At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (11 page)

Along with restrictions on weaponry, towns prohibited nocturnal disguises, including the use of visors and masks—employing a “false face,” in the words of an English law. Banned from time to time were hooded cloaks worn by women and oversized hats by men.
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Urban ordinances mandated that citizens, when abroad, bear a lantern, torch, or other “light” (not permitted were dark lanterns, possession of which in Rome could send one to prison). The main design was not to avert accidents. In Venice, in fact, members of the powerful governing body the Council of Ten were exempt from such restrictions. The purpose of these regulations, widespread throughout Europe, was, instead, to allow authorities to monitor citizens when the need for oversight was greatest. Seen from a short distance, the light from a lantern or flambeau might reveal an individual’s clothing and rank, if not their identity. Penalties for noncompliance were harsh. In Paris, not to carry a light risked a fine of ten sous, equivalent in the late fourteenth century to the price of sixty eighteen-ounce loaves of bread.
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Otherwise, artificial lighting was scarce on city streets, not to mention in rural villages. Apart from the moon and stars, lanterns outside private homes afforded the principal illumination. Containing a lit candle, these were metal cylinders with narrow slits for protection from the wind or transparent sheets made from animal horn (the sawn horns of slaughtered cattle were first soaked in water, then heated, flattened, and thinly sliced)—hence the vernacular spelling “lanthorn.” 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). Paris, at the behest of Louis XI (1423–1483), adopted a measure in 1461 ordering lanterns to hang in the windows of dwellings fronting major streets, thereafter known as
rues de la lanterne
; and in 1595 Amsterdam established a similar decree, though meant to apply to only one house out of every twelve.
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Outside metropolitan centers, municipal improvements proceeded more slowly. In England, it would be another hundred years before provincial towns took halting steps in the wake of London’s lead. In the early 1500s, for example, lanterns were required to be hung in York by aldermen and in Chester by the mayor, sheriff, and innkeepers. Bristol and Oxford, on the other hand, made no provisions for street lighting before the seventeenth century.
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Never were these maiden measures calculated to provide cities and towns with illumination each and every night. Most ordinances decreed that lanterns be displayed a few months a year, when winter nights grew longest, and only on evenings when the moon was “dark.” In London, lights were deemed unnecessary from the seventh night following each new moon until the second night after a full moon. More important, candles were not meant to burn overnight, but just to remain lit for several hours. Declared a watchman’s song:

A light here, maids, hang out your light,

And see your horns be clear and bright,

That so your candle clear may shine,

Continuing from six to nine;

That honest men may walk along

And see to pass safe without wrong.

Intended to guide families homeward, candlelight failed to provide consistent security for either pedestrians or households. Owing to the expense of lanterns and tallow candles, coupled with persistent threats of vandalism and theft, the compliance of homeowners was erratic. Wind and rain made even more difficult the maintenance of lanterns, whose light, at best, cast a faint glow.
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For the most part, streets remained dark. There were a few exceptions. In sudden emergencies, municipalities required families to furnish lighting, either by illuminating windows, setting bonfires, or placing candles outside doors. Residents of Danish towns, by law, had to repair outside, with candles and weapons in hand, to aid victims of violent crime. Fires mobilized households, as did military hostilities. In contrast to the use of urban blackouts in modern warfare, preindustrial cities required more, not less, lighting to mount defenses. One night in the early fifteenth century, the threat of a treasonous conspiracy in Paris caused an uproar “as if the city were full of Saracens,” with lanterns ordered lit by homeowners. Residents of Leeds, upon rumored fighting in a nearby town during the height of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, placed “thousands of lighted candles” in windows, as men prepared to march to their neighbors’ aid.
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Public celebrations also occasioned displays of light at night. Government authorities organized massive illuminations, including fireworks, in observance of royal births, marriages, and coronations, as well as in honor of military victories during wartime. When the King of France in 1499 captured the citadel of Milan, joyous residents of Florence lit bonfires and illuminated the city’s towers to the accompaniment of pealing bells. In 1654, at the urging of officials, citizens of Barcelona lit their homes for three straight nights to celebrate the end of the plague. “Even though this was a time when there was little wealth and much hardship,” noted a contemporary, “everyone made an effort to do what they could.” On ceremonial occasions in England, typically the windows of urban homes glowed with candlelight, normally in unison with bonfires and fireworks. In 1666, on the night of the king’s birthday, Samuel Pepys barely reached home because of numerous fires in London’s streets. At patriotic celebrations, dazzling illuminations, set against the blackness of night, inspired widespread awe. “The people,” averred the “Sun King” Louis XIV (1638–1715), “enjoy spectacles, at which we, in any event, endeavor always to please.” A later observer shrewdly remarked that their purpose was to “keep the people in the dark.”
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The Church, too, relied upon the power of pageantry. The centrality of light to Christian theology lent added force to sacred occasions, drawing attention to the presence of Christ and the Church’s continual struggle against darkness—a conflict as real as it was symbolic. After all, light, as John Milton wrote in
Paradise Lost
, was the “prime work of God.” To celebrate Christ, Pope Gelasius (d. 496) in the late fifth century established Candlemas, on which candles would thereafter be blessed every February 2. Illuminating the dark reaffirmed in dramatic fashion God’s dominion over the invisible world. Before the Reformation, all churches felt this imperative; but with the “stripping of the altars” in Protestant lands across Europe, the ornate use of candles and tapers invariably smacked of papist idolatry—“burning lampes, & lightes that alwaies flame / Before the Virgins image fayre,” ridiculed an English diatribe in 1553. Catholic sacraments continued to make extensive use of giant beeswax candles to illuminate church altars. White in color, the wax emitted little smoke and burned with a clear flame. Years later, James Boswell thought the candles, even unlit, gave “a clearer idea of heaven than any of the rites of the Church of England ever did.”
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Jean Le Pautre,
The 1674 Festival at Versailles Organized by Louis XIV to Celebrate the Re-conquest of the Franche-Comté
, seventeenth century.

