At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  Although in some descriptions a neighbor’s quarrel or a barking dog woke people prematurely from their initial sleep, the vast weight of surviving evidence indicates that awakening naturally was routine, not the consequence of disturbed or fitful slumber. Medical books, in fact, from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries frequently advised sleepers, for better digestion and more tranquil repose, to lie on their right side during “the fyrste slepe” and “after the fyrste slepe turne on the lefte side.”12 And even though the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie investigated no further, his study of fourteenth-century Montaillou notes that “the hour of the first sleep” was a customary division of night, as was “the hour half-way through the first sleep.” Indeed, though not used as frequently as expressions like “candle-lighting,” the “dead of night,” or “cock-crow,” the term “first sleep” remained a common temporal division until the late eighteenth century. As described in La Démonolâtrie (1595) by Nicolas Rémy, “Comes dusk, followed by nightfall, dark night, then the moment of first sleep and finally the dead of night.”13

  At first glance, it is tempting to view this pattern of broken sleep as a cultural relic rooted in early Christian experience. Ever since St. Benedict in the sixth century required that monks rise after midnight for the recital of verses and psalms (“At night we will rise to confess to Him”), this like other regulations of the Benedictine order spread to growing numbers of Frankish and German monasteries. By the High Middle Ages, the Catholic Church actively encouraged early morning prayer among Christians as a means of appealing to God during the still hours of darkness. “Night vigils,” Alan of Lille declared in the twelfth century, “were not instituted without reason, for by them it is signified that we must rise in the middle of the night to sing the night office, so that the night may not pass without divine praise.” Best known for this regimen was St. John of the Cross, author of The Dark Night of the Soul (ca. 1588), though in England voices within both the Catholic and Anglican churches still prescribed late-night vigils in the seventeenth century. Where the Puritan divine Richard Baxter thought it “a foppery and abuse of God and ourselves, to think that the breaking of our sleep is a thing that itself pleaseth God,” more widespread was the conviction expressed by the author of Mid-Night Thoughts (1682) that the “regenerate man finds no time so fit to raise his soul to Heaven, as when he awakes at mid-night.”14

  Although Christian teachings undoubtedly popularized the imperative of early morning prayer, the Church itself was not responsible for introducing segmented sleep. However much it “colonized” the period of wakefulness between intervals of slumber, references to “first sleep” antedate Christianity’s early years of growth. Not only did such figures outside the Church as Pausanias and Plutarch invoke the term in their writings, so, too, did early classical writers, including Livy in his history of Rome, Virgil in the Aeneid, both composed in the first century b.c., and Homer in the Odyssey, written in either the late eighth or early seventh century b.c. And while the Old Testament contains no direct references to first sleep, there are several suggestive passages, including Judges 16:3, in which Samson arises at midnight to pull down the city gate of Gaza.15 Conversely, as recently as the twentieth century some non-Western cultures with religious beliefs other than Christianity still exhibited a segmented pattern of sleep remarkably similar to that of preindustrial Europeans. In Africa, anthropologists found villages of the Tiv, Chagga, and G/wi, for example, to be surprisingly alive after midnight with newly roused adults and children. Of the Tiv, subsistence farmers in central Nigeria, a study in 1969 recorded, “At night, they wake when they will and talk with anyone else awake in the hut.” The Tiv even employed the terms “first sleep” and “second sleep” as traditional intervals of time.16

  Thus the basic puzzle remains—how to explain this curious anomaly or, in truth, the more genuine mystery of seamless sleep that we experience today. There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind. As suggested by recent experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the explanation likely rests in the darkness that enveloped premodern families. In attempting to recreate conditions of “prehistoric” sleep, Dr. Thomas Wehr and his colleagues found that human subjects, deprived of artificial light at night over a span of several weeks, eventually exhibited a pattern of broken slumber—one practically identical to that of preindustrial households. Without artificial light for up to fourteen hours each night, Wehr’s subjects first lay awake in bed for two hours, slept for four, awakened again for two or three hours of quiet rest and reflection, and fell back asleep for four hours before finally awakening for good. Significantly, the intervening period of “non-anxious wakefulness” possessed “an endocrinology all its own,” with visibly heightened levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for stimulating lactation in nursing mothers and for permitting chickens to brood contentedly atop eggs for long stretches of time. In fact, Wehr has likened this period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation.17

