for example, a husband and wife lured a mulatto girl into their Clerkenwell home late one evening. Sexually assaulted, the girl cried out “Murder,” whereupon a fearless friend, Betty Forbes, forced her release, shouting from the street, “You black dog, what are you doing with the girl, turn her out of doors, or I’ll make you, for upon the cry of murder we can break open the door.”69

  All the same, there were practical limits to neighborly support. For one thing, darkness magnified mayhem, making it difficult to identify victims from assailants. Some urban neighborhoods, home to brothels and alehouses, rarely escaped a night without screams and curses breaking the silence. In testimony at the Old Bailey, the neighbors of a prostitute calmly deposed, “She was a very civil neighbour, and they knew no harm of her, only that she kept a bawdy house, and now and then some of her lodgers and visitors used to cry out Rogues! Whores! Thieves! Murder!” From another brothel, “an outcry of murder was so frequently heard” that the loud “disturbance” surrounding the stabbing of a prostitute “was little regarded by the neighbours.”70 Interference risked injury or death. In Salem, Massachusetts, Thomas Smith, hearing cries of “Murder! Murder!” entered a home, believing, as he later attested, that “it was a shame to let neighbors kill one another.” They nearly killed him instead when Smith was brutally beaten for his heroics. In 1728, hearing shouts for help, a Londoner vainly sought a watchman’s aid. Rebuffed, the pedestrian seized the street robber himself only after other onlookers refused—“one saying he was a dangerous fellow, and they would not seize him for twenty pounds.” Further, there was always the danger that screams for help were a ruse to lure unwitting pedestrians into an alley or street. Passing through Smithfield at midnight, Audley Harvey ran with sword drawn to a man’s aid, only to be clubbed by the “victim” and his gang. “There are so many traps laid to draw people in,” deplored a contemporary.71

  Many families, having shut their doors and windows for the evening, were loath to leave the safety of their homes. “Don’t go out,” one of several rapists warned a resident in Villy le Maréchal. “We don’t want to do any harm, we only want to take a bitch.” Spying a man and a woman pull a corpse from a home, Robert Sanderson recorded in his diary, “I did not thinke it proper to draw nearer to them, because I really apprehended that the people were ill folkes.” Most often, citizens turned a deaf ear when strangers were at risk. Unlike friends and family, outsiders enjoyed no claim to the support and protection of a neighborhood. Nor did their lives warrant endangering other innocents. Grabbed at dusk in 1745 outside the White Lion Tavern in London’s Strand, Mary Barber boldly informed her assailants that “she was in a Christian country, and did not fear getting assistance.” Later, battered and bruised, she was kicked into the street, only to lie sprawling on the ground. “No body knew me there, nor nobody came to my assistance,” Barber recounted. Least civic-minded, according to travelers, were residents of Moscow, where violence at night was endemic. Olearius in the seventeenth century reported, “The Burghers showed no pity. If they heard someone suffering at the hands of robbers and murderers beneath their window, they would not even look out, much less come to his assistance.”72

  Single acts of crime, unlike fires, rarely imperiled an entire village or neighborhood. Nor, when fighting the flames from a nighttime blaze, did volunteers ordinarily face life-threatening dangers; duties instead extended to bailing water and raising buildings. Whereas fire meant catastrophe to a village if left unchecked, crime posed a sharp risk to civic-minded samaritans who ran to the aid of victims. Small wonder, then, that many citizens remained behind closed doors. Small wonder, too, that street-savvy victims of crime knew at night to shout, “Fire! Fire!” when assaulted in public. Attested Bonaventure Des Périers in Cymbalum Mundi (1539), “This routs the people out of their homes, some in nightshirts, others entirely naked.”73 If murder or robbery failed to animate their sense of community, the threat of being burned alive almost always did.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DARKNESS VISIBLE:

  NAVIGATING THE NIGHTSCAPE

  I

  We’le live as others doe, as much i’th practises of night, as day.

  SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT, 16361

  FOR ALL OF night’s dangers, surprising numbers of men and women, either by necessity or by choice, forsook the safety of the family hearth. In moonlit paintings by Aert van der Neer and Adriaen Brouwer, we catch glimpses of their silhouettes—shrouded figures walking and conversing with one another in the still night. The Dutch schoolmaster David Beck, on a summer evening in 1624, “walked back and forth through The Hague,” finding “under the full moon . . . many people in the street.” When, late on a November night in 1683, the nonconformist Oliver Heywood preached in rural Yorkshire, “God sent abundance of people many miles, tho it was in the night and very dark and slippery.” By the same token, in New England, a contemporary wrote of children who routinely attended prayer meetings, trudging on dark nights “two and some three miles thro’ a thick wood.”2

