Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  Margaret Barkle, the servant of James Money of Gresham, butcher, was charged to have taken an handkerchief with flour & late in the night with Ellen Berston & Katherine Wilson to have gone to the widow Thoulder’s house in Sustead, intending a merry meeting there with some fellows.36

  The gatherings of young people in the evening for work or conversation could easily turn into an impromptu dance or a “merry meeting.”37

  Indeed, when young men and women met at a spinning bee, they took part in one of several related and widely documented early modern customs of nocturnal courtship. The spinning bee overlapped with the south German Heimgarten (in other parts of Germany, Nachtfreien or Kiltgang), an evening gathering of unmarried young men and women at the house of a married couple. The term Heimgarten could also refer to time spent together by a courting couple at night after the larger gathering broke up, or to night-time visits by young single men to the homes – or beds – of young women.38 Thus the Heimgarten could shade into the practice of bundling, the most intimate of early modern nocturnal courtship customs.39 In France examples of the custom of allowing courting couples to share a bed for the night appear in the Protestant county of Montbéliard, and in Champagne, Burgundy, and Savoy.40 Bundling was a rural custom, arising in part from the long distances suitors traveled to visit young women, which then necessitated an overnight stay. This seems to have been the excuse Leonard Wheatcroft used when staying overnight at the home of his future wife, Elizabeth Hawley, during their courtship in 1656–57.41

  Wheatcroft’s detailed courtship narrative describes many evening gatherings and nights spent together with his “beloved paramour, sweet Betty.” They met at the “wakes” (i.e., church ales, notorious for lasting well into the night) in Wheatcroft’s hometown of Ashover. One evening Wheatcroft waited at Elizabeth’s house for her to return from a walk, “it being a fine warm evening for maids to delight themselves in.” To Wheatcroft’s great joy she returned “when the evening drew towards an end, and the glorious sun withdrew himself from my sight.”42 They went to her uncle’s house, where they stayed the night and “did lovingly embrace each other.” On another occasion, after Wheatcroft pretended to be engaged to another woman, he reported that “these and suchlike expressions [of Elizabeth’s exasperation] did keep us waking all night. She, being then so vexed at me, would not so much as afford me one kiss.”43 Much of Wheatcroft’s courtship of Elizabeth Hawley took place at night.

  Indeed, the night was the accepted time for courtship. A notary describing a street fight and ensuing homicide in the village of Septfontaines (in the Franche-Comté) on the night of December 7, 1623 acknowledged that the night was the time “for visiting homes where there were girls or widows available for marriage.” In this case an unwanted suitor named Pierre Révillon was asked repeatedly to leave a private home where he was courting a young widow, “for which … Pierre Révillon was truly dissatisfied because it was only around seven or eight o’clock in the evening” and “other young people were [still] drinking in the kitchen … Nothing about leaving had been said to them so that he, the said Pierre Révillon, thought that it was insulting to ask him to leave.”44 It was already several hours after sunset, and the gathering continued well after Révillon was expelled. The late hour was not the issue, but the frustrated Révillon started a fight outside which ended with a death, producing our record of the events of that night.45

  In the many ways described here, young adults got to know potential sexual or marriage partners, both personally and physically. As historians of early modern marriage and sexuality have established, “the majority of the … population did not make arranged marriages.”46 Parental consent became more important in the confessional era, but this was consent to a match based on some kind of personal choice. With the exception of the wealthy or the nobility, young people sought out their own marriage partners within a group circumscribed by status, trade, and locale. Once mutual interest was established, courting couples enjoyed considerable physical intimacy with one another; sexual relations often began with the engagement.47 The night significantly facilitated all aspects of the passage from single youth to husband or wife. From meeting a group of potential spouses at a spinning bee or village dance, to getting to know a specific individual in the dim intimacy of a chamber during a Heimgarten visit or while bundling, to the physical consummation of the relationship (ending, it was hoped, in marriage), the night was constant companion to the couple. Church and state gave their sanction to the marriage during the day, but husbands and wives were made at night.