  On the enormous physiological impact of modern lighting—or, in turn, its absence—on sleep, there is wide agreement. “Every time we turn on a light,” remarks the chronobiologist Charles A. Czeisler, “we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep,” with changes in levels of the brain hormone melatonin and in body temperature being among the most apparent consequences. Preindustrial peoples, the subjects in Wehr’s experiments, and non-Western societies still experiencing broken slumber are all linked by a lack of artificial lighting, which in the early modern world fell hardest on the lower and middle classes.18 Interestingly, allusions to segmented sleep are most evident in materials written or dictated by all but the wealthiest segments of society and sparse among the ample mounds of personal papers left by the upper classes—especially, beginning in the late seventeenth century, when both artificial lighting and the vogue of “late hours” grew increasingly prevalent among affluent households. The prolific diarists Pepys and Boswell, by their own admission, seldom woke in the middle of the night. Both, if not conspicuously wealthy themselves, circulated within the upper echelons of London society, patronizing genteel nightspots and homes. Complained Richard Steele in 1710, “Who would not wonder at this perverted relish of those who are reckoned the most polite part of mankind, that prefer sea-coals and candles to the sun, and exchange so many cheerful morning hours for the pleasures of midnight revels and debauches?”19

  II

  It is of no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main outlines of the forms previously studied, or of other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.

  LEONARDO DA VINCI, n.d.20

  After midnight, preindustrial households usually began to stir. Many of those who left their beds merely needed to urinate. The physician Andrew Boorde advised, “Whan you do wake of your fyrste slepe make water if you fele your bladder charged.” An English visitor to Ireland around 1700 “wonder’d mightily to heare people walking to the fire place in the middle of the house to piss there in the ashes,” something he was “forced to doe too for want of a chambrepot.”21 Some persons, however, after arising, took the opportunity to smoke tobacco, check the time, or tend a fire. Thomas Jubb, an impoverished Leeds clothier, rising around midnight, “went into Cow Lane & hearing ye clock strike twelve” returned “home & went to bed again.” The diarist Robert Sanderson, who on one occasion was awoken prematurely “on my first sleepe” by his dog, arose other nights to sit and smoke a pipe, once after first checking upon his ill wife. Counseled an early English ballad, “Old Robin of Portingale”: “And at the wakening of your first sleepe / You shall have a hott drinke made, / And at the wakening of your next sleepe / Your sorrowes will have a slake.” Some varieties
of medicine, physicians advised, might be taken during this interval, including potions for indigestion, sores, and smallpox.22

  For others, work awaited. The Bath doctor Tobias Venner urged, “Students that must of necessity watch and study by night, that they do it not till after their first sleep,” when they would be “in some measure refreshed.” According to a former bedfellow, Seth Ward, while Bishop of Salisbury, frequently “after his first sleep,” for purposes of private study, would “rise, light, and after burning out his candle, return to bed before day.” Such, too, was the regimen of Aimar de Ranonet, president of the parliament of Paris. The seventeenth-century farmer Henry Best of Elmswell made a point to rise “sometimes att midnight” to prevent the destruction of his fields by roving cattle.23 In addition to tending children, women left their beds to perform myriad chores. The servant Jane Allison got up one night between midnight and 2:00 A.M. to brew a batch of malt for her Westmorland master. “Often at midnight, from our bed we rise,” bewailed Mary Collier in “The Woman’s Labour.” Of female peasants, Piers Plowman declared, “They themselves also suffer much hunger, / And woe in wintertime, and waking up nights / To rise on the bedside, to rock the cradle, / Also to card and comb wool, to patch and to wash, / To rub flax and reel yarn and peel rushes.” Suffice to say, domestic duties knew no bounds.24

