At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  There were, of course, institutionalized occasions for personal gratification and social license. Catholic lands had a variety of outlets for festive behavior, such as Carnival, the Feast of Fools, and other annual holidays. Popular diversions were marked by large quantities of food and drink and ample opportunities for sports and rough play. On the occasion of Carnival in the days approaching the observance of Lent, townspeople teased, tricked, and tormented friends and animals alike. By donning disguises, revelers delighted, too, in the ritual of role reversal, parading as clerics and civic officials. “It is sometimes expedient,” a sixteenth-century French lawyer wrote, “to allow the people to play the fool and make merry, lest by holding them in too great a rigor, we put them in despair.”13

  In Protestant countries like England, the number of saints’ days and other religious holidays steadily decreased in the wake of the Reformation. Condemned for their intemperance and frivolity, some festivals gave way to secular or Protestant substitutes, but on a more modest scale. “Our holy and festival days are very well reduced,” reported the Elizabethan William Harrison.14 Even in Catholic communities, cathartic interludes among the common people were of limited duration, confined, as holidays, to special times of the year. And over time, carnal excess declined, with mounting efforts by clergy and town councils to impose greater order. Significantly, only after darkness fell did opportunities for merriment occasionally enter a more violent, at times anarchic stage. So in the Auvergne, weddings typically climaxed in evening violence, and May Day festivities, in parts of Italy, grew more disorderly at night. During Carnival season, anxious authorities in much of Europe forbade masks after dark, lest they incite rioting and bloodshed. “None are suffered to carry swords or arms, while they go masked thus; nor to enter into any house; nor to be abroad masked after it grows dark,” reported a foreign visitor to Rome.15

  Routinely, the darkness of night loosened the tethers of the visible world. Despite night’s dangers, no other realm of preindustrial existence promised so much autonomy to so many people. Light was not an unalloyed blessing, nor darkness inevitably a source of misery. “In the day,” observed the Restoration satirist Tom Brown, “’tis constraint, ’tis ceremony, ’tis dissimulation, that speaks.” Appearances were often deceiving, because they were meant to be. “All’s restraint,” echoed a contemporary. It was after sunset that opportunities expanded and intensified for behavior otherwise forbidden. Night alone permitted the expression of man’s inner character. “Night is conscious of all your desires,” stated a writer. A London song described how “many a face, and many a heart, / Will then pull off the mask” to sin “openly at night.”16

  Nighttime had deep symbolic value, its appeal owing much to its traditional association with licentiousness and disorder. In the popular mind, nocturnal darkness lay beyond the pale of the civilized realm. “’Tis only daylight that makes sin,” wrote John Milton. Dusk represented a borderland between civility and freedom—freedom in both its benign and malignant qualities. “Metaphors matter,” as Bernard Bailyn has reminded us, for “they shape the way we think”—all the more when they make sense in the light of actual experience.

  On a practical level, the sources of night’s allure were considerable, including the natural mask it afforded persons in lieu of the façades often adopted during the day. “Dark enough,” affirmed a London writer in 1683, “to come back to one’s house without being taken notice of by the neighbours.” Even on clear nights, danger of public exposure receded owing to fewer pedestrians. With most persons confined to their dwellings, public behavior invariably became more private—all the more, observed the playwright Aphra Behn, once “mortal eyes are safely lockt in sleep.” Then, too, personal associations at night were the product of choice, not circumstance—trusted friends and family rather than workmates or inquisitive superiors. Darkness, as a late eighteenth-century writer noted, created “little separate communities” quite apart from one’s diurnal relationships.17

  The immensity of night, for some, conferred a pronounced sense of personal sovereignty. “Everything belongs to me in the night,” declared Restif de la Bretonne. In his famed poem The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742–1745), Edward Young echoed, “What awful joy! What mental liberty! / I am not pent in darkness; / . . . in darkness I’m embower’d.” For all of the fear engendered by pestilential damps and celestial spectacles, the outdoors invited mortals’ grandest visions. “We can fix our eyes more comfortably on the heavens,” observed Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle—“our thoughts are freer because we’re so foolish as to imagine ourselves the only ones abroad to dream.” Night knew no bounds. Goethe, on a moonlit evening in Naples, was “overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.” And not just poets and philosophers. Exclaimed an English grazier treading home from an evening’s merriment, “Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars.” To which, replied his companion, “With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.”18

  CHAPTER SIX

  WORKS OF DARKNESS:

  LABOR

  I

  What use of thee can any creature make? For any good? What profit dost thou bring?