  Seen in these terms, the night was much more than an accidental or contingent part of rural servants’ lives. In comparison with young servants in the city, rural youth had less contact with their peers during the working day, and fewer opportunities to socialize.48 They relied more on the evening and night hours for the serious business of meeting potential marriage partners, and for less serious pursuits as well.49 In Norfolk in 1665 a justice of the peace noted that he had

  sent Robert Coe, Sir John Palgrave’s man, to Bridewell for having on two nights run out to dancings, & the first time he was out all night & the last time till midnight, for he would not come home until the dancing was over, though Sir John sent for him. The last time he carried away the key of the hall door to get in again.50

  Here we catch a glimpse of the struggle between servants and masters over access to the night. Coe’s insistence on having his night life reflected a frequent demand by servants. In Bavaria, for example, the Bishop of Augsburg complained in 1603 that when servants negotiated their contracts, they demanded (and received) explicit permission to go out at night and meet with unmarried persons of the opposite sex, or at least to talk with one another at night through a window.51 These are all well-known aspects of rural courtship, of course, but the servants’ contracts and authorities’ complaints make the importance of the night explicit. A shortage of servants made these negotiations possible, as a Bavarian mandate of 1635 explained: “so too the farmers, if they want to keep their servants, are expected to allow [morally] suspect gatherings and Heimgarten, both day and night.”52 In his collection of sermons for country folk, the Tuba rustica (1701), Bavarian parish priest Christoph Selhamer gave several examples of courtship by night, all of which ended badly for the young women involved. In a sermon titled “The Bedroom Window” he came to the root of the problem: “I know quite well: in some places wicked servants set the terms when they enter into service, saying: ‘Yes, farmer, I will serve you well for a year … but I’ll tell you right now: you won’t forbid me from running around the streets at night.’”53 An Augsburg print of the seventeenth century shows this nocturnal courtship at a maid’s window (Figure 7.5).

  Figure 7.5 “Nacht”: lovers meet at a window (“Fensterln”). Augsburg print, seventeenth century.

  In 1760 the Lutheran pastor in Swabian Oberrot (near Hall) complained bitterly to the territorial authorities about the spinning bees and unrestrained night life of the local youth and begged them to impose some discipline: “You can start with my own servant, who is a nightwalker. I am at my wit’s end trying to contain loose servants: as soon as an honest man says something [to them], they simply quit, and no one else wants the job.”54 At the end of the century, Graf Preysing reported the same problem on his Hohenaschau estate in 1796.55 He also blamed the shortage of servants for this demand, suggesting that when their bargaining power rose, rural servants tried to secure their access to the spinning bees and “merry meetings” of the social night.

  Like the spinning bee, the night life of the public house was condemned from the pulpit. But the importance of the public house was also well recognized: these institutions served the village throughout the day and evening.56 Even in a single region they showed great variety, including alehouses, taverns (originally associated primarily with the sale of wine), and inns authorized to provide meals and lodging.57 Subject to licensing and regulation in all European polities, public houses were of tremendous
economic importance locally and served as hubs for communication and travel.58 The men (and often the women) of a village spent much of their leisure time there, and public houses were at their busiest on Sundays, feast days, and in the evenings.59 Closing times were an issue at all public houses, underscoring their association with night life. Mandated closing times were remarkably consistent across early modern Europe, generally 8 p.m. in the winter and 9 p.m. in the summer.60 These mandates were honored only in the breach, however.61 Patrons leaving public houses at closing time (or after) were the most common disturbers of the peace in early modern Europe, urban or rural.62 As we will see below, the evening hours of the public house correspond with the higher incidence of violent crime in the evening rather than late at night.