  True, some persons, after dark, pointedly refrained from venturing outside. Long after towns and cities abandoned curfews, learned wisdom discouraged nocturnal excursions. “The night is the time to remain at home,” warned a Portuguese saying.3 The Yorkshire yeoman Adam Eyre vowed “never hereafter to stay out in the night.” Afraid of robbers and the “bad” night air, James Boswell resigned himself “always to be at home early, in spite of every temptation.” But such pledges seldom lasted, often springing from momentary mishaps, not from deep-seated aversions to nocturnal travel. In Derbyshire, the physician James Clegg, violently thrown by his horse one evening, resolved “to return home in better time or stay all night” with his patients. Within weeks, having resumed his evening housecalls, he was following neither prescription.4

  Preindustrial folk, in facing the natural world, drew on a deep reservoir of rural culture, one fed by many wellsprings, including both pagan and Christian traditions. The critical role at night of customary beliefs and practices cannot be stressed enough. A poet wrote contemptuously in 1730 of “vain notions by traditions bred, among the vulgar.” Some conventions were transmitted from one place to another by peddlers, preachers, and minstrels, though many, in turn, were
homegrown. Households profited from the inherited wisdom of earlier generations, mastering the arcane skills by which to range over menacing terrain at all hours, occasionally for long distances. Differences naturally existed in local conventions, as did dissimilarities between ethnic and religious groups. But more remarkable than these sometimes subtle variations was the collective body of values, skills, and customs found in early modern communities. Nearly everywhere at nighttime, persons embraced a way of doing things distinct from the rhythms and rituals of the visible world. “Times and places demand different behavior,” observed Sarah Cowper, and nighttime was no exception.5

  II

  They must . . . early get habituated to darkness.

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, 17626

  Observers as early as Aristotle and Lucretius have commented upon the timidity of young children at night. According to psychologists, around two years of age the young first exhibit an instinctive fear of the dark. Anxieties, dormant since birth, are awakened by a rising awareness of the outside world. There is no reason to think that this standard pattern of childhood development was any different in premodern communities. The ancient Spartans reputedly made their sons spend entire evenings among the tombs to conquer their fears. “Men feare death as children feare to goe in the dark,” observed Francis Bacon.7

  In early modern times, youthful fears, in parents’ eyes, often served a salutary purpose. Rather than soothe children’s anxieties, adults routinely reinforced them through tales of the supernatural, in part bearing testimony to their own apprehensions. “That natural fear in children is increased with tales,” Bacon noted. Of “our mothers maids,” the Elizabethan author Reginald Scot described, “they have so fraied us with bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies . . . that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.” There were also narratives involving kidnappers, murderers, and thieves. As a girl in seventeenth-century Ghent, Isabella de Moerloose was frightened by the story of “the man with the long coat, of whom it was said that he looked for firstborn children” to kill. The specter of a one-eyed soldier in the royal guard was used to discipline Louis XIII of France (1601–1643) as a child. By warning of bogeymen that preyed on naughty youngsters, parents and servants, critics alleged, played upon children’s worst fears to compel obedience. “As soon as one tries to still a child,” complained the Dutch author Jacob Cats, “one introduces a variety of bizarre features: a ghost, a bogeyman, a lifeless spirit.” Some parents, as punishment, confined children to dark closets or impersonated evil spirits. A Dutch father, Constantijn Huygens, used a doll dressed in black to threaten his infant daughter. The father of Philippe de Strozzi in sixteenth-century France knocked on his chamber door one night. “Disguising his voice in a horrible manner,” the father hoped to test his son’s courage. Philippe passed the test. Struck on the forehead, his father was forced to retreat, “swearing to never again frighten him in this way at night.”8

  Examples like these offer ample fodder for those historians who have depicted the early modern family in a harsh light, as a repressive institution devoid of human affection. To draw that connection here, however, would be to miss a larger point. Although used as an occasional tool of discipline, storytelling and bogeymen served an important educational function. At night, most of all, young children needed to be put on guard. Tales, along with ballads and proverbs, afforded a customary means in this largely illiterate age of imparting cautionary advice. Thus in Traitè de l’Education des Filles (1687), the French churchman Fénelon described nurses who gave “children stupid fears of ghosts and spirits,” thereby exercising their own judgment “as to the things” infants “should seek after or avoid.” Similarly, a visitor to Sicily wrote of “superstitious parents, nurses, and others such like teachers” who spread tales of witchcraft. There was nothing impersonal or abstract about most stories. Many recounted the terrible deeds of neighborhood ghosts and witches, taking care to identify spots that children at night should avoid. According to Jean Paul, his father, a schoolmaster, “did not spare us a single apparition or foolery, which he had ever heard of or believed to have met with, himself.” In contrast to most adults, however, his father “combined with a firm belief in them the equally firm courage to face them.”9

  Vincent van der Vinne, The Safe Refuge, 1714.

