At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (29 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE COMMON BENEFACTRESS:
SOCIABILITY, SEX,
AND SOLITUDE

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Night is the common benefactress of every thing that breathes; it is during her reign the greatest share of happiness is spread over the earth.

LOUIS-SÉBASTIEN MERCIER,
1788
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N
OT EVERY EVENING
, of course, fell prey to work, even for the toiling classes. Along with more affluent families, ordinary folk embraced idle hours as a time to do as they pleased. ’Twas a worker’s reward, declared a sixteenth-century ballad, “to spend at the night, in joy and delight, now after his labours all day.” The better part of many evenings, especially for males, was devoted to recreation and leisure. “The gods have established a respite from heavy labor,” affirmed a Dutch writer.
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If our modern concept of leisure had yet to evolve in the preindustrial age, traditional notions of “ease,” “pleasure,” and “play” were common among all social ranks. In his diary, the Suffolk farmer William Coe routinely recorded nights spent at “play.” “Set up ’till midnight att play,” he entered on four different occasions in January 1694. While, in the course of a day, urban and rural workers suspended their tasks for meals and rest, these respites were generally brief, particularly for laborers who answered to a master or employer. Along with Sundays and holidays, nighttime, by contrast, afforded a prolonged period of relaxation for personal enjoyment. Hence the gleeful refrain in a seventeenth-century masque staged by the Grocers’ Company of London, “We labour all day, but we frollick at night / With smoaking and joking, and tricks of delight.”
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Of course, some laborers must have collapsed after returning home, barely able from numbing fatigue to consume an evening meal, especially in rural regions during the summer when fieldwork grew most strenuous. In southern Wiltshire, complained John Aubrey, workers, “being weary after hard labour” lacked “leisure to read and contemplate of religion, but goe to bed to their rest.” A doctor in the Haute-Loire in 1777 described peasants “returning home in the evening, harassed by weariness and misery.”
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Still, for most persons, nighttime represented more than a dormant interlude between working hours. In spite of myriad perils, it was night, not morning, not afternoon, that was valued most.

Popular among middle-class families were cards, dice, and other games of chance. In Sussex, Thomas Turner and his wife favored whist, brag, and cribbage, whereas Parson Woodforde frequently played backgammon. Of winning two shillings at quadrille, he vouched, “We were very merry tonight & kept it up late.” Drink was common. “Not one of us went to bed sober,” Turner remarked after a night’s frolic with friends. Of another evening, he observed, “We continued drinking like horses (as the vulgar phrase is) and singing till many of us was very drunk, and then we went to dancing and pulling off wigs, caps, and hats. And there we continued in this frantic manner (behaving more like mad people than they that profess the name of Christians).” In early New England, where local officials took particular offense at such behavior, court records are strewn with prosecutions for tippling at “unseasonable times of night.”
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The detailed diary of the Dutch teacher David Beck throws light upon middle-class sociability in The Hague during the early seventeenth century. To judge from his observations, urban families and friends frequently visited one another on moonlit evenings. Recently widowed, Beck may have been unusually peripatetic, but he was far from unique among his married acquaintances. The web of his nocturnal relationships was extensive. In addition to his brother Hendrick, an uncle, and both his mother and mother-in-law, Beck socialized with numerous friends, including a swordmaker who invited him one January evening to “a festive dinner on the occasion of slaughtering time.” In spite of the occasional street stabbing or fire, nights brimmed with late meals, humorous tales, music, and fireside conversations “about a thousand things.” Wine and beer flowed freely. “Talking and warming ourselves together,” he wrote of a November evening filled with “good cheer” at his brother’s home. A few nights later, Beck joined a small company at his tailor’s, “singing, dancing, playing the lute, and jumping like the unruly children in The Hague.” Not until 2:00
A.M.
did he leave, “very drunk.”
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Comparable in many respects was the social world of Samuel Pepys in Restoration London. Intimates were more genteel, and Pepys was more cosmopolitan than Beck in his tastes. Otherwise, many of their pastimes were similar. When not working late in the Naval Office or engaging in a tryst, Pepys devoted nights to cardplay, drinking, meals, and music, both at home and abroad. “Sat playing at cards after supper, till 12 at night; and so by moonshine home and to bed,” he wrote in January 1662. Another evening found him in his garden with Sir William Penn, the Navy Commissioner, both indifferent to the night air. “There we stayed talking and singing and drinking of great draughts of clarret and eating botargo and bread and butter till 12 at night, it being moonshine. And so to bed—very near fuddled.”
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Scores of preindustrial folk flocked to alehouses. In communities large and small, they represented important hubs of social activity for men. Patrons gathered in the evening to tell jokes, play games, and swap news, most seeking a warm sanctuary from work, family, and everyday cares. Unlike inns, which supplied tired travelers overnight accommodation with food and wine, alehouses offered men a meeting place with material comforts often superior to those at home. Continental drinking houses included the French cabaret, the
Wirthaus
in Germany, and the Spanish
venta
. Although spare, alehouse furnishings included chairs and tables along with an oversized hearth. Some interiors contained wood partitions for a measure of privacy. In England, during the decades following the Reformation, the popularity of drinking houses grew as traditional sources of popular entertainment declined, both sporting contests and religious festivals. “I have never seen more taverns and ale-houses in my whole life than in London,” marveled Thomas Platter. Writing of the late sixteenth century, Richard Rawlidge remarked in 1628:

When what the people generally were forbidden their old and ancient familiar meetings and sportings, what then followed? Why, sure ale-house haunting: . . . so that the people would have meetings, either publicely with pastimes abroad, or else privately in drunken alehouses. . . . The preachers did then reprove dailliance, and dancings of maides and young men together; but now they have more cause to reprove drunkennesse and whoring, that is done privately in ale-houses.
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For the most part, alehouses catered to the lower orders, whereas inns and taverns attracted a wealthier clientele. Merchants, yeomen, and substantial craftsmen graced alehouse doors, but most patrons hailed from the ranks of husbandmen, journeymen, servants, and other members of the laboring poor. Customers were single as well as married, both young and middle-aged. According to detailed studies of drinking houses in London, Paris, and Augsburg, evenings drew the largest numbers. And where visits during the day, between one’s working hours, were usually brief, those at night could last several hours or more. A French visitor to London noted during the early 1660s, “A taylor and a shoemaker, let his business be never so urgent, will leave his work, and go to drink in the evening,” “oftentimes” coming “home late.” In the
London Chronicle
, a correspondent condemned the “stupid amusement of guzzling at an alehouse three or four hours in an evening.” Immediate gratification came from imbibing ale and hopped beer, or wine across much of continental Europe. Declared a seventeenth-century Polish poet: “Our lords are a great woe to us, / They fleece us almost like sheep. / You can never sit in peace, / unless you forget the bad things / over a mug of beer.” Important, too, for peasants was the nutritional value of these beverages, “without which they cannot well subsist, their food being for the most part of such things as afford little or bad nourishment,” claimed a writer. Safer to drink than either water or milk, beer and ale were also a source of warmth—“the warmest lining of a naked man’s coat,” professed John Taylor the Water-Poet.
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Jan Steen,
The Ace of Hearts
, seventeenth century.

Equally inviting was the opportunity for good fellowship among one’s peers—rubbing elbows and sharing draughts with men of the “right kidney.” “Good drunken company is their delight; what they get by day, they spend by night,” opined Daniel Defoe. In colonial Massachusetts, John Adams attributed the prevalence of taverns to “poor country people, who are tired with labour and hanker after company.” Toasting one another’s health, playing dominoes and cards, or passing a pipe of tobacco in a crowded tippling-house reinforced male companionship. As did ballads and drinking contests. As the song “Good Ale for My Money” had it, “A good coal fire is their desire, / whereby to sit and parley; / They’ll drink their ale, and tell a tale, / and go home in the morning early.” Common were mutual laments over domestic squabbles—“railing at matrimony,” one observer recounted. Once tongues loosened, masters, clerics, and landlords, all were fair game. “Rant and carouse, damn and drink all in a breath,” remarked a contemporary. There were also displays of fortitude and strength, critical to masculine standing and self-worth. Hence the nickname
Frappe-d’abord
(First-strike) earned by a French journeyman. In England, a person described a group of regulars addicted to the “noble art of boxing”—“shewing their own skill,” he related, “by clenching their fists, putting themselves in a posture of defence, with
here
I could have you, and
there
I could have you.”
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Alehouses also spawned sexual encounters. Although fewer, female patrons represented a mix of maidservants, aging “wenches,” and prostitutes. “A little Sodom,” pronounced a writer. (In provincial Massachusetts, taverns bore a similar reputation. Adams complained in 1761, “Here diseases, vicious habits, bastards and legislators are frequently begotten.”) Within these cramped, ill-lit environs, men and women drank, flirted, and fondled, as depicted by Jan Steen, Adriaen van Ostade, and other northern European artists. An English critic in 1628 urged the removal of partitions to prevent sexual play. And, too, court records divulge that couples copulated in nearby lofts and privies. In temperate weather, adjacent yards supplied convenient spots in the dark. Even neighboring churchyards were used for sexual intercourse. Sarah Badrett of Chester, for example, was allegedly “caught whoring” in the yard of St. John’s Church, having just left “the inn of Widow Kirk.” Less discreet was an amorous pair, John Wilkinson and Ellen Laithwaite, inside a Wigan alehouse in 1694. After three hours of caressing one another (she “handling his prick and he had his hand on her placket”), John “had carnal knowledge” of Ellen against a wall. Usually such encounters were fleeting, with little prospect of courtship, much less matrimony. Alehouses, after all, were meant to be an alternative to domesticity. More than a few male suitors earned reputations for whispering false promises to young women. As a late seventeenth-century ballad described:

Sometimes to the tavern with Betty I go,

And like a true lover much kindness I show;

I kiss, nay I hug, and I cuddle her then,

And vow I will marry, but I know not when.
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II

Nothing is more tempting or contagious to the life of a young man, than the opportunity of night, the operation of wine, & the blandishments of a woman.

BACCHYLIDES, 5TH CENTURY B.C.
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