In areas ridden with crime, pedestrians often traveled in groups. Servants accompanied men and women of property, but other persons, too, avoided walking alone, especially in deserted locations. In the Scottish Highlands, custom discouraged solitary journeys at night. Thomas Platter, on his way to the Kent town of Rochester in 1599, journeyed an entire night by wagon “through many very dangerous localities.” But since “there was a whole wagon-load of us,” he “suffered no anxiety.” Joined by several guards, Pepys walked from Woolwich to Redriffe on the south bank of the Thames. “I hear this walk is dangerous to walk alone at night,” he acknowledged. Paolo da Certaldo advised, “Do not go unless you have a faithful friend and a big light.” Or a large dog. Tending his cows at 3:00 A.M., Richard Mitchel in 1749 took both his “man” and “a great dog” with him to the pasture.72
Weapons, naturally, strengthened frail spirits. In large parts of continental Europe, where thieves bore a fearsome reputation for violence, most people left home armed—not just gentlemen but peasants too, for whom bearing a dagger or quarterstaff was second nature. Country folk in France typically carried a “double-ended stick” reinforced top and bottom by iron caps. “From Verona to Brescia,” noted an English traveler to Italy in the early 1700s, “all the peasants carryed arms, there had been robberys on the road.” In the British Isles, pedestrians in towns and cities took similar precautions. Where laws restricted personal weapons, enforcement seems to have been ignored by a weak and indifferent nightwatch. Even in London’s affluent western suburbs, a newcomer, John Knyveton, was urged in 1750 to carry a cudgel or a small sword, particularly after dark.73 Crime represented less of a problem in the countryside, although coaches bore armed guards and often, too, armed passengers. Boswell kept a loaded pistol in his hand on a journey from Scotland to London. “During our two last stages this night, which we travelled in the dark, I was a good deal afraid of robbers.”74
Spells and amulets offered additional protection. Candles and lanterns, prayers, and rosaries, all were employed to deter sinister forces when venturing abroad. A variety of charms were laden with sacred meaning. For security in Sicily, coaches bore religious paintings on their sides. Images of “the virgin and child, and the souls in purgatory, are seldom omitted,” remarked a passing observer. Women in the Hautes Pyrenees, to guard against evil spirits, sprinkled their shifts with holy water. In Cologne, papers were hawked that reportedly had touched the faces of the three Magi. “Being carried in one’s pockett will protect one from all dangers and robberies,” reported Twisden Bradbourn in 1693.75 Other charms bore no discernible imprint of Christianity. Carrying a strap or apron in parts of France, for example, was thought to deter werewolves. In the fens of East Anglia, holly branches protected against witches; and among Breton peasants, it was common wisdom never to whistle in the dark lest the noise summon demons. In northern England, the same blunder, according to an early modern manuscript, required that the offender walk three times around his house “by way of penance.” Children in Yorkshire learned to “cruck” their thumbs as a defense, placing them within their balled hands. To ward off spirits, midwives in Liège wore articles of clothing inside out, as did slaves in different regions of America.76
Night set its own rules of engagement. Darkness precluded the normal courtesies that facilitated the give and take of daily life, the salutations and gestures of respect routinely exchanged on public lanes. Instead, advised Gay, “Let constant vigilance thy footsteps guide.” Unable to discern an approaching pedestrian’s clothing or demeanor, much less their identity or intentions, individuals relied upon other clues. Travelers proclaimed their identities as well as their proximity by their footsteps and voices. The mere act of coughing or spitting could give an inkling. “It is important for us to have an alert ear,” Rousseau wrote in Emile, “to be able to judge . . . whether the body causing it is big or little, far or near, whether its motion is violent or weak.” A miner in the Yorkshire village of Grasington, John Burnap, knew the doctor’s horse “by its foot.”77
