At Day's Close
Page 20
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Blacksmith’s Shop, eighteenth century.
For most tasks, semi-skilled workers found crude illuminants sufficient. Oil lamps and candles were preferred. On the Isle of Man, the word arnane in the Manx language signified “work done at night by candlelight.” In Sweden, masters each fall invited apprentices and journeymen to their homes for a ljusinbrinning, or “burning-in,” a frolic designed to inaugurate the season for laboring by artificial light. Conversely, German artisans celebrated the end of winter darkness with a meal called a lichtbraten (light roast), as did English shoemakers each March in a ritual known as “wetting the block.” Preindustrial workers also resorted to rushlights, candlewood, and even, on occasion, moonlight. The costs incurred by artificial illumination were another matter. An Elizabethan writer condemned the high price of tallow candles “to the great hindrance of the poor workeman that watcheth [remains awake] in the night.” The common expression, “not worth the candle,” denoted work too minor to warrant the expense. Still, for many tradesmen, profits outweighed the costs. In a popular song entitled “The Clothier’s Delight,” an employer declares, “We have soap and candles whereby we have light, / That you may work by them so long as you have sight.” Indeed, the London Evening Post reported in 1760, “For several months in the winter season, many working businesses are prosecuted by seven or eight hours of candle-light work in the morning and evening”—even though, the paper added, they “require a great deal of it.”20
Among the hardest workers—night in, night out—were women. Unlike men of middling or plebeian rank, who mostly worked outside the home, many urban wives and daughters confined their days to the domestic realm, except for running errands, performing outdoor chores, or visiting a close neighbor. By the late sixteenth century, women were increasingly discouraged from traveling “fro hous to hous, to heere sundry talys,” as does the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387). Rather than a “wanderer abroad,” the virtuous woman was expected to be “a worker at home.” Her moral character was thought essential to the good repute of the household, where, after all, her conduct remained under tighter control. If not the master of her home, the wife, nonetheless, was its keeper, with all the obligations that burden entailed. A full day’s labor included cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Although most women rose earlier than their husbands, they had less opportunity during the day to rest. “Some respit to husbands the weather may send,” wrote Thomas Tusser in the sixteenth century, “but huswives affaires have never an ende.”21
Nights brought little seeming relief. Often, to paraphrase a contemporary, work was exchanged for work. Domestic tasks invariably extended the day’s toil. “The good huswive’s candle never goeth out,” remarked William Baldwin in Beware the Cat (1584). A late July evening in 1650 found Jane Bond of Massachusetts making a cake and collecting firewood. Jane Morris of London mended linen from the early afternoon to nearly midnight. So well known was the seventeenth-century ballad “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” that the Maine midwife Martha Ballard invoked it, late one evening, when scribbling in her diary–“happy shee,” reflected Ballard, “whos strength holds out to the end of the rais.” Indeed, when the Wiltshire laborer Stephen Duck published his celebrated poem “The Thresher’s Labour” in 1739, it brought a stinging response from the poet Mary Collier. “When night comes on, and we quite weary are, / We scarce can count what falls unto our share.” Unlike the toil of men, protested Collier, “Our labours never know an end.”22
Certainly not when laundry needed washing. This task was unpleasant and laborious. Tubs of water had to be carted inside and heated, and garments scrubbed, starched, and ironed. Cleansers, in the absence of soap, included lye, urine, and even dung mixed with cold water. In propertied households, women servants bore the brunt of the labor. So time-consuming was washing that they typically began late at night to minimize domestic disruption. “A washing pickle,” Pepys called the confusion upon returning home one November night. Indigent women earned a living by washing clothes at home or, more commonly, by traveling to dwellings as laundresses. The widow Mary Stower, on “a very moon light” evening, visited a house in Leeds at 2:00 A.M. Stated Ann Timms of London, “I wash for a living, being late at work between eleven and twelve o’clock.”23