It was at night that Catholics staged their most magnificent spectacles. More than any of the Protestant faiths, the Church of the Counter Reformation publicly proclaimed its nocturnal domain. Periodically, church bells assisted in this task, rung on both somber and festive occasions as well as during thunderstorms to frighten evil spirits. In the archdiocese of Salzburg, for example, church bells tolled all night during the summer solstice in 1623 because of fears of “devilish activities.”
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But light was the Catholic Church’s foremost weapon against darkness. Streets were strewn from one end to another with candles and paper lanterns to illuminate festivals. In seventeenth-century Germany, passion plays, organized every Good Friday by the Jesuits and the Capuchins, animated Catholic communities. In Spain on the Wednesday evening of Holy Week, processions, lit by candles with four wicks, passed in the streets as penitents were lashed before onlookers. Of a festival in the Sicilian town of Messina, a visitor noted in the early 1670s, “The streets are as lightsome almost by night as by day.” So remarkable was the display that the town could be seen for miles around. Cathedrals and churches formed the centerpiece of such spectacles, lit from top to bottom, as an onlooker described Rome’s Church of St. Mark one Christmas Eve. “A man would thincke it all on fire,” he exclaimed. “The illuminations are spectacular, like a scene from a fairyland,” pronounced Goethe—“one can hardly believe one’s eyes.”
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The prevalence of such extravagant exhibitions should not be overstated. Their splendor, after all, partially derived from their infrequency. Like Protestant faiths, the Catholic Church still viewed darkness, first and foremost, as a sacred time of solitude, prayer, and rest. When cardinals, upon the death of Paul III (1468–1549), approached Cardinal Pool at night to “adore” him as the new pope, he reportedly admonished them that “God lov’d light.” Turning them away, he urged that they wait until morning (they elected Julius III [1487–1555] instead). More common at night were less spectacular assertions of Catholic hegemony. In many parts of Europe, starting in the late Middle Ages, communities illuminated Madonnas next to streets and highways. Set in the walls of homes and churches, illuminated paintings of the Virgin Mary and other sacred images afforded the principal candlelight on urban streets. So rife were shrines on roads in the Low Countries, reported a contemporary, that “it is easier to find a god than a man.” In Spain, small chapels aglow with the light of a single candle dotted the countryside. Officials hoped that shrines, besides inspiring reverence, would inhibit blasphemous acts among passersby. The pious also valued them for warding off evil spirits. As late as the 1700s, Roman authorities, bent on preserving the darkness of night, still opposed alternate means of artificial illumination as a sacrilege against the divine order. “All Rome would be in utter darkness,” noted a visitor, “were it not for the candles which the devotion of individuals sometimes place before certain statues of the virgin.” Nearly as ill lit was Venice. Only in Naples, during the eighteenth century, did the Church sanction a more pragmatic stance. There, a popular Dominican known as Father Rocco encouraged the erection of Madonnas along common thoroughfares, with lamp oil supplied by his large following. “He fixes [them] up in the most convenient places, and thus turns their devotion to public account,” an observer remarked.
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Gabriel Bella,
The Good Friday Procession in Illuminated Saint Mark’s Square
, eighteenth century.

By that time, authorities elsewhere in Europe, in a growing number of cities and towns, had embraced the need for improved lighting. During the second half of the 1600s, large urban areas began taking steps to enhance lighting on major streets at public expense. The underlying reasons for this shift in official attitudes are not hard to find. Technological innovations were influential, particularly street lamps newly fashioned by Edmund Heming in London and Jan van der Heyden in Amsterdam, both of which contained reflectors to magnify light. Such was the popularity of van der Heyden’s oil lamps that their design was adopted in cities across Europe, including Cologne, Leipzig, and Berlin. As important as technology was the emergence of the early modern state, which accelerated the growth of government regulation. Commercialization and urban growth also played critical roles, as did the rising wealth of propertied households, coupled with expanding opportunities for entertainment, including drinking houses, gaming, and organized prostitution. Curfew restrictions, where they remained, were increasingly ignored—“not so much abolished as overwhelmed,” John Beattie has written of London. All of these transformations, converging in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, rendered less tolerable the “many mischiefs and inconveniences in the streets in the dark nights” about which authorities increasingly complained. “Most theft,” warned a Paris official in 1667, “has been done as a result of the darkness in districts and streets where there are no lanterns.” The following year, a proposal to light Amsterdam’s streets cited the perils of crime, fire, and accidental drownings.
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