More cloistered were evenings in the countryside, with dispersed populations, wide-open fields, and far less bustle. “Half its inhabitants wished us at the devil,” grumbled William Beckford when his companion coughed one night upon entering a remote Spanish town. If not human voices, sleep nonetheless remained vulnerable to other branches of the animal kingdom, from frogs and katydids to barking dogs, lovesick cats, and needy livestock, not all of which grew familiar with time. In the dairy region of East Anglia, “bull’s noon” was a common expression for midnight, the hour when bullocks, in full throat, bellowed for their mates. And vice-versa. Complained a Somerset diarist, “Up rather early, a disagreeable cow running and roaring under our window disturbed us much. Our cow makes too much noise, she must be sent to the bull.”29
Within some homes, most notoriously those with wooden frames fixed in the earth, such was the tumult created by rats and mice that walls and rafters seemed on the verge of collapse. “We might have rested,” a traveler in Scotland remarked in 1677, “had not the mice rendezvoused over our faces.” Ill-constructed houses generated their own cacophony, owing to shrinking timber, loose boards, drafty doors, broken windows, and open chimneys. All of which inclement weather made worse. Not only did keyholes whistle, but hinges and bolts gave way, and roofs leaked. “Tiles and thatch are things that storms and tempests have a natural antipathy to,” observed George Woodward of East Hendred. Not surprisingly, once awakened in a storm’s midst, families refused to re-enter their beds until wind and rain had subsided. In 1703, Thomas Naish, his wife, and the maid all arose during a “violent storm of wind” about 2:00 A.M., “not being able to lye a bed for the violence of the noise, ratling of the tyles, and for fear that my house would fall down upon me. I went down into [the] parlour for prayers.”30
Frigid temperatures assaulted sleep during the winter, all the more since Western Europe and northern North America experienced a “Little Ice Age” in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Growing seasons were abbreviated, winters unusually raw, and the Thames froze on eighteen occasions. Most mammals, including human beings, appear to sleep best while temperatures hover between 70 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, with 77 degrees optimum. Temperatures much below a person’s thermal comfort zone lead to wakefulness and fragmented sleep, as early modern families, huddled in homes with no insulation from either the ground or the weather, readily understood. So frigid were conditions one January in Massachusetts, according to Cotton Mather, that sap froze as it seeped from the bare ends of burning logs. Even in otherwise comfortable lodgings during winter, inkhorns, water basins, and chamber pots sometimes froze overnight. To the London readers of Lloyd’s Evening Post, “Dillenius” railed in 1767: “I have often been kept awake for hours by the coldness of my legs and feet. I have loaded myself with cloaths to no purpose. I have had my bed heated till I could scarce bear the touch. Thus baffled, night after night have I shivered through the winter.” “The cold almost too much for me at going to bed,” remarked Parson James Woodforde. Once there, many must have been loath the following morning to leave their blankets.31
Unless, of course, insects feasted first. Bedding afforded notorious homes to lice, fleas, and bedbugs, the unholy trinity of early modern entomology. Compounding the irritation, in all likelihood, is that the sensitivity of human skin peaks towards 11:00 P.M., as does one’s propensity to itching. British sleepers did not have to endure all the pests to which Europeans in warmer climes like Italy were subjected, including tarantulas and scorpions. Nor did they have to contend with the voracious mosquitoes for which England’s colonies in North America most summers were infamous; worse, the Virginia servant John Harrower found a snake one night under his pillow. It is nonetheless telling that people in Britain often referred to bedtime pests in martial terms—for example, “troops,” “detachments,” “a compleat regiment,” and “whole armies” of bugs. Legg in Low-Life wrote of “poor people who have been in bed some time, . . . groping about for their tinder-boxes, that they may strike a light in order to go a bugg-hunting.” The street ballad “How Five and Twenty Shillings were Expended in a Week” mentions “a three farthing rushlight every night, to catch the bugs and fleas.” Naturally, hunters had to weigh the cost of artificial lighting; so the caution, “To waste a candle and find a flea.”32
Gerrit van Honthorst, The Flea Hunt, 1621.
