- Author: [[A. Roger Ekirch]] - Melvil Decimal System (DDC): - [[3 - Social sciences]] - [[30 - Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology]] - [[306 - Culture and Institutions]] - [[306.4 - Specific aspects of culture]] - ### Highlights - It is eventide, when, say the Irish, a man and a bush look alike, or, more ominously, warns an Italian adage, hounds and wolves.2 ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=340)) - “Our ancestors,” recalled a London newspaper in 1767, “spent one half of their life in guarding against death . . . they dreaded fire, thieves, famine, hoarded up their gains for their wives and children, and were some of them under terrible apprehensions about their fate in the next world.” ([Location 437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=437)) - Claimed a seventeenth-century Polish aristocrat, “When a rustic or cowardly person wants to say something seriously, what do you see? He squirms, picks his fingers, strokes his beard, pulls faces, makes eyes and splits every word in three. A noble man, on the contrary, has a clear mind and a gentle posture; he has nothing to be ashamed of.” ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=453)) - “When men in darknesse goe, /” Humphrey Mill wrote in 1639, “They see a bush, but take it for a theefe.” ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=461)) - “The night is more quiet than the day,” observed the Jacobean writer George Herbert, “and yet we feare in it what we doe not regard by day. A mouse running, a board cracking, a dog howling, an owle scritching put us often in a cold sweat.”9 ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=462)) - As in the Middle Ages, comets, meteors, and lunar eclipses inspired awe and trepidation, as either omens of God’s will or marks of his wrath. Known as “blazing stars,” comets, it was said, foretold “destruction & corruption of earthly things,” whether from tempests, earthquakes, wars, plagues, or famine. ([Location 483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=483)) - A colonist in Connecticut, viewing a bright light in the sky, reportedly sacrificed his wife to “glorify God.” ([Location 493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=493)) - Fears of contagion were intensified by the common perception that illnesses worsened at night. “All sickness,” wrote the Minorite friar Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “generally is stronger by night than by day.” Observed Thomas Amory, “There is never a night passes wherein sickness and death do not afflict and lay waste many.”21 In truth, symptoms associated with many illnesses almost certainly grew worse at nighttime, much as they do today. Deaths themselves, we know, are most likely to occur during the early morning hours, often due to circadian rhythms peculiar to such maladies as asthma, acute heart attacks, and strokes brought on by blood clots, accentuated perhaps by reduced blood flow to the brain owing to the position of the body while asleep. In general, we become most vulnerable when the body’s “circadian cycle is at its lowest ebb.” There is no reason to suspect that physiological cycles were significantly different four hundred years ago. A related problem is that immune systems weaken while we sleep, thereby releasing fewer “killer cells” to ward off infection. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=538)) - The late eighteenth-century reformer Jonas Hanway wrote that the poor, in particular, when sick “imagine that warmth is so necessary to their cure.” As a consequence, “they frequently poison themselves with their own confined air.” ([Location 551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=551)) - Variously defined as ghosts or fallen angels, some fairies were believed benign, but others absconded with livestock, crops, and even young children. “The honest people,” if we may believe a visitor to Wales, “are terrified about these little fellows,” and in Ireland Thomas Campbell reported in 1777, “The fairy mythology is swallowed with the wide throat of credulity.” No part of the British Isles was thought safe from their kindred—brownies, sprites, colts, or pixies, as they were called. Dobbies, who dwelt near towers and bridges, reportedly attacked on horseback. An extremely malicious order of fairies, the duergars, haunted parts of Northumberland in northern England, while a band in Scotland, the kelpies, bedeviled rivers and ferries. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=602)) - The modern author of a study of early revenants flatly states: “We must be careful not to dramatize too greatly the medieval fear of the night. In the Middle Ages one could savor the calm of a beautiful night without fear.” ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=652)) - Drink less and go home by daylight. ENGLISH PROVERB ([Location 697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=697)) - Whereas forests cover 21 percent of modern Italy, they comprised 50 percent in 1500, though the peninsula was among the most densely settled parts of continental Europe. ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=704)) - There can be little doubt that alcohol, the lubricant of early modern life, often contributed to accidents. Available at all hours, during work as well as leisure, ale, beer, and wine flowed freely in drinking houses and private dwellings. Despite the expense, the daily consumption of ale was particularly high in England among the lower and middle classes, children as well as adults. Based upon a partial survey in 1577, there were an estimated 24,000 alehouses in the country, approximately one for every 140 inhabitants. Moreover, beer on both sides of the Atlantic became progressively cheaper and more powerful. A New England newspaper in 1736 printed a list of more than two hundred synonyms for drunkenness. Included were “Knows not the way home” and “He sees two moons” to describe people winding their way in the late evening.50 Then as now, persons at that hour likely grew more susceptible to intoxication. From 10:00 P.M. until 8:00 A.M., according to clinical research, the stomach and liver typically metabolize alcohol less rapidly than at any other time, thereby keeping it longer within the body.51 Not surprisingly, with vision and alertness impaired, accidents followed close on the heels of nighttime revels. A man named Kerry, on his way to Manchester in 1635, paused at an alehouse to drink with friends. Finally refused pints by the hostess, he “swore he would drink 10 dozens that night” and left for another alehouse “far into the night,” only to fall into a pit and drown. Of the “squadrons of drunkards staggering” into Paris late at night from the suburbs, Louis-Sébastien Mercier observed, “In vain the semi-blind leads the blind, each step is perilous, the ditch waits for them both, or rather the wheels.” Besides broken necks, some victims perished from exposure after passing out. In Derby an inebriated laborer snored so loudly after falling by the side of a road that he was mistaken for a mad dog and shot.52 Drownings of all sorts were unavoidable. Overturned boats and treacherous docks contributed their share of mishaps, by day as well as night. But often in the darkness persons miscalculated the turbulence of a swollen creek or failed to spy debris before it struck their craft. Sometimes, too, they simply found it impossible to follow a well-traveled road. The Duke of Northumberland, for example, nearly died when a servant ran his coach and horses down a steep bank into a nearby river. On a rainy evening in 1733, a young woman near Horsham, Pennsylvania, had an infant swept from her arms while crossing a swift stream on a log. By one report, the horse she was leading pulled mother and child into the water.53 Often, at night, horses were dangerous. Not only were riders tired and roads bad, but mounts spooked. Of a treacherous road along the Italian coast, Johann Wolfgang Goethe commented, “It has been the scene of many accidents, especially at night when the horses shy easily.” ([Location 727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=727)) - By 1700, urban areas with five thousand or more persons comprised some 15 percent of England’s population of five million inhabitants, ([Location 751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=751)) - By then, large-scale urbanization had already transformed much of continental Europe, from the Italian peninsula to southern Scandinavia.55 Most cities and towns resembled a rabbit warren of narrow streets and alleys—cramped, crooked, and dark. Upper façades, by projecting over streets below, obstructed light from both the sun and moon. Already by the 1600s, buildings in Amsterdam towered four stories high. Not until the eighteenth century would linear thoroughfares of ample breadth set the standard in urban design.56 In the absence of adequate street lamps, darkness reestablished the supremacy of the natural world. On most streets before the late 1600s, the light from households and pedestrians’ lanterns afforded the sole sources of artificial illumination. Thus the Thames and the Seine claimed numerous lives, owing to falls from wharves and bridges, as did canals like the Leidsegracht in Amsterdam and Venice’s Grand Canal. Men and women dodged fast-moving coaches and carts, whose drivers, railed a visitor to Paris, often failed to shout a warning. Keeping to the wall, on the other hand, surprised pedestrians with open cellars and coal vaults, while shop signs menaced strollers from overhead. Only the flash from a sudden bolt of lightning, one “very dark” August night in 1693, kept the merchant Samuel Jeake from tumbling over a pile of wood in the middle of a road near his Sussex home. Dirt and pebble streets contained a labyrinth of ditches for channeling sewage and rainwater to “kennels” running down the center, or, with wider thoroughfares, gutters on either side. The Duchess of Orleans expressed amazement in 1720 that Paris did not have “entire rivers of piss” from the men who urinated in streets, already littered with dung from horses and livestock. Ditches, a foot or more deep, grew clogged with ashes, oyster shells, and animal carcasses. “All my concern is to keep clear of the kennel,” wrote a town resident of his midnight rambles. Poor drainage transformed some streets into swamps.57 Only in the eighteenth century did most town fathers take responsibility for street paving, with mixed results. Stone pavements, favored for the protection they offered from dust and filth, became broken and uneven. In continual repair, they were patched, as one Londoner pointed out, by different workmen with different stones at different times. Most cities fared no… ([Location 753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=753)) - At least in England, ordinary folk each evening no longer worried about one traditional nemesis, as their ancestors often had. For all of night’s hazards, wild animals, except for an occasional fox, no longer bedeviled rural households and their livestock. What bears and wolves once roamed the countryside had been hunted down by the late Middle Ages and destroyed. In contrast, much of continental Europe, while increasingly agricultural, still contained expanses of wilderness, such as the Ardennes Forest, inhabited by a variety of… ([Location 800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=800)) - Still, “lying-out” overnight, as opposed to enjoying a few late hours of merriment, continued to invite condemnation. ([Location 842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=842)) - there was a rough rhythm to most days. Crime kept its own timetable. Charles Mascall, a former carter in London who had “met with losses,” described a typical day: “We met that morning as usual about nine o’clock, at the King’s Arms, and there we staid ’till between 6 and 7 at night; and that’s the time we commonly go out to pick pockets, and what handkerchiefs we meet with we bring to the woman at the King’s Arms; then we get our suppers, and afterwards turn-out, upon street-robberies.” ([Location 910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=910)) - Had that menace, each night, been the worst of it, urban families would have slept more soundly. But what always they feared most was the invasion of their dwellings by burglars. Every evening, men retired with their families to the shelter of their homes, whose sanctity they were charged with preserving. Besides protection from the elements, the home provided a refuge from the dangers and disorder of daily existence. Asserted a sixteenth-century prayer, “Houses are builded for us to repair into, from the annoyances of the weather, from the cruelty of beasts, and from the waves and turmoils of this troublous world.” ([Location 917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=917)) - Many burglars, because of the planning their craft demanded, operated as professional gangs, and, worse, they struck when persons were defenseless, disarmed by sleep. Some ruffians, known as “smudges” or “night-sneaks,” gained entry during the day and hid beneath beds until families retired. “The cull is at snoos” was street slang for a sleeping target. Every portal at night offered potential access for a thief. Large homes made tempting targets, as much for their entrances as for their possessions. “My house is mighty dangerous,” Pepys bemoaned, “having so many ways to come to.” ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=925)) - In the night, every cat is a leopard. ITALIAN PROVERB ([Location 1028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1028)) - “Their anger seems to overpower their utterance, and can vent only by coming to blows,” a traveler observed of the English. ([Location 1032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1032)) - Samuel Johnson warned in 1739, “Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.” ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1057)) - Personal vendettas were not as common in England and colonial America, where the male cult of personal honor was less entrenched. Moreover, social competition within the upper ranks found other outlets, such as gambling, horseracing, and hunting. When attacks did occur, victims might be bruised and battered, but lives were normally spared. At Oxford, for example, several Fellows of New College in 1692, believing that Anthony Wood had “abused their relations,” vowed “they would beat” him when “dark nights” arrived. ([Location 1067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1067)) - In the overwhelmingly male atmosphere of drinking houses, violence could follow quickly on the heels of political disputes, ill-chosen words, or cheating at cards. Access to a hearth precipitated a brawl in a South Gosford alehouse. “Booger your eyes, give us one side of the fire,” a newcomer demanded of other patrons. ([Location 1111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1111)) - As late as 1769, “Palladio,” writing in the Middlesex Journal, complained, “The English dwell and sleep, as it were, surrounded with their funeral piles.” Congested rows of homes and shops created a maze of narrow lanes and winding alleys highly vulnerable to conflagrations. Iago in Othello (ca. 1604) speaks of fires “spied in populous citties” by night, and Sir William Davenant in 1636 wrote of the horrible dangers “which mid-night fires beget, in citties overgrowne.”48 A strong breeze could make matters worse. During a fire in 1652 that consumed much of Glasgow, the wind changed direction five or six times. “The fire on the one syde of the street fyred the other syde,” reported the minister of New Kilpatrick parish. A visitor to Moscow found, “Not a month, nor even a week, goes by without some homes—or if the wind is strong, whole streets—going up in smoke.” The sacred suffered with the profane, the rich with the poor. Innocent lives might be lost to flames normally reserved by towns for heretics and witches. Fire, unlike other predators, noted the writer Nicolas de Lamare, “devours all and respects neither churches nor royal palaces.” Within minutes, one’s home and property, the labor of a lifetime, could be destroyed, as could future opportunities for subsistence.49 Among other ill consequences was the damaging impact large fires had on local economies. Beset by as many as four fires from 1594 to 1641, Stratford-upon-Avon was already described in 1614 as “an ancient but a very poore market towne.” ([Location 1137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1137)) - Little wonder that just the alarm of fire at night could strike a person dead with fright, or that a mob in 1680, upon learning that a woman had threatened to burn the town of Wakefield, carried her off to a dung heap, where she lay all night after first being whipped. A worse fate befell a Danish boatman and his wife, upon trying to set the town of Randers ablaze. After being dragged through every street and repeatedly “pinched” with “glowing tongs,” they were burned alive. ([Location 1150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1150)) - Often, barely a year passed before some town or city in England experienced disaster. From 1500 to 1800, at least 421 fires in provincial towns consumed ten or more houses apiece, with as many as 46 fires during that period destroying one hundred or more houses each. “In some great town a fire breaks out by night, /” wrote Sir Richard Blackmore in 1695, “And fills with crackling flames, and dismal light, / With sparks, and pitchy smoak th’ astonish’d sky.”52 Of course, London’s Great Fire, originating in a bakehouse in the early morning hours of September 2, 1666, still ranks among the worst in human history. At first, the flames appeared manageable, prompting the Lord Mayor to opine that “a woman might piss it out.” But fanned by an east wind, the fire consumed four-fifths of the city over the course of four days. Reduced to ashes were Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, 87 churches, more than 13,000 houses, and such public buildings as the Guildhall, Custom House, and the Royal Exchange. The diarist John Evelyn wrote, “The stones of Paules… ([Location 1155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1155)) - No other metropolis suffered London’s ordeal, but fires spread terror from Amsterdam to Moscow, where an early morning blaze in 1737 took several thousand lives. Few cities escaped at least one massive disaster. Paris was unusually fortunate, with a writer in the eighteenth century estimating that at least fifty houses ordinarily burned in London for every five lost in the French capital. But Toulouse was all but consumed in 1463, as was Bourges in 1487, and practically a quarter of Troyes in 1534. The better part of Rennes was destroyed in 1720 during a conflagration that raged for seven days.54 In colonial America, as cities grew, so did fire’s threat. Boston lost 150 buildings in 1679 after a smaller blaze just three years before. Major fires again broke out in Boston in 1711 and in 1760 when flames devoured nearly 400 homes and… ([Location 1166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1166)) - One of the most horrific rural disasters occurred on a night in 1727 in the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Burwell. A barn caught fire with more than 70 persons trapped inside watching a puppet show. Because the doors had been bolted, nearly everyone perished. So indistinguishable were the remains that they were interred in a common grave denoted by a tombstone still standing in the Burwell churchyard.56 ([Location 1181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1181)) - 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. ([Location 1212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1212)) - 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.” ([Location 1217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1217)) - The term “curfew” reportedly originated from the French word couvre-feu, meaning “cover-fire.” ([Location 1369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1369)) - Even males of good repute still faced constraints after dark. In Catalonia, for instance, no more than four men could walk together in a group. ([Location 1417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1417)) - By day, armed travelers to Italian cities were instructed, “Liga la spada” (tie the hilt to the sheath), but at night swords were confiscated. “They who have license to cary swordes in the cittyes,” noted a visitor to Florence, “yet must not weare them when the evening beginns to be dark.” “The carrying of arms fosters violence,” a Spanish decree explained in 1525, and “many persons take advantage of the cover of darkness to commit all kinds of crimes and misdemeanors.” ([Location 1425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1425)) - At the beginning of the fifteenth century, London officials required households on main streets to hang one lantern apiece on designated evenings, always at private expense. Included were saints’ days as well as sessions of Parliament for the benefit of members forced to return late to their lodgings. In 1415, the first of many London regulations extended this mandate to all evenings falling between All Hallows’ Eve (October 31) and Candlemas (February 2). ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1441)) - In all likelihood, the nightwatch, not prostitution, is the world’s most ancient profession, originating as soon as men and women first feared the darkness. In early cultures, sentries remained vigilant at all hours, as soldiers on foot and horse patrolled urban streets. But it was at nighttime that cities and towns most relied upon watchmen’s eyes and ears. “Rulers that are watchful by night in cities,” observed Plato, “are a terror to evildoers, be they citizens or enemies.” Of the nightwatch, the Roman prefect Cassiodorous wrote in the fifth century, “You will be the security of those who are sleeping, the protection of houses, guardian of gates, an unseen examiner and a silent judge.” ([Location 1574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1574)) - More unusual was the pack of mastiffs set loose each evening within the walls of Saint-Malo, a garrison town on the northern coast of France with valuable quantities of naval stores. The lineage of this practice dated to the thirteenth century, when the Dominican monk Albertus Magnus commented that the dogs “patrolled well and trustily.” In the early 1600s, a passing observer recorded, In the dusk of the evening a bell is rung to warn all that are without the walls to retire into the town: then ye gates are shut, and eight or ten couple of hungry mastiffs turn’d out to range about the town all night, to secure their naval stores etc. from being stollen: and some that have had the misfortune to be drunk, & lie abroad have been found next morning as Jezabel was at Jesreel. ([Location 1600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1600)) - Verses, sung at the top of their lungs, accompanied watchmen’s reports. Some of these adopted a playful tone. Declared an English verse, “Men and children, maides and wives, / ’Tis not late to mend your lives. / Lock your doors, lie warm in bed— / Much loss is in a maidenhead.” Even so, this verse, like most, imparted a practical message. “Looke well to your locke, / Your fier and your light,” was standard advice. Some cries were meant to be comforting—“Sleep in peace, I am watching” was the chant in Marseilles. Many bore a strong religious character, interspersing calls for prayer with reports of the time. “Rise up, faithful soul, and go down on your knees,” intoned a Slovakian verse. ([Location 1628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1628)) - “Every hour of the night they waken people out of their sleep by shouting to them that they hope they are sleeping well.” (A London newspaper correspondent named “Insomnius” attributed the watch’s racket to envy.) Still, in the eyes of local officials, broken slumber heightened people’s vigilance to perils of all sorts, including enemy attacks, criminal violence, and fire. The cries of sentries guarding Irish castles reportedly served the same purpose. The late sixteenth-century historian Richard Stainhurst noted, “They shout repeatedly as a warning to the head of the household against nocturnal thieves and vagrants lest he sleep so soundly that he be unprepared to repel his enemies bravely from his hearth.” Whether, in the case of urban watchmen, theirs represented a deliberate policy or an unintended consequence, town fathers rarely heeded complaints about their clamor. ([Location 1648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1648)) - Fire prevention, for the nightwatch, was a critical responsibility. Not only were fires more prevalent at night, but they were also more dangerous, with fewer people abroad to sound a warning. It was the watch’s duty to investigate unusual sources of light or smoke. Officers in colonial Philadelphia had orders to arrest anyone found smoking outdoors, while in Boston, members of the watch were themselves forbidden to “take tobacco” next to any home. More