Started: [[2024-10-31]] Finished: [[2024-11-25]] (DNF - abandoned at p198) ## Review This should have been right up my street. [["At Day's Close" by A. Roger Ekirch]] is a similar book, and it's one of my favourites. However this one never really agreed with me. It lacked passion, excitement and intrigue. I found myself skipping over quite a few of the sections. At no point did this book delight me. ## New Words - concomitant p19 - naturally accompanying or associated. - "she loved travel, with all its concomitant worries" - mendicant (p33) - _adjective_ - given to begging. - *noun* - a beggar - itinerant (p33) - _adjective_ - travelling from place to place. - "itinerant traders" - *noun* - a person who travels from place to place. - diurnal - of or during the day. - daily; of each day. - "diurnal rhythms" - [[Userer]] - a person who [lends](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=5f65fee2391b9f64&q=lends&si=ACC90nwXlEU2j3qee_ajN1FbIPWBPdan2ateG_brgRsqrNIub1bITB9ZTK1BzIu1Asi6xGnBUAnlxINv7-5No0curCjpNxULZg%3D%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbqpChk8GJAxUzWkEAHbuRPXcQyecJegQINBAM) money at [unreasonably](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=5f65fee2391b9f64&q=unreasonably&si=ACC90nxgkPHmtVkpPj_lUgtQ0AenYn7iv-UwWDhHfzE7S8X_yJIhJW1_d6-DvFigiunr2yIecy5o9LMZcrKjMrHmRyC4Azu0RCmM6_N7FA9PWE_7oVS87sQ%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbqpChk8GJAxUzWkEAHbuRPXcQyecJegQINBAN) high rates of interest. - postlapsarian (p132) - occurring or existing after the Fall of Man. - perambulate - walk or travel through or round a place or area, especially for pleasure and in a [leisurely](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=8e300a61fb8ea468&q=leisurely&si=ACC90nytWkp8tIhRuqKAL6XWXX-NuRFRnHCGEIrryCz38YZYQTjM6BHCchW8v6bD0W3ayb6pTf2jxIOHkCLJhV3k_Y1wYX8J4oZeWh8FqxL6cloX6OddhJg%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifzZXe6eeJAxVSVUEAHZIgC-oQyecJegQIIRAQ) way. - "the locals perambulate up and down the thoroughfare" - walk round (a parish, forest, etc.) in order to officially [assert](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=8e300a61fb8ea468&q=assert&si=ACC90nwzNcbSj6HKgPz_Y9fzn5jcvnzu1l_P9kfhjr5eglPBHqce_YLV0FXb9Ns3jkD-tXZXwUa5ob25bcI07hyNBl3DIbrqNQ%3D%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifzZXe6eeJAxVSVUEAHZIgC-oQyecJegQIIRAU&biw=393&bih=655&dpr=3) and record its boundaries. - "commissioners were appointed to perambulate the Devon forests before Whitsun 1319" - misanthrope - a person who [dislikes](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=8e300a61fb8ea468&q=dislikes&si=ACC90nwZKElgOcNXBU934ENhMNgqHg51eQw_Bs5EH-ISvmj4Y8Opj470fEgR3A6bFG2xhBRwwkm2jee8Zb4j974F__zA5sVC7XLhus_d2hZGXvS77_8r7-E%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiutPvJ6ueJAxWfVkEAHVXIL9EQyecJegQIIhAu) [humankind](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=8e300a61fb8ea468&q=humankind&si=ACC90nytWkp8tIhRuqKAL6XWXX-NGVBM9SJDRZ4PHE_7BZIldeHLrmsLxQUnWvxc-17Oo-QgTv1mZw4Mac7V-8TPzKKpMypWc9aJFS2bqAieto21Eoam0PE%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiutPvJ6ueJAxWfVkEAHVXIL9EQyecJegQIIhAv) and [avoids](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=8e300a61fb8ea468&q=avoids&si=ACC90nwzNcbSj6HKgPz_Y9fzn5jcsuahOlJLFFRYlylDSsMi6uhunn4qyQCUqd-yU0jjpZ_dzjIQCkG6eP_da0mJb_IAjGgHIQ%3D%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiutPvJ6ueJAxWfVkEAHVXIL9EQyecJegQIIhAw) human society. - "Scrooge wasn't the mean-spirited misanthrope most of us believe him to be" - Similar: hater of mankind, cynic, sceptic --- ## Notes Prior to the 1500s a man accused of wandering at night was described as a noctivagator. I like that word. P7 --- > “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.” – Rupert Brooke. P8 --- > “There was in the early modern period no right to the night – especially for plebeians.” P18 --- In [[1285]] [[Edward I]] introduced laws around night walkers. Towns would shut their gates from sunset to sunrise. Edward I’s law was only repealed in England in [[1827]]. And in the UK as a whole it remained on the statute books, in name at least, until 1967. P27 --- Dodgey people at night would sometimes paint their faces black to better blend into the darkness. P19 --- [[Curfew]]: ![[Curfew#Etymology]] --- I’ve always been curious by the [[biphasic]] sleep of people in the medieval period. To my modern self it seems very odd, having two sleeps a night. The book mentions that England's curfew time under [[William the Conqueror]] was 20:00. Biphasic sleep makes more sense to me if you couldn't go out late. I mean what else is there to do? _Especially_ in the winter. Picture it. You're a medieval