At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  With good reason, fears mounted after nightfall. The Restoration playwright John Bancroft wrote of “old kingdom night, / Where the fierce element of fire ne’r fades.”57 Even before being rendered defenseless by sleep, households became vulnerable when families lit hearths to escape the cold and the dark. As Benjamin Franklin observed, “Accidental fires in houses are most frequent in the winter and in the night time,” and a London newspaper one January spoke of “the frequency of fires at this time of the year.” Open hearths threw sparks onto wood floors, or worse, onto thatch roofs, when belched from chimneystacks. Clothing and flax hung dangerously next to fireplaces in order to dry. Chimneys themselves were a persistent hazard. Not only did they blaze out when clogged with soot, but cracks within chimneys and hearths permitted flames to reach a house’s joists. Some homes lacked chimneys altogether, to the consternation of anxious neighbors. Complaining that John Taylor, both a brewer and a baker, had twice nearly set his Wiltshire community ablaze from not having a chimney, petitioners in 1624 pleaded that his license be revoked. Of their absence in an Irish village, John Dunton observed, “When the fire is lighted, the smoke will come through the thatch, so that you would think the cabin were on fire.”58

  Candles, oil lamps, and other sources of artificial illumination posed perils of their own. Fire, to paraphrase an English proverb, could change quickly from being a good servant to an ill master. Clothing was highly combustible: the neckcloth of Reverend Ralph Josselin’s daughter, Mary, suddenly burst into flames from a candle in 1669, as did, another evening, the head cloth of Elizabeth Freke of County Cork while she was reading in her chamber. Just to carry a naked brand outdoors courted disaster. Newmarket’s Great Fire of 1683 began on a March night when someone’s torch accidentally set a rick of straw ablaze. In New York City, a cartman lost his home as well as his stable after his children’s candle ignited a fire when they were putting horses up. “Feare candle in hayloft, in barne, and in shed,” instructed Thomas Tusser.59

  Most blazes began less dramatically, with untended candles causing the greatest devastation. Untrimmed wicks dropped cinders onto tables and floors. “A snuffe of a candle will set a whole house on fire,” warned an Elizabethan writer.60 Lit candles also made tempting targets for hungry rats and mice. Samuel Sewall of Boston attributed a fire within his closet to a mouse’s taste for tallow. “If sickness or any other cause should oblige you to leave a candle burning all night,” advised The Old Farmer’s Almanack, “place it in such a situation as to be out of the way of rats.”61 Another refrain faulted the mishandling of candles by servants. In the Netherlands, the Ervarene Huyshoudster lectured, “Darning hose, done by the maids in their bedrooms by candlelight, is very dangerous, for when such a maid, being fatigued, falls from her chair, thus fire can start from the candle.” Domestics were condemned for using candles in bed, always a perilous risk. “It is a dangerous fire begins in the bed straw,” asserted a proverb.62 In truth, there was ample blame to go around in view of people’s late-night predilections for reading in bed and consuming alcohol, sometimes simultaneously. Several homes on London’s Albermarle Street burned to the ground in 1734 after a gentleman fell asleep reading.63

  Also vulnerable at night were workplaces. Along with candles for lighting, many tradesmen, including brewers, bakers, and tallow-chandlers, employed “constant large and violent fires,” with wood, coal, or other fuels stockpiled nearby. Too costly to extinguish, fires in ovens and furnaces often burned through the night. “No sensible person ought to live in an house contiguous to those trades,” exhorted a contemporary. Judging from the numbers of reported blazes, bakeries and malthouses seem to have been peculiarly vulnerable to accidents. Of brewers, Piers Plowman complained in the fourteenth century, “We’ve all seen sometime through some brewer / Many tenements burnt down with bodies inside.”64

  Gerard Vlack, Sleeping Servant, n.d.