important, if a blaze flared, watchmen were expected to raise an alarm. Only streetwalkers, in cities where prostitution was legal, shared a like charge. Church bells typically contributed to the alarm. After a Stockholm fire in 1504, a bellringer, for his negligence, was ordered to be broken on the rack, until pleas for mercy resulted instead in his beheading. In France, members of the watch had the power to enlist passersby for fire-fighting “without respect,” complained Mercier, “for age or function or insignia.” Any who refused to help were subject to arrest and, if convicted, having their ears cut off.45 Additional tasks occupied watchmen on their rounds, including checking that homeowners locked their doors. “As they pass,” noted a visitor to London, “they give the hours of the night, and with their staves strike at the door of every house.” The sound of knocking awakened Pepys early one morning: “It was the constable and his watch, who had found our backyard door open.”46 So, too, it was the watch’s duty to remain vigilant against potential wrongdoers. In England, watchmen were empowered to arrest nightwalkers on the strength of their own suspicions. That meant the right to apprehend—with at most a general warrant—drunkards, prostitutes, vagrants, and other disorderly persons. A contemporary noted, “If they meet with any persons they suspect of ill designs, quarrelsome people, or lewd women in the streets, they are empowered to carry them before the constable at his watch-house.” There, suspects could either be interrogated by a justice of the peace, if one was available, or jailed overnight until examined the following morning, when often they would be committed to a house of correction. There was ample opportunity for abuse. Respectable pedestrians resented the authority of watchmen, who could seize “better men than themselves,” as a seventeenth-century writer complained. Worse, at times, was the watch’s treatment of the poor. One night in 1742, drunken constables in London threw twenty-six women, whom they had collected, into a “roundhouse,” with the windows and doors shut. By morning, four had died from asphyxiation. Exclaims the fictional constable in a play by Ned Ward, “I’m monarch of the night, can stop, command, examine, loll in ease, and, like a king, imprison whom I please.” ([Location 1655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1655)) - In view of the lawlessness afflicting urban centers, one might wonder why authorities did not deploy larger, more professional forces. Besides the heavy cost, within England and America, traditional fears of monarchical power hindered the creation of trained police, lest like a standing army they fall under despotic control. As late as 1790, a Russian visitor reflected, “The English have a dread of a strict constabulary, and prefer to be robbed rather than see sentries and pickets.”48 Among some officials, there also may have been a grudging recognition that night afforded a safety-valve for criminal violence. Better to conceal human vices in darkness than run the risk of daily disorders. Just how shortsighted this belief was would become increasingly clear in many cities and towns; but, for the time being, it may have helped to discourage tougher responses to crime. Most important, the goals of officials in preindustrial towns were confined to curbing misbehavior and preventing fires, mostly by discouraging nocturnal activity. Across Europe, the duty of the watch was “to keep the streets clear of people, that had no real business in them.” Their purpose was not to render nighttime more habitable to pedestrians, other, perhaps, than offering to see them home. And even that service was erratic. Abroad in the dark and “rather afraid,” the Londoner Sylas Neville failed to enlist any of the watchmen whose aid he repeatedly requested. “They declining,” he wrote, “I ventured & got to the inn safe, thank God!”49 All the same, watchmen bore a heavy burden of responsibility. For eight or more hours each night, they alone embodied legal authority in contrast to the network of municipal institutions in daily operation. Except for constables to whom they reported, no other public officials were entrusted with keeping the peace or protecting households from sudden conflagration. “The watch,” declared a Boston resident, “are the greatest safeguard to the town in the night.” If that charge were not burden enough, fatigue, icy weather, and streets strewn with refuse made rounds all the more onerous.50 Initially, within many communities, it was the civic duty of all able-bodied townsmen, from time to time, to donate their services, with little or no compensation. Already in the sixteenth century, however, men of property paid money to local officials with which to hire… ([Location 1676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1676)) - Especially serious was burglary. Under the Tudors, it became one of the first crimes in England removed from the list of those which allowed a felon to escape the death penalty by claiming literacy. ([Location 1788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1788)) - Rarely did preindustrial folk pause to ponder the beauty of day’s departure. In contrast to the praises sung of dawn, neither in literature nor in letters and diaries did contemporaries marvel at the sun’s decline. Feelings of insecurity more often than awe swept the terrain. ([Location 1845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1845)) - The saying that “a man’s house is his castle” assumed profound importance at night. This timeworn expression, at least as old as the 1500s, applied alike to turf huts and brick manor homes. ([Location 1864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1864)) - A London wine merchant observed, “I never keep the door open after ’tis dark.” “Barricaded,” “bolted,” and “barred,” as an English playwright described a Georgian home—“backside and foreside, top and bottom.” ([Location 1873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1873)) - Samuel Pepys concealed valuables throughout the rooms of his house, including his dressing room, study, and cellar, where he stored sundry chests constructed of iron. “I am in great pain to think how to dispose of my money,” he fretted, “it being wholly unsafe to keep it all in coin in one place.” Blessed with one hundred and fifty pounds, Anne Feddon of Cumberland always locked her fortune in a drawer during the day but “took it to bed with her at night.” John Cooper in Yorkshire hid ten pounds beneath a large stone in a corner of his home. As reflected in fairy-tales, hiding places were not restricted to dwellings. In addition to closets, chests, and beds, they included dry wells and hollow tree trunks. Among villagers in eighteenth-century Languedoc, burying the family treasure in a nearby field was a favorite tactic.13 All these steps constituted a family’s preliminary line of defense. There were also precautions designed to alert slumbering households, such as equipping shutters with bells. Servants, too, knew to sound an alarm. Late one evening in 1672 when three maids, washing dishes in a Northamptonshire home, heard a noise in the yard, they promptly awakened the household—“one beat the bell, another blew a horn, a third put candles in every room.” Wealthy estates occasionally employed guards and, by the late seventeenth century, spring-traps. ([Location 1899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1899)) - Accidental fatalities at night were a common hazard. Any strange noise or unfamiliar light put households on edge. In a Cumberland village, the son of a blacksmith was shot for a burglar after he whistled outside a home to signal a servant maid. When an aged man suffering from senility entered an unfamiliar house in Pontrefract, a maid shouted “thieves,” causing her master to “cut him in pieces” with a sword. ([Location 1931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1931)) - Watchdogs prowled inside and out. In the countryside, they did double duty, guarding against thieves as well as predators. “Bandogs,” for their ferocity, were chained during the day. According to William Harrison, the mastiff, or “master-thief,” received its name for its prowess against intruders. Dogs everywhere were prized for their vigilance, from the feared Kalmuk dogs in southern Russia to rural France, where the nineteenth-century author George Sand observed that even the meanest peasant possessed one. It was the rare night that early modern villages did not echo with sporadic barking. Failing to find shelter late one evening, a traveler in rural Scotland lamented, “None made reply but their dogs, the chief of their family.” In towns and cities, dogs guarded shops as well as homes. In Harp-Alley, a London brazier kept “a crass, crabbed” mutt that barely tolerated customers in the day, “much less in the evening,” according to a wary neighbor.18 Thomas Rowlandson, Housebreakers, 1788. Of the proper qualities for a watchdog, a sixteenth-century writer recommended an animal that was “big, hairy, with a big head, big legs, big loins, and a lot of courage”—“big,” of course, being the cardinal qualification. Harrison suggested a “huge dog, stubborn, ugly, eager, burdenous of body (and therefore of but little swiftness), terrible and fearful to behold.” All the better, commentators agreed, if the dog was black, so that it could surprise a thief in the dark. A watchdog’s worth lay in its bark as much as its bite. Owners, just from the pitch and intensity of their dog’s bark, could determine the presence of an intruder. In England, these dogs were called “warners” or “watchers.” Equally important was their value as a deterrent. “Whenever I went upon any such expedition, we immediately desisted upon the barking of a dog, as judging the house was alarm’d,” one burglar claimed. The Florentine Leon Battista Alberti urged in the mid-1400s that not just dogs but also geese patrol inside homes—“one wakes the other and calls out the whole crowd, and so the household is always safe.” Experienced thieves poisoned watchdogs, but such efforts were fraught with risk. In London, an impatient burglar, after throwing poisoned food over a wall, entered the property too quickly and was badly mauled. ([Location 1935](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=1935)) - For ordinary folk confronting an uncertain cosmos, the occult formed a potent part of their lives. If nothing else, the existence of supernatural forces provided another way to understand life’s misfortunes—to render more comprehensible the frightening uncertainties of everyday existence. Confessed John Trenchard, author in 1709 of The Natural History of Superstition, “Nature in many circumstances seems to work by a sort of secret magick, and by ways unaccountable to us.” While religion furnished, in the words of Keith Thomas, “a comprehensive view of the world,” magic’s role was more circumscribed. Despite a grassroots belief in fairies, there is no evidence, at least in England, to suggest the actual worship of pagan deities or spirits. Instead, magic was confined largely to concrete problems and their resolution. If the occult did not address life’s greatest mysteries, it nonetheless made ordinary life more susceptible to human control—especially in the hours after sunset when the world seemed most threatening.30 ([Location 2018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2018)) - Still, light’s principal value lay in expanding the borders of domestic space for work and sociability. During long winter evenings, the hearth furnished the greatest glow. Even in dwellings with more than a single room, it became the focus for evening life, combating the cold darkness with both heat and light. In Normandy, as late as the nineteenth century, the room containing a fireplace, even in large homes, was called “the room” or “the heated room.” Because of the hearth’s importance to domestic life, tax assessments were sometimes based on their number within a home. Chimney fireplaces first appeared in English dwellings in the thirteenth century, but not until the 1600s in many households did they eclipse the open central hearth, ringed either by stones or hardened clay. Despite the gradual spread of fireplaces to private chambers, the large majority of homes in England and France in the seventeenth century still contained just a single hearth. Most were constructed from stone or brick, though some rural chimneys were fashioned from timber and wattle and daub. Besides their cost, fireplaces were messy and dangerous. “It is easier to build two chimneys,” declared a proverb, “than to maintain one.” Fireplaces were also inefficient, with most of their heat escaping up the chimney until the eighteenth-century introduction of flues. Stoves offered a common alternative to the hearth in Germany, Eastern Europe, and parts of Scandinavia; beginning in the sixteenth century upper-class homes in England occasionally used them to burn coal. But, as a source of light, stoves were a dismal substitute for fireplaces.35 Anon., Clipping the Church, nineteenth century. Mending or “beating” a fire required patience and skill. Just igniting a small pile of kindling could be time-consuming. Before the nineteenth-century invention of “lucifer” or friction matches, the easiest solution was to borrow a burning brand or hot coal from a neighbor, taking care not to start a fire in transit. Otherwise, the alternative was to strike a piece of steel against flint to ignite a small quantity of tinder, typically linen, cotton, or soft paper wet by a solution of saltpeter. “No easy matter,” recollected a West Yorkshire native of the difficulty, especially when attempted in the dark. Iron or ceramic firedogs (andirons) helped to assure enough oxygen. Once lit, fires burned best at a slow and steady pace, unless cooking required a “high” blaze. “The French readily say that fire keeps company,” noted a German, “because they spend much time making it.”36 Fuels varied widely depending upon local resources. Throughout Europe and early America, wood was a popular source of heat, particularly hardwoods like oak, beech, and ash that gave off the most warmth. A typical household required from one to two tons of wood per year. Brush provided faggots for kindling, as did, each fall, cuttings from vineyards in winemaking regions of the Continent.37 Another popular fuel in England… ([Location 2043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2043)) - Such was the extravagance of the court of Louis XIV that used candles were never relit. Of comparable quality, with the rise of whale hunting in the North Atlantic during the early eighteenth century, were spermaceti candles, fashioned from a rose-colored liquid wax found in the head of sperm whales—thus the mission of Captain Ahab’s vessel, the Pequod, in Moby-Dick (1851). Such illuminants were costly. Prices fluctuated over time, but never did wax or spermaceti candles become widely accessible. ([Location 2105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2105)) - As tallow candles burned, the quality of their light deteriorated. They also required continual attention to avoid wasting the fat. Unless “snuffed” (trimmed) every fifteen minutes, the fallen remains of the cloth wick could create a “gutter” of molten fat down one ([Location 2118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2118)) - Only on special occasions did wax candles light bourgeois homes. Of a friend’s festive dinner, the Norfolk parson James Woodforde recorded, “Mr. Mellish treated very handsomely indeed. Wax candles in the evening.” Similarly, Woodforde noted, one Christmas, briefly burning his “old wax-candle.” “It is almost finished, it might last for once more.”47 Further complicating the use of both wax and tallow candles in England were the taxes levied on each, at least during the eighteenth century. At the same time, making one’s own candles became illegal.48 ([Location 2124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2124)) - A variation of candlewood, known as bogwood, was available in northern England and Scotland. Along with branches pulled from dead fir trees, residents unearthed decaying trunks from bogs—not just firs but also elm and oak trees, all packed with resin. “Instead of candle,” noted a visitor to the Scottish Highlands, “the common people here, and thro’ most of the highlands, use chips of fir dug out of the mosses. These chips being full of resin, burn generalie with a bright flame.” Tenants sometimes paid part of their rent by supplying cartloads of “candle fir.” ([Location 2158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2158)) - Wasting candlelight was synonymous with extravagance and dissipation. Individuals thought naturally profligate, such as children, servants, and slaves, received special scrutiny. Such was the outrage of the Virginia planter William Byrd II upon discovering his slave Prue with “a candle by daylight” that he “gave her a salute” with his foot.53 Normally, not even twilight brought the first glimmer of household lights. The interval between sunset and nightfall in Iceland and most of Scandinavia was called the “twilight rest,” a hiatus during which it was too dim to ply one’s trade and too light to warrant candles or lamps. Persons instead reserved this hour before the evening’s tasks for rest, prayer, and quiet conversation. In Britain and colonial America, only once darkness descended did the time widely known as “candle-lighting” arrive. ([Location 2170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2170)) - At all hours of the evening, families often had to navigate their homes in the dark, carefully feeling their way through familiar rooms and halls. “Man’s best candle is discretion,” declared a Welsh proverb. The sense of touch was critical. Individuals long committed to memory the internal topography of their dwellings, including the exact number of steps in every flight of stairs. Others, finding themselves in an unfamiliar setting, had to cope as best they could. In Emile, Rousseau advised, in a strange room, clapping one’s hands. “You will perceive by the resonance of the place whether the area is large or small, whether you are in the middle or in a corner.” Forced to take “miserable” lodgings one evening along the Italian coast, a nineteenth-century traveler “took a very accurate survey” of his chamber in order “to pilot” himself “out of it” before daybreak. The absence of lighting in homes spawned a number of ingenious techniques, most no doubt passed from one generation to another. Within the elegant two-story house that once dominated Sotterley Plantation in colonial Maryland, there remains to this day a handmade notch in the wood railing leading to the second floor, located at an abrupt right turn up the stairs. Furniture in Scandinavian homes was placed at night against walls in order to avert collisions. And everywhere it was important to maintain a tidy home, lest a tool or weapon needed to be located in the dark. The saying “everything has its place” took on added importance at night. ([Location 2184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2184)) - “By candle-light a goat is lady-like.” ([Location 2200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2200)) - Often, comfort came from closer quarters. Common acts of compassion happened nightly as persons sat up with an ill neighbor or relation. The sick were rarely left alone, surrounded by one or more “watchers” from the ranks of friends and family. Veiller un malade was the French expression for this age-old practice. Many attendants were women with long hours of experience. Besides monitoring changes in appearance and temperament, they eased patients’ suffering by replacing dressings, administering medicine, and feeding broth. “We sat with him far into the night,” Glückel of Hameln recalled of the hours preceding her father’s death. If some watchers were apt to nap, probably most withstood the temptation. Nor, upon a death, did duties for family and friends always end. Protestants and Catholics alike felt a customary obligation to maintain a vigil at night before the burial. Protection from evil spirits alone made that necessary. In 1765, following the death of his master’s son, the New England apprentice John Fitch “sat up with the child all night alone” in “keeping off spirits.” ([Location 2260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2260)) - Certainly, victims, when attacked at night, either at home or abroad, knew to shout for aid, loudly and repeatedly. Dire cries of “Murder, murder” constituted the customary alarm, no matter the assault’s severity. ([Location 2281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2281)) - In 1684, the entire village of Harleton, “excepting one,” pledged their aid to Henry Preston, a yeoman who feared a nocturnal attack by robbers. ([Location 2290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2290)) - All the same, there were practical limits to neighborly support. For one thing, darkness magnified mayhem, making it difficult to identify victims from assailants. Some urban neighborhoods, home to brothels and alehouses, rarely escaped a night without screams and curses breaking the silence. ([Location 2296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2296)) - Further, there was always the danger that screams for help were a ruse to lure unwitting pedestrians into an alley or street. Passing through Smithfield at midnight, Audley Harvey ran with sword drawn to a man’s aid, only to be clubbed by the “victim” and his gang. “There are so many traps laid to draw people in,” deplored a contemporary. ([Location 2305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2305)) - Many families, having shut their doors and windows for the evening, were loath to leave the safety of their homes. “Don’t go out,” one of several rapists warned a resident in Villy le Maréchal. “We don’t want to do any harm, we only want to take a bitch.” Spying a man and a woman pull a corpse from a home, Robert Sanderson recorded in his diary, “I did not thinke it proper to draw nearer to them, because I really apprehended that the people were ill folkes.” Most often, citizens turned a deaf ear when strangers were at risk. Unlike friends and family, outsiders enjoyed no claim to the support and protection of a neighborhood. Nor did their lives warrant endangering other innocents. Grabbed at dusk in 1745 outside the White Lion Tavern in London’s Strand, Mary Barber boldly informed her assailants that “she was in a Christian country, and did not fear getting assistance.” Later, battered and bruised, she was kicked into the street, only to lie sprawling on the ground. “No body knew me there, nor nobody came to my assistance,” Barber recounted. Least civic-minded, according to travelers, were residents of Moscow, where violence at night was endemic. Olearius in the seventeenth century reported, “The Burghers showed no pity. If they heard someone suffering at the hands of robbers and murderers beneath their window, they would not even look out, much less come to his assistance.”72 Single acts of crime, unlike fires, rarely imperiled an entire village or neighborhood. Nor, when fighting the flames from a nighttime blaze, did volunteers ordinarily face life-threatening dangers; duties instead extended to bailing water and raising buildings. Whereas fire meant catastrophe to a village if left unchecked, crime posed a sharp risk to civic-minded samaritans who ran to the aid of victims. Small wonder, then, that many citizens remained behind closed doors. Small wonder, too, that street-savvy victims of crime knew at night to shout, “Fire! Fire!” when assaulted in public. Attested Bonaventure Des Périers in Cymbalum Mundi (1539), “This routs the people out of their homes, some in nightshirts, others entirely naked.”73 If murder or robbery failed to animate their sense of community, the threat of being burned alive almost always did. ([Location 2308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2308)) - Observers as early as Aristotle and Lucretius have commented upon the timidity of young children at night. According to psychologists, around two years of age the young first exhibit an instinctive fear of the dark. Anxieties, dormant since birth, are awakened by a rising awareness of the outside world. There is no reason to think that this standard pattern of childhood development was any different in premodern communities. The ancient Spartans reputedly made their sons spend entire evenings among the tombs to conquer their fears. “Men feare death as children feare to goe in the dark,” observed Francis Bacon.7 In early modern times, youthful fears, in parents’ eyes, often served a salutary purpose. Rather than soothe children’s anxieties, adults routinely reinforced them through tales of the supernatural, in part bearing testimony to their own apprehensions. “That natural fear in children is increased with tales,” Bacon noted. Of “our mothers maids,” the Elizabethan author Reginald Scot described, “they have so fraied us with bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies . . . that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.” There