worker back home after a day of hard labour. You've had a small supper and chatted to the wife and kids. Now what? You're exhausted, bored and the darkness has arrived. Before William's curfew you might go to a neighbours house. The wives would knit by the one tallow candle they could afford whilst the men would chat in a corner. But it's past the 20:00 curfew. So you're probably just going to go to sleep for a few hours. It makes sense. --- Odd thing: I can picture [[Edwardian]] men being gay with each other. And I can picture [[Renaissance]] men being gay with other. But oddly I can’t picture [[Medieval]] men being gay with each other. Seeing two serfs going at it just doesn’t seem possible. --- > In the Middle Ages, eavesdropping was classified alongside nightwalking especially often, largely because it too tended to happen under cover of darkness. To eavesdrop literally meant to stand within the 'eavesdrip' of a house - the strip of ground liable to receive the rainwater running from the eaves - in order to listen secretly to a private conversation; or, perhaps, to keep a neighbour's sexual activities under surveillance. 'Eavesdroppers stood outside other people's houses, often at night, listening to their conversations or sometimes observing their private acts', explains the historian Marjorie McIntosh in her research on the Sessions of the Peace records from 1351 to 1599. She adds that nightwalkers, who were generally 'suspected of having more nefarious intent', were more likely to be male, while eavesdroppers were more likely to be female. p28 --- By the 1500s and 1600s a “nightwalker” started to be used less as a legal definition of a crime and more as an insult. This line from “The London Cuckolds” (1681) demonstrates how it was used in conversation: > “This was a night-walker, a spy, a thief, a villain, he would have murdered thee, and eat thee.” P28 --- ‘Strangers’ – people without lanterns or torches – were often arrested on sight. P18-19 Many of the laws around nightwalking seem to be around harassing the suspiciously poor and/or jobless. You could be detained by a regular citizen, “till he make it appear, that he is a person of good reputation.” ‘Reputation’ probably meant ‘class’. Many of the wealthy would freely wander (with their staff and servants) the streets at night. Even if they were drunk, causing a riot (‘riot’ meant just being loud at this time), or soliciting prostitutes, as long as they were of good ‘reputation’ they were generally left. (p31-32) Gentlemen and important merchants were unquestionably regarded as peaceful inhabitants of the city, even when they were being unpeaceful. Plebeians were regarded as disturbers of the peace, even when they were being peaceful. (P33). “"The greatest offence against property', as E. P. Thompson puts it, in this period as in subsequent ones, "was to have none."” (P53) A book called *Gull’s Horn-Book* (1609) by Thomas Dekker advices that if you’re apprehended on the streets at night you should pretend to be a boisterous upper-class aristocrat. p32 --- > From the end of the Middle Ages, the ascendant capitalist class developed a new morality, increasingly shored up by Calvinist theology, which enshrined labour as a religious duty. According to this regimen, as Christopher Hill puts it, poverty 'ceased to be a holy state and [became] presumptive evidence of wickedness'. The Franciscan doctrine according to which the poor, and in particular the mendicant poor, were sanctified for their state of indigence was dismissed as outdated. Instead, productive forms of labour were consecrated, and individual worldly achievements, as the Humanists proposed, were lionized. So the unemployed, especially the itinerant unemployed, became socially unacceptable in the age in which agrarian capitalism emerged. (p34) --- The book says that mediaeval people’s [[Biphasic sleep|biphasic]] sleep was often called it ‘dead’ and ‘morning’ sleep. (p38). Claude disagrees, saying the source of that is [["At Day's Close" by A. Roger Ekirch]]: > but he described finding terms like "first sleep" and "second sleep" ("premier sommeil" and "second sommeil" in French sources) rather than "dead" and "morning" sleep. --- There’s such a thing as a [[Stonebow]] – a crossbow that fires stones instead. In [[1543]] a poet and ex-soldier named [[Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey]] terrorised London during an evening, breaking many windows with his stonebow (in the 1500s a window was rare. And expensive). (P46-47) --- > Apprentices, many of whom had originally migrated from the countryside in search of regular wages, just like those who ended up as vagrants, were for their