Less often did beds themselves disrupt slumber, at least among the propertied classes. Despite the heavy sums invested, the thickness and composition of mattresses may have mattered less than was imagined—unless, ironically, their softness awakened sleepers by restricting their movements. Some persons complained of hard beds and featherless pillows, but those criticisms often emanated from travelers forced to rest in unfamiliar settings. Though but a “poor man,” so demanding were the requirements of John Byng, the future Viscount Torrington, that he found good bedding (the “first comfort of life”) wanting “in almost every house” he “ever enter’d.” Never did he sleep in another bed like his own, “smooth, deeply mattress’d, and 6 feet wide.” Cultural prejudices mattered most. Attested Montaigne, “You make a Germane sicke, if you lay him upon a matteras, as you distemper an Italian upon a fetherbed, and a French man to lay him in a bed without curtaines.” In 1646, while in Switzerland, John Evelyn bewailed having to sleep on a “bed stuff’d with leaves, which made such a crackling, & did so prick my skin through the tick.” Among the Swiss upper classes, however, mattresses filled with beech leaves were greatly preferred to those made from straw.33 Unfortunately, portions of the preindustrial population confined to the meanest quarters left behind few firsthand impressions of their bedding. Notwithstanding John Locke’s contention that sound slumber “matters not whether it be on a soft bed, or the hard boards,” sleeping on a thin mattress, much less a rigid surface, must have been all the more uncomfortable for emaciated human frames with minimal bodyfat for padding.34
Even a well-constructed mattress could not always comfort multiple bedmates. “Packed like herrings,” David Beck described a night in 1624 between two other sleepers. Entitled “One Sleeps Better than Two,” a French song complained: “One coughs, one talks; one’s cold, one’s hot; / One wanting to sleep and the other one not.” Worst were the gyrations of unaccustomed bedmates. Forced to lie one evening with a friend in his chamber, Pepys “could hardly get any sleep all night, the bed being ill-made and he a bad bedfellow.” Similarly, the Scottish-American physician Andrew Hamilton, trying to sleep one night in Delaware, shared a room with two bedfellows, one of whom, an “Irish teague,” constantly tossed and turned while “bawling out, ‘O sweet Jesus!’”35
In moist night air, chamber pots reeked. “So barbarous a stink” engulfed two women sharing an inn room that they first “accused each other for some time,” only to discover a latrine at the head of their beds. The Restoration melody “Aminta One Night had Occasion to Piss” describes in Rabelaisian detail a conversation between two companions when both awaken to use the chamber pot, concluding with one scolding the other, “That tempest broke out from behind ye; / And though it was decently kept from my eyes, / The troubled air offends my nose.” As a chambermaid informed a traveler when asked about the chamber pot and privy, “If you see them not you shall smell them well enough.”36 Embarrassing accidents often ensued, with pots overturned and broken. Riskier still was reliance on a urinal, often in the shape of a small flask.37 Alternatives, particularly for the lower classes, included urinating outside the front door or, more commonly, in the fireplace. Protested Thomas Tusser, “Some make the chimnie chamber pot to smel lyke filthy sinke.” Lacking a pot, Pepys “shit in the chimney” twice one night, whereas the Yorkshire laborer Abram Ingham used his “clogg” [shoe] to “make water in.” If all else failed, an Italian adage instructed, “You may piss a bed, and say you sweated.”38
IV
How is it possible to be well, where one is kill’d for want of sleep?
In affluent households, perfume-burners became popular to disguise septic smells, and privies could always be secreted from bedchambers. Cosimo, Duke of Tuscany, appears to have placed his close-stool, a portable toilet, inside a servant’s chamber.40 But, then, in this, as in many respects, the lower orders were peculiarly disadvantaged in their sleep. If noxious aromas more commonly afflicted their quarters, so, too, did discordant noises, cold temperatures, and voracious pests. Plainly, lower-class households lay more exposed to unwanted intrusions. In Paris, due to the high cost of obtaining quiet quarters, Boileau remarked, “Sleep like other things is sold, / And you must purchase your repose with gold.”41 Feverish individuals, capable of affording two beds, could “find great luxury in rising, when they awake in a hot bed, and going into the cool one,” advised Benjamin Franklin. And should a spouse’s illness or pregnancy prove unsettling, a husband like Pepys could always retire to another room. In fact, by the eighteenth century, aristocratic couples in France typically kept separate chambers. Neither did indigent families enjoy curtained beds to block drafts or the option exercised by a gentleman in colonial North Carolina who, tormented by bugs, exchanged beds with his servant.42
Perhaps for the laboring population, as poets and playwrights often claimed, fatigue and clear consciences alleviated the hardships incurred at bedtime. The Virginia tutor Philip Fithian studied many evenings to the point of exhaustion to render his sleep “sound & unbroken” and immune to “cursed bugs.”43 But probably more realistic than most pieces of verse, if less well known, was a passage from The Complaints of Poverty (1742) by Nicholas James:
And when, to gather strength and still his woes,
He seeks his last redress in soft repose,
The tatter’d blanket, erst the fleas’ retreat,
Denies his shiv’ring limbs sufficient heat;
Teaz’d with the sqwalling babes nocturnal cries,
He restless on the dusty pillow lies.
