Let the lazy great-ones of the town,
Drink night away
And sleep all day,
’Till gouty, gouty, they are grown:
Our daily works such vigour give,
That nightly sports we oft’ revive;
And kiss our dames,
With stronger flames,
Than any prince alive.22
Slaves routinely fraternized on neighboring properties, especially spouses owned by different masters. “Amusements” included “legendary ballads” and “narratives of alternate dialogue and singing,” according to the Richmond lawyer George Tucker—“the night is their own.” A traveler to Virginia reported that the average slave, rather than retire to rest at day’s end, “generally sets out from home, and walks six or seven miles in the night, be the weather ever so sultry, to a negroe dance, in which he performs with astonishing agility, and the most vigorous exertions.” A common precaution, of West African origin, was a kettle or pot. Placed upside-down, it was meant to capture human voices and other sounds. Using traditional techniques to tell time by the moon and stars, slaves returned before dawn. Along with moonlight, burning candlewood provided illumination as well as warmth on cool evenings. “Dem old pine knots would burn for a long time and throw a fine bright light,” a former slave observed.23
Of course, drinking houses, too, catered to the lower orders. Such favorites as Lille’s Savage Man’s Tavern or Eva’s Whores and Thieve’s Bar in Amsterdam left little to the imagination. The Darkened Room in Augsburg provided a refuge in the 1590s to a notorious gang of thieves. Worst, in the eyes of the upper classes, were alehouses that remained open through most of the evening. In England, many of these night-cellars, as they came to be called in the early 1700s, were squalid, ill-lit hovels. In contrast to other drinking houses, they were more affordable as well as less accessible to social superiors. Reeking of tobacco fumes, vomit, and urine, they attracted a steady stream of patrons eager to tipple away the small hours. So at the Three Daggers, a London alehouse, the cellar-man Joshua Travers drank with comrades until 6:00 A.M. “Here are discharged vollies of oaths and execrations, ribaldry and nonsense, blasphemy and obscenity,” noted a London resident. Often, in Paris, late-night revelers refused to leave cabarets at closing time. “Most cabaretiers,” complained authorities in 1760, “keep their houses open during the night, and receive people of every estate, and often give shelter to debauched women, soldiers, beggars and sometimes to thieves.” In Strasbourg, so-called sleeping houses were faulted during the mid-1600s for “all kinds of wantonness, forbidden dancing, excessive drinking, eating, and carousing.” So, too, in Virginia, the planter Landon Carter denounced the proliferation of “night shops” and their popularity among slaves and poor whites as receptacles for stolen goods. Not only did the shops dispense rum, but proprietors sold “to anybody any thing whatever.” “At best,” chided Carter, “they must steal what they sell.”24
III
Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.
THOMAS HARDY, 188625
“He that does ill hates the light,” affirmed a Scottish proverb. Numerous folk, besides burglars, robbers, and other hardened rogues, exploited the evening darkness, often for illicit purposes. Petty criminals were far more numerous, if less feared. For poor families, social and legal constraints of all sorts eased. Indigent households buried their dead at night to escape paying parish dues, which had the added benefit of protecting gravesites from thieves, often needy themselves. Where grave robbers at night stole clothing and caskets, “resurrection men” unearthed entire bodies, freshly interred in churchyards, to sell for medical dissection.26 Meanwhile, struggling mothers, after dark, abandoned newborns for whom they could ill afford to care. In London, the Royal Exchange became a favored location for castaways. Mothers in Paris attached tags to their infants, identifying their sex, birth date, and first name. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, approximately two thousand abandoned children were annually admitted to the foundling hospital in Paris, one of numerous such institutions throughout Catholic Europe. Provincial roads, too, received their share. On a dark winter evening in 1760, for example, a new mother, Jane Brewerton, placed her illegitimate daughter beside a byroad in the Yorkshire town of Chapell Allerton, waiting at a distance until a couple discovered the child.27