part regarded as a significant agent of social disruption at night in the early modern period. These young men, who fiercely defended their rather limited rights, tended to be central to political and religious demonstrations in the capital. They were also often responsible for social disturbances that had little to do with principled challenges to authority, both individually and collectively. In 1517, for example, apprentices were responsible for the Evil May Day Riots, a xenophobic demonstration inspired by a preacher at St Paul's Cross (and dramatized by Shakespeare and others in Sir Thomas More [c. 1592]). The authorities, which suppressed this outburst with troops, punished the perpetrators severely: they arrested 400, and, once they had hanged, drawn and quartered the leaders, gibbeted their remains. By 1600 roughly 30,000 apprentices-comprising approximately 15 per cent of the city's population - filled London's proliferating workshops and warehouses. They tended to be unmarried male adolescents from the outlying regions of London who hoped, after their seven-year tenure, to rise through the lower ranks of metropolitan society and become shopkeepers or master craftsmen. In return for being trained in a trade - as drapers or grocers or mercers or skinners they were paid a limited stipend and accommodated with their master's family. But many of these apprentices, not least those with a predilec tion for alcohol, chafed under the imposition of their masters domestic discipline. Popularly depicted as 'idle', they were often prosecuted for acts identified as 'vagrant' (almost three-quarters of the Londoners whose occupations were listed in the records of Bridewell between 1597 and 1608 were apprentices). The nighttime - when they were freed from their duties to their employer but were nonetheless expected to remain indoors - was their particular domain. They had a reputation for unpredictable, violent behaviour in the night - specifically, as Peter Ackroyd states, for victimizing 'foreigners, "night-walkers", or the servants of noblemen who were considered to take on the airs of their superiors'. An uncontainable mass of class contradictions, these cocky, drunken adolescents blustered about after dark, drinking and looking for trouble - lying-out', it was called. They picked on vagrants or nightwalkers because they were poor and weak, and on servants because they were lackeys to the rich and powerful. Like the upperclass roisterers they aped, they too were self-aggrandizing walkers in the night who aggressively persecuted common nightwalkers. In addition, again like their social superiors, they liked to humiliate London's nightwatchmen, mocking them or beating them Some of them even styled themselves 'masters of the night'. Hence Anthony Nixon's advice to apprentices in 1613, which included the admonition to 'please thy master, / And all the night keep close within his doors'; and to 'Rove not about the suburbs and the streets/ When he doth think you wrapped between his sheets'. (P53-54) --- People moving to London for the higher wages, but being subjected by the cost of accommodation is as old as Londinium itself. It’s a familiar theme, no matter the century. --- The watchmen or ‘bellman’ worked from 21:00 – 07:00 in the winter and 22:00 – 05:00 in the summer. Each hour they would cry out the time, along with some security advise, in a kind of poem. Originally regular citizens would take it in turn being a watchmen for the night. With time it was professionalised as a profession. However, ‘professional’ might not be the right term. It was a poorly paid and dangerous job. They weren’t provided a uniform. They had to buy their own big coat, to keep them warm, and often carried halberds or staffs. Many of them had jobs in the daytime too. (P67-69) --- People moving to London for the higher wages, but being subjected by the cost of accommodation is as old as Londinium itself. It’s a familiar theme, no matter the century. --- The watchmen or ‘bellman’ worked from 21:00 – 07:00 in the winter and 22:00 – 05:00 in the summer. Each hour they would cry out the time, along with some security advise, in a kind of poem. Originally regular citizens would take it in turn being a watchmen for the night. With time it was professionalised as a profession. However, ‘professional’ might not be the right term. It was a poorly paid and dangerous job. They weren’t provided a uniform. They had to buy their own big coat, to keep them warm, and often carried halberds or staffs. Many of them had jobs in the daytime too. (P67-) --- Grub Street, where writers and poets lived and did trade in 1600s, lies under the Barbican Estate. P173