At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (16 page)

“All would be horror without candles,” stated a sixteenth-century religious meditation.
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Each evening, darkness itself, not merely the perils it unleashed, was pushed back within homes. With fire and fuel, men and women created for themselves small patches of light amid the blackness. Light, of course, had immense supernatural importance. Endowed with religious symbolism, it also possessed magical properties dating to pagan times. Sparks from a candle’s flame could bear enormous portent for the future. Peasants in Upper Languedoc punctuated their conversation by swearing oaths “by the fire” or “by the flame of the candle.” At night, such was light’s prophylactic appeal that in Germany a large house candle was lit to fend off evil spirits and storms, just as candles in Poland reputedly prevented the devil from frightening livestock. In parts of the British Isles, to guard against demons, persons “clipped,” or encircled, buildings and fields with lit tapers.
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Also common, naturally, for those who could afford the expense, was the practical use of candlelight to ward off thieves. Besides denying anonymity to burglars, artificial lighting signified human activity. With the windows of his parlor under repair, William Dyer of Bristol burned a candle all evening to deter “nightly depradators,” while Pepys, “to scare away thiefs,” ordered a candle lit in his dining room. In the Auvergne of France, so alarmed by crime were peasants in the mid-1700s that an official reported, “These men keep watch with a lamp burning all night, afraid of the approach of thieves.”
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Still, light’s principal value lay in expanding the borders of domestic space for work and sociability. During long winter evenings, the hearth furnished the greatest glow. Even in dwellings with more than a single room, it became the focus for evening life, combating the cold darkness with both heat and light. In Normandy, as late as the nineteenth century, the room containing a fireplace, even in large homes, was called “the room” or “the heated room.” Because of the hearth’s importance to domestic life, tax assessments were sometimes based on their number within a home. Chimney fireplaces first appeared in English dwellings in the thirteenth century, but not until the 1600s in many households did they eclipse the open central hearth, ringed either by stones or hardened clay. Despite the gradual spread of fireplaces to private chambers, the large majority of homes in England and France in the seventeenth century still contained just a single hearth. Most were constructed from stone or brick, though some rural chimneys were fashioned from timber and wattle and daub. Besides their cost, fireplaces were messy and dangerous. “It is easier to build two chimneys,” declared a proverb, “than to maintain one.” Fireplaces were also inefficient, with most of their heat escaping up the chimney until the eighteenth-century introduction of flues. Stoves offered a common alternative to the hearth in Germany, Eastern Europe, and parts of Scandinavia; beginning in the sixteenth century upper-class homes in England occasionally used them to burn coal. But, as a source of light, stoves were a dismal substitute for fireplaces.
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Anon.,
Clipping the Church,
nineteenth century.