  HUMPHREY MILL, “OF DARKNESSE,” 16391

  AND, TOO, NIGHT often declared a welcome truce from daily toil. For countless laborers, darkness brought freedom not only from social oversight but also from punishing hours of work. “The night cometh, when no man can work,” affirmed the Book of John. In sections of Britain, the expression “blindman’s holiday” customarily signified the arrival of evening, when it became too dark for most labor. “The sun set, the workman freed,” declared a Spanish saying.2

  During the Middle Ages, nocturnal labor in many trades was illegal. In a variety of crafts, municipal regulations forbade work, even during the early hours of winter darkness preceding the curfew bell. In 1375, Hamburg required farriers to stop their labors in the autumn when “the sun turns golden” and each winter “when day gives way to night.” Not that the physical well-being of workers weighed heavily on the minds of medieval authorities. Along with religious objections to night’s desecration, there existed the heightened risk of fire. Moreover, by limiting trades to daylight, towns imposed greater order upon economic activity, whether for setting taxes or instituting price controls. Tradesmen themselves, to ensure the quality of their goods, often restricted hours. As much for pride as for profit, master craftsmen found candlelight deficient for their chisels, files, and other fine tools. “The night work is a daies confusion,” went a familiar adage. Beginning in the twelfth century, English guilds typically prohibited work at night. In the forefront were skilled crafts that required keen wits, sharp eyesight, and ample illumination. A French Book of Trades in the thirteenth century forbade gold and silversmiths to work, for “light at night is insufficient for them to ply their trade well and truly.” During a street riot in Dijon, a cutler was stabbed for keeping late hours. Magnifying such concerns was a deep-rooted suspicion of nocturnal commerce of any sort. Not only was nighttime associated with the devil’s work, but unwitting customers placed themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous tradesmen—eager to “practice deception in their work,” condemned the Spurmakers Guild of London in 1345. “Choose not a woman, nor linen clothe by the candle,” warned a saying.3

  Even so, not all labor in medieval towns and villages subsided at dusk. There existed a variety of exceptions, including some rural tasks and unskilled trades. Within the fourteenth-century account books of a large Florentine cloth company, the term notte, or night, indicated workers who toiled until midnight. In St. Omer, sailors and weavers were among those exempted in 1358 from heeding the night bell to cease labor. Of a neighborhood smith reluctant to extinguish his forge, a medieval poet protested, “Such noise on nights ne heard men never, / What [with] knaven cry and clattering knocks!” Even tailors and cobblers occasionally performed rudimentary tasks by candlelight.
Filling orders for noble families, they were given exemptions—as were workers on the eve of markets and fairs. Louis XI permitted Parisian glovemakers, one winter, to labor until 10:00 P.M. Not only had their orders mounted, but masters complained of the need to keep apprentices and servants at night from gaming. Work, among other things, was a form of social control.4

  Not until the early modern era, however, was there a marked rise in nocturnal labor. With the emergence of new markets and manufacturers, regional economies expanded in all directions, temporally as well as spatially. Despite persistent fears of fire, guilds and municipal authorities adopted less stringent regulations. In Sweden, for example, such was the importance of beer production that breweries remained in operation overnight. The same was true in Amsterdam. When the monk Woulter Jacobszoon in 1573 abruptly awoke at 2:00 A.M. from a noise, he suspected a nearby brewery “where beer was put into vats.” For most callings, to be sure, the day’s work still ended with darkness, as it normally did for the urban middle classes. Strictly speaking, the English Statute of Artificers of 1563 required that artisans and other laborers work during spring and summer from five in the morning to between seven and eight in the evening and during fall and winter from daybreak to dusk (two and a half hours were allotted for rest and meals). In seventeenth-century France, the common expression “day-laborer” meant a laborer who worked from sunrise to sunset. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, in his evocative description of pre-Revolutionary Paris, described the exodus home each sunset of carpenters and masons, leaving trails of white plaster from their shoes.5