Impoverished souls too proud to beg by day dotted urban streets after sunset, desperate for bread. As the monk Woulter Jacobszoon described a nun in Amsterdam, “She went out at night when it was dark, because during the day she was ashamed, being respectable at heart.”28 Likewise, debtors and other fugitives, fearful of arrest, traveled freely. At night, wrote Thomas Dekker, “The banckrupt, the fellon, and all that owed any mony, and for feare of arrests, or justices warrants, had like so many snayles kept their houses over their heads all day before, began to creep out of their shels.” Many a tenant, unable to make their rent, took moon-light flight, “moving house with as little noise as possible.”29 Darkness also offered the indigent an opportunity for squatting, if only overnight, in urban sheds and stables or in barns and other outbuildings in the country. Yeomen, claimed Dekker, from their fear of arson “dare not deny them.” Squatters in parts of western England and Wales laid more permanent claims. A local custom of uncertain origins permitted one to occupy a piece of waste or common land by building a turf cottage overnight, generally known as a caban unnos. The work had to be completed between twilight and dawn, though friends and family were permitted to help.30
And there were opportunities at night for sorcery. On both sides of the Atlantic, members of the poor and dispossessed resorted to magic, especially as private charity in communities declined and poverty rose. “Poverty,” noted a sixteenth-century authority on witchcraft, “is often the source of many evils in persons who do not choose it voluntarily or endure it patiently.” By night, those on the economic margins eagerly participated in a “supernatural economy,” pinning their hopes on magical charms believed to help locate buried gold and silver. The spells used by Hans Heinrich Richter, a disabled blacksmith in eighteenth-century Prussia, had both Christian and pagan roots. The best time for treasure hunting fell after midnight, with some evenings preferred to others depending on the moon’s phase. Silence was critical. As a defense against demons, it was customary to draw one or more circles at the supposed spot. More alarming to authorities, malevolent spirits might be invoked to assist in unearthing the treasure. An English statute in 1542 threatened hunters with the death penalty for “invocacions and conjurations of sprites” to “get knowledge for their own lucre in what place treasure of golde and silver shulde or mought be founde.”31
For some desperate sorts, sorcery offered a means of punishing their persecutors—or smiting neighbors who had turned a blind eye to one’s misfortune. When a farmer in Worcestershire, one night, apprehended an elderly woman, her arms filled with stolen wood, she immediately fell upon her knees and prayed with uplifted hands that “he might never more be warm, nor ever know the warmth of a fire.” Other practitioners pierced wax images with thorns or called directly upon Satan’s assistance. Slaves, by resorting to magic, sought to escape their oppression. In Kentucky, Henry Bibb, having “great faith in conjuration and witchcraft,” learned to make a magical concoction from an older slave. After heating a mixture of fresh cow manure, red pepper, and “white people’s hair,” he ground the substance into a fine powder, which he sprinkled at night about his master’s chamber—all for the purpose, Bibb later wrote, of preventing “him from ever abusing me in any way.” Still more ambitious was a plan hatched by the German servant Johannes Butzbasch. Too scared to abscond from his master on foot, he instead considered visiting “an old hag,” hoping he might receive a “black cow upon which he could escape through the air.”32
John Quidor, The Money Diggers, 1832.