  And some hardy souls, if rested, remained awake. Thomas Ken, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, reputedly “rose generally very early, and never took a second sleep.” In Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), a physician counsels the protagonist “to rise immediately after his first sleep, and exercise himself in a morning-walk.”25 Equally invigorating was Benjamin Franklin’s habit of taking cold air baths, which he considered an improvement over the vogue of bathing in cold water as a “tonic.” While in London, he rose “early almost every morning” and sat naked in his chamber either reading or writing for up to an hour. “If I return to bed afterwards . . . as sometimes happens,” he explained to an acquaintance, “I make a supplement to my night’s rest, of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined.”26

  For the poor, awakening in the dead of night brought opportunities of a different sort. At no other time of the night was there such a secluded interval in which to commit petty crimes: filching from dockyards and other urban workplaces, or, in the countryside, pilfering firewood, poaching, and robbing orchards. Perhaps a Scottish court exaggerated in claiming “that it is a known artifice in thieves to go to bed at night and rise in the morning in presence of others” to conceal “actions committed by them in the night time,” but plainly an undercurrent of illegal activity reverberated through the early morning hours. In 1727, Gilbert Lambert, a laborer in Great Drisfield, summoned a friend, Thomas Nicholson, “out of his bed” around midnight, desiring him to help drive “a parcel of sheep” that were later found to be stolen. “Some wake,” affirmed George Herbert, “to plot or act mischiefe”—or more serious offenses. Reverend Anthony Horneck condemned “high-way-men and thieves” that “rise at midnight to rob and murder men!” Examples are easily found. Of Luke Atkinson, charged with an early morning murder in the North Riding of Yorkshire, his wife admitted “that it was not the first time he had got up at nights and left her in bed to go to other folks houses.” And in 1697, young Jane Rowth’s mother, “after shee had gott her first sleep, . . . was gotten up out of bedd, and [was] smoaking a pipe at the fire side” when two male companions “called on her mother at the little window, and bad her make ready & come away” according to plans all three had hatched the preceding morning. Although nine-year-old Jane was told by her mother to “lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning,” the mother’s dead body was found a day or two later.27

  Is it possible that persons rose to practice magic? One does not need to believe in witches’ sabbaths to accept surviving descriptions of sorcery, some involving small groups of kindred spirits. Witchcraft prosecutions, such as those in Rémy’s Démonolâtrie and Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum (1608), contain intriguing reports of women who left the sides of their slumbering husbands, allegedly to attend gatherings late at night. Pretending to be in a deep sleep, a charcoal burner of Ferrar, for example, claimed to have witnessed his wife rise from bed and “immediately vanish” upon anointing herself from a “hidden vase.” In Lorraine, an admitted “witch” confessed to having put her husband under a spell to prevent, during her absence, his awakening: “She had many times tweaked his ear after having with her right hand anointed it with the same ointment which she used upon herself when she wished to be transported to the Sabot.” And in the Dutch village of Oostbruck, a widow, her manservant testified, routinely went to the stables, once she thought her servants asleep, in order to practice black magic.28

  None were more familiar than the Church with sinister forces in the dead of night. “Can men break their sleep to mind the works of darkness, and shall we not break ours,” asked Reverend Horneck, “for doing things, which become the children of light?” With equal fervor, the late sixteenth-century Bishop of Portugal, Amador Arrais, stressed the need for nocturnal vigilance: “Not only do princes, captains, philosophers, poets, and heads of families stay awake and arise during the night . . . but also thieves and brigands do so, . . . and should we not abhor sleep that is the ally of vice? Should we not awaken to guard against cutthroats who remain awake to murder us?” Certainly, there was no shortage of prayers intended to be recited “when you awake in the night” or “at our first waking,” a time not to be confused with either dawn or “our uprising,” for which wholly separate devotions were prescribed. Prayers reminded vigilant men and women of God’s glory, Satan’s corruption, and the need to combat “fiery darts of the Devil,” “arrows of temptation,” and “noisome lusts.”29 Anecdotal evidence suggests that many persons took advantage of early morning hours for prayer. William Cowper’s set of three poems “Watching Unto God in the Night Season” recounts his devotions in the middle of the night. A parent instructed his daughter that “the most profitable hour for you and us might be in the middle of the night after going to sleep, after digesting the meat, when the labors of the world are cast off . . . and no one will look at you except for God.” The author of Mid-Night Thoughts “grew to such habit of nightly meditations (at his first waking) as prov’d more pleasant then sleep.”30