Among strangers, distance was important to forestalling conflict—avoiding the paths of other passersby and ensuring that they avoided yours. Counseled a writer, “I would advise all strangers not to let any body come too near them particularly in the night-time.” Hence the narrow escape of the American Elkanah Watson when lost one evening on a rural road in France. Seeing an oncoming coach, he ran into its path, crying “postillon, arrête! arrête!” only to discover that the driver thought him a bandit. “Expecting he would send a ball at me, I made the best of my way down the hill, and the postillon made the best of his over it; being mutually afraid of each other.”78
When paths crossed, silence only heightened suspicions. Alarmed by a passing figure in the market square of Traunstein, the clerk Andre Pichler declared, “If you do not speak, I shall stab you.” Exchanges were terse and to the point: “Who is there?” or “Who is that?” were common questions. “A friend and a neighbor,” William Mowfitt replied in 1647 during his way home. As important as one’s words was tone of voice, which needed to be strong but inoffensive. Timidity, no less than hostility, invited clashes. Most wayfarers projected a brave front, often by brandishing their weapons. Fearful of being robbed in the Spanish countryside, Thomas Platter and his companions shook swords above their heads “to make them gleam in the light of the moon.” Scraping one’s sword against the ground, on the other hand, was an unmistakable “declaration of war.” Against bands of brigands in rural Scandinavia, a traveler in 1681 instructed the unarmed drivers of a convoy of carriages to equip themselves with white sticks of wood, “which appeared by the light of the moon, as if they had been muskets.” Thomas Ellwood crossed paths with a ruffian upon returning home from a court session in Watlington. “The suddain and unexpected sight of my bright blade, glittering in the dark night,” Ellwood marveled, “did so amaze and terrify the man.” Less fortunate, by contrast, was Michael Crosby as he made his way on a Sunday night from the alehouse Black Mary’s Hole. Jostled in a nearby field by a thief, Crosby declared that he “wanted nothing but civility,” only to be assaulted and robbed. Any bump in the night, cautioned Rousseau, required force. “Boldly grab the one who surprises you at night, man or beast—it makes no difference. Hold on and squeeze him with all your might. If he struggles, hit him.”79
Supernatural encounters called for different defenses. Evil spirits were identified by their dark color and threatening sounds. Many appeared as serpents, toads, or other creatures. Other than flight, one’s natural response was to recite a prayer while making the sign of the cross. “Here is the Cross, adverse forces disperse” was a customary verse in Poland. Local lore in France counseled boldness. In Basse-Bretagne, the admonition was direct: “If you are coming from the Devil, go on your way as I go on mine.” Before fainting, a young Spanish woman invoked the Holy Trinity upon sighting a “demon” on a moonlit evening, whereas the German father of Jean Paul faced them with “God or the cross” as his “buckler and shield.” A few stout souls responded more aggressively, with Satan himself on rare occasions reportedly put to flight. Felix Platter, during a visit to Marseilles, no doubt took comfort from knowing that his Swiss guide was nicknamed the “devil-chaser,” after one such encounter.80
Only in desperation did persons sleep abroad in the open countryside. “Who goeth abroad must look about him, and sleep in the night, as a hare,” warned an Italian proverb. So anxious was the German surgeon Johann Dietz when lost outside Lübeck that after trying to sleep in the woods he found strength enough to make his way to a granary (only to happen upon a band of robbers asleep in the cribs). And Thomas Platter, arriving too late to enter the city gate at Munich, sought overnight shelter at a “leper-house.”81 Besides listening for familiar sounds, stray souls “hallooed” into the dark, hoping to rouse a nearby family. Returning from Birmingham to Nottingham, the bookbinder William Hutton found himself lost in Charnwood Forest. “I wandered slowly, though i
n the wet, for fear of destruction, and hallooed with all my powers, but no returns.” Lost as a child, Ulrich Bräker called to two men across a meadow. “No answer was forthcoming; maybe they took me for some monster.” To extend their range, persons fired guns as a signal of distress. Plymouth Colony in 1636 forbade firing weapons at night, with just two exceptions: to kill a wolf and “for the finding of some one lost.” Benighted during a trip to Italy, Boswell “groped” his way to a town after hearing several gunshots. Not having fired any himself, he likely profited from someone else’s distress.82
V
I came ploughing home in the night, yet gott no harm thanks be to God who suffers not men nor devils to do all the mischief they would.