were also narratives involving kidnappers, murderers, and thieves. As a girl in seventeenth-century Ghent, Isabella de Moerloose was frightened by the story of “the man with the long coat, of whom it was said that he looked for firstborn children” to kill. The specter of a one-eyed soldier in the royal guard was used to discipline Louis XIII of France (1601–1643) as a child. By warning of bogeymen that preyed on naughty youngsters, parents and servants, critics alleged, played upon children’s worst fears to compel obedience. “As soon as one tries to still a child,” complained the Dutch author Jacob Cats, “one introduces a variety of bizarre features: a ghost, a bogeyman, a lifeless spirit.” Some parents, as punishment, confined children to dark closets or impersonated evil spirits. A Dutch father, Constantijn Huygens, used a doll dressed in black to threaten his infant daughter. The father of Philippe de Strozzi in sixteenth-century France knocked on his chamber door one night. “Disguising his voice in a horrible manner,” the father hoped to test his son’s courage. Philippe passed the test. Struck on the forehead, his father was forced to retreat, “swearing to never again frighten him in this way at night.”8 ([Location 2360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2360)) - Central, also, to children’s education was their progressive exposure to darkness. Collecting firewood, gathering berries, and tending livestock all took youths outdoors in the evening. The engraver Thomas Bewick, growing up in Northumberland, was sent by his father on “any errand in the night.” “Perhaps,” he reflected as an adult, “my being frequently exposed to being alone in the dark” helped to lessen the terror.10 Some tasks were contrived. In 1748, the author of Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, and Affections Peculiar to Children advised parents: “You must create little errands, as if by accident, to send him in the dark, but such as can take up but little time; and encrease the length of time by degrees, as you find his courage encrease.” The son of a shoemaker, young Thomas Holcroft was sent one night to a distant farm. “Now and then making a false step,” he remembered later of the route. With his father and a companion secretly following at a distance, the lad completed his journey unscathed. “At last I got safely home, glad to be rid of my fears, and inwardly not a little elated with my success.”11 Games served the same purpose. Rousseau urged reliance on “night games” for children, including a complex labyrinth formed by tables and chairs. “Accustomed to having a good footing in darkness, practiced at handling with ease all surrounding bodies,” he observed, “his feet and hands will lead him without difficulty in the deepest darkness.” Outdoor contests, such as “Fox and Hounds,” were designed for the obscurity of night. Restif de la Bretonne, as a boy, enjoyed the contest of “Wolf,” which in his French village “was always played in the dark,” as in parts of Britain was “Bogle about the Stacks,” a game that allowed children to act out their fears of ghosts. A favorite throughout the British Isles was “Can I Get There by Candle Light?” Dating to the sixteenth century, if not earlier, one version of the game pitted a coven of “witches” against a larger band of “travelers.” Although not intended for the dark, the game conveyed two practical lessons: the importance of returning home, when possible, before “candle-lighting”; and the need to beware of sinister forces once night fell. “Watch out!” chanted the players, “mighty bad witches on the road tonight.”12 Some youngsters, like Jonathan Martin, were impatient learners. The son of a Northumberland forester, he routinely absconded from bed on summer nights to ramble alone in the woods. One morning, finally, he was returned home by men who had first taken the six-year-old for a ghost. His father, alert to the dangers of such rash behavior, immediately forbade Jonathan’s solitary excursions.13 Both at home and abroad, prudence after nightfall was essential. It was one thing to invade night’s dominion; it was quite another to flout its laws. ([Location 2391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2391)) - For guidance, ordinary folk drew upon local lore and an intimate awareness of nature acquired from childhood. While adjoining counties sometimes seemed like foreign lands, most persons claimed a detailed knowledge of the parishes in which they had been reared, having committed to memory a mental map of every ditch, pasture, and hedge row. Games like “Round and Round the Village,” popular in much of England, familiarized children at any early age to their physical surroundings, as did fishing, collecting herbs, and running errands. Schooled by adults in night’s perils, children learned to negotiate the landscape “as a rabbit knows his burrow”—careful after dark to skirt ponds, wells, and other hazardous terrain. In towns and cities, shop signs, doorways, and back alleys afforded fixed landmarks for neighborhood youths. As a child, Jacques-Louis Ménétra claimed a first-hand knowledge of the Parisian waterfront, where he played games like hide-and-seek and slept nights when banished from home by an abusive father. Lessons could be painful. Fleeing his stepfather, the peasant Valentin Jamerey-Duval, as a boy, tumbled into the muck of an empty wolf pit, where he lay trapped overnight. The goat-boy Ulrich Bräker, at four years of age, ran off on a “pitch-dark rainy night” across a meadow, nearly somersaulting down a muddy slope into a swift brook. Rescued by his father, they returned to the site the next morning. “Here, lad,” his father declared, “only a few steps more, and the brook rushes over the cliff. If the water had managed to sweep you away, you’d be lying dead down there.”16 Certainly by adolescence, most youths had learned to master the footpaths crisscrossing rural fields, or, in towns, the narrow lanes intersecting serpentine streets. “Be not fearful,” a Berliner counseled his friend at night, “I know by heart the streets of home.” Even in the shadows, asserted Leon Battista Alberti, “those who knew the country by experience and had seen all the places in the light of day would recognize them and could say what they were and who lived there.”17 Only during the winter, in the event of a heavy snowfall, could surroundings lose their familiarity, despite the advantage to travelers of a lighter, more visible landscape. So in 1789, a pair of Pennsylvanians drowned in the Susquehanna River. The “night being dark, and the path covered by the snow, they mistook the road” and fell through the ice.18 Human eyesight, in less than an hour’s time, gradually improves in the dark as the iris expands to permit sufficient light. Despite losses in color recognition and depth perception, peripheral vision may actually sharpen. Humans see better at night than most animals, many of which are virtually blind. Quite possibly, the nocturnal sight of preindustrial populations benefited from consumption of leafy green vegetables and fresh fruit, rich in vitamin A, though availability was largely limited to late spring and summer. In addition, consumption of alcohol… ([Location 2424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2424)) - In most towns and cities, one could hire a linkboy for a small sum. These, for the most part, were orphans or other impoverished adolescents who, for a pedestrian’s benefit, carried links (torches) or, less often, lanterns. In some English communities, they were nicknamed mooncursers, for the harm done their trade by moonlight. Within London, they congregated in such well-known spots as Temple Bar, London Bridge, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Samuel Pepys occasionally relied upon linkboys when trudging home to Tower Hill. In Venice, they were termed codeghe, and in France porte-flambeaux or, for lantern-carriers, falots. “Here’s your light,” they cried in Paris streets. Louis-Sébastien Mercier exulted, “The lanternman’s light is a convenience, and a precaution well worth while for those whose business or pleasure keep them late from home.”22 At least in London, however, linkboys bore a checkered reputation for consorting with street ruffians. “Thieves with lights,” Daniel Defoe charged. It was a common complaint that they conveyed besotted customers into the waiting grasp of robbers, extinguishing their links at the critical moment. Warned John Gay, “Though thou art tempted by the link-man’s call, / Yet trust him not along the lonely wall; / In the mid-way he’ll quench the flaming brand, / And share the booty with the pilf’ring band.” Defoe favored strict regulation by licensing linkboys, akin to the prevailing system in Paris during most of the 1700s. There, in sharp contrast, falots became infamous toward the end of the ancien régime for acting as spies. “Hand in glove with the police,” described Mercier, who applauded their contribution to public safety. Customers kept their money if not their secrets. ([Location 2461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2461)) - A London victualer of modest purse taught his dog to carry a lantern in its mouth. ([Location 2479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2479)) - During evenings when full or nearly full, it was sometimes likened, half in jest, to a second sun.27 Persons even awakened, on occasion, in the middle of the night, thinking that it was daybreak, only to be fooled by a “false dawn.” “The moon shining bright mistook it for day light,” wrote a Pennsylvanian in 1762. “Arrose & drest but after rousing the family & getting a light found it was not 2 o’clock.” In Yorkshire, the apprentice clothier Mary Yates arose at 3:00 A.M., thinking “it was day,” though “it being then moonlight” instead. ([Location 2497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2497)) - Among rural folk, the phases of the moon, their sequence and duration, were common knowledge, part of the essential lore conveyed to youngsters at an early age. So, in a simple English verse, “The Honest Ploughman,” children learned that the husbandman “finds his way home by the light of the moon.” Urban households were less tutored in such matters, but almanacs were readily accessible by the seventeenth century. Published across Europe, these charted the moon’s progress in monthly tables. In England, upward of four hundred thousand almanacs were published annually by the 1660s, with an estimated one family in every three a consumer; ([Location 2515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2515)) - Even then, there was often the natural light of the stars, whose glow, though fainter, was more reliable. “It was neither dark nor light; it was a starlight night,” observed a man in 1742. In some parts of England, the first “star” after sunset, Vesper (actually the planet Venus), was called the “Shepherds-Lamp” because of its bright glow above the western horizon. “The shepherd’s lamp, which even children know,” penned John Clare in the early nineteenth century. Besides seeming brighter than today, stars appeared vastly more plentiful, likely totaling on a clear night in excess of two thousand. Like the moon, their light was capable of casting shadows. Wrote the poet Robert Herrick, “Let not the dark thee cumber: / What though the moon does slumber? / The stars of the night will lend thee their light.” A Londoner recounted in the mid-eighteenth century, “Between 11 and 12 it being a fine star-light night, I put my sword and cane under my arm and walked.”32 Unless haze interfered, the Milky Way, a broad swath of white light, stretched from one horizon to another, dividing the sky in two: “The region seems to be all on a blaze with their blended rays,” described a writer in the Universal Magazine of Knowedge and Pleasure in 1753. Although Chaucer and others early on employed the expression Milky Way, it was used interchangeably with the names of different highways, whose routes, depending upon the season, ran in the galaxy’s general direction. Early pilgrims kept to such roads as the “Walsingham Way” in East Anglia and the “Strada di Roma” in Italy by eyeing the sky. “By us,” wrote the astronomer Thomas Hood in 1590, “it is called the Milke way: some in sporting manner doie call it Watling streete,” the ancient Roman road that ran from the outskirts of London to Wroxeter near the Welsh border. ([Location 2533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2533)) - In the end, neither moon nor stars but clouds regulated the flow of celestial light. Thus Thoreau wrote of the moon’s “continual war with