At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (39 page)

Not that every city, town, and village resounded at night with the triumphant cries of the lower orders. Many evenings found the typical laborer prostrate in bed, hoping for rest in preparation for another punishing day. Otherwise, drinking pints, courting, and raiding orchards always drew far greater numbers than exhibitions of mayhem and violence. In all likelihood, the midnight experience in 1600 of a servant and two friends in Essex, who, after a wedding, repaired to a neighbor’s wheat field to snare rabbits, was much more common. Similarly, of a Sunday evening, the Buckinghamshire farmworker Joseph Mayett recalled, “I set off down to the town where I met with a girl that had worked for my master in the haytime and stayed with her until nearly midnight when I left her in order to return home, but meeting with two more of my companions in vice we presently agreed to go and rob a pear tree.” That accomplished, Mayett returned to the orchard several nights later, only to flee after the arrival of other thieves.
61

William Hogarth,
The Idle ’Prentice Betrayed by a Prostitute
(pl. 9 of Industry and Idleness), 1747. The raucous interior of a night-cellar, which many watchmen wisely avoided, unlike those in the engraving. In addition to Tom Idle’s exchange of stolen merchandise, there are images of a brawl, a soldier urinating against a rear wall, and a corpse being dumped into the cellar, the victim of Tom’s villainy.

Despite the multiracial cast of some colonial bands, there was no unified counterculture at night. Dominating the landscape instead was a cluster of overlapping subcultures, some more cohesive than others. Certainly, few groups anywhere could match, in longevity or internal discipline, the formal youth groups that in France had a hand in fostering nocturnal disturbances; or, for that matter, the “night-kingdoms” of West Indian slaves, replete with monarchs, regiments, and flags. In 1805, an investigation uncovered a slave conspiracy in Trinidad plotted by several “kings,” each with his own courtiers and army.
62
Instead, most nocturnal gangs, grounded in casual associations, possessed neither distinctive ranks nor their own ceremonies. Unlike guilds, for example, there was no established hierarchy, uniform membership, or fixed code of behavior. This was only natural in light of the values they epitomized of personal autonomy and self-assertion. On the other hand, members shared common bonds of friendship. Vagabonds, roaming in small groups, typically referred to one another as “brethren” and “walk-fellows,” with some swearing “by their soul” never to betray a comrade. So strong was the “fraternall affection” uniting London apprentices, claimed a writer in 1647, that they instinctively followed the credo, “Knock him down, he wrongs a prentice.” And in Paris, when a young band of servants on a winter night in 1749 spied the city watch marching three soldiers to jail, one of the domestics exclaimed, “We’ve got to jump those bastards; we can’t let them haul off three good boys.” A nearby coachman, ready to join the fray, was barely restrained by his bourgeois master. Members of the lower orders shared familiar songs and slang as well as customary haunts and meeting places, which they routinely frequented at night, employing their mastery of the nocturnal terrain. A London newspaper spoke, for example, of “the dialect of the night-cellar.” Not only did reliance on “cant” strengthen social ties, but it also concealed conversations from one’s betters.
63

Most of all, these diverse subcultures shared common adversaries and a familiar vision of life, freedom from the constraints of the visible world and domineering masters of all sorts (adults, parents, employers, and owners)—a mentality that night reinforced and intensified by creating a coherent experience very different from daily life. According to an Italian proverb, “The dogs of Casaserro in the daytime, they are ready to kill one another, and in the night time, they go out a robbing together.”
64

IV

. . . In night all creatures sleep;

Only the malcontent, that ’gainst his fate

Repines and quarrels. . . .

JOHN MARSTON,
ca. 1600
65

Such, then, was the alternate realm inhabited by substantial segments of the early modern population on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. One can only speculate on the broader consequences this nocturnal universe had for the character of daily life, including whether its impact had any positive value from the perspective of the established order. It is after all true that some youth groups contributed to social control, disciplining adulterers, abusive husbands, and cuckolds for violating common morality. Often occurring at night,
charivaris
in France,
mattinata
in Italy, and “skimmington rides” in England subjected errant neighbors to “rough music,” mockery, and on occasion, physical abuse. Such traditional rituals helped to reaffirm the sanctity of marriage, which the young themselves expected one day to embrace. For the same reason, bachelors were known to battle adolescent bands from rival communities in order to protect the virginity of local maidens. And, too, gangs of apprentices sometimes razed houses of prostitution, prompting Charles II to inquire incredulously, “Why do they go to them then?”
66

Still, did these bands represent moral watchdogs or, more often perhaps, wolves in sheeps’ clothing? For there remains a strong possibility that such outbursts served as a frequent pretext for mischief, as the historian Daniel Fabre has remarked in noting the contradiction of “achieving order through disorder.” An early eighteenth-century poem, “
The Libertine
’s Choice,” suggested as much in recounting the drunken antics of the young when attacking brothels: “When thus well freighted with the chearful juice, / We’d sally forth and give our selves a loose, / Break brothel windows, scowre the crazy watch, / And with fresh mischiefs crown the nights debauch.”
Charivaris
, despite their conservative purpose, were condemned, beginning in the sixteenth century, by civil and religious leaders. Too often, from the authorities’ point of view, these “nocturnal assemblies” degenerated into riots. “Frequently there are brawls,” Felix Platter observed in France.
67
Further, the incidence of such popular rituals, however an expression of communal values, paled in comparison to the number of times bands voiced slogans and perpetrated violence diametrically opposed to the prevailing social order.

