Most of all, these diverse subcultures shared common adversaries and a familiar vision of life, freedom from the constraints of the visible world and domineering masters of all sorts (adults, parents, employers, and owners)—a mentality that night reinforced and intensified by creating a coherent experience very different from daily life. According to an Italian proverb, “The dogs of Casaserro in the daytime, they are ready to kill one another, and in the night time, they go out a robbing together.”64
IV
. . . In night all creatures sleep;
Only the malcontent, that ’gainst his fate
Repines and quarrels. . . .
JOHN MARSTON, ca. 160065
Such, then, was the alternate realm inhabited by substantial segments of the early modern population on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. One can only speculate on the broader consequences this nocturnal universe had for the character of daily life, including whether its impact had any positive value from the perspective of the established order. It is after all true that some youth groups contributed to social control, disciplining adulterers, abusive husbands, and cuckolds for violating common morality. Often occurring at night, charivaris in France, mattinata in Italy, and “skimmington rides” in England subjected errant neighbors to “rough music,” mockery, and on occasion, physical abuse. Such traditional rituals helped to reaffirm the sanctity of marriage, which the young themselves expected one day to embrace. For the same reason, bachelors were known to battle adolescent bands from rival communities in order to protect the virginity of local maidens. And, too, gangs of apprentices sometimes razed houses of prostitution, prompting Charles II to inquire incredulously, “Why do they go to them then?”66
Still, did these bands represent moral watchdogs or, more often perhaps, wolves in sheeps’ clothing? For there remains a strong possibility that such outbursts served as a frequent pretext for mischief, as the historian Daniel Fabre has remarked in noting the contradiction of “achieving order through disorder.” An early eighteenth-century poem, “The Libertine’s Choice,” suggested as much in recounting the drunken antics of the young when attacking brothels: “When thus well freighted with the chearful juice, / We’d sally forth and give our selves a loose, / Break brothel windows, scowre the crazy watch, / And with fresh mischiefs crown the nights debauch.” Charivaris, despite their conservative purpose, were condemned, beginning in the sixteenth century, by civil and religious leaders. Too often, from the authorities’ point of view, these “nocturnal assemblies” degenerated into riots. “Frequently there are brawls,” Felix Platter observed in France.67 Further, the incidence of such popular rituals, however an expression of communal values, paled in comparison to the number of times bands voiced slogans and perpetrated violence diametrically opposed to the prevailing social order.
So, also, in the political realm, the threat of nighttime violence enforced conformity. In English and American cities, especially during the eighteenth century, street crowds celebrated military triumphs as well as more radical causes by compelling households to place lit candles in their windows—those that did not thus signal their solidarity risked having their homes pelted with rocks. Of anti-Irish mobs on a summer evening in London in 1736, an onlooker reported, “Late that night assembled many hundred disturbers of the peace, proclaiming thro’ the streets a law of their own making, viz. that every Englishman should put out lights in their windows; and then the cry run, Down with the Irish.” Whatever the source of agitation, the “mob,” rather than guardians of the law, controlled the streets after dark.68
Perhaps, in the eyes of authorities, nighttime served the well-known function of a safety valve, a concept familiar to the age. Resigned to the human capacity for sin, proponents favored channeling mortal appetites in ways least harmful to the established order—hence the cathartic value of holidays for letting off steam. Argued a petitioner defending a Feast of Fools before the Paris Faculty of Theology in 1444: “Such a diversion is necessary, because folly, which is our second nature and seems inherent to man, can thus express itself at least once a year. Wine barrels will burst if one does not occasionally release the plug to give them some air.”69 Customary in rural Britain were evening feasts held by farmers for laborers at the end of the yearly harvest. These “harvest suppers” were renown for generous offerings of food, drink, and good fellowship. According to Henry Bourne, “At this the servant and his master are alike, and every thing is done with an equal freedom.” But, of course, such occasions, considered all together, were fleeting respites whose provisional nature underscored the necessity to resume anew one’s normal life. As Henry Fielding noted in 1751, “The diversions of the people have been limited and restrained to certain seasons.” After Carnival followed the spartan regimen of Lent. Of harvest suppers, the Wiltshire poet Stephen Duck remarked, “The next morning soon reveals the cheat, / When the same toils we must again repeat.”70