Similarly, George Herbert wrote in 1657 of “manie” who “worke hard all day, and when night comes, their paines increase, for want of food or rest.” The author of L’État de Servitude (1711) complained, “In an attic with no door and no lock, / Open to cold air all winter long, / In a filthy and vile sort of garret, / A rotten mattress is laid out on the ground.”44
Sleep, the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release? Not, it would seem, in any conventional sense, except for allowing a sometimes troubled respite from what was likely an even more onerous day. If most people in bed did not experience prolonged bouts of wakefulness, merely a series of “brief arousals” of at most several minutes apiece, unknown even to the sleeper, could impose an enormous burden on the mind and body in terms of physical repair.45 Far from enjoying blissful repose, ordinary men and women likely suffered some degree of sleep deprivation, feeling as weary upon rising at dawn as when retiring at bedtime. All the more arduous as a consequence were their waking hours, especially when sleep debts were allowed to accumulate from one day to the next and superiors remained unsympathetic. Returning to his London quarters one evening to find his “man” asleep, William Byrd II delivered a prompt beating, as did the Yorkshire yeoman Adam Eyre to a maidservant for her “sloathfulnesse.” Late hours of merriment, some nights, could only have compounded the fatigue of apprentices, servants, and slaves.46
Thomas Rowlandson, Haymakers at Rest, 1798.
If complaints are to be believed, the work of laborers was erratic and their behavior lethargic—“deadened slowness” was one description of rural labor. “At noon he must have his sleeping time,” groused Bishop Pilkington of the typical laborer in the late 1500s. While previous historians have explained such behavior as the product of a preindustrial work ethic, greater allowance must be made for the chronic fatigue that probably afflicted much of the early modern population. Indeed, napping during the day appears to have been common, with sleep less confined to nocturnal hours than it is in most Western societies today.47 No doubt exhaustion occasioned other symptoms of sleep deprivation, including losses in motivation and physical well-being as well as increased irritability and social friction. “Whether due to sleeping on a bed fouler than a rubbish heap, or not being able to cover oneself,” a Bolognese curate observed of insomnia among the poor, “who can explain how much harm is done?”48
CHAPTER TWELVE
SLEEP WE HAVE LOST:
RHYTHMS AND REVELATIONS
I
For the waking there is one common world only; but when asleep, each man turns to his own private world.
HERACLITUS, ca. 500 B.C.1
“I AM AWAKE, but ’tis not time to rise, neither have I yet slept enough. . . . I am awake, yet not in paine, anguish or feare, as thousands are.” So went a seventeenth-century religious meditation intended for the dead of night. As if illness, foul weather, and fleas were not enough, there was yet another, even more familiar source of broken sleep in preindustrial societies, though few contemporaries regarded it in that light. So routine was this nightly interruption that it provoked little comment at the time. Neither has it attracted scrutiny from historians, much less systematic investigation. But as a vital commonplace of an earlier age, country-folk yet knew about it in the early twentieth century.2 Some probably still do today.
Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. In the absence of fuller descriptions, fragments in several languages in sources ranging from depositions and diaries to imaginative literature give clues to the essential features of this puzzling pattern of repose. The initial interval of slumber was usually referred to as “first sleep,” or, less often, “first nap” or “dead sleep.”3 In French, the term was premier sommeil or premier somme,4 in Italian, primo sonno or primo sono,5 and in Latin, primo somno or concubia nocte.6 The succeeding interval of sleep was called “second” or “morning” sleep, whereas the intervening period of wakefulness bore no name, other than the generic term “watch” or “watching.” Alternatively, two texts refer to the time of “first waking.”7
Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest. Not everyone, of course, slept according to the same timetable. The later at night that persons went to bed, the later they stirred after their initial sleep; or, if they retired past midnight, they might not awaken at all until dawn. Thus in “The Squire’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, Canacee slept “soon after evening fell” and subsequently awakened in the early morning following “her first sleep”; in turn, her companions, staying up much later, “lay asleep till it was fully prime” (daylight). William Baldwin’s satire Beware the Cat recounts a quarrel between the protagonist, “newly come unto bed,” and two roommates who “had already slept” their “first sleep.”8
Men and women referred to both intervals as if the prospect of awakening in the middle of the night was common knowledge that required no elaboration. “At mid-night when thou wak’st from sleepe,” described the Stuart poet George Wither; while in the view of John Locke, “That all men sleep by intervals” was a normal feature of life, extending as well to much of brute creation.9 For the thirteenth-century Catalan philosopher Ramón Lull, primo somno stretched from mid-evening to early morning, whereas William Harrison in his Description of England (1557) referred to “the dull or dead of the night, which is midnight, when men be in their first or dead sleep.”10
Customary usage confirms that “first sleep” constituted a distinct period of time followed by an interval of wakefulness. Typically, descriptions recounted that an aroused individual had “had,” “taken,” or “gotten” his or her “first sleep.” An early seventeenth-century Scottish legal deposition referred to Jon Cokburne, a weaver, “haveing gottin his first sl
eip and awaiking furth thairof,” while Noel Taillepied’s A Treatise Of Ghosts (1588) alluded more directly to “about midnight when a man wakes from his first sleep.” “So I tooke my first sleepe,” states the protagonist in the play Endimion (1591), “which was short and quiet”; and the servant Club in George Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle (1698) declares, “I believe ’tis past midnight, for I have gotten my first sleep.” “I am more watchful,” states Rampino in The Unfortunate Lovers (1643) “than / A sick constable after his first sleep / On a cold bench.”11
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