CHAPTER NINE
MASTERS BY NIGHT:
PLEBEIANS
I
Who dares not stir by day must walk by night.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 15961
NIGHT REVOLUTIONIZED the social landcape. If darkness rendered members of the mighty more plebeian, it made legions of the weak more powerful—walking “the streetes,” moaned a writer, “as uprightly, & with as proud a gate as if they meant to knock against the starres with the crownes of their heads.” Freed from hours of toil and degradation, multitudes in Europe and America drew renewed purpose from the setting sun. Night’s widespread appeal—freedom from both labor and social scrutiny—resounded among the lower orders. Personal associations were by choice, confined to family and friends, social peers rather than superiors. “No eyes break undistinguish night / To watch us or reprove,” wrote John Clare, the former Northamptonshire hedge-setter. The attraction of darkness takes on richer significance if we consider night’s ability to obscure vestiges of the visible world. Veiled on black evenings were common reminders of institutional power and privilege, designed to instill fear along with veneration and respect. Crests and crucifixes receded from sight; guildhalls and gaols loomed less large; and church steeples no longer dominated the terrain. “All real ills in dark oblivion lye,” wrote Charles Churchill, “and joys, by fancy form’d, their place supply.”2
Night, to be sure, afforded asylum to diverse sorts. Forced to conceal their identities by day, dissident minorities found fresh resolve after dark, successfully eluding the constraints of church, state, and popular prejudice. In England not only did political outsiders like the Jacobites cabal at night, but rival factions during times of heightened unrest used the cover of darkness to circulate incendiary broadsheets. In the tense period surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, mornings brought the discovery of handbills strewn about the streets of London. Years later, during the Hanover Succession Crisis, Mary, Countess Cowper remarked, “Not a night passing but some scandalous pamphlet or other was cried about.”3
Religious dissenters congregated at night much in the tradition of early Christians during the Roman persecution. In the Middle Ages, Cathars, Waldensians, and other heretical sects assembled secretly. Their enemies circulated rumors of midnight orgies. Of a sect in 1427, the Sienese friar Bernadino wrote, “Deep in the night they all get together, men and women in the same room, and they stir up quite a broth among themselves.” Crypto-Jews, like the marranos in Spain, worshipped in private and committed isolated acts of defiance. So in early seventeenth-century Seville, for two nights in a row, signs appeared on the door of the Church of San Isidro proclaiming, “Long live the laws of Moses. They are the best.” Late one evening in 1551, a small band of Italian Jews, during the Jewish festival week of Purim, roamed freely through the empty streets of Rome, even at one point masquerading as the nightwatch.4
On the heels of the Reformation, Protestant minorities, fearing arrest, held nocturnal services, including weddings and burials. Reportedly, French Protestants (Huguenots) acquired their name from meetings at night in the city of Tours, where once the spirit of a medieval monarch, King Hugo, was said to haunt the streets. Whether true or not, secret assemblies for reading and discussion were customary in French cities. Persecuted Anabaptists in Strasbourg congregated in nearby forests. According to an eyewitness in 1576, two hundred men and women prayed and listened to sermons, having first taken secret “paths and by-ways” protected by guards. “The many lighted candles looked like wolves’ eyes shining among the trees and bushes on a dark night.” Some may have been.5
François Morellon la Cave, Night Meeting of the Adamites, eighteenth century. An antiauthoritarian religious sect active at different times in England and other parts of Europe. Seeking to regain the innocence of the Garden of Eden, they worshipped in the nude.
In Britain, Catholic recusants occasionally met at night for services and sacraments. Of a widow in 1640, a Monmouth gentleman noted, “She was unlawfully buried by night in the church, she being a papist.” In the wake of the Clarendon Code re-establishing the primacy of the Church of England after the Civil War, numerous nonconformists met covertly. The diary of Oliver Heywood in Yorkshire is filled with evening excursions to preach in private homes, some nearly too crowded with followers to enter. Years later, during another spasm of Anglican persecution, the Manchester dissenter Thomas Jolly wrote, “Our danger of being deprived of our privileges wholly made us meet in the evening and the night-time mostly according to the example of the primitive christians.”6
Refugees from daylight also included victims of disease, lepers and other sufferers whose physical disfigurements exposed them to daily scorn. During outbreaks of plague, urban officials frequently restricted victims and their families to home, with doors barred from the outside, and, in London beginning in 1519, marked with a red cross and the plaintive inscription “Lord Have Mercy Upon Us.” Often, inmates were unable to acquire fresh water and food, much less receive the help of friends. Still, at night, persons managed to escape, either fleeing to the countryside or returning home before daybreak with provisions. During an outbreak in Florence, the gold beater Alessandro Conti, in a frenzied effort to safeguard his son, lowered him one night from a household window. Of London’s Great Plague, Daniel Defoe recounted the “running of distempered people about in the streets” at night, who were nearly impossible for officials to curb.7
No less common were homosexuals. By the sixteenth century or earlier, European cities including Florence, Venice, and Geneva contained homosexual networks, with London, Paris, and Amsterdam all following suit by the 1700s. In many localities, sodomy was a capital offense, which it became in England at the urging of Henry VIII. In London, more than twenty homosexual brothels, known as “molly-houses,” were raided in 1726. At Margaret Clap’s house, with “beds in every room,” thirty or forty men were said to assemble each evening. Wherever the location, night was widely favored as the safest time for sexual encounters. In Tuscany, la notte was a popular metaphor for sodomy. The Florentine court chiefly responsible for the prosecution of homosexuals in the late Middle Ages was titled the Officials of the Night. In Paris, public gardens were favorite sites, where clumps of shrubs and trees provided shelter on moonlit evenings. On a summer night in 1723, the abbé de la Vieuxville informed a fellow stroller in the Tuileries, “I see you here every evening. If you want to, come with me under the yew trees, for there’s no staying here because the moonlight is too bright and there are too many people around.” Less often, nighttime for homosexuals posed risks of its own. In Florence, Jacopo di Niccolò Panuzzi, amid the gathering darkness of evening, offered money to a young male for the commission of “shameful gestures,” only to discover that the “youth” was a constable.8
II
Their shortliv’d jubilee the creatures keep,
Which but endures, whilst tyrant-man does sleep.