Night, by contrast, was neither a set piece of ritual license nor a temporary escape from reality. Instead, it represented an alternate reality for a substantial segment of the preindustrial population, a realm of its own that, at a minimum, implicitly challenged the institutions of the workaday world. As a resident of Maryland said of slaves, “Though you have them slaves all the day, they are not so in the night.” Nor were night’s excesses limited just to the hours of darkness. Aftershocks from an evening’s merriment reverberated past dawn. “The next morning,” noted a writer of the typical journeyman mechanic, “he is both too ill and too lazy for work.” William West, an apprentice to a London cutler, returning home from “bouts of revelry,” typically stank of drink and would “swear and curse and throw his tools away.” Stolen livestock and crops, besotted servants, weary slaves, broken fences and windows, not to mention assorted cuts, scrapes, and bruises, numbered among the inventory of damages that darkness bequeathed, lending force to the Elizabethan saying, “Midnight feastings are great wasters, / Servants’ riots undo masters.”71
Superiors frequently expressed exasperation over their dependents’ revels. Complaints echoed across the Atlantic of “wicked” and “impudent” inferiors, as “bold” and “saucy” as they were “thievish.” One Leeds master, out of desperation, lashed his servant to a bed. Others took to locking doors with padlocks. John Clare, while a gardener’s apprentice, was confined each night to an outbuilding to prevent him from stealing fruit.72 Nevertheless, inferiors regularly outwitted their masters, usually waiting until families had retired to bed. Many domestics had access to keys. Clare escaped out a window, stealing “every opportunity” to visit a nearby village for his “midnight revels.” Moreover, if laborers found their tenure too restrictive, they could elect in the future to serve another master, as many evidently did, “running from place to place,” fumed a critic. Upon hearing a friend bemoan his punishment for lying out all night, Richard Wilkinson retorted, “What need of that? There [are] more masters than parish churches.”73
Slaves, of course, lacked that opportunity; still, they faced few obstacles at night if bent on escaping their quarters, which on plantations stood apart from the residences of owners and overseers. There was little that a master could do. Landon Carter, who generally resigned himself to their rambles, placed his slave Jimmy under surveillance one evening only because earlier protestations of lameness had kept him from working. “They that cannot work for me,” groused Carter, “cannot without great deceit walk 2 or 3 miles in the night.” George Washington, while president, attributed “the fatigue and drowsiness” of his slaves to “night-walking, and other practices which unfit them for the duties of the day.” An absentee planter, Washington expressed alarm over the extent of theft by his slaves, for which he blamed the nighttime “frolicking” of negligent overseers. Not until the nineteenth century would masters systematically spread ghost tales among slaves to deter their travels, with overseers impersonating spirits by donning white sheets.74
The
prevalence of nocturnal revelry also alarmed authorities. Whatever cathartic value nighttime once possessed increasingly diminished over time. Unlike isolated acts of crime, violence by roving bands raised fears of social disorder, especially when leading citizens were targeted for abuse—the affront to established authority exceeded only by their sense of personal injury. Some officials, to impose order, resorted to curfews not unlike medieval restrictions. Large towns and small enacted injunctions, with the young and dispossessed singled out for sanctions. During periodic rioting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London officials vainly tried to impose curfews on apprentices. In the city of Bratislava, officials during the early eighteenth century threatened paupers, Jews, and other “disorderly people” at night with military conscription. Meanwhile, American colonies up and down the eastern seaboard mandated that servants, slaves, free blacks, Indians, and adolescents all retire early to their homes, usually by nine o’clock.75
