At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime

by A. Roger Ekirch

Some ruffians, known as “smudges” or “night-sneaks,” gained entry during the day and hid beneath beds until families retired.

Thefts occurred with greatest frequency from late fall to early spring, when dearth was greatest and nights longest.

“The season chiefly for breaking into houses is during the winter, and long nights,” noted Daniel Defoe.

In the cant pidgin of habitual criminals, “a good darky” meant “a fit night for stealing.” Least desirable were nights when the “tattler” (moon) was up.

Even on moonlit evenings, towns offered thieves alleys, courts, and alcoves for shelter. “It was indeed a moonlight night,” testified the victim of an assault in 1732, “but I was robb’d on the dark side of the way.” On the Hampstead Road from London, a notorious spot for robberies, a band grabbed a man off his horse to assault behind a haycock, “because it was then a moon-light night.”25

Some murderers hoped to escape capture by consuming a meal from atop their victim’s corpse.

On a night in Venice, a young English lady suddenly heard a scream followed by a “curse, a splash and a gurgle,” as a body was dumped from a gondola into the Grand Canal. “Such midnight assassinations,” her escort explained, “are not uncommon here.” First light in Denmark revealed corpses floating in rivers and canals from the night before, just as bloated bodies littered the Tagus and the Seine. Parisian officials strung nets across the water just to retrieve corpses.

The Danish theologian Peder Palladius urged individuals to drink at home to prevent “anyone from killing you in a beer house and you from killing anyone else.”

Fire, a persistent threat after dark, terrified preindustrial populations even more than crime and violence. Not only were precautions weaker at night, but the need for heat and light was greater.

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.

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.

Burglars employed arson, hoping to disguise their crimes.

In Muzzle-Hill, outside London, a gang ignited a barn containing a large quantity of hay. As the frantic farmer and his family worked to extinguish the flames, the incendiaries stole money and goods from their home.

Fireside thefts were endemic, committed less often by arsonists than by onlookers nicknamed fire-priggers, notorious for stealing valuables on the pretense of helping distraught victims retrieve their belongings.

ACROSS THE preindustrial countryside, fortified cities and towns announced the advance of darkness by ringing bells, beating drums, or blowing horns from atop watchtowers, ramparts, and church steeples.

Three times, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to his great anxiety, found himself outside the barred gates of Geneva, a city without suburbs. Of one instance, he wrote, “About half a league from the city, I hear the retreat sounding; I hurry up; I hear the drum being beaten, so I run at full speed: I get there all out of breath, and perspiring; my heart is beating; from far away, I see the soldiers from their lookouts; I run, I scream with a choked voice. It was too late.”

Besides those whose demeanor, looks, or location made authorities wary, several groups were enjoined from circulating at night because of the perceptible threat they posed to public order. These included foreigners, beggars, and prostitutes. In Paris, beginning in 1516, vagrants found themselves at night tethered together in pairs, whereas in Geneva, they were expelled at sunset.

By 1150, merchants and artisans supplied men each night to keep watch in Paris. Within England, the Statute of Winchester in 1285 created the framework for regular watches in every city, town, and borough. The law decreed that officers patrol at night around the clock. Watchmen had the power to arrest suspicious wayfarers and, if necessary, to raise the community by “hue and cry.”

Typical, perhaps, of large towns and cities in England, York in the mid-1500s relied upon a force of six men for each of its wards, with patrols scheduled from 8:00 P.M. until 5:00 A.M.

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.

In Norway and Denmark, watchmen equipped themselves with a spiked mace called a morgenstern (morning-star).

Preindustrial towns also posted watchmen in church towers, ready to blow a horn or sound a bell upon the first glimpse of trouble. In the event of fire, a lantern might be hung on the side facing the blaze.

Along with announcing the weather, officers on foot cried the time. This was done every hour on the hour, in contrast to church bells that traditionally tolled at curfew and again at dawn.

The calls of the watch, chanted methodically throughout the night, beg an interesting question. To whom did officers address their cries? Who possibly could have been listening in the late hours of the evening?

As an ordinance explained in the Danish port of Helsingør, residents needed to know “how the night was passing.”

The irony of this was not lost upon contemporaries, accustomed to being awakened by paeans to sound slumber. “For though you lay you downe to sleepe, /” fumed an early seventeenth-century poet, “The Belman wakes your peace to keepe.” In the Danish play Masquerades (ca. 1723), by Ludvig Baron Holberg, the servant Henrich complains, “Every hour of the night they waken people out of their sleep by shouting to them that they hope they are sleeping well.”

Respectable pedestrians resented the authority of watchmen, who could seize “better men than themselves,” as a seventeenth-century writer complained.

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.

“By night,” affirmed the poet Edward Young, “an atheist half-believes a God.

High on the list of iniquities was “burning daylight,” resorting to artificial light unnecessarily during the day. Wasting candlelight was synonymous with extravagance and dissipation. Individuals thought naturally profligate, such as children, servants, and slaves, received special scrutiny.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

In the Down-country of southern England, villagers heaped mounds of chalky soil, known as “down-lanterns,” to mark routes through open fields. Heading south from Edinburgh in 1745, Alexander Carlyle and his brother traveled along the shoreline “as there was no moonlight . . . and the sands always lightsome when the sea is in ebb.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“What is more conducive to wisdom than the night?” asked St. Cyril of Jerusalem. For all of the opportunities that nighttime afforded for courting and companionship, it also permitted preindustrial folk unprecedented freedom to explore their own individuality.

History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders,