At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (43 page)

However long this final phase of wakefulness, communal sleep afforded persons a trusted comrade in whom to confide on a level of intimacy rare for daytime relationships. “Most men,” wrote an essayist, “follow nature no longer than they are in their night-gowns,” whereas “all the busy part of the day they act in characters.” Conviviality among bedmates may help to explain the enigmatic expression “blanket fair,” which in Sheffield, among other parts of England, signified retiring to bed.
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Some bedfellows rarely bared their souls or ever displayed a “humour to discourse,” as a Dorsetshire falconer complained in explaining his own bedtime penchant for reading. But most relationships appear to have been tightly knit, with each typically referring to another as his “bedfellow” or “companion,” caring for him when sick, and sharing his secrets. Unable to attend school, the sixteenth-century apprentice Simon Forman “lerned by nighte” lessons from his bedmate Henry, who went to “free scole” during the day. In the Restoration tale
The Princess Cloria
(1661), the male character Locrinus expresses surprise that the politician Hercrombrotus spoke “with such loving and familiar language, as if that night I should have been his bed-fellow.” Solitary sleepers, by contrast, may have felt a keen personal loss, including persons of privilege. At seventy-one years of age, Lady Newport astounded her friend Sarah Cowper by coveting a parrot with which to converse alone in bed.
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Lying side by side in the dark, bedfellows proved more willing to transgress social mores. Male servants consigned to the same bed might engage in homosexual relations. Similarly, when male and female dependents in small households shared beds, illegitimate births often followed.
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Communal sleeping could even subvert relations between master and servant. However hierarchical and uncaring household relationships could be during the day, bedtime brought a frequent shift in tempers. In
The English Rogue
(1671), a mistress who usually shares her bed with a maidservant is “very free in all” her “discourse,” acquainting the servant “with all passages” involving her “sweet-hearts.” Less polite is the bedtime “match at farting” between mistress and maid described in the Restoration melody “She Went to Bed in the Dark.” Female domestics, when sleeping with their mistresses, afforded protection at night from abusive husbands. In short, as Thomas Yalden’s “Hymn To Darkness” allowed, “Though light distinction makes, thou giv’st equality.” The authors of a conduct book thought it necessary to remind bedfellows to defer to their superiors: “Any tyme that you schall lye with any man that is better than you, spyre hym what syde of the bedd that most best will ples hym.” Madame de Liancourt admonished her granddaughter never to share her bed with servants, which would be “contrary to the respect they owe you, and goes against cleanliness and decency.”
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Most altered in bed were bonds between husband and wife. Rarely was the potential so promising for physical and emotional intimacy. As in their daily behavior, some men remained insensitive—abusive, selfish, and deaf to their wives’ entreaties. Sylvia in
The Atheist
(1684) condemns the typical husband as “heavy and useless, comes faint and loth to bed, turns him about, grunts, snores.” Still, less fortunate was Mary Arthur, of Massachusetts, who in 1754 was “kick’t” by her husband out of bed with such violence that a lodger elsewhere in the house feared a passing earthquake.
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But often, having been apart much of the day, couples found time abed for quiet conversation, games, and sexual pleasure. Pillow talk included events of the day or yet more pressing matters. In “The Second Nun’s Tale” of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, the maiden Cecilia says to her husband, “O my sweet husband, well beloved and true, I have a secret to impart to you.” Lord Wariston “discoursed a long tyme” with his wife about a biblical verse, whereas Pepys derived “great pleasure talking and discoursing” in bed. Boswell, an unfaithful spouse, like Pepys, grew depressed when away from his “good bed” and “dear wife.”
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As tired souls reclined, laid low were traditional distinctions between wives and husbands, resulting in moments of rare autonomy for women within the patriarchal household. Sexual boundaries were redrawn. Lying abed in the dark encouraged wives to express concerns unsuited to other hours. “Women know their time to work their craft,” claimed Joshua Swetman in 1702, “for in the night, they will work a man like wax.” Flattery and wit were fabled artifices, as was withholding sexual relations, or, as husbands lamented, coming “cold” to bed. “Absolutely avoid discord in the bedroom,” an authority counseled men, so that a “pleasurable occasion for lifting cares” did not become “yet another vexation.”
The Fifteen Joys of Marriage
(n.d.), a misogynist work from the late Middle Ages, recounts at length tactics wives reportedly used to manipulate their husbands at ease.
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Least pleasant was a scolding widely known as a “curtain” or “boulster” lecture. “It is a resource which belongs to the rights of women,” proclaims Miss Plimlimmon in
The Welch Heiress
(1795). An obscure diary kept by John Eliot of Connecticut contains a vivid account of the authority some wives wielded. “These curtain lectures,” he wrote of his wife, “very frequent, severe & long (every other night almost to the keeping both awake great part of the night & sometimes every night or night after night) with the most vile & scurrilous language . . . raking up the old stories about a first & second wife, first & second children etc.” Besides upbraiding Eliot for his past marriages and spurning his bedtime advances, sometimes his wife insisted that he sleep in another room, as did the wife of John Richards, a Dorsetshire gentleman, banished to the dining room or the cellar.
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Anon.,
A Boulster Lecture
, seventeenth century.