the clouds” on the traveler’s behalf.34 The density and velocity of cloud formations were vital considerations. “Moon shines, tho’ clouds are flying,” noted Elizabeth Drinker on a June evening. The Irish draper Humphrey O’Sullivan referred regularly to nights that were either “thin” or “heavy” clouded. Only on clear evenings could one be confident of protracted light, for within minutes the sky might dramatically change. Observed a passing visitor to Scotland in the late eighteenth century, “During some part of this ride the moon was so much obscured I could scarcely see if I was upon the road, at other times it shone so bright as to give me a distinct view of the country.”35 The blackest nights, when clouds blanketed the sky, inspired numerous expressions—“pit-mirk,” “lowry,” “darkling,” and, of course, “pitchdark” in reference to the tarry resin of pine trees. “As dark as pitch,” Pepys remarked upon returning home at 2:00 A.M. on a January evening in 1666. Nóche ciéga, Spaniards called “blind nights.” Winter temperatures, due to cloud cover, might be warmer, but vision on such evenings was severely impaired. The sky, let alone distant objects or their colors, was barely visible. “It was such a dark night I could hardly see my finger,” described a London resident in 1754.36 Options for travel were few, with most people all the more inclined to remain safely at home. Some, if possible, employed torches or lanterns, for which they were said to be “belanter’d.” “We were obliged to have a lantern,” wrote Parson Woodforde in 1786, “being very dark.” But, invariably, occasions arose when overcast skies caught individuals off-guard or winds extinguished a candle or torch. Passing through Palaiseau in France, a group of men, finding their lamp broken, canvassed the occupants of an inn for a lantern, for which they exchanged a bottle of wine. “We got a lantern with a rushlight in it, but the wind soon blew it out, and we went on our way darkling.” ([Location 2547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2547)) - On the worst nights, ordinary folk relied heavily upon secondary senses, including their powers of hearing, touch, and smell. Although today the large bulk of our sensory input is visual, sight’s sister senses, for much of the early modern era, remained critical to everyday existence, particularly at nighttime. On overcast evenings, individuals often were forced to navigate, not with their eyes, but with their ears. The nocturnal experience was heavily aural. “The day has eyes, the night has ears,” affirmed a Scottish proverb. After sunset, reliance on hearing was so pronounced that in East Yorkshire the verb “dark” meant “to listen.”41 Nighttime, as contemporaries understoood, was well suited to communicating sound. Although the moist air could have a damping effect, impairment of sight naturally sharpened one’s hearing. Observes Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Dark night, that from the eye his function takes, / The ear more quick of apprehension makes. / Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, / It pays the hearing double recompense.” In addition, nocturnal silence gave heightened resonance to isolated noises. With a less complex soundscape, it was easier for a cocked ear to detect the source and direction of separate sounds.42 Unfortunately, hearing, unlike sight, is a passive sense, and sound can be intermittent at best. “Sounds come and go in a way that sights do not,” John M. Hull, the blind author of Touching the Rock, has recently noted. At night, noises become more sporadic. On the other hand, hearing is a more pervasive sense than sight, not limited to a single direction; nor is it as easily blocked by an intervening obstacle such as a building or a tree. And with the range of earshot extended at night, preindustrial sounds represented the aural equivalent of landmarks.43 Overtaken by darkness on an unfamiliar road outside the Scottish town of Paisley, a set of travelers “proceeded with great caution and deliberation, frequently stopping to look forward and listen.” Where wind and rain, by their sounds, could help to reveal the contours of a landscape, familiar noises afforded welcome wayposts. The “clattering” of their horses’ hooves told visitors to Freiburg that they were entering “a large pavd town.” Bleating ewes and bellowing bulls provided bearings, as did tolling church bells. In 1664, Richard Palmer of Berkshire bequeathed funds for the village sexton to ring the great bell at eight o’clock each night as well as in the morning, not only to encourage “a timely going to rest” but also that persons “might be informed of the time of night, and receive some guidance into their right way.” Most helpful were dogs, whose barks pierced the air. Like a homing signal, the noise increased in volume and intensity the closer that one approached. “We lost our road,” wrote a traveler in France, “and about midnight, directed by the sound of village dogs, dropt upon Fontinelle.” Noted a colonist in seventeenth-century Maryland, “It was a… ([Location 2577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2577)) - Touch, on the other hand, enabled individuals to navigate at close quarters, warily shuffling their feet as they advanced with outstretched arms. “Better walk leisurely than lie abroad all night,” advised a familiar saying. Deprived of their sight, pedestrians grew intensely conscious of their limbs and extremities. “We groped about, like a cou ple of thieves, in a cole hole,” described a London resident. Few persons, admittedly, navigated on all fours as the agricultural writer Arthur Young did one night in Italy. With his lantern extinguished by wind, Young was forced to crawl to avert falling over a cliff. It was not unusual for drivers to halt their coaches in order to gauge the road. “Mr. Taylor,” described a passenger in Scotland, “was oft obliged to descend from the carriage to feel whether we were upon the road or not.”46 Fingers and feet were employed to best effect on wellmarked paths, whereas, on a “blind road,” the surface differed little from the shoulders. Smooth, open spaces, such as a pasture or commons, also provided few orienting clues, in contrast to rough, uneven surfaces, despite the threat of tripping. Visiting a patient without the aid of a lantern, the New England midwife Martha Ballard removed her shoes to feel the path in her stockings. “Steerd as strait a coars as I could,” she recorded of her safe arrival.47 In cities, differences in pavement could alert pedestrians to their location, as they struggled to keep to the beaten track. Of navigating London’s streets, Gay wrote, “Has not wise nature strung the legs and feet / With finest nerves, design’d to walk the street? / Has she not given us hands to groap aright, / Amidst the frequent dangers of the night?”48 Canes and staffs gave a feel of the road by extending one’s reach. Among all social classes, these appear to have been commonplace, intended as much for navigation as for self-defense. “No doubt you have had the experience of walking at night over rough ground without a light, and finding it necessary to use a stick in order to guide yourself,” wrote Descartes. “You may have been able to notice that by means of this stick you could feel the various objects situated around you, and that you could even tell whether they were trees or stones or sand or water or grass or mud.”49 With or without a cane or staff, the experience of traveling by foot on dark evenings could be daunting, particularly for the upper classes, accustomed to horseback or coach. Fanny Boscawen in 1756 wrote her husband Edward, the admiral, “I have made such profession of my aversion to groping that at length I seem to have obtained a dispensation never to visit in the dark.” A traveler to the Swiss city of Lausanne, to his great dismay, was forced “to walk gropingly like a blind man.” ([Location 2605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2605)) - Embodying the distilled wisdom of past generations, popular conventions governed nearly every aspect of night journeys, both long and short—from treading ancient sheep-tracks to traversing unfamiliar woodlands and meadows. In spite of the critical role that human senses played in surmounting night’s obscurity, there were still other challenges to mind, body, and soul. Custom governed not only people’s mode of lighting but also their dress and form of travel, their companions, what they did or did not carry, and when and where they went. So, too, did unwritten protocols exist for encountering fellow travelers as well as for seeking help when lost. As Thoreau later reflected, “What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine.”52 Before embarking outside, travelers usually dressed with care. During the day, neat clothing suitable to class and calling was customary, as was cleanliness, regardless of station. Many working men and women took pride in their garments. “The people of England, from the highest to the lowest,” wrote Tobias Smollett, “are remarkably neat in their attire.” The London-Spy spoke of the “abundance of rubbing, scrubbing, washing and combing” men performed to make “tolerable figures to appear by day light.”53 But at night, appearance mattered less, and standards changed. For some persons, darkness disguised garments too dirty or torn to be worn by day. A drunken squire returned home from a London alehouse at night because he “was too dirty to go home by day-light.” “In the night,” affirmed an Italian saying, “any cap will serve.”54 Outer clothing, in general, became less varied and more functional. Colors were plainer. Because manure and mud lay everywhere, leather boots and shoes were favored by those who could afford them, along with leggings by the end of the seventeenth century. For protection from wet and cold weather, men and women wore buttoned capes or cloaks made from felt. “Great cloaks,” predominantly used by men, were thick, heavy garments that hung loosely—to mid-calf for pedestrians, whereas riders required a shorter design. In Rome, a visitor discovered that the “great cloak” was “worn by all when walking the streets.” By the late 1600s, “great coats” or “watch coats” also grew popular, featuring a turned-up collar for foul weather. In The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), Smollet wrote of a man “muffled in a great coat.” Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe saves from his shipwreck “a great watch-coat to cover” him. For added comfort, Dutch women affixed small pots of hot embers or smoldering turf beneath their petticoats. Sicilians, when the “night air was sharp,” tied similar devices to their wrists. Among the poor, with neither cloaks nor coats, multiple layers of clothing lent a measure of warmth.55 Heads, too, required protection. Of the “damps of the night air,” a traveler wrote that the English “take more precautions here… ([Location 2632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2632)) - Time, too, mattered to travelers. Preindustrial societies divided evenings as well as days into well-defined intervals. Ancient Romans partitioned their nights into as many as ten different periods, which, unlike modern hours, varied in length. Extending from dusk (crepusculum) to the break of day (conticinium), each was identified with either a natural event or a human activity, such as bedtime (concubium). So, also, did the medieval Church institute canonical hours for prayer.61 For households in early modern Britain, sundry intervals at night were commonplace. The most familiar chronology consisted of sunset, shutting-in, candle-lighting, bed-time, midnight, the dead of night, cock-crow, and dawn. Despite the growing regimentation of time by the seventeenth century into hours and minutes, traditional intervals afforded members of all social ranks a frame of reference for calibrating the darkness. Even men and women able to afford clocks or other timepieces found these temporal categories convenient. Natural transitions marked some intervals, making nights easier to chart. Roosters, for the regularity of their habits, were hailed as the “peasant’s clock.”62 For other nocturnal times, such as midnight, rural families often depended upon the stars and the moon. Asked the time in the play Rhodon and Iris (1631), the shepherd Acanthus replies that it is the eleventh hour, for “Orion hath advanced very high.” Famed for their accuracy were the Pleiades, a cluster of stars in the constellation of Taurus—“called by the vulgar, the hen and chickens,” wrote Samuel Purchas in 1613. Claimed a Boston writer in 1786, “The poor