Women augmented the family income in other ways—brewing ale and making cheese, to name two evening enterprises. Of beermaking, Collier complained, “Our wort boils over if we dare to sleep.” Above all, women devoted nights to spinning and knitting, carding wool, and weaving. Starting in the fourteenth century, the putting-out system emerged in many sections of Europe, whereby urban merchants provided households with wool, flax, and other raw materials. Making textiles was a major activity in both rural and urban households. On long winter evenings, from Sweden to the Italian peninsula, mothers, daughters, and servants turned their hands to spinning wheels or looms. Instructed the steward of a Scottish laird, “Keep the maids closs at their spinning till 9 at night when they are not washing or at other necessary work.” Of his childhood home in Bavaria, Jean Paul recalled the cattle maid “at her distaff in the servants’ room, which was lit by what little light the pinewood torches afforded.” None of these tasks required much light. Of knitting, an Aberdeen minister noted that many of his parishioners performed “their work throughout the winter evening, with the faintest light issuing from a few turfs.” So important a source of income was spinning in parts of Germany that widows were allowed to keep their wheels after selling other possessions for debt. In the East Anglian city of Norwich, according to a census in the early 1570s, 94 percent of poor women performed textile work of some sort. At times of economic crisis, spinning afforded families vital support. In 1782 during crop failures in Scotland, women, reported a local resident, contributed “more to the welfare of their families than the men” by “sitting up at their work every other night.”24
Finally, in urban communities a handful of occupations were nocturnal, limited largely to the hours of darkness. For the most part, they were jobs staffed by persons of small means who could not compete successfully in the daytime economy. Instead of rest, night offered these souls a livelihood. Together with the nightwatch, paid at public expense, scattered numbers, for example, found employment as private “watchers.” Enlisted by manufacturers and tradesmen, they guarded merchandise from vandalism, theft, and fire. Watchers protected mills, counting houses, and stables. In Florence, private guards patrolled warehouses. Having “frequently lost coals,” the proprietor of a London coalyard in 1729 hired a force of four watchmen. Servants served their masters in twin capacities. At mills near Edinburgh, for instance, it was the “custom of the miller’s servants to watch the mills nightly by turns.” In Newcastle, a butcher’s maidservant, Catherine Parker, “watch’d his stall” at night in the city’s fleshmarket. A few persons were watchers by calling. “I am watchman at the steel-yard,” declared John Stubley, testifying at the Old Bailey against a thief.25
“Nightmen,” for their part, emptied underground cesspools, or “vaults.” Over each pit stood a privy, known as a “jake” or “house of easement,” located in a cellar or garden. Advised Tusser, “Foule privies are now to be clensed and fide, / let night be appointed such baggage to hide.” With the rapid growth of cities and towns, nightmen played an essential role in urban sanitation. Already by the sixteenth century, the city of Nuremberg employed Nachtmeister to empty some fifty public pits. Of course, many municipalities permitted the evening disposal of human waste in streets, which, in theory, workmen called scavengers swept clean in the hours before daybreak. Cities like London, however, discouraged this practice as a danger to public health, and civic-minded households increasingly relied upon private latrines. “Night-soil” was the euphemism coined for the ordure that professional nightmen hauled in buckets to waiting carts. Some families, like the Pepys household, benefited from sharing their cellar with a neighbor. “So to bed,” Samuel wrot
e in July 1663, “leaving the men below in the cellar emptying the turds up through Mr. Turner’s own house; and so, with more content, to bed late.” Besides mandating the emptying of cesspools at night, Parisian officials in 1729 required that gadouards, or nightmen, proceed directly to dumps rather than pause at taverns for refreshment. In England, whereas the countryside initially received most urban waste, transportation costs became prohibitively high once cities increased in size and density. And, unlike other premodern peoples, such as the Japanese, who relied heavily upon human waste for fertilizer, Western households generally preferred animal excrement. In the case of London, much of its waste was dumped into the Thames.26
Anon., John Hunt, Nightman and Rubbish Carter, near the Wagon and Horses in Goswell Street, near Mount Mill, London, eighteenth century.