Sorcery was employed at al
l hours, but its power was thought most potent when spirits roamed. Common belief held that some curses and spells worked solely at night, making wary neighbors all the more suspicious of single women found abroad after dark. It was not unusual in colonial New England for women to be warned that their “nightwalking” could fuel suspicions of witchcraft. Seventeen-year-old Lydia Nichols, questioned during the Salem witch hunt in 1692 “how she darst lie out a nights in the woods alone,” replied that “she was not a fraid of any thing” for “she had sold her selfe boddy & soull to the old boy.” In 1665 a Connecticut colonist named John Brown was alleged, late one night inside a neighbor’s home, to have drawn a satanic symbol for his brother. According to a witness, “He went to the doore & called his brother out to looke upon ye stars, then hee told him he [Satan] was there in ye stars, then he comes in & burnt his paper & sd if he had not burnt ye paper, the divell would have come presently.”33
None of these nocturnal pursuits, however—neither black magic nor other misdeeds—ever attracted the large numbers given to pilfering. Servants, slaves, apprentices, laborers, husbandmen, all engaged in petty theft. “They steal every thing they can lay their hands on,” exclaimed Arthur Young of the Irish poor. Of Italian peasants, a poem, “De Natura Rusticorum,” railed: “At night they make their way, as the owls, / and they steal as robbers.” In eighteenth-century Paris, laborers, apprentices, and journeymen committed two-thirds of petty thefts.34 Along with theft at urban worksites, pilfering by domestic servants was rife. Samuel Pepys one evening discovered half the wine in his cellar missing, which he attributed to midnight frolics among his servants—“after we were in bed,” he groused. Servile larceny prompted Parliament in 1713 to enact a draconian law rendering a capital offense, without benefit of clergy, the theft of goods valued at more than forty shillings from a dwelling.35
In rural regions, crops and livestock made tempting targets. Vulnerable, too, were beehives, fishponds, and the week’s wash. “Never let your linen hang out after dark,” advised a writer. Despite surveillance by landowners, fields were too large and nights too dark. In 1709, items stolen by Agnes Park from neighbors in the Scottish parish of Cathcart included peas and beans, bowkail, straw, and malt from a brewhouse. A visitor to Ireland discovered, “Turnips are stolen by car loads, and two acres of wheat pluckt off in a night.” For rural families without land, stolen grass supplied fodder for livestock. Sometimes, too, cattle were grazed overnight in neighboring pastures. Closes were breached to rob cows of their milk—the Virginia planter Landon Carter complained that his slave Criss encouraged her children to “milk my cows in the night.” Perhaps most prized was wood, dead or alive, for cooking in summer and in winter for heat. In addition to fallen branches from storms, green limbs were “brumped” from trees, and estate fences stripped of their rails. “Gates will be cut in pieces, and conveyed in many places as fast as built; trees as big as a man’s body, and that would require ten men to move, gone in a night,” reported Young.36
Most goods appear to have been purloined for domestic consumption, but at least a portion resurfaced in local markets. In 1664, for example, a Norfolk court charged three women with the overnight theft of green peas from a neighbor, allegedly having the intention of feeding them to their pigs and selling the rest. In America, slaves and free blacks both engaged in a lively traffic, selling to families and small traders stolen provisions along with those from personal plots. A Moravian visitor to Virginia, discovering blacks one evening “roaming everywhere,” deemed the colony “full of thieves.” George Washington blamed the overnight loss of his sheep on slaves with dogs. “It is astonishing to see the command under which their dogs are.” Of free blacks, a resident of Maryland declared, “It is well known that these free negroes are stealing poultry and fruit in the season in the night, to sell in the market in the towns and cities.”37
In the countryside, poaching drew added numbers afield—tenants, husbandmen, and servants, armed with snares, nets, and guns. Some, claiming no trade, were vagrants. In 1599, Sir Edward Coke described poachers in Staffordshire as “verie dissolute, riotous and unruly persons, common nightwalkers and stealers of deare.” Not only was hunting forbidden in aristocratic deer parks but also, more often than not, in royal forests. Standard prey included rabbits and hares, partridges, pheasants, and deer. Certain types of nightfishing were also illegal, though widely practiced. Game laws were far less stringent in colonial America than in Europe, although Virginia and the Carolinas enacted legislation prohibiting fire-hunting, a nocturnal technique of Indian origin by which hunters used torchlight to blind their quarry. Besides the risks of fire, cattle and horses were sometimes mistaken for deer.38