  Central, also, to children’s education was their progressive exposure to darkness. Collecting firewood, gathering berries, and tending livestock all took youths outdoors in the evening. The engraver Thomas Bewick, growing up in Northumberland, was sent by his father on “any errand in the night.” “Perhaps,” he reflected as an adult, “my being frequently exposed to being alone in the dark” helped to lessen the terror.10 Some tasks were contrived. In 1748, the author of Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, and Affections Peculiar to Children advised parents: “You must create little errands, as if by accident, to send him in the dark, but such as can take up but little time; and encrease the length of time by degrees, as you find his courage encrease.” The son of a shoemaker, young Thomas Holcroft was sent one night to a distant farm. “Now and then making a false step,” he remembered later of the route. With his father and a companion secretly following at a distance, the lad completed his journey unscathed. “At last I got safely home, glad to be rid of my fears, and inwardly not a little elated with my success.”11

  Games served the same purpose. Rousseau urged reliance on “night games” for children, including a complex labyrinth formed by tables and chairs. “Accustomed to having a good footing in darkness, practiced at handling with ease all surrounding bodies,” he observed, “his feet and hands will lead him without difficulty in the deepest darkness.” Outdoor contests, such as “Fox and Hounds,” were designed for the obscurity of night. Restif de la Bretonne, as a boy, enjoyed the contest of “Wolf,” which in his French village “was always played in the dark,” as in parts of Britain was “Bogle about the Stacks,” a game that allowed children to act out their fears of ghosts. A favorite throughout the British Isles was “Can I Get There by Candle Light?” Dating to the sixteenth century, if not earlier, one version of the game pitted a coven of “witches” against a larger band of “travelers.” Although not intended for the dark, the game conveyed two practical lessons: the importance of returning home, when possible, before “candle-lighting”; and the need to beware of sinister forces once night fell. “Watch out!” chanted the players, “mighty bad witches on the road tonight.”12

  Some youngsters, like Jonathan Martin, were impatient learners. The son of a Northumberland forester, he routinely absconded from bed on summer nights to ramble alone in the woods. One morning, finally, he was returned home by men who had first taken the six-year-old for a ghost. His father, alert to the dangers of such rash behavior, immediately forbade Jonathan’s solitary excursions.13 Both at home and abroad, prudence after nightfall was essential. It was one thing to invade night’s dominion; it was quite another to flout its laws.

  III

  The leagues are longer by night, than by day.

  ITALIAN PROVERB14

  Despite fears of evil spirits and foot-pads, more common still were natural hazards concealed by night’s obscurity—fallen trees, thick underbrush, steep hillsides, and open trenches. Just a short jaunt to a neighbor’s dwelling could be fraught with difficulty, as could returning to one’s residence. Coming home at 10:00 P.M. after assisting a patient, a New England doctor recorded, “Rather disagreeable time riding, bad night, cloudy, dark; difficult time keeping the path which was very narrow.” For Cowper, darkness, a source of incalculable peril, was “a state that robbs us of our noblest sense, disables or confounds all our powers of motion.” To it, she observed, “wee seem to have ye most naturall, the most just, the most unconquerable aversion.”15

  For guidance, ordinary folk drew upon local lore and an intimate awareness of nature acquired from childhood. While adjoining counties sometimes seemed like fore
ign lands, most persons claimed a detailed knowledge of the parishes in which they had been reared, having committed to memory a mental map of every ditch, pasture, and hedge row. Games like “Round and Round the Village,” popular in much of England, familiarized children at any early age to their physical surroundings, as did fishing, collecting herbs, and running errands. Schooled by adults in night’s perils, children learned to negotiate the landscape “as a rabbit knows his burrow”—careful after dark to skirt ponds, wells, and other hazardous terrain. In towns and cities, shop signs, doorways, and back alleys afforded fixed landmarks for neighborhood youths. As a child, Jacques-Louis Ménétra claimed a first-hand knowledge of the Parisian waterfront, where he played games like hide-and-seek and slept nights when banished from home by an abusive father. Lessons could be painful. Fleeing his stepfather, the peasant Valentin Jamerey-Duval, as a boy, tumbled into the muck of an empty wolf pit, where he lay trapped overnight. The goat-boy Ulrich Bräker, at four years of age, ran off on a “pitch-dark rainy night” across a meadow, nearly somersaulting down a muddy slope into a swift brook. Rescued by his father, they returned to the site the next morning. “Here, lad,” his father declared, “only a few steps more, and the brook rushes over the cliff. If the water had managed to sweep you away, you’d be lying dead down there.”16

  Certainly by adolescence, most youths had learned to master the footpaths crisscrossing rural fields, or, in towns, the narrow lanes intersecting serpentine streets. “Be not fearful,” a Berliner counseled his friend at night, “I know by heart the streets of home.” Even in the shadows, asserted Leon Battista Alberti, “those who knew the country by experience and had seen all the places in the light of day would recognize them and could say what they were and who lived there.”17 Only during the winter, in the event of a heavy snowfall, could surroundings lose their familiarity, despite the advantage to travelers of a lighter, more visible landscape. So in 1789, a pair of Pennsylvanians drowned in the Susquehanna River. The “night being dark, and the path covered by the snow, they mistook the road” and fell through the ice.18