The objectionable nature of the work is suggested by the sarcastic nickname “goldfinder,” given to nightmen. In Augsburg, senior latrine cleaners were known as “night kings.” If a vault had gone long unemptied, the undertaking could be arduous. At the Philadelphia home of Elizabeth Drinker, forty-four years of “depositing” elapsed before a cesspool in the yard was cleaned in 1799. The ordeal required two carts and five men laboring for two consecutive nights until four or five each morning. Wondered Drinker afterward, “If liberty and equality which some talk much about, could take place, who would they get for those, and many other hard and disagreeable undertakings?” The dangers were considerable, including asphyxiation whenever workmen entered a vault, equipped at most with lanterns for light. At a Southwark tavern called the Tumble-down Dick, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported in July 1753:
The first man that went down, overcome by the stench, call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face; a second went to help him, and fell down also; then a third, fourth went down, when these two were obliged to come up again directly: and the stench of the place being by this time greatly abated, they got the two that went down first; but the second was dead, and the first had so little life in him, that he died in the afternoon.27
As with human excreta, so with bodies of the dead. Cities and towns reserved their worst tasks for night. Thus, during epidemics, municipal officials waited for darkness to dispose of their dead. With fewer citizens abroad, there was less risk, according to common thought, of spreading infection. And there was less likelihood then of public panic. During London’s Great Plague of 1665, which killed some fifty-six thousand people, “dead-carts” were stationed evenings at the entrance of streets and alleys for families to deposit bodies. Municipal officials in Bavaria muffled their wheels with rags. “All the needful works, that carried terror with them, that were both dismal and dangerous, were done in the night,” noted Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In the event of plague, night also brought the burning of victims’ clothes and bedding. Of an outbreak in Barcelona during the mid-1600s, a contemporary reported:
If anyone died of the plague they took the body at night to be buried in the graveyard of Nazareth along with the mattresses and sheets. The following night they would come to burn the wooden bed frame and curtains and the clothing and everything the sick person might have touched.
Charged with all these tasks were gravediggers known in England as vespillons for their evening duties (that is, at the time of vespers). In Italy, they were named beccamòrti, or corpse-carriers. Sometimes clad in white, gravediggers carried torches as a warning. When smallpox afflicted Boston in 1764, they were ordered to place each body in a tarred sheet and a coffin “in the dead of night,” with a man to proceed before the corpse “to give notice to anyone that may be passing.” Pepys restricted his nocturnal peregrinations in 1665 during London’s plague. On one such outing—“in great fear of meeting of dead corpses carrying to be burned”—he periodically spied “a linke (which is the mark of them) at a distance.” “Blessed be God, met none,” he confided to his diary.28
III
Many things even go best in the raw night-hours.
VIRGIL, 1ST CENTURY B.C.29
“My business drives me dreadfully,” complained the New England farmer Hiram Harwood. “Go to bed late and rise early.” From the early American piedmont to the steppes of western Russia, more than three-quarters of the population worked the soil as tenants, laborers, servants, serfs, and slaves, in addition to smaller numbers of landowning peasants, yeoman farmers, and planters. Fields produced flax and grains like oats, rye, and wheat, along with hay and other sources of animal fodder. Common were vegetable gardens and orchards. On colonial plantations, tobacco, rice, indigo, and sugar dominated. Rather than a hiatus, evenings for rural folk frequently represented a continuation of the working day. More than a few vainly struggled to eke out an existence, toiling, like one farmer, “night and day” to stave off debt and the loss of their meager plots (more often rented than owned). The London writer “Mus Rusticus” in the 1770s lamented the typical laborer’s plight, who “in order to support himself and his family” was forced to work for a larger landholder “from four A.M. ’til eight at night, if he can get any glimmering of light.” Always pressing were the demands of farming and planting, regardless of one’s economic independence. “You will find no diligent overseer who does not stay up for the greater part of the night,” claimed the German Jacobus Andreas Crusius in 1660. For the early Roman writer Columella, an aversion to sleep in addition to wine and “sexual indulgence” was a prerequisite for good husbandry.30
Francesco Bassano the Younger, Autumn Harvest (Grape-picking), 1585–1590.