ANNE FINCH, 17139
Religious and political minorities, the diseased and disabled, and homosexuals—all were wayfarers instead of permanent denizens of the nocturnal world. Rather than laying claim to darkness, each sought, as the French saying went, to make “a hole in the night”—or, as a Spanish rabbi remarked, “to hide from the world.” Their scattered numbers only enhanced their anonymity. Quite different was the larger body of people for whom nighttime spawned an alternate existence, a separate realm rather than just a passing refuge.10
Many evenings, few looked forward to sunset more eagerly than did the indigent and dispossessed. Along with unskilled laborers and struggling peasants, the preindustrial countryside teemed with vagrants and beggars, many of them refugees from regional wars and economic dislocation. Predominantly male and single, they streamed to cities, where poverty, according to conservative estimates, swelled during years of economic crisis to between 20 and 30 percent of municipal populations. Having scant opportuni
ties for employment, these unfortunates, in Daniel Defoe’s words, comprised “the miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.”11
At night, indigent men and women grew bold. Darkness freed untold numbers from the control of their betters, including, for some, the oversight of masters. “They lie close in their dens and holes all the day, and at night range the country for their prey,” fumed a contemporary. Anxious superiors likened the movements of the lower classes to those of owls, wolves, and other nocturnal creatures—“wicked night birds,” groused a commentator. “They are like the beasts that creep forth in the night,” declared Solomon Stoddard of Massachusetts. Such comparisons attested to both their prowess and their prevalence at night. Paintings by artists as disparate as Leonaert Bramer, David Teniers the Younger, and Johann Konrad Seekatz reveal not only the nighttime camps of the poor but also their favored haunts for camaraderie and drink. “Those who appear,” observed Oliver Goldsmith in 1759, “no longer now wear their daily mask, nor attempt to hide their lewdness or their misery.”12
Johann Konrad Seekatz, Gypsies Before a Campfire, eighteenth century.
Impatient of patriarchal authority, the young were also drawn to evening hours—apprentices, students, and other adolescents whose subordination was more often the consequence of age than class. For adults, the young were a persistent concern. The years between seventeen and twenty-seven, declared the sixteenth-century scholar Roger Ascham, were “the most dangerous of all in a man’s life.” Moralists warned of their restless temperaments and the need for close control. Apprenticeship, undertaken by young males of modest origins, offered training over a period of years in a craft or trade while supplying moral supervision both on the job and off. Across Europe, the institution was a popular means of socializing adolescents, as well as a cheap source of labor. Although large numbers failed to complete their training, London alone by the early seventeenth century contained upwards of twenty-five thousand apprentices, roughly 12 percent of its population. Not only were they supposed to reside in their masters’ households, but there was little free time except for meals and, at most, a midday rest.13
Under a master’s thumb by day, many fled their domination at night. “Lying-out” was the term reserved for dependents that remained abroad much of the evening, often in defiance of a household curfew. “They can’t bear the orders, the restraints, the seasonable hours, whereto their parents or masters would have them obliged,” a contemporary observed in 1705. The self-styled “masters of the night,” adolescents provoked fear among urban denizens throughout the early modern world. Just as Cotton Mather condemned “knotts of riotous young men” in Boston, including his own son Increase (“Cressy”), so in Germany, a Protestant synod protested, “Decent people can no longer be sure of anything and must fear the most shameful insults, even physical attacks.” Of London, Sir William Davenant declared in 1673, “Our city fam’d for government, is by / These nightly riots and disorders, grown / Less safe then galleys, where revolted slaves / Inchain their officers.”14
So, too, for bound laborers, night brought uncommon opportunity. So pervasive was servitude in Europe that even poor households sometimes possessed a single maid. Eighteenth-century Paris contained forty thousand domestics, with London having at least as many. Like apprentices, servants were predominantly young, generally from fifteen to thirty years of age. Although they often changed jobs, servitude, unlike apprenticeship, rarely represented a stepping-stone to propertied independence. Working conditions were demanding. By definition, servants were subject to the will of their masters, and to their verbal and physical abuse. Maidservants fell prey to sexual exploitation. Worse were the lives of indentured servants in the American colonies, whose terms averaged from three to five years. If banished from Britain as convicts, they labored for seven years. Still, the lot of colonial servants was superior to that of African slaves, whose miserable material existence, especially on Southern plantations, was compounded by strenuous labor and savage discipline.15
