At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (15 page)

Accidental fatalities at night were a common hazard. Any strange noise or unfamiliar light put households on edge. In a Cumberland village, the son of a blacksmith was shot for a burglar after he whistled outside a home to signal a servant maid. When an aged man suffering from senility entered an unfamiliar house in Pontrefract, a maid shouted “thieves,” causing her master to “cut him in pieces” with a sword. Colonists in early New England were occasionally mistaken at night for Indians and shot.
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Watchdogs prowled inside and out. In the countryside, they did double duty, guarding against thieves as well as predators. “Bandogs,” for their ferocity, were chained during the day. According to William Harrison, the mastiff, or “master-thief,” received its name for its prowess against intruders. Dogs everywhere were prized for their vigilance, from the feared Kalmuk dogs in southern Russia to rural France, where the nineteenth-century author George Sand observed that even the meanest peasant possessed one. It was the rare night that early modern villages did not echo with sporadic barking. Failing to find shelter late one evening, a traveler in rural Scotland lamented, “None made reply but their dogs, the chief of their family.” In towns and cities, dogs guarded shops as well as homes. In Harp-Alley, a London brazier kept “a crass, crabbed” mutt that barely tolerated customers in the day, “much less in the evening,” according to a wary neighbor.
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Thomas Rowlandson,
Housebreakers
, 1788.

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. Harrison suggested a “huge dog, stubborn, ugly, eager, burdenous of body (and therefore of but little swiftness), terrible and fearful to behold.” All the better, commentators agreed, if the dog was black, so that it could surprise a thief in the dark. A watchdog’s worth lay in its bark as much as its bite. Owners, just from the pitch and intensity of their dog’s bark, could determine the presence of an intruder. In England, these dogs were called “warners” or “watchers.” Equally important was their value as a deterrent. “Whenever I went upon any such expedition, we immediately desisted upon the barking of a dog, as judging the house was alarm’d,” one burglar claimed. The Florentine Leon Battista Alberti urged in the mid-1400s that not just dogs but also geese patrol inside homes—“one wakes the other and calls out the whole crowd, and so the household is always safe.” Experienced thieves poisoned watchdogs, but such efforts were fraught with risk. In London, an impatient burglar, after throwing poisoned food over a wall, entered the property too quickly and was badly mauled.
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III

To whom but night belong enchantments?

THOMAS CAMPION,
1607
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Thus the array of common-sense measures families adopted to protect their homes from intruders: locks, dogs, and weapons. Across the social spectrum, defenses varied more in degree than in kind, with most households, however modest, taking steps to safeguard lives and property. In addition to these rudimentary precautions, a family’s religious faith provided an important sense of security. While many households remained ignorant of basic tenets of Christian theology, God to most believers was not a lifeless abstraction confined, in word and deed, to the impersonal pages of scripture. For Protestants and Catholics alike, his presence affected every sphere of daily existence, including one’s physical and mental well-being. “Were it not for the providence of God,” asked Sarah Cowper, “what security have we?”
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Seldom was God’s protection more valued than at night. Dangers were greater and less predictable. The venerable salutation “good night” derived from “God give you good night.” “By night,” affirmed the poet Edward Young, “an atheist half-believes a God.” Locks and latches, by themselves, afforded little protection from Satan’s minions. Special prayers existed not only for bedtime but also for sunset and evening. Of his Lutheran childhood in Germany, Jean Paul recalled that his family, “at the toll of the evening bell,” joined hands in a circle to sing the hymn, “The Gloom of Night with Might Descends.” With hosts of angels at his command, God, in his infinite mercy, kept night’s terrors at bay. A seventeenth-century meditation “for the night season” implored “that thy guardian angel may both guide and protect thee.” A French priest advised, “Upon hearing any strange noise or crack in a house let us fervently recommend ourselves to God.”
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Preindustrial families also embraced the occult. Beliefs and practices that religious authorities increasingly condemned as superstition, much of the laity viewed more benignly. Rather than rivaling God’s word, folk magic equipped ordinary men and women with an additional means of combating Satan’s wiles. On a practical level, there was no contradiction in most eyes between faith and the occult. Amulets rested side-by-side with crucifixes, both prized for their protective powers. In one Irish household, an early eighteenth-century poem described:

St. Bridget’s cross hung over door,

Which did the house from fire secure . . .

And tho’ the dogs and servants slept,

By Bridget’s care the house was kept.