DAME SARAH COWPER, 170483
No other time of the day so challenged the ingenuity and wit of ordinary mortals. Darkness tested their knowledge of local customs and magic as well as their understanding of the natural world. And, of course, night tried their souls or, at least, the mettle of their religious convictions. More than a few folk, upon safely returning from an evening abroad, thanked God for his protection. Even short jaunts merited occasional expressions of gratitude. To judge from early modern diaries, these were not formulaic phrases recited by rote but earnest expressions of relief. “Set out for home but had dark and dangerous travelling,” noted a Derbyshire vicar, “yet thro the mercy of God I came safe and found all well.” Thomas Turner recorded, “I came home about 9.10, thank GOD very safe and sober.”84
With good reason, men and women gave thanks. Misfortune might strike even seasoned travelers. Nighttime could be cruelly unpredictable. Some scrapes defy understanding, at least by modern minds. John Pressy of Amsbury, Massachusetts, around the year 1668 embarked upon a three-mile trip to his home “near about the shutting in of day light.” Taking a familiar path, he “steered by the moone w’ch shone bright” but repeatedly became “wildered.” Encountering a series of odd lights, one of which he struck with his staff, Pressy fell into a pit. Finally, after finding a woman “standing on his left hand,” he reached home “seazed with fear”—as, from his appearance, was his family. Other misadventures, despite travelers’ well-laid plans, were more foreseeable. In the Irish village of Dereen, probably few residents were as cautious as John “of the moon” O’Donoghue when picking times to tread abroad. He was well known for going home after nightfall by moonlight—“I’ll go home with the light of the moon,” he frequently declared. But returning from a tavern on an October night, he stumbled into a ditch and drowned. For earlier that evening John had indulged another habit, drinking large quantities of whiskey and beer. And to human frailty, nighttime often proved unforgiving. “Though the moon was full, and he had the benefit of its light,” grieved an acquaintance, “there was no light in his eyes.”85
PART THREE
BENIGHTED REALMS
PRELUDE
I curse the night, yet doth from day me hide.
WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF
HAWTHORNDEN, 16161
IN THE SHARP glare of daylight, privacy was scarce in early modern communities. Face-to-face relationships predominated in urban as well as rural settings, with most inhabitants intimately familiar with their neighbors’ affairs. Affording persons moral and material assistance, communities also upheld common standards of public and private behavior. In theory, vigilance in the spirit of combating sin was every good neighbor’s duty. “If any in the neighbourhood, are taking to bad courses, lovingly and faithfully admonish them,” urged New England’s Cotton Mather. “The neighborhood,” as the historians David Levine and Keith Wrightson have written, “was not only a support network, but also a reference group and a moral community.”2
For reasons rooted in self-interest as well as public morality, personal misbehavior courted exposure—more often from prying eyes and loose tongues than from constables and churchwardens. The transgressions of a single household, feared residents, could harm the wider community by its corrupting influence. Had neighbors been less dependent upon one another, this danger would have mattered less. In cases of sexual misconduct, burdening the local parish with an illegitimate child threatened financial hardship and invited punishment from the Almighty. In 1606, a set of petitioners in Castle Combe, Wiltshire, condemned a woman’s “filthy act of whoredom” for, among other reasons, provoking “God’s wrath” upon “us the inhabitants of the town.”3 In short, social oversight was essential. “In England,” a German visitor commented in 1602, “every citizen is bound by oath to keep a sharp eye at his neighbour’s house.”4