  If most nighttime fires arose from human negligence, and lightning caused sundry more, an alarming number were intentional. Certainly no more frightening crime existed—the “most pernicious to society,” declared a Scottish pastor in 1734. In English criminal law, nearly all forms of arson, directed against a home or a haystack, were punishable by death. In Denmark, whether or not lives were lost, beheading was the penalty for a mordbroender, meaning literally a murderer by fire. The crime endangered lives and property on a horrific scale, as both innocents and incendiaries understood.65 Some persons, seeking to exploit public fears, extorted money from property owners in anonymous letters threatening arson. You will be “woken up by the red cock” was a favorite taunt. Named le capitaine des boutefeu, a twenty-four-year-old student at the University of Paris was convicted of both arson and extortion in 1557, for which he was burned alive. Years later, several residents of Bristol received letters threatening fire, including a merchant, whose defiance resulted in the destruction of his brick home shortly past midnight. Warned a letter in 1738 to a London ironmonger in Holborn, “We are all resolutely determined to kill you and yours by consuming your house to ashes.”66

  Burglars employed arson, hoping to disguise their crimes. In old regime France, this was a known ruse among thieves. Even in a small Scottish village late one night, a woman set a cottage afire after first combing its belongings. A full-scale blaze was averted only when a passerby alerted the community. Less fortunate was the owner of a London home consumed by a fire set to hide a theft of nearly £1,000 in banknotes. In Piccadilly on a Sunday night in 1761, the servant of a grocer stole clothing and linen before setting lit pieces of coal in three different spots of his master’s home. Alerted by smoke, family members barely escaped.67 A variation on this ploy occurred when thieves pillaged homes amid the confusion accompanying fires that they themselves set. Observed the seventeenth-century jurist Roger North, “It is believed that houses are often fired by thieves for opportunities of stealing.” In Muzzle-Hill, outside London, a gang ignited a barn containing a large quantity of hay. As the frantic farmer and his family worked to extinguish the flames, the incendiaries stole money and goods from their home.68

  Often, however, arson arose from other hands. Across Western Europe, fire was used against landowners by bands of peasants and vagabonds. Arson was a “weapon of the weak”—inexpensive and accessible, with small chance of prevention at night. Used during the Middle Ages, “fireraising” first reached epidemic proportions in the sixteenth century. Within Germany, for example, during the Bundschuh disturbances in 1513 and 1517, homes were fired, as were many more following the Peasants’ War of 1524–1526. In the Black Forest, an abbey was torched to avenge the death of a peasant leader. From Austria to the Low Countries, bands of incendiaries terrorized country villages. A gang near Salzburg in 1577 supposedly contained eight hundred members. That appears unlikely, but such exaggerations reflected the depth of rural fears. In the Netherlands, the Estates General in 1695 imposed new penalties against “the large bands of gypsies travelling in these areas, carrying arms and threatening arson.”69 And though fireraising was less prevalent in the British Isles, agrarian rioters in eighteenth-century Ireland routinely employed arson at night. In 1733, rumors circulated of a band of incendiaries in western England, whereas in Sussex, residents of Horsham, disgruntled over a ban on bonfires, posted a notice on the town hall vowing to fire the homes of local officials. “We should desire no better diversion than to stand at a distance and see your houses all in flames,” they declared. In the American provinces, some fires were attributed to discontented slaves, for example in Boston in the early 1720s and in New York City twenty years later.70

  In most instances of arson, personal, not social or political, grudges were responsible, although these impulses occasionally dovetailed when servants or slaves were involved. In Germany, the community of Dutz burned in 1538 after a former prisoner in the town gaol set his own house ablaze. “Tonight I have to pay back the Dutz people’s friendship,” he first informed his family. The late
-night burning of a Gloucestershire barn in 1769 resulted in the arrest of a servant girl, whose apron was used to hide a fire-stick. Upon confessing, she admitted that she disliked her “place,” from which she wished to be discharged.71

