Goings-on after sunset
Raymond Carr
AT DAY’S CLOSE: A HISTORY OF NIGHTTIME by A. Roger Ekirch Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 447, ISBN 0297829928 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 After 20 years of hard labour Professor Ekirch has produced an absorbing social history of nighttime in pre-industrial society from the Balkans to the British colonies of North America. His vast accumulation of quotations from diverse sources — he has employed ‘a legion of translators’ — threatens, at times, to overwhelm the reader, but they are linked together in a narrative of clear prose.
Nighttime for our ancestors 300 years ago had a significance and an importance we have lost. ‘Rather than a backdrop to daily existence, or a natural hiatus,’ Ekirch writes, ‘nighttime in the early modern age instead embodies a distinct culture, with many of its own rituals and customs.’ Called ‘night season’ it was, as the poet John Gay put it, ‘an alternative reign’.
It was the reign of fears we do not experience. It was the realm of Satan and his demons; every village had its churchyard ghosts and tales of witches’ sabbaths. Darkness was the cloak of violence; in towns violence was ten times more frequent than it is today. Hobbes, ever the realist, confessed not to ‘be affrayed of sprights’ but of being ‘knocked over the head for five or ten pounds’. Three quarters of thefts occurred after dark. Men of property hurried home while it was still daylight barricading their houses against intruders of the lower orders. Shooting a burglar was, in law, a legitimate act of self-defence. Nightwatchmen were no protection in keeping undesirables off the streets and were universally despised as infirm cowards; a Portsmouth constable who accosted a suspicious night wanderer was told ‘to kiss his arse’.
Apprentices were 12 per cent of the population of London. Confined at work by day, they found ‘liberty’ at night. In street gangs they not only roughed up the well-dressed but engaged in the kind of gang warfare which now afflicts California, New York and London’s East End. Gang rapes were common in Dijon. The violence of the poor and dispossessed was fuelled by heavy drinking, especially in northern Europe; the enormous quantities of beer drunk gave them the calories their limited diet could not. It was not only the poor and wretched who were violent in despair, robbing at night as vengeance for the labour that had been robbed from them in daytime. Aristocratic rowdies ‘after drinking away their brains and pissing away their estates’ roamed the streets looking for a dust-up. Pepys discovered young blades at night dancing with naked prostitutes.
If nighttime brought fears of burglars and fires — Tiverton was burnt twice in the 18th century — the semi-darkness of candles and rushlights also encouraged sociability by generating ‘an intimate atmosphere in which words of affection flowed more freely’. To save expensive firewood, women gathered together in spinning bees; young boys and girls were allowed, under strict supervision and fully clothed, to ‘bundle’ in beds. For male sociability there was one alehouse for every 140 inhabitants. In my boyhood the farmers of north Devon gathered in the local alehouse to play brag; worse for wear they tumbled out, flinging the reins on their horses’ necks to be guided home in the darkness.
It was not only that nighttime and darkness loomed large in the imagination and life of our ancestors. While we think of sleep as a seamless process, Ekirch shows how they enjoyed ‘segmented sleep’: going to bed at around nine at night for what they called their ‘first sleep’, they awoke around midnight for a period of wakefulness. Thieves might get up to steal; sober citizens might indulge in pillow talk, read, pray or make love. Pepys’ wife touched her husband’s penis to see if he was indulging in sexual fantasies. Like Tolstoy he could not be trusted not to fall on an available female domestic.
By the end of the 18th century a Parisian could write, ‘The Reign of Night is finally going to end.’ By 1823, 40,000 gas lamps lit 200 miles of London’s streets. For the men of the Enlightenment, ‘we experience every day that, as science and learning increase, the vulgar notions of spirits and apparitions and witches and demons decrease and die of themselves’. The night air was not the noxious vapour of old but ‘sweet and refreshing’. Hitherto it had been only aristocrats who could stage masquerades lit by thousands of wax candles: later they became commercialised and open to anyone who could buy a ticket. ‘If this light is not put a stop to,’ a lady of the night exclaims in a Rowlandson cartoon, ‘we might as well shut up shop.’ In fact a better class of tart flourished in Shepherd Market and Stratton Street where the customer could inspect his wares in a stronger light.
This silent revolution in the towns left the countryside in darkness. People still stumbled home as in Parson Woodforde’s day, relying on other senses than sight — the barking of dogs or the feel for a gap in the hedge; all this is splendidly described by Ekirch. At home in my childhood, with the rest of the room in obscurity, we sat round the table lit by an oil lamp playing patience or cribbage, and ending the evening with reading the daily prescribed text of the Bible. Such nightly gatherings were a favourite subject of Dutch painters of the 17th century. Going to bed while the candle cast grotesque shadows on the wall gave me the night fears that affect children after the age of two. When in 1929 we moved to a village with electric light, with a pull on a string the whole room was lit up and my fears vanished. The silent revolution had reached Hardy’s Egdon Heath and Blackmore’s Exmoor.
If for me, as a survivor from a pre-industrial English countryside, this book was a remembrance of things past, for younger readers it will be a wonderful revelation of a vanished age of darkness.
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