And, yet, once evening’s tasks were done, masters were hard-pressed to curtail their laborers’ jaunts. The General Court of Massachusetts in 1675 condemned the “evil of inferiours absenting themselves out of the families whereunto they belong in the night.” Sarah Cowper complained bitterly of “impudent wretches who go where they will.” In Scotland, a vicar reported, “A farmer must often rise from bed at 3 or 4 o’clock, in a winter’s morning to admit his servants, who have been junketing all night.”16 Equally peripatetic were slaves. “Both sexes are frequently travelling all night,” remarked a white resident of Barbados, “going to or returning from a distant connection.” A correspondent in the Boston Evening-Post railed against the “great disorders committed by Negroes, who are permitted by their imprudent masters, &c. to be out late at night.” In short, as a North Carolina planter remarked, “night” was “their day.”17 Then, also, apprentices, servants, and slaves bent on escape were most likely to abscond after sunset, lurking by day in woods and marshes and navigating at night by the stars. In Germany, two ship’s apprentices in March 1588, having fled their river vessel, escaped to Bonn “with help of the darkness of night,” only to be discovered in the morning. Alerted a colonial newspaper advertisement for runaway servants, “It is supposed they will travel mostly in the night.”18
In certain respects, the members of these four groups—adolescents, servants, slaves, and the poor—had little in common. Some resided on the social margins of early modern communities, while others were partially integrated. The lot of Carolina slaves varied immensely from that of lower-class whites, as did the prospects facing hardened vagrants compared to those of young servants. The groups themselves were fragmented by occupation, ethnicity, gender, and religion. Among slaves, important, too, were their identities as creoles or native Africans. Yet these groups frequently overlapped, and boundaries separating one from another were often blurred. Thus, for instance, apprentice riots in London were rumored to include “forlorn companions” and “masterless men.” Most of all, these men and women, despite their diverse backgrounds, were alike in one fundamental respect. Rather than living in one world, they each resided in two. Days mired in misery and fear often gave way to nights of opportunity and promise. Alienated from daily reality, only in the evening could they work and play with their own kind by their own rules. Recalled a former North Carolina slave, “We hated to see da sun rise in slavery time cause it meant annudder hard day, but den we wus glad to see it go down.” Or, as a New England minister wrote of the young, “Because they are weary of the restraint, which they have been under in the day time, wherefore when they get liberty, they are apt to run mad, like water, that has been pent all the day.”19
If night posed myriad dangers, the lower orders were well equipped to navigate its darkness. Most were intimately familiar with their physical environs and versed in the mysteries of the natural world. Both servants and apprentices were regularly required to traverse their communities, running errands or retrieving their masters after dark. In colonial Virginia, upon a slave’s overnight death in a meadow after visiting his wife on another plantation, his owner attributed the mishap to drunkenness, “for he must have known every foot of the way so well.” Drink, too, for at least some individuals, must have eased nocturnal fears. So in Somerset, young James Lackington’s father, on a gloomy night, “drank too large a quantity of ale to be much afraid of any thing.” “Night knows no shame,” went a popular saying, “or love and wine no fear.”20
For the lower orders, theirs was a world in motion long past sunset. On mild evenings, friends and relations congregated in small clusters in the open-air past midnight. Laughter and camaraderie, stoked by ale, beer, or wine, animated their hours. “Every evening in every village,” remarked Giovanni Gelsi of Italian peasants during the seventeenth century, “you’ll see them dance into the night as they carouse together. Laughing in our faces, they all make merry.” In Rome, laborers and paupers gather
ed by the Piazza Navona, while in Paris, parks like the Tuileries and the Luxembourg drew men and women. Jesuits in Bavaria described “night-time gatherings” as “rooted habits among peasants,” and in Lisbon a visitor wrote that revelers “frisk, and dance, and tinkle their guitars from sunset to sunrise.” A London resident complained of an “idle, drunken, dissolute set of miscreants and gamblers” that assembled in an open field each evening.21Homes, barns, and stables permitted cardplay and dice, stories and gossip, and derisive songs. Constables in Berkshire discovered one night six couples “dancing naked.” Declared a seventeenth-century ballad:
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