  Yet the final agony attending blazes came in their waning hours. After managing in the dead of night to escape both smoke and flames, survivors faced the pilfering of what few goods they could salvage. Fireside thefts were endemic, committed less often by arsonists than by onlookers nicknamed fire-priggers, notorious for stealing valuables on the pretense of helping distraught victims retrieve their belongings. So routine was this form of larceny that Parliament legislated in 1707 against “ill-disposed persons” found “stealing and pilfering from the inhabitants” of burning homes. A generation later nothing had changed, with thefts common on both sides of the Atlantic. “There was much thieving at the fire,” reported the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1730 of a nighttime blaze that destroyed stores and homes along the Philadelphia waterfront.72

  Such was the early modern nightscape, a forbidding place plagued by pestilential vapors, diabolical spirits, natural calamity, and human depravity, the four horsemen of the nocturnal apocalypse. Of these were the darkest nightmares composed. Unlike such recurrent perils as war, famine, and plague, these dangers were a pervasive source of anxiety for most households.

  Not that violence, fire, and other nightly terrors spared daily life, for plainly lives and property stood at risk during all hours in such a precarious age. There need be no doubt, however, that nightfall occasioned the gravest threats to personal safety. Darkness gave free rein to the most threatening elements in the natural and supernatural worlds. Dangers that by day remained sporadic multiplied both in number and in severity. “The terrors of the night,” explained Thomas Nashe, are “more than of the day, because the sinnes of the night surmount the sinnes of the day.”73 Never before in Western history, at least since the time of Christ, had night appeared more menacing. With crime a persistent threat, both evil spirits and the terror of fire posed heightened dangers in the centuries following the Middle Ages.

  It is a wonder that with the initial shades of darkness men and women did not flee to their beds, warily banking their fires first. And yet, for all of night’s terrors, for all the dangers from demons, rogues, and poisonous damps, many persons retreated neither to their chambers nor even to their homes. Instead, they worked and played into the night. Complained a Swiss pastor in 1696, “In the evening, when the sun is setting, the cattle returning from the field home to the stall, and the birds in the wood are falling silent, man alone in his foolishness acts against nature and the general order.”74

  PART TWO

  LAWS

  OF NATURE

  PRELUDE

  If there was no obscurity, man would not sense his own corrupt state.

  BLAISE PASCAL, 16601

  FOR MOST OF THE early modern era, night’s perilous domain escaped the normal vigilance of church and state. Much of the scaffolding of civic and religious institutions so vital within European communities to the preservation of social order fell dormant each evening—courts, councils, and churches to which ordinary men and women looked to settle local disputes and help protect life and property. Magistrates, aldermen, and churchwardens returned home, shedding robes and responsibilities. “The still village lies dissolv’d in sleep,” wrote the poet Thomas Foxton.2

  Nightfall, in the view of secular and ecclesiastical officials, commanded a close to hours of daily toil. On a practical level, to avoid the risks of both fire and poor craftsmanship, most tradesmen were required to snuff candles and bank hearths. But there was also a heavenly imperative to obey. Darkness mandated that the profane demands of the visible world be forsaken. In their stead, authorities expected men and women to embrace their deity through prayer and meditation. Such early Church Fathers as Ignatius, Jerome, and Cyril of Jerusalem all stressed the value of prayer at night, as did, in the sixteenth century, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. In the poem “On a Dark Night,” he proclaimed, “O you my guide, the night, / O night more welcome than dawn.” By closing eyes and ears, darkness and solitude opened hearts and minds to the word of God. In the evening, related Bishop James Pilkington, “the senses are not drawn away with fantasies, and the mind is quiet.” And no time made prayer more essential than night, the time of Satan’s reign, when persons retired to their beds, entrusting themselves to their creator’s care.3

  Most of all, darkness was intended for rest. “The day sees work and labor; the night sees rest and peace,” wrote the seventeenth-century Jesuit Daniello Bartoli in La Ricreazione del Savio (1656). Nocturnal slumber strengthened the faithful for their daily duties. Admonished a Puritan minister, sleep should never be taken “out of season” so “that we may the better serve God and our neighbours.” To spurn rest defied divine providence, but it also endangered personal health. By turning night into day, stated Reverend John Clayton, men imperiled both their “principles” and their “constitutions.”4 Equally alarming, venturing abroad put persons at needless risk, exposing them to all the “troubles and dangers that continually ensue.” “Except in extreme necessity,” warned Monsignor Sabba da Castiglione, “take care not to go out at night.”5