Mending or “beating” a fire required patience and skill. Just igniting a small pile of kindling could be time-consuming. Before the nineteenth-century invention of “lucifer” or friction matches, the easiest solution was to borrow a burning brand or hot coal from a neighbor, taking care not to start a fire in transit. Otherwise, the alternative was to strike a piece of steel against flint to ignite a small quantity of tinder, typically linen, cotton, or soft paper wet by a solution of saltpeter. “No easy matter,” recollected a West Yorkshire native of the difficulty, especially when attempted in the dark. Iron or ceramic firedogs (andirons) helped to assure enough oxygen. Once lit, fires burned best at a slow and steady pace, unless cooking required a “high” blaze. “The French readily say that fire keeps company,” noted a German, “because they spend much time making it.”
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Fuels varied widely depending upon local resources. Throughout Europe and early America, wood was a popular source of heat, particularly hardwoods like oak, beech, and ash that gave off the most warmth. A typical household required from one to two tons of wood per year. Brush provided faggots for kindling, as did, each fall, cuttings from vineyards in winemaking regions of the Continent.
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Another popular fuel in England was bituminous or “pit” coal, which boasted a higher caloric value (6.9) than wood (3.5) and required less maintenance. Most prized, from northern England and Wales, was “candle coal,” a form of bituminous coal that burned with a brilliant flame and emitted little smoke. Such was its radiance, commented a visitor, that “in winter time poor people buy it to serve instead of candles.” Owing to their expanding size and distance from woodland areas, London and other large cities grew ever dependent upon supplies of coal.
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For heat, the preindustrial poor relied upon anything and everything, ranging from such shrubs as heather, furze, and gorse to dried seaweed in coastal areas (its use on the Scottish island of Eriskay imparted a pungent flavor to baked bread). Along England’s Dorset coast, popular were pieces of shale impregnated with enough oil for a good blaze.
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Widely used in West Country moorlands and other woodless regions was peat or turf, cut in slabs from the ground with spades and stacked in large piles to dry and harden. Easily kindled, peat fires required less care than wood but burned more quickly than coal. They emitted a very strong smell along with abundant smoke. On the other hand, extensive deposits existed not only in England but also in Ireland, Scotland, and the Netherlands. In Ireland, where all classes employed this fossil fuel, fully one-seventh of the land area reputedly consisted of peat bogs. According to a minister in the Scottish community of Tongue, peat afforded “a strong, though not a clear light” used “instead of candles.” A traveler to Scotland in 1699 claimed, “In some parts where turf is p[1]entiful, they build up little cabbins thereof . . . without a stick of timber in it; when the house is dry enough to burn, it serves them for fuel and they remove to another.”
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Finally, in place of costlier alternatives, the lower orders burned cow, oxen, and horse dung. Demand, naturally, increased in the winter when temperatures plummeted and peat fell in short supply. Widely available, dung was kneaded with straw or sawdust, patted into cakes, and piled next to homes to dry. “Dithes,” they were called in Lincolnshire, where, a resident reported, “The cows shit fire.” Despite a sharp odor when burned, dung generated more heat than did wood. In the Cambridgeshire town of Peterborough in 1698, Celia Fiennes noted, “The country people use little else in these parts.” A century later, a set of travelers—in Cornwall and Devon—was followed by “an old woman hobbling after” their “horses in hopes of a little fuel.”
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Whatever the source of domestic heat, hearths gave off limited light, confined to a radius of several feet. Usually, just the meanest hovels depended entirely for light upon a fire, located in the center of the dwelling. Forced to take shelter with a poor family, the Birmingham traveler William Hutton recounted, “I was now in a room ten feet square, dignified with the name of
house
, totally dark, except a glow of fire, which would barely have roasted a potato.” The absence of subsidiary lighting inside a home invited derision and contempt, as jokes contained in chapbooks reflected—thus, the story of Leper the Tailor, who boarded overnight in the farmhouse of a penurious Scotswoman. Denied a decent bed, he was forced to sleep on the floor, only to discover that she had mistakenly placed his pile of straw atop a slumbering calf, so dim was the light. Leper had his revenge when, to the shame of his hostess, the “bed” moved next to the hearth.
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A broad spectrum of illuminants in early modern communities afforded light. All, in spite of their diversity, relied upon the common medium of fire; not until the twentieth century would most Western households turn to a radically different technology in the form of electricity. Apart from the hearth, there were really just three basic types of preindustrial lighting, none of which had essentially changed in over a thousand years. Most widespread were candles, a form of solid fuel whereby a wick was encased in wax or animal fat; and lamps, in which oil was drawn through a wick from a small receptacle. In fact, the top of a candle really functioned as a small lamp, with the wick mounted in a pool of oil. Cruder in form than either candles or lamps were resinous splinters of wood called candlewood, which burned with a steady flame.
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Candles predominated in the English-speaking world and throughout much of northern Europe, especially among the propertied classes. Common sayings reflected their ubiquity, such as “burning a candle at both ends” and “holding a candle to the devil.”
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Introduced by the Phoenicians, the beeswax candle first became popular among European aristocrats during the late Middle Ages. Renowned for its pleasant odor and clear flame, it was long favored by genteel households. According to the
Boke of Curtasye
(ca. 1477–1478), it was the chandler’s duty to see that “in the chamber no light there shall be burned but of wax.” Such was the extravagance of the court of Louis XIV that used candles were never relit. Of comparable quality, with the rise of whale hunting in the North Atlantic during the early eighteenth century, were spermaceti candles, fashioned from a rose-colored liquid wax found in the head of sperm whales—thus the mission of Captain Ahab’s vessel, the
Pequod
, in
Moby-Dick
(1851). Such illuminants were costly. Prices fluctuated over time, but never did wax or spermaceti candles become widely accessible. To light and heat the palatial home of the Marquis de la Borde, a wealthy Parisian financier, Horace Walpole in 1765 estimated an annual expense of more than 28,000 livres.
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Thomas Frye,
Young Man Holding a Candle
, eighteenth century.

Tallow candles, by contrast, offered a less expensive alternative. The mainstay of many families, their shaft consisted of animal fat, preferably rendered from mutton that was sometimes mixed with beef tallow. (Hog fat, which emitted a thick black smoke, did not burn nearly as well, though early Americans were known to employ bear and deer fat.) Among other rural chores reserved for fall, Thomas Tusser advised, “Provide for thy tallow, ere frost cometh in, and make thine wone candle, ere winter begin.” Unlike wax or spermaceti candles, however, those made from tallow gave off a rancid smell from impurities in the fat. Describes Shakespeare in
Cymbeline
(ca. 1609), “Base and unlustrous as the smoky light that’s fed with stinking tallow.” As tallow candles burned, the quality of their light deteriorated. They also required continual attention to avoid wasting the fat. Unless “snuffed” (trimmed) every fifteen minutes, the fallen remains of the cloth wick could create a “gutter” of molten fat down one side of the candle. Charred bits of wick, known as “snot,” posed a fire hazard, depending upon where they landed. And tallow candles required careful storage so that they would neither melt nor fall prey to hungry rodents. Still, despite such drawbacks, even aristocratic households depended upon them for rudimentary needs. At the country estate of Castletown, home to Ireland’s richest man, Thomas Connolly, some 2,127 pounds of tallow supplied candles in the single year 1787, compared to the family’s consumption of 250 pounds of beeswax candles, reserved for such formal spaces as the parlor and dining room.
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Only on special occasions did wax candles light bourgeois homes. Of a friend’s festive dinner, the Norfolk parson James Woodforde recorded, “Mr. Mellish treated very handsomely indeed. Wax candles in the evening.” Similarly, Woodforde noted, one Christmas, briefly burning his “old wax-candle.” “It is almost finished, it might last for once more.”
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Further complicating the use of both wax and tallow candles in England were the taxes levied on each, at least during the eighteenth century. At the same time, making one’s own candles became illegal.
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