Directly under Bridget’s cross

Was firmly nail’d the shoe of horse

On threshold, that the house might be

From witches, thieves, and devils free.
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Popular magic lay rooted in centuries of rural tradition. Every generation inherited from its forbears an ancient faith in the importance of supernatural beliefs and practices. “Transmitted down from one generation to another,” a minister in Scotland observed. Specialized knowledge of magical spells came from conjurers who inhabited premodern communities—“white witches” and “cunning” men and women, including
kloka
gubbarna
and
visa käringarna
in Sweden,
saludadores
in Spain, and giravoli in Sicily. Often, it was their intimate mastery of magic that enabled neighbors to manipulate supernatural forces. In 1575, a German clergyman reported from Neudrossenfeld, “Magic and recourse to soothsayers have become very common on account of theft, and it follows from this that many use magic in times of illness, and bring those soothsayers to themselves.” Unlike “black witchcraft,” practiced to inflict harm, “white witchcraft” was beneficent—“mischievously good” in the words of John Dryden. Within England, much to the annoyance of church authorities, conjurers likely equaled parish clergy in number. Of his Lutheran parishioners, a German pastor despaired, “They hold such people in their hearts as a God.”
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Foremost in a household’s battery were “night-spells.” Containing both Christian and occult elements, these guarded homes, livestock, and crops from thieves, fire, and evil spirits. An English verse implored, “From elves, hobs, and fairies, / That trouble our dairies, / From fire-drakes and fiends, / And such as the devil sends, / Defend us, good Heaven!”
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Similar in purpose were amulets, ranging from horse skulls to jugs known as “witch-bottles,” which typically held an assortment of magical items. Contents salvaged from excavated jugs have included pins, nails, human hair, and dried urine. Highly valued everywhere were amulets fashioned from iron, long preferred for its magical properties over bronze or stone. Hung to ward off evil spirits, horseshoes were common throughout Europe and early America. “Naile a horse shoo at the inside of the outmost threshold of your house,” instructed Reginald Scot in 1584, “and so you shall be sure no witch shall have power to enter.”
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Among slaves in the British West Indies, the use of amulets, or possets and fetishes, was routine. Of West African origin, they included an assortment of broken glass, blood, alligators’ teeth, and rum, hung by a hut or garden to frighten evil spirits and thieves, who, according to a traveler, “tremble at the very sight.” An estate manager on St. Kitts wrote in 1764, “Their sable country daemons they defy, / Who fearful haunt them at the midnight hour.”
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Just as families fortified doors and windows against burglars, so too were objects with supernatural powers placed by household entrances. Small crosses, holy water, and consecrated candles, ashes, and incense all offered spiritual protection. “I put the cross on the windows, on the doors, on the chimney,” declared a Slavic verse. Although Protestant clerics in the wake of the Reformation disdained sacramentals, many households continued to employ them. Common, too, in parts of Europe was the practice of placing on doors religious icons and inscriptions beseeching God’s care. “O Lord,” began a verse in the Danish town of Kolding, “if you will preserve our house and keep it from all danger and fear. . . .” Remarked a traveler to Switzerland, “Here as in Germany they have verses or texts of Scripture on the front of their homes.” Customary outside Jewish homes were mezuzas, encased scrolls of biblical verse affixed to doorposts.
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Other objects were less orthodox but no less popular. Even the gateposts fronting the home of Reverend Samuel Sewall bore the traditional safeguard of two “cherubims heads.” Besides horseshoes, doors bore wolves’ heads and olive branches. To keep demons from descending chimneys, suspending the heart of a bullock or pig over the hearth, preferably stuck with pins and thorns, was a ritual precaution in western England. In Somerset, the shriveled hearts of more than fifty pigs were discovered in a single fireplace. Favored along the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire were flat oolite stones known as “witch-steeans” that inhabitants tied to the door-keys of their cottages; whereas in Swabia, for protection from fire, families were urged to bury beneath their thresholds the stomach of a black hen, an egg laid on Maundy Thursday, and a shirt soaked in the menstrual blood of a virgin, all bound with wax.
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For ordinary folk confronting an uncertain cosmos, the occult formed a potent part of their lives. If nothing else, the existence of supernatural forces provided another way to understand life’s misfortunes—to render more comprehensible the frightening uncertainties of everyday existence. Confessed John Trenchard, author in 1709 of
The Natural History of Superstition
, “Nature in many circumstances seems to work by a sort of secret magick, and by ways unaccountable to us.” While religion furnished, in the words of Keith Thomas, “a comprehensive view of the world,” magic’s role was more circumscribed. Despite a grassroots belief in fairies, there is no evidence, at least in England, to suggest the actual worship of pagan deities or spirits. Instead, magic was confined largely to concrete problems and their resolution. If the occult did not address life’s greatest mysteries, it nonetheless made ordinary life more susceptible to human control—especially in the hours after sunset when the world seemed most threatening.
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IV

When the absence of the moon, or the thickness of the air, takes from us the light we stand in need of, we are always masters of procuring it to ourselves.

“OF THE NIGHT,”
1751
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