  Nighttime’s final importance for authorities lay in drawing heightened attention to the glory of God’s earthly paradise. How better to appreciate the wonder of daily life than by contemplating the black obscurity of night? For the people of this age, there was no more useful way, in fact, to understand any subject than by studying its antithesis. By providential design, observed writers, the horrors of darkness set life’s blessings in sharper relief. “Safe from the dangers” of “the night season,” men and women awakened each morning to the “beauty and order of the creation.” Asserted Piers Plowman, “If there were no night, I believe no man / Should really know what day means,” a sentiment routinely echoed by later generations. A New England clergyman declared, “God sends our night upon us, to make us children of the day.”6

  Fundamentally, then, night’s paramount value, apart from encouraging devotion and rest, lay in its negation of the waking world. It should not surprise us that the established order viewed “nightwalkers” with trepidation or took few steps after dark to make common thoroughfares safer and more accessible. Not that its attitude was one of indifference or inaction, for night remained a source of profound concern. But rather than seeking to render darkness more habitable, authorities resorted instead to restraint and repression. The fewer persons abroad the better. Night was a no-man’s-land, or so, at least, civic and religious officials prayed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE FRAGILITY OF

  AUTHORITY:

  CHURCH AND STATE

  I

  The gates of the citty were shutt, and the streetes chayned at dinner tyme, as if it were in tyme of warr.

  FYNES MORYSON, 16171

  ACROSS THE preindustrial countryside, fortified cities and towns announced the advance of darkness by ringing bells, beating drums, or blowing horns from atop watchtowers, ramparts, and church steeples. In Catholic lands, the hum of daily life slowed to a soft murmur as men and women of faith recited the Ave Maria, a prayer of thanks for divine mercies. With the return of peasants and peddlers to the countryside, townspeople hurried home before massive wooden gates, reinforced by heavy beams, shut for the evening and guards hoisted drawbridges wherever moats and trenches formed natural perimeters. “When Ave Maria you hear, see that your house be near,” advised a customary saying. The daily intercourse between town and country abruptly halted at nightfall, as households took shelter behind walls of earth, brick, and stone, some more than fifty feet in height and ten feet in width. During the summer, gates might not be barred until eight or nine o’clock, but in winter, when darkness came on quickly, they could shut as early as four o’clock. At no other time was the contrast more evident between ur
ban and rural life. Town folk eagerly abandoned the surrounding countryside to frightening perils, as armed sentinels with torches patrolled the ramparts. In Italian towns, guards were obliged to ring a small bell every five minutes to signal that none had fallen asleep.2 For anyone caught and convicted of either defacing or scaling urban walls, penalties were harsh, including, in Stockholm, the loss of one’s head. Just to approach ramparts without warning at night constituted a crime. After all, a Milanese scholar pointed out in 1602, it was for the offense of vaulting the walls of Rome that Romulus slew his brother Remus. “So perish all who cross my walls,” Romulus had allegedly exclaimed.3

  Predominantly medieval in origin, urban fortifications dominated the surrounding terrain for centuries afterward. For every city or town cursed by crumbling battlements, there stood another with freshly strengthened façades. In spite of the expenditure of time, labor, and money, more than a few small towns received protection. The Netherlands, according to an estimate in the sixteenth century, contained over two hundred walled towns. Even rural villages occasionally took refuge behind crude bastions. A visitor to Germany reported, “Every village has a wall or ditch around it; few country farmhouses; all are huddled together in towns.” Fearing an attack by water, authorities in Amiens forbade all boat traffic at night on the Somme where the river passed the city’s ramparts. Boatmen were required to bring their skiffs within the walls before sunset “on pain of being punished as enemies of the town.”4