Rather than performing the function of a safety valve, nocturnal license helped to pave the way instead for greater disorder. Not only did nighttime suggest an alternate way of life, but organized violence among the lower classes most often erupted after dark. For reasons habitual as well tactical, obscurity was their preferred stage. In Britain, apprentices, hedge-breakers, Spitalfields weavers, and Jacobins all drew on a longstanding tradition of nocturnal revelry and resistance, as did vandals of turnpikes and dikes. The Waltham Blacks, boasted a member in 1723, “could raise 2,000 men in a night’s time.” Often, darkness was central to prolonged hours of preparation in remote locations. In order to drill with the United Irishmen, a secret society pledged, beginning in the mid-1790s, to home rule, the adolescent John “Michael” Martin made off from home once his parents fell asleep. “The meetings,” he later recalled, “were generally appointed at different places each night—sometimes near my father’s; and frequently many miles off.”76
Almost everywhere, arsonists struck at night, from incendiaries in Chesapeake tobacco fields to bands of mordbrenner in Central Europe. The vicar of a Hampshire village lamented in 1729, “As oft as night returns we are all under the dreadful apprehension of having our houses & barns fired.”77 In 1712, upwards of thirty slaves in New York City ignited a building and then killed a handful of whites drawn to fight the blaze. Time and again, slave insurrections were set for the dead of night—for example, conspiracies in Barbados (1675 and 1816), Stono in South Carolina (1739), Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica (1760), and the Virginia rebellions of Gabriel Prosser (1800) and Nat Turner (1832). Most plots involved nights of clandestine meetings to map strategy, with messengers crossing miles of terrain in the dark or, in the West Indies, beating drums or blowing conch shells to summon conspirators. Often, midnight became the bleeding edge of early-morning violence. On the eve of the American Revolution, such was the close association between slaves and nocturnal resistance that some Loyalists dreamed of enlisting black support against their Whig enemies. A Maryland Tory reputedly declared, “If I had a few more white people to join me, I could get all the negroes in the county to back us, and they would do more good in the night than the white people could in the day.”78
Besides secrecy and surprise, darkness afforded insurgents other familiar advantages. In England, for instance, fenland commoners in 1653 routed at midnight a military guard appointed to protect drainage works in Norfolk. Unfamiliar with the local terrain, the soldiers put up a weak defense, having “lost themselves in the night.” Even the distant rumble of advancing cavalry, the Luddites knew, could better be heard in the still darkness. Magic, too, occasionally played a supporting role. Conspirators in the New York uprising of 1712 believed that a supernatural powder would make them invincible. During the nights leading up to an abortive slave rebellion on Antigua in 1736, an obeahman administered a ritual oath to conspirators. In southern Ireland, agrarian rebels known as White Boys, whose nighttime musters attracted hundreds of followers, even called themselves “fairies,” as much to bolster morale as to intimidate their adversaries. Years later, for the same reasons, peasant rioters in France, dressed in white robes, adopted the name Demoiselles, “white fairies of the past.” Because, for the lower orders, night represented their day, it also became their chosen field of battle for insurgencies large and small. Luddites, having drilled in darkness for many evenings, proclaimed in the cropper’s song, “Night by night, when all is still, / And the moon is hid behind the hill, / We forward march to do our will / With hatchet, pike and gun!”79
PART FOUR
PRIVATE WORLDS
PRELUDE
Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, n.d.1
WHAT,” ASKED JOHN MILTON, “hath night to do with sleep?” Surprisingly little, perhaps, at the inception of the human race. Contrary to common belief, our earliest ancestors may not have instinctively slept after dark. The custom of reserving nighttime for rest, some psychologists now surmise, evolved gradually among prehistoric peoples. Only with the passage of time did these first generations learn to sleep away the dangers of darkness by resting in caves, sheltered from foraging predators. Sleep made nighttime seem both shorter and safer. Rather than night, according to the Talmud, having been created for sleep, self-preservation may have required that sleep be reserved for night. “Man slept through the dark hours,” Stanley Coren has remarked, “because it was too inefficient and too dangerous to do anything else.” Intense physiological activity during intervals of dreaming might have served the purpose of a sentinel, readying the body to respond quickly to imminent peril. Irregular heart rates and respiration, muscular twitches, and eye movements, all may have permitted potential prey to awaken prepared for battle or flight.2