For households in rural England, poaching was a favorite pastime and, often, a valued source of income. Proclaimed a popular ballad, “The Lincolnshire Poacher”: “When I was bound apprentice, in famous Lincolnsheer, / Full well I served my master for more than seven year, / Till I took up poaching, as you shall quickly hear: / Oh! ’tis my delight of a shiny night, in the season of the year.” Certainly, no youths were better trained in woodcraft: mastering shifts in weather and phases of the moon as well as learning the scents and habits of both gamekeepers and game. “Parents take care to instruct their children,” observed a contemporary. Years later, a retired poacher recalled of his boyhood, “We knew every inch of the countryside and darkness was our friend.”39
As often nighttime was for smugglers. Common throughout the Continent, smuggling reached epidemic proportions in the British Isles in the eighteenth century. With the imposition of import duties on such commodities as brandy, tobacco, and tea, the contraband trade involved thousands. Smugglers unloaded goods, usually at night, all along the British seashore, though the southern coastline acquired the greatest notoriety. The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands served as staging grounds offshore. Through an inland nexus of drop points and distributors, much of the contraband ultimately found its way to cities. Reported a London newspaper in 1738, “The present dark nights being very favourable for the smugglers designs, the gentlemen in that employ have made a diligent use of them, and have run a large quantity of tea and other rich goods in town.” As the adolescent son of a Berkshire horse trader, Joseph Jewell worked for an innkeeper, whose house served as “a resort for smugglers.” “My master followed smuggling on his own account,” Jewell wrote in his autobiography, “so that I frequently had to ride out nights with tea, spirits etc. I used to carry a whip with about 2 pound weight of lead run into the large end of it, made for the purpose of defence if I should meet with excise officers.” To disguise his “goods,” he wore a “long, loose, great coat.”40
In turn, a lively export trade of illegal wool arose, popularly known as “owling” because of smugglers’ penchant for nighttime—just as spirits shipped to the coasts of Sussex and Kent were dubbed “moonshine.” It was along the same shore that large, at times violent bands of smugglers, like the Hawkhurst gang in the 1740s, operated, to the alarm of government authorities. Less troubled were local inhabitants, who generally welcomed the cheaper merchandise. Parson Woodforde, for one, received periodic supplies of gin at night, left on his doorstep by the village blacksmith, himself nicknamed Moonshine. “Busy all the morning almost in bottling two tubs of gin, that came by Moonshine this morn’ very early,” Woodforde wrote in his diary. Jewell, on one of his many “night rides,” traveled fifteen miles to deliver contraband goods to an elderly woman. So little fear did smugglers inspire that burglars adopted that disguise in 1782 upon entering the Suffolk town of Orford. As a consequence, “no notice was taken of them,” and the thieves successfully broke into several homes toward nightfall. Elsewhere, lest villagers dare to interfere, smugglers occasionally masqueraded as ghosts or spread rumors of haunted caves. “Ghosts, warlocks, and witches were the best and cheapest guards against vagrants strolling about at night,” a veteran smuggler later reflected.41
The vast majority of smugglers ca
me from humble backgrounds. Like Woodforde’s connection, most were bit players, relying upon the trade to augment their meager incomes. Endemic smuggling in France was dominated by day-laborers and peasants, many of them women and children. On a December night in 1775, three hundred people, mostly peasants, assembled on the Brittany coast to take delivery of a shipment of tobacco. Armed with pistols and clubs, they blacked their faces to counter the moonlight.42
Economic necessity begot most nocturnal license. With subsistence a never-ending struggle, impoverished households naturally turned to poaching, smuggling, or scavenging food and fuel. “All the common people are thieves and beggars,” wrote Tobias Smollett, “and I believe this is always the case with people who are extremely indigent and miserable.” Crime could also be a matter of dignity and self-worth—the ability of men and women to feed and shelter their families while keeping the wolf from the door. Or, as the struggling schoolmaster John Cannon put it, the right for any “poor devil” not to be “piss against.” Before robbing a London coach in 1752, John Wilks informed a friend, “I owe my landlord rent, and you must go with me to rob coaches to pay it, and we shall be made men of in a night or two’s time.” Similarly, the robber Daniel Drummond tried to enlist the aid of a Leeds laborer, swearing that “if they would but get as much money, as would carry them up to London, they might live like men.” Theft helped to mend the psychological damage of being an apprentice, servant, or slave—taking back by night what was extracted by day. Reported an estate steward in the late seventeenth century, “All people break and steal away the fences and prey upon us as if a landlord were a common enemy.” Many years later, in the English village of Bowers Row, the reported credo among poachers was, “He robs us all day, we’ll rob him all night.” Despite the risks of detection, some poachers kept deer antlers as trophies of their “exploits.” In East Sussex, Thomas Bishe bragged to friends in 1641 that “he would have two braces of buckes and two of does out of Sir Richard Weston’s ground yearely. And he had killed fower deere in one night there.”43
At Day's Close Page 28