So, also, in the political realm, the threat of nighttime violence enforced conformity. In English and American cities, especially during the eighteenth century, street crowds celebrated military triumphs as well as more radical causes by compelling households to place lit candles in their windows—those that did not thus signal their solidarity risked having their homes pelted with rocks. Of anti-Irish mobs on a summer evening in London in 1736, an onlooker reported, “Late that night assembled many hundred disturbers of the peace, proclaiming thro’ the streets a law of their own making, viz.
that every Englishman should put out lights in their windows
; and then the cry run,
Down with the Irish
.” Whatever the source of agitation, the “mob,” rather than guardians of the law, controlled the streets after dark.
68

Perhaps, in the eyes of authorities, nighttime served the well-known function of a safety valve, a concept familiar to the age. Resigned to the human capacity for sin, proponents favored channeling mortal appetites in ways least harmful to the established order—hence the cathartic value of holidays for letting off steam. Argued a petitioner defending a Feast of Fools before the Paris Faculty of Theology in 1444: “Such a diversion is necessary, because folly, which is our second nature and seems inherent to man, can thus express itself at least once a year. Wine barrels will burst if one does not occasionally release the plug to give them some air.”
69
Customary in rural Britain were evening feasts held by farmers for laborers at the end of the yearly harvest. These “harvest suppers” were renown for generous offerings of food, drink, and good fellowship. According to Henry Bourne, “At this the servant and his master are alike, and every thing is done with an equal freedom.” But, of course, such occasions, considered all together, were fleeting respites whose provisional nature underscored the necessity to resume anew one’s normal life. As Henry Fielding noted in 1751, “The diversions of the people have been limited and restrained to certain seasons.” After Carnival followed the spartan regimen of Lent. Of harvest suppers, the Wiltshire poet Stephen Duck remarked, “The next morning soon reveals the cheat, / When the same toils we must again repeat.”
70

Night, by contrast, was neither a set piece of ritual license nor a temporary escape from reality. Instead, it represented an alternate reality for a substantial segment of the preindustrial population, a realm of its own that, at a minimum, implicitly challenged the institutions of the workaday world. As a resident of Maryland said of slaves, “Though you have them slaves all the day, they are not so in the night.” Nor were night’s excesses limited just to the hours of darkness. Aftershocks from an evening’s merriment reverberated past dawn. “The next morning,” noted a writer of the typical journeyman mechanic, “he is both too ill and too lazy for work.” William West, an apprentice to a London cutler, returning home from “bouts of revelry,” typically stank of drink and would “swear and curse and throw his tools away.” Stolen livestock and crops, besotted servants, weary slaves, broken fences and windows, not to mention assorted cuts, scrapes, and bruises, numbered among the inventory of damages that darkness bequeathed, lending force to the Elizabethan saying, “Midnight feastings are great wasters, / Servants’ riots undo masters.”
71

Superiors frequently expressed exasperation over their dependents’ revels. Complaints echoed across the Atlantic of “wicked” and “impudent” inferiors, as “bold” and “saucy” as they were “thievish.” One Leeds master, out of desperation, lashed his servant to a bed. Others took to locking doors with padlocks. John Clare, while a gardener’s apprentice, was confined each night to an outbuilding to prevent him from stealing fruit.
72
Nevertheless, inferiors regularly outwitted their masters, usually waiting until families had retired to bed. Many domestics had access to keys. Clare escaped out a window, stealing “every opportunity” to visit a nearby village for his “midnight revels.” Moreover, if laborers found their tenure too restrictive, they could elect in the future to serve another master, as many evidently did, “running from place to place,” fumed a critic. Upon hearing a friend bemoan his punishment for lying out all night, Richard Wilkinson retorted, “What need of that? There [are] more masters than parish churches.”
73

Slaves, of course, lacked that opportunity; still, they faced few obstacles at night if bent on escaping their quarters, which on plantations stood apart from the residences of owners and overseers. There was little that a master could do. Landon Carter, who generally resigned himself to their rambles, placed his slave Jimmy under surveillance one evening only because earlier protestations of lameness had kept him from working. “They that cannot work for me,” groused Carter, “cannot without great deceit walk 2 or 3 miles in the night.” George Washington, while president, attributed “the fatigue and drowsiness” of his slaves to “night-walking, and other practices which unfit them for the duties of the day.” An absentee planter, Washington expressed alarm over the extent of theft by his slaves, for which he blamed the nighttime “frolicking” of negligent overseers. Not until the nineteenth century would masters systematically spread ghost tales among slaves to deter their travels, with overseers impersonating spirits by donning white sheets.
74

The prevalence of nocturnal revelry also alarmed authorities. Whatever cathartic value nighttime once possessed increasingly diminished over time. Unlike isolated acts of crime, violence by roving bands raised fears of social disorder, especially when leading citizens were targeted for abuse—the affront to established authority exceeded only by their sense of personal injury. Some officials, to impose order, resorted to curfews not unlike medieval restrictions. Large towns and small enacted injunctions, with the young and dispossessed singled out for sanctions. During periodic rioting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London officials vainly tried to impose curfews on apprentices. In the city of Bratislava, officials during the early eighteenth century threatened paupers, Jews, and other “disorderly people” at night with military conscription. Meanwhile, American colonies up and down the eastern seaboard mandated that servants, slaves, free blacks, Indians, and adolescents all retire early to their homes, usually by nine o’clock.
75