  Most people, upon awakening, probably never left their beds, or not for long. Besides praying, they conversed with a bedfellow or inquired after the well-being of a child or spouse. Lying with her daughter Sara, Mary Sykes, “after theire first sleepe,” upon “heareing” Sara “quakeing and holding her hands together” asked her daughter “what she ailed.”31 Sexual intimacy often ensued between couples. According to one wife, it was her husband’s “custom when he waketh to feele after me & than he layeth hym to slepe againe.” Joked Louis-Sébastien Mercier of the midnight clatter of Parisian carriages, “The tradesman wakes out of his first sleep at the sound of them, and turns to his wife, by no means unwilling.” According to ancient Jewish belief, copulating “in the middle of the night” prevented husbands from hearing “human voices” and thinking of “different women.”32

  Significantly, for our understanding of early modern demography, segmented sleep probably enhanced a couple’s ability to conceive children, since reproductive fertility ordinarily benefits from rest. In fact, the sixteenth-century French physician Laurent Joubert concluded that early-morning intercourse enabled plowmen, artisans, and other laborers to beget numerous children. Because exhaustion prevented workers from copulating upon first going to bed, intercourse occurred “after the first sleep” when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better.” “Immediately thereafter,” Joubert counseled those eager to conceive, “get back to sleep again, if possible, or if not, at least to remain in bed and relax while talking together joyfully.” The physician Thomas Cogan similarly advised that intercourse occur not “before sl
eepe, but after the meate is digested, a little before morning, and afterwarde to sleepe a while.”33

  Jan Saenredam, Night, seventeenth century.

  Perhaps even more commonly, persons used this shrouded interval of solitude to immerse themselves in contemplation—to ponder events of the preceding day and to prepare for the arrival of dawn. Never, during the day or night, were distractions so few and privacy so great, especially in crowded households. “As I lay in bed sleepless, I was ever meditating upon something,” remarked the Italian scholar Girolamo Cardano. Thomas Jefferson before bed routinely read works of moral philosophy “whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep.” For the moralist Francis Quarles, darkness, no less than silence, encouraged internal reflection. In order “to take the best advantage of thy selfe (especially in matters where the fancy is most imploy’d),” he recommended:

  Let the end of thy first sleep raise thee from thy repose: then hath thy body the best temper; then hath thy soule the least incumbrance; then no noyse shall disturbe thine ear; no object shall divert thine eye.34

  Naturally, midnight reflections sometimes proved painful. A character in the Jacobean comedy Everie Woman in Her Humor (1609) “everie night after his first sleepe” wrote “lovesicke sonnets, rayling against left handed fortune his foe.” For better or worse, this interval was yet another reason for night’s far-flung reputation as the “mother of counsel.”35 The seventeenth-century merchant James Bovey, reputedly from age fourteen, kept a “candle burning by him all night, with pen, inke, and paper, to write downe thoughts as they came into his head.” Meanwhile, a German lawyer, beside his bed, attached a black marble table on which to record his reflections. Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century, in order to better preserve midnight ruminations, methods were devised to “write in the dark, as straight as by day or candle-light,” according to a report in 1748. Twenty years later, after first obtaining a patent, a London tradesman, Christopher Pinchbeck, Jr., advertised his “Nocturnal Remembrancer,” an enclosed tablet of parchment with a horizontal aperture for a guideline whereby “philosophers, statesmen, poets, divines, and every person of genius, business or reflection, may secure all those happy, often much regretted, and never to be recovered flights or thoughts, which so frequently occur in the course of a meditating, wakeful night.”36