  Dancing linked all sites and forms of nocturnal sociability, from the spinning bee to the public house and beyond. Young and old took part in dances scheduled and spontaneous. We learn from court records of a late-night “dancing match” in 1639 at a mill in Wiltshire. When examined, Jane Lawes explained “that on St. John’s Day last at night she was invited to the mill at Broad Chalke to a dancing match where there were diverse of the young men and maidens of the p[ar]ish, where she saw no abuse offered or incivility committed by any.” Another examinant gives us an idea how these impromptu dances ended: “Joane Deane confirms the above and says further that ‘about two hours before day, the candles being burnt out, she heard some of the maids cry out, but who they were or what caused them to cry out she knows not, being in the dark’.”63 Again we see youth-centered night life as more itinerant than that of married folk.64

  7.1.3 Disorder

  From distracted spinners to violent suitors and riotous dancers out all night, the rural night was a time of disorder. Of course, “disorder” is in the eye of the beholder; here it refers to the category used by church and secular authorities. Some of the night-time practices classified by authorities as disorder, such as the charivari, were seen by the participants as in fact affirming a village order which had been upset by a problematic marriage. Other sources of disorder, such as spinning bees, were important to villagers for economic and social reasons. Beyond these group practices, disorderly individuals appear across the rural night. By examining what constitutes “disorder” in the rural night we can better understand the conflicting claims made on it.

  As Norbert Schindler has observed, in towns or villages the disturbers of the nightly peace fell into two distinct groups: young men and tavern visitors.65 The two groups were separated by the cost of drinking in the tavern, which exceeded the means of most young men. As Beat Kümin has shown, drinking beer or wine at a public house regularly was a luxury for most peasants: a few glasses could easily exceed a day’s wages.66 Those who could afford to drink at a public house often left singing, shouting, blaspheming, or quarreling, often well after the mandated closing time.67 For the young men of the village, on the other hand, the sheer disruptive exuberance of making noise under the cover of darkness sometimes bursts out of the records, as in a 1732 church council report from Gruorn, a Württemberg village in the Swabian Alps: “The servants from the Aglishardt farm raced through the village at eleven-thirty at night with bellowing cries, which greatly angered the residents.”68 Singing also could disturb the relative peace of the village at night. The 1732 church council report from Gruorn mentions “Johannes Grießinger, mason” who “almost every night, and especially on Sundays, sings improper street songs.”69 These songs might be as lewd as the “The Chimney-Sweep” (a “knave’s ditty” sung by servants at spinning bees across southern Germany in the first half of the seventeenth century) or pious but unorthodox, such as the “Jörg Wagner,” an Anabaptist hymn sung by Hans Ankelin at the top of his lungs one night in 1598.70

  When night fell the contrast between the order of the state and the order of the village became especially clear.71 The various shaming rituals of early modern rural society, such as the charivari (also “skimmington” or “riding”) or the “groaning” were meant to restore order upset by some individual or relationship. In France the charivari was typically nocturnal, but the best-documented “ridings” and “groanings” in early modern England were all daytime events.72 The cover of darkness allowed individual villagers to reproach their neighbors anonymously, and these practices could be quite refined. In 1639 a tavern servant named Bastian Scheckenbach was fined heavily by the parish of Frickenhausen (near Würzburg) for “strewing straw at night as mischief.”73 This sounds insignificant to modern ears, but in fact the practice was well known: villagers would awake one morning to find their muddy lanes marked with paths of straw connecting various houses, suggesting or revealing illicit relationships among their inhabitants – the rural equivalent, one might say, of posting political placards at night in London or Paris.

  In this case, the young Scheckenbach seems to have gone too far: someone turned him in for creating a disturbance at night.74 These nocturnal disturbances threatened the order of the day, as the local clergy felt most keenly. For priests, pastors, and preachers all this disorderly night life resulted in drowsy churchgoers who fell asleep during services. Among the published sermons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sleeping in church was a familiar topic. In 1709 the Swiss Reformed pastor Conradin Riola published a “spiritual trumpet” against the habit of sleeping during services. Riola, writing from the village of Sent, explained that God had ordained the night for rest and the day for labor: those who roamed about at night like wild animals and slept during the day disturbed the divine order.75 Catholic preachers in Bavaria repeated such condemnations, as did the Reformed Scottish kirk sessions studied by Margo Todd.76 All referred to the misuse of the night as the cause of daytime slumber.

