Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  In addition to this interpersonal violence, the rural night also saw communal violence that enforced group identities or village boundaries. The young Thomas Isham of Lamport kept a diary of country life in Northhamptonshire in 1671–73, recording on April 30, 1673 a particularly brutal encounter between the young men of two villages:

  Last night the servants of four farmers, with Mr. Baxter’s man and Henry Lichfield, went to Draughton [about a mile northwest] to bring home the first drawing of beer, which they bought from Palmer. On the way back sixteen or seventeen Draughton men met them with stakes and began to lay about them; but being few and unarmed against a greater number of armed men, they were easily beaten, and Mr. Baxter’s man has had his skull laid bare in several places and almost fractured.86

  The diarist does not explain what score the Draughton men had to settle with the six young men of Lamport; a slight to village pride, or perhaps the visitors were courting the young women of Draughton. The chronicle of the Dötschel brothers of Mitwitz, a village in rural Franconia, recorded violent brawls after their village’s church fair (kermesse, Kirchweihfest) on August 31, 1628 and in 1670: “Anno 1670 year [sic], at our church fair in the night, Erhart Bauer … became unruly with Attam and Michael, the two Jüng brothers from Rotschreuth … and it became a great brawl.” Each of these “battles” (as the Dötschels described them) between neighboring villages ended with several men seriously injured.87

  Nocturnal crimes against property were associated with nightwalkers, suspicious persons who might eavesdrop, “cast men’s gates, carts or the like into ponds, or commit other outrages or misdemeanors in the night, or shall be suspected to be pilferers, or otherwise likely to disturb the peace.”88 When the term first appeared in the late Middle Ages, nightwalkers were assumed to be men, but, as discussed in chapter 6, in seventeenth-century London the term came to refer to “lewd and idle women.” In the provinces the term retained its masculine associations through the eighteenth century: as the Justice of the Peace Robert Doughty explained to Norfolk jurors at a quarter session in 1664, nightwalkers were “rogues … such as slept on the day & watched on the night, & such as frequented alehouses & fared well & had no visible means of livelihood.”89 In the countryside nightwalking shaded into poaching, a widespread nocturnal crime issuing from deep social tensions.90

  Whatever the actual level of interpersonal nocturnal crime in the countryside, early modern villagers were quick to defend themselves against perceived nocturnal threats to themselves or their goods.91 Thomas Isham recorded an “uproar” on the night of December 13, 1672:

  About eleven or twelve o’clock tonight a noise was heard in Mr. Wright’s yard. The maids, who were washing dishes, heard someone beating on the window, breaking it as if trying to get in. They were terrified.

  The entire household, and the village, sprang into action:

  [O]ne beat on the bell, another blew a horn, a third put candles in every room. Meanwhile Wright, clad only in a nightshirt, ran through the house like a madman, and his son waited in the hall with a sword and holding a gun, ready to receive them with a volley … the neighbors, aroused by the horn and thinking that the house was being attacked by thieves, assembled with forks, sticks, and spits.

  Armed and ready, when the villagers investigated the yard they found “a dog that had been shut out and had broken a window.” Isham notes that “this sent them away with roars of laughter,”92 but the retrospectively ridiculous preparation for violence clearly shows that such a situation could be dangerous. In the Bavarian town of Traunstein in 1698 the apprentice carpenter Ruepp Jähner lost the fingers on his right hand when he took an ill-considered shortcut over a fence late one night: he was attacked without warning by his neighbor, Sylvester Schneiderpaur. After dark, any “intruder” to a domestic space could reckon with a violent response.

  7.2 Colonizing the rural night?

  The rural night belonged to the common people. When church and state authorities sought to discipline the night in the countryside, they spoke and acted as if they faced a “dark continent” of rural superstition, excess, and intransigence. All the activities just described drew the authorities’ attention as they sought to regulate and police labor, leisure, disorder, and crime in villages and farms, and in the rural night’s uninhabited spaces, such as forests and roads.93 This focus on the rural night increased in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.94 In Catholic areas church leaders tried to reinforce their moral discipline by co-opting or introducing nocturnal forms of popular piety.95 How does this engagement with the rural night compare with the colonization of the urban night examined in previous chapters? The same legal-disciplinary framework underlay authorities’ engagement with the night in the countryside as in the city. But the encounter of church and state with the rural night was shaped by different cultural and social forces and led to outcomes distinctly different from the colonization of the night in the cities of Northern Europe.