peasant, who never saw a watch, will tell the time to a fraction, by the rising and setting of the moon, and some particular stars.” In contrast, many urban residents relied upon clock towers and the cries of the nightwatch. Despite their erratic performance, church clocks could be found by the sixteenth century in a growing number of cities and towns. On a dark winter morning in 1529, the Cologne student Herman Weinsberg wakened and left home for school, unaware that it was barely past midnight. When the clock tower struck one o’clock, he “thought the clock was not working right.” Finally realizing his error, yet locked outside, he “wandered up and down the streets to stay warm,” nearly dying from the cold. ([Location 2683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2683)) - When paths crossed, silence only heightened suspicions. Alarmed by a passing figure in the market square of Traunstein, the clerk Andre Pichler declared, “If you do not speak, I shall stab you.” Exchanges were terse and to the point: “Who is there?” or “Who is that?” were common questions. “A friend and a neighbor,” William Mowfitt replied in 1647 during his way home. As important as one’s words was tone of voice, which needed to be strong but inoffensive. Timidity, no less than hostility, invited clashes. Most wayfarers projected a brave front, often by brandishing their weapons. Fearful of being robbed in the Spanish countryside, Thomas Platter and his companions shook swords above their heads “to make them gleam in the light of the moon.” Scraping one’s sword against the ground, on the other hand, was an unmistakable “declaration of war.” Against bands of brigands in rural Scandinavia, a traveler in 1681 instructed the unarmed drivers of a convoy of carriages to equip themselves with white sticks of wood, “which appeared by the light of the moon, as if they had been muskets.” Thomas Ellwood crossed paths with a ruffian upon returning home from a court session in Watlington. “The suddain and unexpected sight of my bright blade, glittering in the dark night,” Ellwood marveled, “did so amaze and terrify the man.” Less fortunate, by contrast, was Michael Crosby as he made his way on a Sunday night from the alehouse Black Mary’s Hole. Jostled in a nearby field by a thief, Crosby declared that he “wanted nothing but civility,” only to be assaulted and robbed. Any bump in the night, cautioned Rousseau, required force. “Boldly grab the one who surprises you at night, man or beast—it makes no difference. Hold on and squeeze him with all your might. If he struggles, hit him.” ([Location 2801](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2801)) - A few stout souls responded more aggressively, with Satan himself on rare occasions reportedly put to flight. Felix Platter, during a visit to Marseilles, no doubt took comfort from knowing that his Swiss guide was nicknamed the “devil-chaser,” after one such encounter. ([Location 2820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2820)) - IN THE SHARP glare of daylight, privacy was scarce in early modern communities. Face-to-face relationships predominated in urban as well as rural settings, with most inhabitants intimately familiar with their neighbors’ affairs. Affording persons moral and material assistance, communities also upheld common standards of public and private behavior. In theory, vigilance in the spirit of combating sin was every good neighbor’s duty. “If any in the neighbourhood, are taking to bad courses, lovingly and faithfully admonish them,” urged New England’s Cotton Mather. “The neighborhood,” as the historians David Levine and Keith Wrightson have written, “was not only a support network, but also a reference group and a moral community.”2 For reasons rooted in self-interest as well as public morality, personal misbehavior courted exposure—more often from prying eyes and loose tongues than from constables and churchwardens. The transgressions of a single household, feared residents, could harm the wider community by its corrupting influence. Had neighbors been less dependent upon one another, this danger would have mattered less. In cases of sexual misconduct, burdening the local parish with an illegitimate child threatened financial hardship and invited punishment from the Almighty. In 1606, a set of petitioners in Castle Combe, Wiltshire, condemned a woman’s “filthy act of whoredom” for, among other reasons, provoking “God’s wrath” upon “us the inhabitants of the town.”3 In short, social oversight was essential. “In England,” a German visitor commented in 1602, “every citizen is bound by oath to keep a sharp eye at his neighbour’s house.”4 Close quarters, whether at home or the workplace, lessened the likelihood of misbehavior. In most dwellings, rooms were few and cramped. During their trip to the Hebrides, James Boswell and Dr. Johnson, whose tastes ran to plusher quarters, often conversed with one another in Latin “for fear of being overheard in the small Highland houses.” Secrets large and small fell victim to servants, who ranked among the most notorious rumormongers.5 Making matters worse were the narrow lanes separating early modern dwellings, with their thin walls, revealing cracks, and naked windows. Not until the eighteenth century did curtains adorn many urban portals, while in the countryside they remained a rarity. In towns, closing them invariably aroused suspicion in daytime. A New England colonist called them “whore curtains” when he detected a pair drawn at a neighbor’s home.6 And while forests and fields afforded natural refuges, they, too, were vulnerable to surveillance. A writer in the Westminster Magazine averred in 1780, “A person in a country place cannot easily commit an immoral act without being detected or reproved by his neighbours.”7 The good opinion of neighbors was not a trifling concern, especially in small, close-knit communities. “A man that hath an ill name is halfe hangd,” stated an English proverb. Bonds, personal as… ([Location 2866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2866)) - AND, TOO, NIGHT often declared a welcome truce from daily toil. For countless laborers, darkness brought freedom not only from social oversight but also from punishing hours of work. “The night cometh, when no man can work,” affirmed the Book of John. In sections of Britain, the expression “blindman’s holiday” customarily signified the arrival of evening, when it became too dark for most labor. “The sun set, the workman freed,” declared a Spanish saying.2 During the Middle Ages, nocturnal labor in many trades was illegal. In a variety of crafts, municipal regulations forbade work, even during the early hours of winter darkness preceding the curfew bell. ([Location 2968](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2968)) - Trades in the thirteenth century forbade gold and silversmiths to work, for “light at night is insufficient for them to ply their trade well and truly.” During a street riot in Dijon, a cutler was stabbed for keeping late hours. Magnifying such concerns was a deep-rooted suspicion of nocturnal commerce of any sort. Not only was nighttime associated with the devil’s work, but unwitting customers placed themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous tradesmen—eager to “practice deception in their work,” condemned the Spurmakers Guild of London in 1345. “Choose not a woman, nor linen clothe by the candle,” warned a saying. ([Location 2981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2981)) - Not until the early modern era, however, was there a marked rise in nocturnal labor. With the emergence of new markets and manufacturers, regional economies expanded in all directions, temporally as well as spatially. Despite persistent fears of fire, guilds and municipal authorities adopted less stringent regulations. In Sweden, for example, such was the importance of beer production that breweries remained in operation overnight. The same was true in Amsterdam. ([Location 2994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=2994)) - On Christmas Eve in 1660, painters did not finish until 10:00 P.M.—“this night I was rid of their and all other work,” a relieved Pepys recorded in his diary. According to the Northampton squire Daniel Eaton in 1726, joiners frequently worked by candlelight when autumn days grew short.14 Bakers labored much of the night in order to provide morning customers with warm bread. “He burns the midnight oil for me,” wrote Mercier of Paris’s bakers.15 To produce ale or beer, commercial brewers began after midnight the laborious process of grinding the malt, boiling it in water to produce mash, drawing off the wort, furnishing hops (for beer), and adding yeast. ([Location 3059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3059)) - The common expression, “not worth the candle,” denoted work too minor to warrant the expense. ([Location 3087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3087)) - So important a source of income was spinning in parts of Germany that widows were allowed to keep their wheels after selling other possessions for debt. ([Location 3124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3124)) - In England, whereas the countryside initially received most urban waste, transportation costs became prohibitively high once cities increased in size and density. And, unlike other premodern peoples, such as the Japanese, who relied heavily upon human waste for fertilizer, Western households generally preferred animal excrement. In the case of London, much of its waste was dumped into the Thames.26 Anon., John Hunt, Nightman and Rubbish Carter, near the Wagon and Horses in Goswell Street, near Mount Mill, London, eighteenth century. The objectionable nature of the work is suggested by the sarcastic nickname “goldfinder,” given to nightmen. In Augsburg, senior latrine cleaners were known as “night kings.” If a vault had gone long unemptied, the undertaking could be arduous. At the Philadelphia home of Elizabeth Drinker, forty-four years of “depositing” elapsed before a cesspool in the yard was cleaned in 1799. The ordeal required two carts and five men laboring for two consecutive nights until four or five each morning. Wondered Drinker afterward, “If liberty and equality which some talk much about, could take place, who would they get for those, and many other hard and disagreeable undertakings?” The dangers were considerable, including asphyxiation whenever workmen entered a vault, equipped at most with lanterns for light. At a Southwark tavern called the Tumbledown Dick, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported in July 1753:   The first man that went down, overcome by the stench, call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face; a second went to help him, and fell down also; then a third, fourth went down, when these two were obliged to come up again directly: and the stench of the place being by this time greatly abated, they got the two that went down first; but the second was dead, and the first had so little life in him, that he died in the afternoon. ([Location 3148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3148)) - As with human excreta, so with bodies of the dead. Cities and towns reserved their worst tasks for night. Thus, during epidemics, municipal officials waited for darkness to dispose of their dead. With fewer citizens abroad, there was less risk, according to common thought, of spreading infection. And there was less likelihood then of public panic. During London’s Great Plague of 1665, which killed some fifty-six thousand people, “dead-carts” were stationed evenings at the entrance of streets and alleys for families to deposit bodies. Municipal officials in Bavaria muffled their wheels with rags. “All the needful works, that carried terror with them, that were both dismal and dangerous, were done in the night,” noted Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In the event of plague, night also brought the burning of victims’ clothes and bedding. Of an outbreak in Barcelona during the mid-1600s, a contemporary reported:   If anyone died of the plague they took the body at night to be buried in the graveyard of Nazareth along with the mattresses and sheets. The following night they would come to burn the wooden bed frame and curtains and the clothing and everything the sick person might have touched. ([Location 3165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3165)) - Sanger in wintertime transported wood by sled, the white snow reflecting the lunar light. By contrast, when on another night Sanger carried a bushel of rye to