  All the same, a wealth of evidence indicates that nocturnal labor became surprisingly widespread in preindustrial communities, especially when days grew shortest from autumn to spring. Notwithstanding the loss of daylight, numerous people toiled past nightfall, both in towns and in the country. “In this age, tradesmen, and those that have any toiling employment in the world,” complained an English writer in 1680, “have brought themselves to an ill custom of sitting up at their trade.” Where many extended their labors by several hours, some persons worked past midnight. “In the day-time as much as thou wilt, in the night as much as thou canst,” affirmed a seventeenth-century adage. Counseled a Scottish saying, “Stabel the steed and put your wife to bed when there’s night wark to do.”6

  II

  As touching intemperance and excess in sleep, necessity cures most of you that are poor of this evil.

  WILLIAM BURKITT, 16947

  Who labored at night, and why? Was the decision to work more a matter of choice or necessity? One answer to these questions lies in the irregular hours that marked some laborers’ travail. Not all times of the day or days of the week for these workers were alike in intensity. The Sabbath naturally brought a respite from labor. But even on other days, rather than adhering to fixed hours, laborers set their own pace by performing piecework inside cottages and small shops or selected tasks on farms. According to E. P. Thompson, “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their working lives.” What portion of the premodern workforce they represented is impossible to say; but plainly more than a few men and women deferred to evening tasks that might have been completed earlier, albeit at a less leisurely tempo. Days were devoted not just to labor but also to gossip and drink.8 Then, too, such trades as baking, due to their unique demands, operated overnight, whereas still other trades grew busy at times from the sudden press of fresh orders. Goods were produced on demand. In Hertford, the apprentice tailor John Dane “sat up three nights to work” because his master “had manie sargants cotes to make.” And the glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra devoted a night to completing a set of windows for a church in Vendôme, having pledged to deliver them the following day. A London shoemaker in 1722, “being oblig’d to get a pair of shoos made,” worked in his stall close to midnight.9

  Most often, however, pressures of subsistence—not personal preference, the pace of business, or a “preindustrial work ethic”—drove workers to toil late hours. “The day is short, the work is much,” affirmed an English proverb. Evenings let individuals of small means complete the day’s drudgery and, in some cases, find gainful employment. The Elizabethan writer Thomas Dekker, in an essay on candlelight, asked rhetorically, “How many poore handy-craftes men by thee have earned the best part of their living?” A resident of London, the laborer Thomas Long, worked two nights straight just to get “the money up” to pay his rent. “The hardest part of the day’s service,” declared Reverend James Clayton, “often falls upon our poor, at that time which God and nature have allotted to rest.” So, also, in a fourteenth-century tale by Franco Sacchetti, the character Bonamico asks a neighbor, “Art thou then in such great poverty that thou canst not do without working at night?”10