  In these cities, the colonization of the night was based on settlement, achieved when courtiers and respectable burghers shifted their daily activities later into the evening and night. Respectable activity after dark reoriented the use of the evening and night hours away from young people and toward a new kind of homosocial, respectable man. The result was a new period of urban time based on public street lighting and private consumption. This engagement with the night sought to create an urban site of activity for respectable men, who eagerly occupied its taverns, coffeehouses, clubs, and theaters, now more safely connected by lighted streets.96 Unlike the colonization of the urban night, which was based on the expansion of the nocturnal activity of one group at the expense of another, the colonization of the rural night was a struggle to clear the rural night of its traditional activities (such as spinning bees, courtship customs, and popular nocturnal celebrations) and create an ordered time largely empty of activity.97

  Efforts to colonize the rural night required a sharp focus on young people. Youth were the “indigenous” people of the early modern night, and limiting their night life was a constant concern. The Bavarian priest Christof Selhammer epitomized this view when he preached that rural servants should be locked in at night: “Among the peasants, the master of the house should keep careful watch over his servants. At night every house-door should be locked and bolted so that no one goes out and no one can sneak in.”98 The administrators and pastors who sought to discipline the rural night had little interest in supplanting traditional village night life with their own sociability. The colonization of the rural night was not based on settlement. Indeed, as we will see below, the rural gentry began to slip out of step with the daily rhythms of their urban cousins at the start of the eighteenth century.

  The means by which spiritual and secular authorities sought to colonize the rural night have been described as “social discipline.” The early modern colonization of the night – urban and rural – began on paper with a stream of legal writing on the dangers of the night and its fundamental association with sin and crime in the early seventeenth century.99 These works proposed, both implicitly and explicitly, that policing could and should combat the disorder of the night. In theory and practice, the colonization of the rural night sought to reclassify nocturnal leisure, sociability, and disorder as crime.

  7.2.1 Disciplining the rural night

  The sexuality of young adults was at the center of these attempts to discipline the rural night. As we have seen, young people in the countryside depended on the night for courtship, social exchange, and leisure, and they defended their access to the night in negotiations with their masters. In response, church and state authorities repeatedly tried to restrict all forms of rural “night life.”

  The prescriptions of church and state maintained an intense focus on spinning bees and similar gatherings. Across France a succession of bishops condemned these gatherings from the sixteenth century through the end of the Old Regime.100 The statutes published by the bishop of Saint-Malo in 1619 were espe
cially florid, describing the spinning bees as “assemblies of the night invented by the prince of darkness whose sole aim is to cause the fall of man.”101 Worse even than the public house was the “intolerable corruption and detestable, hideous debauchery committed under the guise of what is known in this country as spinning [and] scutching [hemp] … done at night, where men, women, and girls flock.” “We have heard from reliable people,” the statutes continued, “that going to such a … spinning bee is [the same as] going to a brothel.”102 The parlement of Brittany prohibited them entirely in 1670.103 The synodal statutes issued for the diocese of Troyes in 1680 forbade

  men and boys, under pain of excommunication … to be with women and girls in the places where they assemble at night to spin or work, to linger there in any way, or to wait to walk them back home. As we also forbid under the same penalties women and girls to receive [the men and boys]. We urge them to behave during the time of their work with all the modesty befitting the faithful, and even to sanctify their meetings by a few prayers.104

  This statute reflects a modest hope that casual labor at night could be “sanctified” once the sexes were rigorously separated. Most other authorities, less optimistic, simply forbade the gatherings entirely.105 German authorities also focused on the sexual associations of the spinning bee, “in which all kinds of immorality and fornication are carried on.”106 In a personal plea, a Lutheran pastor bedeviled by the spinning bees begged the state authorities for a decree that “every servant who would be found on the streets or in public houses, or other such places after 9 p.m. should be condemned to pay a fixed fine.” Recognizing that masters were not especially interested in separating young people from the rural night, the pastor continued: “and those heads of households whose servants were not home at the aforementioned time, and who keep silent about it and do not report [their servants] should just as well be punished with a fine.”107

  Church authorities challenged all forms of nocturnal courtship across Europe in the seventeenth century, with some success: in France bishops threatened bundling and prenuptial sex with excommunication, and they had all but disappeared by the mid eighteenth century.108 In electoral Cologne the nocturnal courtship customs of the spring, such as the Mailehen (a mock marriage for courting couples) were successfully separated from the church’s celebration of Pentecost, though not eliminated entirely.109

  We might suspect that the focus on the sexuality of village youth made the night itself incidental to this program of social discipline. But the official abhorrence of youthful rural night life was so prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we can see the night disciplined as night. As the council of Schwäbisch Hall ordered in 1684:

  If any unmarried servants go out to drink wine, and otherwise do only what is right, and in the evening each one goes home alone, nonetheless the male servants shall pay 1 fl. and the maids 15 ß as punishment.110

  In this small city, most servants came from the surrounding countryside and continued to socialize there – hence the rural context of this decree. The authorities focused directly on the night rather than on excesses in nocturnal sociability in their attempts to contain their young servants: even if nothing improper was done and all returned home by a reasonable hour, nocturnal gatherings would still be an offense.