Whether “diurnal man” evolved slowly or emerged, instead, practically overnight, genetically configured from day’s first dawn, certainly by the early modern era nocturnal repose had become inseparable from life’s natural order. Despite the high level of human activity after dark, never was there any doubt that sleep remained best suited for evening hours. “We must follow the course of nature,” affirmed Thomas Cogan, a Manchester physician, “to wake in the day, and sleepe in the night.” Thus in the imaginary world of the Leigerdumaynians, where none stirred but at night, reigned thieves, usurers, and knaves. “They hate the sun,” related the Elizabethan satirist Joseph Hall, “and love the moone.”3
Few characteristics of sleep in past ages have received examination since Samuel Johnson complained in 1753 that “so liberal and impartial a benefactor” should “meet with so few historians.” More even than the subject of night itself, sleep has long eluded historical attention. “Our entire history,” lamented the eighteenth-century scholar Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “is only the history of waking men.” Sleep in preindustrial communities remains largely unstudied, for only the subject of dreams has drawn sustained scrutiny.4 Historical indifference has stemmed partly from a seeming shortage of sources, in particular our misguided notion that contemporaries rarely reflected upon a state of existence at once common yet hidden from the waking world. In truth, however, buried within such disparate evidence as diaries, medical books, imaginative literature, and legal depositions are regular references to sleep, often lamentably terse but nonetheless revealing. Far from being ignored, the subject frequently absorbed people’s thoughts.
And, too, the relative tranquillity of modern slumber has dulled perceptions of sleep’s past importance. Much like the Scottish cleric Robert Wodrow, historians appear to have concluded that “sleep can scarce be justly reconed part of our life.” Lacking the drama and intensity of life’s waking hours, sleep has suffered from its association with indolence and inactivity. Whereas our daily lives are animated, volatile, and highly differentiated, sleep seems, by contrast, passive, monotonous, and uneventful—qualities scarcely designed to spark the interest of historians dedic
ated to charting change across time, the faster-paced the better. “I cannot see how sleeping can offend any one,” contends Porco in The Universal Passion (1737), an attitude that could easily explain our current ignorance.5
CHAPTER TEN
ORDINANCES OF
THE BEDCHAMBER:
RITUALS
I
There is not any one thing in the constitution of animals which is more to be wonder’d at than sleep.
WEEKLY REGISTER, OR, UNIVERSAL JOURNAL, SEPT. 22, 17381
AMONG LEARNED AUTHORITIES, a night’s sound slumber was thought critical not only for withered spirits but also for bodily health. Most medical opinion by the late Middle Ages still embraced the Aristotelian belief that the impetus for sleep originated in the abdomen by means of a process called concoction. Once food has been digested in the stomach, Thomas Cogan explained in The Haven of Health (1588), fumes ascend to the head “where through coldnesse of the braine, they being congealed, doe stop the conduites and waies of the senses, and so procure sleepe.” Not only did nighttime invite repose “by its moisture, silence and darkness,” but those properties were thought enormously well suited to concoction.2 Among sleep’s other salutary effects, according to William Vaughan in 1607, it “strengthenth all the spirits,” “comforteth the body,” “taketh away sorrow,” and “asswageth furie of the mind.” Noted an Italian adage, “Bed is a medicine.”3 A parallel belief was that by retiring early, one could best reap the benefits of slumber. “By going early to asleep and early from it, we rise refreshed, lively and active,” claimed the author of An Easy Way to Prolong Life (1775). How widespread this notion was may be seen in such proverbs as “Go to bed with the lamb and rise with the lark,” and, well before it was adopted by Benjamin Franklin, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”4
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