At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (13 page)

The watch’s cries might have served an additional purpose, directed instead at families asleep. If the frequent complaints of urban denizens are any indication, slumber in towns and cities was light and fitful, due, at least in part, to loudmouthed watchmen. 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.” (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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 sieze “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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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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.
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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 substitutes instead. Almost everywhere—on both sides of the Atlantic—this pattern seems to have rapidly taken hold. Nonetheless, the wages of watchmen remained meager. Many, by necessity, held daytime jobs. Numerous others, aged or infirm, depended upon alms for alternate income. “Decrepit,” “feeble,” and “worn-out” were among common descriptions. A Norwich court in 1676 attributed frequent fires to a shortage of “sober and substantial inhabitants” among the watch; whereas a London jury acquitted a burglar, for “the matter depending purely upon the watchman’s evidence,” he was thought “old and his sight dark.” At least a few members were adolescents. New York authorities warned against enlisting boys, apprentices, and servants; and Boston selectmen observed in 1662 that “the towne hath beene many times betrusted with a watche consistinge of youths.” Although constables occasionally came from the middling ranks of their communities, most members of the watch belonged to the lower orders—the “very dregs” of the “human race,” claimed a commentator. In Slovakian villages, widows are known to have served.
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It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of popular contempt for nightwatchmen. Neither their credentials nor their appearance inspired public confidence. These men were not the swashbuckling guards, resplendent in ruffles and silk, portrayed in Rembrandt’s famous painting of Captain Frans Banning Cocq’s militia company, later misnamed
The Nightwatch
. In the absence of uniforms, watchmen donned tattered hats and either cloaks or heavy coats to guard against the chill night air. Of a London watchman, a writer described, “He was covered with a long sooty garment, that descended to his ankles, and his waste was clasp’d close within a broad leathern girdle.” Sometimes, rags were wrapped like scarves about their heads. English officers were ridiculed for eating onions. These, wrote Thomas Dekker, “they account a medicine against the cold.” Most of all, it was the watch’s conduct that invited derision. They were frequently the butt of playwrights and poets. In
Much Ado About Nothing
(1600), Shakespeare reflected prevailing prejudices in his portrait of the constable Dogberry. Under his merry command, parish officers turned a willing backside to benches but a blind eye to thieves. “The most peaceable way for you,” instructs Dogberry, “if you do take a thief, is to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.”
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Some officers wisely desisted from enforcing unpopular laws at their neighbors’ expense, especially when infractions were minor. Thus the watch in Paris refrained from dispersing late-night revelers at a cabaret for they were “
honnêtes gens
.” Allegations of corruption were common—not just consorting with prostitutes but taking bribes and colluding with thieves. Citizens of the Swedish market town of Borgerne complained in 1483 that a constable routinely extorted coins at night from small boys and adolescents. A London author wrote of “constables going around their parishes and precincts to the several bawdy-houses to receive sufferance-money.” More often, members of the watch were faulted for negligence—napping, tippling, and shirking their rounds. As proof of their diligence in Geneva, officers were required to drop chestnuts into boxes along the route of their patrols. In England, the “Watch-mens Song” from the mid-seventeenth century lampooned:

Sing and rejoyce, the day is gone,

and the wholsome night appears,

In which the constable on throne

of trusty bench, doth with his peeres,

The comely watch-men sound of health,

sleep for the good ot’h Commonwealth.
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Anon.,
The Midnight Magistrate
, eighteenth century. Watchmen as monkeys delivering their charges to the constable at the watch-house.

Small wonder that watchmen, during rounds, suffered verbal and physical abuse. “Fowle words” and “ill language” some nights flowed freely. In Paris, derisory nicknames included
savetiers
(bunglers) and
tristes-à-pattes
(flatfeet). Told to return home late one evening, Joseph Phillpot retorted that the “constables of Portsmouth should kiss his arse.” Abuse of parish officers comprised a significant portion of assaults in seventeenth-century Essex, whereas in the Dalmatian port of Dubrovnik, even armed patrols fell prey to violence. In the Danish town of Naestved in 1635, two watchmen fled to the door of the mayor one night, rousing him in his nightshirt, after a troop of journeymen shoemakers, crying “Kill them, kill them,” attacked with knives. Fumed an English critic, “So little terror do our watchmen carry with them, that hardy thieves make a mere jest of ’em.”
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III

The law is not the same at morning and at night.

GEORGE HERBERT,
1651
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Night, the French legal scholar Jean Carbonnier mused, probably gave birth to the rule of law. Deeds of darkness, not daylight, spurred early communities to fix sanctions for personal misconduct. All the more ironic, declared Carbonnier, that by the late Middle Ages law at best exerted a faint influence at night. Edicts and ordinances became little more than dead letters. Indeed, until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, evening hours escaped legal oversight in both urban and rural areas—“
vide de droit
,” in Carbonnier’s elegant words. So frail were institutions and so immense were night’s dangers that authorities abdicated their civic responsibilities.
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