Close quarters, whether at home or the workplace, lessened the likelihood of misbehavior. In most dwellings, rooms were few and cramped. During their trip to the Hebrides, James Boswell and Dr. Johnson, whose tastes ran to plusher quarters, often conversed with one another in Latin “for fear of being overheard in the small Highland houses.” Secrets large and small fell victim to servants, who ranked among the most notorious rumormongers.5 Making matters worse were the narrow lanes separating early modern dwellings, with their thin walls, revealing cracks, and naked windows. Not until the eighteenth century did curtains adorn many urban portals, while in the countryside they remained a rarity. In towns, closing them invariably aroused suspicion in daytime. A New England colonist called them “whore curtains” when he detected a pair drawn at a neighbor’s home.6 And while forests and fields afforded natural refuges, they, too, were vulnerable to surveillance. A writer in the Westminster Magazine averred in 1780, “A person in a country place cannot easily commit an immoral act without being detected or reproved by his neighbours.”7
The good opinion of neighbors was not a trifling concern, especially in small, close-knit communities. “A man that hath an ill name is halfe hangd,” stated an English proverb. Bonds, personal as well as financial, depended upon one’s honor and reputation, which any number of misdeeds, from domestic quarrels and drunkenness to promiscuity and theft, could imperil. “Bad fame” often constituted the basis of presentments at court, and trials frequently invoked “the report of the neighborhood.” A damaged reputation was usually irreparable, an indelible stain reviled by the community. “He is not look’d upon to be an honest man in the neighborhood, for they say he buys stolen goods,” Ann Parfit noted of a London neighbor in 1742. Of his Inveresk parishioners, a Scottish minister commented, “There is no censorial power half so effectual as the opinion of equals.”8
Men and women on the lower rungs of society attracted the greatest scrutiny. Common laborers, servants, vagabonds, and slaves all bred deep suspicion among social superiors. The truly indigent were not even subject to the authority of a master—“nobody to govern them,” observed John Aubrey. “The lower class of people,” spewed the British Magazine, “are in England the meanest, dirtiest, wickedest and most insolent creatures of all the human species.” The mobility of vagrants, possessing neither “fire nor place,” fueled apprehension. Of the typical beggar, the Elizabethan Nicholas Breton wrote, “Hee is commonly begot in a bush, borne in a barne, lives in a highway and dyes in a ditch.”9 In some regions, social pariahs such as Jews, prostitutes, and heretics had to wear badges of shame tagged to their clothing. In Augsburg, beggars bore the Stadtpir, a civic symbol, on their garments. Prostitutes wore a green stripe and Jews, a yellow ring. An English statute in 1572 required that vagrants be “grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron.”10 Marked already by their tattered garments and physical infirmities, the lower orders reputedly exhibited a roguish demeanor, the product of years of hardship and insecurity. Of thieves like himself, an Irishman remarked, “If we go abroad in the day, a wise man would easily find us to be rogues by our faces, we have such a suspicious, fearful and constrained countenance, often turning back and slinking thro’ narrow lanes and alleys.” Not surprisingly, vagrants fantasized about magical hats that could render them invisible to their tormentors. One German adolescent spoke of a wh
ite powder that, with the devil’s assistance, shielded him from human sight.11
It would be wrong to conclude that privacy is a modern priority neither known nor valued by earlier generations. While its importance has varied by period and place, the appeal of privacy has been an enduring characteristic of Western culture. Common throughout the classical world, concern for privacy seems to have intensified during the late Middle Ages with the increasing accumulation of personal possessions and greater interest in their safekeeping. First used in the 1400s, the words “privacy” and “private” became part of popular parlance by the time of Shakespeare, as his plays reflect. Clearly, for early modern folk, the close scrutiny of communities did not diminish privacy’s appeal. Quite the contrary. Local oversight coupled with the threat of sanctions only fostered a heightened appreciation for seclusion. Especially at nighttime. “Be private as the night is,” counsels one character to another in the play The Bastard in 1652. “Night makes me bold,” wrote George Herbert, “and I dare doe that in the dark and in privat, which in companie I forbeare.”12
At Day's Close Page 18