  In urban areas, a broad spectrum of laborers comprised the working poor at night. Servants, found in a quarter or more of all English families, remained subject to a master’s summons. Some domestics, like chamberlains and maidservants, bore assigned duties after dark, from locking doors and windows to preparing bedchambers and snuffing candles. In the wake of company, complained a Dutch writer, a family’s maidservants might not retire until two or three o’clock. Outside the home, manual laborers such as porters and carmen occasionally toiled late hours. At two in the morning, the London workman John Thomson was called to heave ballast aboard a vessel on the Thames, where the tides, not daylight, determined shipping schedules, as they did for commercial fishermen. Urban peddlers at night peopled streets, like the young oublieurs who sold waffles each evening in Paris. In the Venetian engravings of Gaetano Zompini may be found men and boys hawking such perishables as calves’ blood and fresh shellfish by moonlight. “Come, buy my mussels,” shouts a youth, “there’s no fish will keep.” In Rome, vendors sold brandy to combat night’s “bad air.”11 And everywhere, “bunters” foraged lanes for rags and other articles dropped by crowds that could be sold for making paper. Returning home one evening, Samuel Pepys encountered a boy with a lantern “that was picking up of rags”—“he could get sometimes three or four bushels of rags in a day, and gat 3d a bushel for them,” Pepys marveled. Dunghills, rummaged, yielded small treasures of their own. Persons scavenged deserted market stalls, hunting for bread, vegetables, and scraps of meat to sell. Others collected excrement from lanes to peddle in the country for fertilizer. There was money in manure. In Naples, Goethe discovered boys and farmhands “reluctant to leave the streets at nightfall,” such was the “gold mine” to be had from the “droppings of mules and horses.”12

  Pehr Hilleström, The Testing of an Egg, 1785.

  Ordinary folk followed various trades requiring rudimentary skills. English weavers, in response to a burgeoning cloth industry, sometimes sat at looms until 10:00 P.M., even in wintertime. On the Continent, conditions were little different. Male weavers in Lyons, for example, labored from 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M., as did women in silk mills. Tailors, shoemakers, feltmakers, and dyers endured long days. “Burgess bedtyme,” stated a Scottish proverb, “is surtois [shoemaker’s] suppertyme.” In The Hague, when David Beck, one January evening in 1624, returned to his dwelling after nine o’clock, he found “Abraham the tailor who was still working at our home.” Of tallow chandlers, an eighteenth-century guide to London trades noted that their “time of working must be as the season permits, or goods are wanting, by night or by day.” The youth Tom Poundall, nearly blind from smallpox, cut candlewicks evenings for a chandler.13

  Late hours typified the regimen of masons, carpenters, and other members of the building trades. Scattered workmen labored at night inside Pepys’s home on Seething Lane. On Christmas Eve in 1660, painters did not finish until 10:00 P.M.—“this night I was rid of their and all other work,” a relieved Pepys recorded in his diary. According to the Northampton squire Daniel Eaton in 1726, joiners frequently worked by candlelight when autumn days grew short.14 Bakers labored much of th
e night in order to provide morning customers with warm bread. “He burns the midnight oil for me,” wrote Mercier of Paris’s bakers.15 To produce ale or beer, commercial brewers began after midnight the laborious process of grinding the malt, boiling it in water to produce mash, drawing off the wort, furnishing hops (for beer), and adding yeast.16

  Shifts of glassmakers and iron smelters kept vigil beside blazing furnaces. To sustain the intense temperatures, furnaces burned around the clock, as did lime kilns and mounds of wood, covered by peat, to produce charcoal. In the coastal town of Lymington, Celia Fiennes found workers boiling large pans of sea water to make salt. “They constantly attend night and day all the while the fire is in the furnace . . . they leave off Satterday night and let out the fire and so begin and kindle their fire Monday morning, it’s a pretty charge to light the fire.” Except for cities like London with noise restrictions, blacksmiths worked late many evenings.17 Mills ran overnight in order to take advantage of the natural power, whether wind or water, propelling their wheels. Just as olive oil mills in southern France operated “day and night,” so did gristmills in England. “They keep theire mills goinge all night, if they have but whearewithall to keepe her doinge,” observed a Yorkshire farmer in 1642. (Millers, because of their nocturnal labors, were sometimes rumored to dabble in magic.)18 Mines, too, functioned through the night, for the time of day mattered little in shafts lit by miners’ lamps. Such was the regimen within copper mines in central Sweden and silver mines outside Freiburg. In Cornwall, according to a writer, “poore men” earned “their living hardly by mininge and digging tinne and metall oute of the grounde bothe daye and night.” Already, in these nascent enterprises—the mills, forges, and mines of early modern Europe—we can glimpse the profound contribution that nighttime would one day make to industrial productivity.19