a mill, the moon was new. “I come home in the evening through mud and mire,” he moaned. It was at harvest time, when fieldwork was most grueling, that moonlight became especially critical. For several nights every September, light from the full moon nearest to the autumnal equinox is more prolonged than usual because of the small angle of the moon’s orbit. Well known in England as the “harvest moon,” it bore the name in Scotland of the “Michaelmas moon.” Farmers on both sides of the Atlantic benefited from the moonlight to gather crops. “Sometimes,” Jasper Charlton wrote in 1735, “the harvest people work all night at their hay or corn.” Nearly as useful was the “hunter’s moon” in October, when a full moon next appeared. “The moon of September,” declared a writer, “shortens the night. The moon of October is hunter’s delight.” ([Location 3233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3233)) - Among a farmer’s final labors was taking his crops or stock to market, arriving hours before daybreak to haggle with vendors. Along with carts laden with vegetables and fruit, small herds of cattle passed in the darkness, their collars strung with bells lest any stray. At night, the countryside moved to the city. In Venice, beginning at 3:00 A.M., peasants arrived in boats “loaded with every produce of nature,” while a visitor to Lyons was awakened at four o’clock “by the braying of asses, and a busy hum of people” loaded with baskets. The timing of such trips depended upon market days and the availability of moonlight. Fortified towns needed to open their gates well before dawn. The largest urban centers had an insatiable appetite for foodstuffs, with public markets open daily from early morning until dusk, if not later. In a single week, farm animals alone brought to London, according to an estimate in 1750, included one thousand bullocks, two thousand calves, six thousand sheep, three thousand lambs, thirty-five hundred hogs and pigs, and nearly twenty thousand fowl. “How many labour all day, and travell, nay wake att night to bring provisions to this town,” wondered Sarah Cowper. Peasants traveled to Paris from distant towns like Gisors and Aumale. “At one in the morning six thousand peasants arrive, bringing the town’s provisions of vegetables and fruits and flowers,” Mercier wrote. At the central market of Les Halles, he noted:   The noise of voices never stops, there is hardly a light to be seen; most of the deals are done in the dark, as though these were people of a different race, hiding in their caverns from the light of the sun. The fish salesmen, who are the first comers, apparently never see daylight, and go home as the street lamps start to flicker, just before dawn; but if eyes are no use, ears take their place; everyone bawls his loudest.41 ([Location 3262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3262)) - Each fall in the Auvergne during threshing, peasants barely got “even a few hours of sleep” at night. Given such rigors, accidents inevitably followed, resulting in the loss of limbs and lives. Standard equipment at a Jamaican sugar works toured by Lady Nugent was a hatchet used to sever the forearms of slaves who, from falling asleep, caught their fingers in the mill—the sole means, she noted, of saving their lives. ([Location 3301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3301)) - Opportunities for sexual misconduct were also greater. In Nuremberg, where laundresses relied upon a small number of wash-houses bordering a stream, these in 1552 had to be locked at sunset so that “the laundresses have no place for their indecent behavior.” Similarly, the apprentice John Dane was alone in his master’s shop in Berkhamsted, “when most folke was a bead,” when a “mayd” visited for a sexual tryst. Though they “jested togetther,” he reluctantly declined her entreaties. The Massachusetts colonist Esay Wood, on a moonlit evening in 1662, lay outside with Mary Powell, after she had been sent by her mother to help husk his corn.50 ([Location 3321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3321)) - Equally industrious were African-American slaves who occasionally received provision grounds on which to plant gardens or raise hogs and poultry. Nights when plantation regimens did not interfere were a favored time. In size, plots could range from small patches of dirt to extensive tracts of wasteland. In 1732, an observer in the Chesapeake remarked that gardens enabled slaves to plant potatoes, peas, and squash, either on Sundays or at night. Besides adding variety to otherwise bland diets, these enterprises provided slaves with goods to sell in public markets, which in the Carolina Lowcountry and much of the West Indies they regularly supplied. ([Location 3337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3337)) - No doubt, many people derived satisfaction from sharing tedious tasks with neighbors and family—their feelings of camaraderie occasionally intensified by alcohol. More important still, nighttime, by its very nature, connoted freedom from the constraints of daily life, the innumerable rules and obligations that repressed gaiety and playfulness. Night, on top of everything else, was a state of mind. Amid familiar countenances and helping hands, formalities fell by the wayside, along with feelings of fear and degradation. Inhibitions receded in the darkness, as friends laughed and toiled together. Affirmed a Welsh adage, “John” in the morning became “Jack” at night. Among other benefits, communal labor allowed families to conserve precious fuel, sharing the light from a lone torch or lamp. Indoors, men and women, hoping to escape the biting cold, assembled around the soothing glow of a hearth. Just to catch the warmth, let alone complete one’s tasks, made it necessary to close ranks. Under such ill-lit, cramped conditions, night could be a time of profound intimacy and companionship. “Evening words are not like to morning,” attested an English proverb. ([Location 3360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3360)) - Many stories, rooted in generations of past strife, recounted the familiar deeds of heroic warriors. Everywhere, it seems, listeners took epic legends to heart, from Icelandic sagas to bylini in Russia. Noted Howitt of knitting-nights in Yorkshire, “Here all the old stories and traditions of the dale come up.” Amid the darkness, superior storytellers spirited suggestible minds to realms of wonder, far removed from daily hardships. In Brittany, according to Pierre-Jakez Hélias, his grandfather, a sabot-maker, was well known for his ability to “transform a gathering of peasants in a farmhouse into so many knights and ladies.” Only then, reflected Hélias, might rural folk have stopped worrying about “the price of suckling pigs, or daily bread, or Sunday meat soup.” ([Location 3423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3423)) - Immediate gratification came from imbibing ale and hopped beer, or wine across much of continental Europe. Declared a seventeenth-century Polish poet: “Our lords are a great woe to us, / They fleece us almost like sheep. / You can never sit in peace, / unless you forget the bad things / over a mug of beer.” Important, too, for peasants was the nutritional value of these beverages, “without which they cannot well subsist, their food being for the most part of such things as afford little or bad nourishment,” claimed a writer. Safer to drink than either water or milk, beer and ale were also a source of warmth—“the warmest lining of a naked man’s coat,” professed John Taylor the Water-Poet.9 Jan Steen, The Ace of Hearts, seventeenth century. Equally inviting was the opportunity for good fellowship among one’s peers—rubbing elbows and sharing draughts with men of the “right kidney.” “Good drunken company is their delight; what they get by day, they spend by night,” opined Daniel Defoe. In colonial Massachusetts, John Adams attributed the prevalence of taverns to “poor country people, who are tired with labour and hanker after company.” Toasting one another’s health, playing dominoes and cards, or passing a pipe of tobacco in a crowded tippling-house reinforced male companionship. As did ballads and drinking contests. As the song “Good Ale for My Money” had it, “A good coal fire is their desire, / whereby to sit and parley; / They’ll drink their ale, and tell a tale, / and go home in the morning early.” Common were mutual laments over domestic squabbles—“railing at matrimony,” one observer recounted. Once tongues loosened, masters, clerics, and landlords, all were fair game. “Rant and carouse, damn and drink all in a breath,” remarked a contemporary. There were also displays of fortitude and strength, critical to masculine standing and self-worth. Hence the nickname Frappe-d’abord (First-strike) earned by a French journeyman. In England, a person described a group of regulars addicted to the “noble art of boxing”—“shewing their own skill,” he related, “by clenching their fists, putting themselves in a posture of defence, with here I could have you, and there I could have you.”10 Alehouses also spawned sexual encounters. Although fewer, female patrons represented a mix of maidservants, aging “wenches,” and prostitutes. “A little Sodom,” pronounced a writer. (In provincial Massachusetts, taverns bore a similar reputation. Adams complained in 1761, “Here diseases, vicious habits, bastards and legislators are frequently begotten.”) Within these cramped, ill-lit environs, men and women drank, flirted, and fondled, as depicted by Jan Steen, Adriaen van Ostade, and other northern European artists. An English critic in 1628 urged the removal of partitions to prevent sexual play. And, too, court records divulge that couples copulated in nearby lofts and privies. In temperate weather, adjacent yards supplied convenient spots in the dark. Even neighboring… ([Location 3542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3542)) - In woods outside Tours, Jacques-Louis Ménétra and a companion “spotted a little shepherd and a young shepherd girl in action.” Panicked, the naked boy fled, leaving his lover to be raped by Ménétra—“I amused myself with the girl half willingly the rest by force.” On another occasion, Ménétra and a married woman were themselves assaulted while copulating, seemingly “out of sight” on a slope near Belleville. “That taught me a lesson,” he later acknowledged. ([Location 3598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3598)) - In the early 1600s, the Swiss town of Wil attempted to limit to five the number of visits girls could annually receive at home from suitors, with all respects to be paid before nightfall. ([Location 3678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3678)) - The bed is a far better place to go courting. BARDUS LOCHWD, EARLY 19TH CENTURY ([Location 3696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3696)) - So, too, in New England were “bundling boards” reportedly employed to separate youths in bed. ([Location 3745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3745)) - How many unions were compelled by premature pregnancies is impossible to say. It seems just as likely, as some historians have posited, that couples only elected to have intercourse once marriage was in the offing. According to this view, pregnancy was less often a cause for marriage than were marital plans a precondition of copulation. Noting the popularity of “bundelage” in America, a European visitor observed that once “the swain promises marriage” his partner “gives herself without reserve.”34 ([Location 3766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3766)) - Of some bearing, as well, was a couple’s sexual compatibility. As a Cambridgeshire youth bluntly informed his skeptical parson, “But vicar, you wouldn’t buy a horse without getting astride it to see how it trotted.” In fact, in parts of Germany, after several nights of courting (known as “welcome nights”), couples embarked upon a more telling sequence of “trial nights” that could eventually lead to marriage. Should matters turn out differently, no embarrassment or dishonor, barring a pregnancy, attached to either party, with each free to commence a future relationship. ([Location 3790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3790)) - In general, literacy rates were highest in northern and northwestern Europe, though many regions witnessed a marked rise during the 1700s, caused in part by the spread of Pietism, a Protestant movement that stressed personal study of the Bible. ([Location 3820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CSTCOK0&location=3820))