Mortal violence against husbands, although rare, was likeliest in bed. Short of being poisoned, never were men so vulnerable to aggrieved wives. An abused housewife in York warned her loutish spouse “that she could kill him in bed at night if she wanted.” In Germany, Margaretha Craft of Hallbach slew her second husband in bed with an axe “shortly after their union,” later covering with manure his severed remains in the cellar. In 1737, a Connecticut husband—perchance while snoring—received from his wife a shovel of hot embers in his gaping mouth, whereas in Derby, the girlfriend of a journeyman stocking-maker named Samuel Smith took a knife to his penis as he lay asleep in the dark. She protested that “he had courted her for several years, and had often promised to mary her, but always deceived her.” Only after losing a “great quantity of blood” and “his pain increasing” did Smith “apprehend what was amiss.”
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CHAPTER ELEVEN

UNRAVELING THE
KNITTED SLEEVE:
DISTURBANCES

I

Happy are those who can get rid of their problems when sleeping.

GUILLAUME BOUCHET,
1584–1598
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I
MPLICIT IN MODERN
conceptions of sleep before the Industrial Revolution remains the wistful belief that our forebears enjoyed tranquil slumber, if often little else, in their meager lives. Notwithstanding the everyday woes of preindustrial existence, most families, we like to think, at least rested contentedly until dawn. Evening silence coupled with overpowering darkness contributed to unusually peaceful repose, as did the fatigue ordinary men and women suffered from their labors. A leading modern authority on sleep, reliving this “more primitive pattern” when camping outdoors, recently rhapsodized, “With the stars as our only night-light, we are rocked in the welcoming arms of Mother Nature back to the dreamy sleep of the ancients. It’s little wonder we wake the next morning feeling so refreshed and alive.”
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Our nostalgia lies deeply rooted in Western literature. With the explosive expansion during the sixteenth century in imaginative writing in England and much of continental Europe, the peacefulness of sleep became a favorite topic for all forms of literary adulation, especially verse drama and poetry. Samuel Johnson later claimed that because poets required “respite from thought,” they were naturally “well affected to sleep,” which not only bestowed “rest, but frequently” led “them to happier regions.” Life’s daily miseries made beds appear all the more oases of serenity—“the onelie giver of tranquility” for poets, hailed the German physician Christof Wirsung.
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Writers typically celebrated sleep as a sanctuary that locked “sences from their cares.”
Macbeth,
in a famous passage, speaks of “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.” “Oh sleep! Thou only cordial,” exclaimed William Mountfort, “for injured and disorder’d souls!”
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Scant surprise that writers regularly likened slumber to the gentle embrace of death—“la mort petite,” according to the French Jesuit Louis Richeome. “So like it, that I dare not trust it without my prayers,” observed Sir Thomas Browne.
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Nor were sleep’s blessings reserved just for persons of privilege. What Edmund Spenser called “the forgetfulness of slepe” was, like death, peculiarly egalitarian. At a time when distinction, rank, and preferment ordinarily reigned in Western societies, slumber made “the wretched equal with the blest.” Sir Philip Sidney called sleep “the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, / The indifferent judge between the high and low.” For Sancho Panza in
Don Quixote
(1605), sleep was “the balancing weight that levels the shepherd with the king, and the simple with the wise.”
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A corollary to this assumption, rooted in the medieval concept of the “sleep of the just,” was the belief that the soundest slumber, in fact, belonged to those with simple minds and callused hands, society’s laboring classes. A French poet wrote of “sweet sleep” that restores “with rest the weary limbs of work-men overprest.” Felled by fatigue, simple rustics brought to their beds none of the anxiety that plagued the slumber of wealthy and powerful men. In
Henry V
, Shakespeare wrote that none “laid in bed majestical, / Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, / Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind / Gets him to rest.”
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Sleep, to be sure, granted weary men and women of all ranks some measure of relief from daily cares as well as an interval of hard-won rest. Rare was the early modern family that did not shoulder its share of tribulations both petty and severe. Sleep’s principal contribution was not merely physiological but psychological. Thus, according to East Anglian slang, falling asleep was to “forget the world.” If only because “its pleasures are purely negative,” surmised Sarah Cowper, “sleep may be reckon’d one of the blessings of life.” “When our spirits are exhausted,” she noted, “we wish for sleep as old men for death, only because we are tired with our present condition” (in fact, Cowper complained that her husband, Sir William, commonly went to bed early to escape her presence). Even for night owls, slumber provided an occasional haven. Having survived yet another “drunken delirium,” James Boswell stole “into bed” to avoid his wife’s wrath—“I say into,” he later confided, “because it was truly a refuge.”
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Also possible is that the solace persons derived from sleep varied in inverse proportion to their quality of life, with those farther down the social ladder, such as servants and slaves, most looking forward to bed. A French priest noted, “The Prince hath no advantage over his subjects, when they are both asleep.” In bed, kings forswore their crowns, bishops their miters, and masters their servants. “Sleep hab no Massa,” affirmed a Jamaican slave proverb. Set against the drudgery of their waking hours, retiring to bed for most laborers, if only on a thin mattress of straw, must have been welcome indeed, all the more since few claimed furniture of any greater comfort. “How dead sleep our people sleeps,” complained Samuel Pepys after trying to rouse his servants one night. When, on another evening, his wife failed by ringing a bell to summon her wash-maids, Pepys vowed to obtain a yet bigger bell.
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But did slumber ordinarily offer individuals a genuine asylum? Did most, in an era before sleeping pills, body pillows, and earplugs, enjoy the reasonable expectation of undisturbed rest? If one defining characteristic of sleep is the barrier it erects between the conscious mind and the outside world, another is that sleep’s defenses are easily breached. Unlike sleep-like states resulting from anesthesia, coma, or hibernation, sleep itself is interrupted with relative ease. The Elizabethan Thomas Nashe wrote of “our thoughts troubled and vexed when they are retired from labour to ease,” and Cowper, in her diary, noted that “even sleep it self” was “not altogether free from uneasiness.”
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II