  7.1.4 Violence and crime

  Sociability at night flowed easily into nocturnal violence. On December 9, 1666 in the Hessian village of Ebsdorf, two men emerged from a house “in the evening in the twilight.”77 Andreas Keiser, a Lutheran, and Hans Caspar Hägelich, “calvinisch,” had been drinking beer in the house of Hans Kiß. They had begun to argue about religion and had already come to blows. They each left the alehouse to go home but met up outside, where the dispute continued. Hägelich, the Calvinist, pulled a hatchet out from his tunic and swung; Keiser, unarmed, tried to flee but received a deep wound in the back, from which he died two days later.

  The victim Keiser was the husband of the niece of Caspar Preis of Stausebach, a pious Catholic peasant whose diary recorded this typical outburst of “one-on-one” nocturnal violence.78 Robert Muchembled was one of the first to note that dusk, rather than the late night, was the critical time for violent crime in the countryside. Based on a study of judicial records in Artois from 1401 to 1660, he observed that among cases of homicide in which the time of the violence is indicated (37 percent of the total cases), about 17 percent of these deadly encounters took place in the afternoon, 22 percent at night, and 55 percent in the evening.79 Alain Cabantous has made a more detailed comparison of eight studies of rural crime at night in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and England and concluded that about half of all crimes recorded took place at night, about equally divided between the evening hours and later at night.80 In other words, the rural night was no more criminal than the rural day.

  But nocturnal crime was more frightening, if not more frequent, than crime during the day. Records of criminal proceedings confirm the real potential for violence in any encounter involving young men in the evening or after dark. In the Artois village of Lorgies in 1602, on March 17 at around eight in the evening, the young Pierre Soix mistakenly attacked Philippe Carpentier, the village farrier, mortally wounding him. Their exchange captures some of the tension of these nocturnal encounters. Soix was walking along, singing, when he heard someone approaching and called out “Who goes there?” Carpentier, well known to Soix but unrecognized in the dark, responded with “What have you?” [“Que veux-tu avoir?”] Soix responded hopefully “friends,” but Carpentier replie
d “I know of no friends” [“Je ne cognois nulz amis”] and knocked Soix to the ground. In defense, Soix fatally stabbed him.81 In 1616 in the upper Bavarian village of Siegsdorf, a certain “Wolf, servant of Pämer” stabbed another young servant “for no other reason” than that they came together in the lane and did not recognize each other. Earlier that year in the same village Adam Aufhaimer attacked the weaver Stephan Peutner “at night in the street,” breaking one of his ribs with a stone.82 In the dark villagers tended to attack first, assuming that anyone whom they did not recognize had shadowy intentions.83

  Early modern authorities condoned this kind of defensive or pre-emptive nocturnal violence, even at its most extreme. On April 30, 1666 William Knaggs and Thomas Bell, a blacksmith, “together with several young men and boys of the town of Birdsall [Yorkshire] … being about the number of fourteen” went into a forest belonging to the Eddlethorpe farm at “about eleven o’clock in the night.” Knaggs and Bell separated from the group, “their intention then being to choose and get a young ash tree for a Maypole to carry to the town of Birdsall.” The search proved fatal for Knaggs: he and Bell “heard someone speak but did not well understand what they said and immediately after a gun was discharged and the said William Knaggs being then close by … gave a shriek and turned around and fell down dead.” Bell could not see who shot Knaggs, but “immediately after the gun was discharged, one Mr. Edward Ruddock and another person” came up to Birdsall, saying “‘Ho rogues! Ho rogues! Have we met with you? I’ll make rogues on you. It’s more fit you were in your beds than here at this time of night.’”84 Ruddock asked Bell where the rest of the group was, then set off after them, “in his hand one gun,” and fired again a few minutes later.85 Ruddock was tried for the homicide. Despite the evidence given here by Thomas Bell, he was acquitted, underscoring the expectation of danger at night reflected in all these deadly encounters.