Often there were jobs at night to do, from butchering stock to chopping wood to picking apples, all labor-intensive tasks able to be performed in poor light. Having in May 1665 gathered furze all day, the Norfolk laborer Thomas Rust carted it home later that evening. Farm workers near Aberdeen, on summer nights, cut slabs of peat for fuel. Nighttime found Abner Sanger of New Hampshire mending fences, building hogpens, and hauling lumber. “I work until daylight,” he recorded in 1771 after digging a garden the entire evening. From late spring to fall, it was not unknown for fieldwork to be completed after nightfall, whether that meant breaking ground, sowing seed, haymaking, or harvesting a crop. “They finished my haycock at night,” noted a country vicar in his diary.31 In late summer and early autumn, harvests consumed long hours, as workers scrambled to gather mature crops. “This night we cut down all our corn,” recorded a Yorkshireman with satisfaction in late August 1691. In parts of the Continent, the vintage beckoned. Of southern France, a seventeenth-century observer wrote, “In the vintage time the people are very busy early and late.” A sudden thunderstorm could destroy a harvest left lying overnight. And there were easier pickings then for thieves. A visitor to Scotland reported, “No part is left in the field but carried home every night as it is cut down & deposited in barns.” A manorial official instructed Prussian villagers in 1728, “In the harvest, there can be no fixed hours for service with horse-teams, which must be regulated according to the work that needs doing.”32
Domestic animals also required close attention. Returning from pasture, cows were foddered, watered, and milked, nighttime as well as morning. Once cleaned, stalls needed fresh straw. Horses, hogs, and poultry, all had to be fed and put to bed. Not until eleven o’clock did the Cumberland servant John Brown on a March evening “get some straw to clean and bed up” his master’s horse. Animals occasionally fell sick, while the birth of a foal or calf could mean long hours waiting by the stall. In early spring, newborn lambs necessitated constant care.33 Stock sometimes broke loose, trampling crops and gardens. In Dorset, on a spring evening in 1698, John Richards’s dairy cow, Bexington Red, fell into a ditch. Unable to rise, it had to be watched through the night.34
Some rural tasks were specially suited to evening, from destroying slugs to shifting beehives. Wasps’ nests, too, were best burned after dark. Starlings, sparrows, and other “nuisance” birds were easiest then to catch with a
combination of lanterns and nets. Although thought harmful to humans, the damp, cool night air had a variety of salutary effects, according to agricultural writers and farmers. Just as the author Di Giacomo Agostinetti in 1707 advised sowing millet “in the evening when the air is cool” to “benefit from the dew of the night,” so, too, on an April night in 1648, did Adam Eyre of Yorkshire plant mustard seed and turnips in his garden. Evening was the preferred time to water crops in order to avoid evaporation. On the Virginia plantation of Landon Carter, slaves scrupulously irrigated young tobacco plants at night to speed their maturation. “We have gangs enough to dispatch a field in a hurry,” the wealthy planter boasted in his diary. The farming book of Henry Best of Elmswell advised that straw be watered at night in preparation for thatching roofs.35
Also important, each evening, were clues that the night sky furnished of the day ahead. Displayed across the heavens were meteorological signs thought capable of forecasting everything from thunderstorms to hard frosts. As the authors of Maison Rustique explained in 1616, a good farmer, “although he need not to be booke-wise,” must “have knowledge of the things foretelling raine, wind, faire weather, and other alterations of the seasons.” Sundry omens existed, but most people seem to have put their faith in the night sky. Declared the London author of A Prognostication Everlasting (1605), “Behold the stars whose magnitude you know best. If they appeare of much light, in bignesse great, more blazing then they are commonly, it betokeneth great wind or moysture in that part where they shew.”36