  These attempts to discipline the rural night faced sharp limits. The proliferation of laws, ordinances, and statutes focused on the night life of rural youth began in the first third of the seventeenth century. As many scholars have noted, this legislation remained in place, relatively unchanged, for 150 years or more.111 Spinning bees and similar nocturnal gatherings were forbidden everywhere, but with little effect. Scholars have documented their persistence through the eighteenth century in German-speaking Switzerland, in the Vorarlberg, in rural France, and across Germany.112 Disciplining night life in rural public houses was equally unsuccessful. These inns and taverns were too deeply rooted and performed too many acknowledged functions to be challenged directly. Specific complaints about late hours did not lead to any general restriction of opening times on paper or in practice.113

  This failure to discipline the rural night is part of a key feature of the early modern state first discussed by Jürgen Schlumbohm in 1997: countless laws and regulations promulgated but not enforced.114 Yet the limited effectiveness of early modern administration only partially explains the enormous gap between prescription and enforcement seen in these attempts to discipline the rural night. As Schlumbohm has argued, early modern administrators valued laws, ordinances, and proclamations as symbols of the state’s authority. As symbols, these laws were not limited by modern-rational expectations of what could be enforced or effected in practice. The act of making or proclaiming law in itself showed the state to be Christian and benevolent.

  For these laws to be more than symbols of state authority, local cooperation between rulers and subjects was essential. Church and state authorities proclaimed their baleful view of the moral and physical dangers of the night in countless laws and ordinances. But local support for limiting the night life of village youth was quite limited. Priests, pastors, and administrators noted that when pressed, heads of households sometimes defended spinning bees. One Lutheran pastor complained that “the fornication and license of the youth are made into a praiseworthy custom by parents [who claim that] from it many Christian marriages are made, as the nightly gatherings and noise bear witness.”115 Every spinning bee or Heimgarten had at least the tacit approval of the head of the household in which it was held, and the concluding verses of the Beham spinning bee print (Figure 7.1) explain: “how could it be finer for these servants / after all, the whole community of the village is with them / high and low alike. And so they like their fun at all hours / in the evening as in the morning.” With the whole village involved, who would prevent this night life? Village courts almost never prosecuted young men for nocturnal visits to court young women at their windows, or in their bedchambers. Indeed, these visits were not met with the sort of condoned violence seen above in cases of nocturnal intruders, suggesting some level of acceptance. In the specific case of Leonard Wheatcroft and Elizabeth Hawley, we know that her parents allowed them to spend the night together on many occasions once their courtship had begun. As long as spinning bees, late nights in taverns, nocturnal courtship customs, and similar night life received the tacit approval of village elders, neither church nor state could do much to discipline the rural night.

  7.2.2 Sanctifying the rural night

  Alongside these widespread attempts to discipline the rural night and limit nocturnal activity, a more ambitious aspect of the colonization of the rural night unfolded in Catholic territories, driven by the baroque piety of Catholic reform. As we saw in chapter 3, pious laymen, Capuchin missionaries, and reforming bishops all sought new uses for the night in a program of spiritual renewal and ecclesiastical intensification. The spiritual uses of darkness discussed in chapter 3, ascetic and aesthetic, inspired new forms of nocturnal lay piety in Italy, France, and Catholic Germany.116 This interest in sanctifying the rural night went beyond the purely disciplinary aims shared by church and state. New practices, such as the devotion of the Forty Hours and nocturnal lay processions during Holy Week, played a major role in the public piety of the seventeenth century, urban and rural. The continuous veneration of the Host day and night, formalized in the Forty Hours’ Devotion, has been described as “an incomparable means to gather the faithful,” while the nocturnal processions of the lay penitent brotherhoods on Holy Thursday or Good Friday represented “Catholic ritual’s most massive venture into the night” in the early modern centuries.117 Here we will examine the rise and fall of rural nocturnal devotion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  The devotion of the Forty Hours is a period of continual prayer before the Eucharist augmented with preaching, processions, and other displays of piety.118 From its origins in Milan in the 1520s and 1530s, the devotion spread with the reforms of Tre
nt. As Pope Clement VIII explained in the Papal Constitution “Graves et diuturnae” of 1592: “We have determined to establish publicly in this Mother City of Rome an uninterrupted course of prayer in such wise that … there be observed the pious and salutary devotion of the Forty Hours … at every hour of the day and night.”119 The devotion was an ideal expression of the visual, emotional, and Eucharistic piety of the Catholic Reformation: performed in commemoration of the forty hours between the death and resurrection of the Christian savior, the penitential devotion served the missionary efforts of Capuchins, Jesuits, and Barnabites in the century after Trent.

  The Forty Hours’ Devotion was practiced in French-speaking lands from the late sixteenth century on.120 In the duchy of Chablais, for example, the devotion played a vital role in missions to the Protestant region around Geneva in 1597–98, performed twice in the town of Thonon and once in the village of Annemasse. Held across France in episcopal cities and towns, the devotions were intended to draw the faithful from rural parishes and involved confraternities from nearby towns and villages.121 The literal span of forty hours meant prayer through at least one full night. Public prayers and processions in darkness served to “render the site [of the devotion] more venerated through this clear dark obscurity,” as one Catholic account explained in apophatic terms.122 The night served the emotional, penitential, and missionary goals of the Forty Hours’ Devotion.