Let no lamenting cryes, nor dolefull teares,

Be heard all night within nor yet without.

EDMUND SPENSER,
1595
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Notwithstanding idyllic stereotypes of repose in simpler times, early modern slumber was highly vulnerable to intermittent disruption, much more so, in all likelihood, than is sleep today. Past descriptions contained such adjectives as “restless,” “troubled,” and “frighted.” A seventeenth-century religious devotion spoke of “terrors, sights, noises, dreames and paines, which afflict manie men” at rest. “Our sleepe,” the writer Francis Quarles remarked, “is oft accompanied with frights, / Distracting night dreames and dangers of the night.” Early diaries, in some instances, are riddled with complaints of inadequate rest. For Peter Oliver, the “best nights rest for a period beyond the reach of memory” meant “not awaking once from going to bed.” Among the “plagues” visited upon a lodger in the colony of Delaware were a “male bedfellow,” a “very restless one,” the “stink of the candle-snuff,” “buggs,” “musquittoes,” the “grunting & groaning of a person asleep in the next room,” and the “mewing of a cat” that had to be turned out twice!
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Sickness, among all social ranks, took the greatest toll. Not only do strokes and acute heart attacks strike more frequently at night, but symptoms of other ailments tend to worsen: cluster headaches, congestive heart failure, heartburn, gout, gallbladder attacks, and toothaches, as well as both peptic and gastric ulcers.
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Victims of respiratory tract illnesses sometimes hung “spitting sheets” by their beds, if not for greater convenience then to inspect their sputum for blood. Bedding rife with house mites triggered asthma, as did lying prone. So severe was the asthma afflicting Elizabeth Freke’s husband that for more than two months he slept in a chair, with watchers forced to hold his head upright. Of course, communal sleeping only helped to spread infectious diseases. “Crowding the sick and the healthy together in one bed,” reported a Scottish rector, was one reason for the prevalence of consumption in his Highlands parish.
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Making illness more onerous is that sensitivity to pain intensifies at night. Cowper, who like many diarists recorded vivid accounts of her nocturnal woes, had no doubt that her back pain worsened “in the night season,” as did a toothache one evening before plucking out the “stump.” Similarly tormented, the Massachusetts minister Ebenezer Parkman smeared a mixture of cow manure and hog fat on his face at night. “Despicable as it seems,” he averred, “it gave me relief.” Without the range of medications and procedures available today, physical maladies caused prolonged loss of rest or, at best, sleep that rarely went unbroken. Hence the Welsh maxim, “Apart will keep disease and sleep,” or as Thomas Legg, the author of
Low-Life or
One Half of the World Knows Not How the Other Half Live
. . . (1750), described Londoners between 1:00 and 2:00
A.M.
, “Sick and lame people meditating and languishing on their several disorders, and praying for day-light.”
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William Hogarth,
Francis Matthew Schutz in His Bed
, late 1750s.

Illness magnified anxiety and depression, insidious sources of disturbed sleep in their own right. “Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, [and] sorrows is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men,” Robert Burton wrote in
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621). Sleeplessness was among the most common symptoms reported by mentally disturbed patients of the seventeenth-century healer Richard Napier. Of some two thousand men and women seen over several decades, just over four hundred (20 percent) complained of insomnia. All manner of unpleasant feelings, from sorrow to anger, disrupted rest. Burdened by debt, the struggling farmer Ulrich Bräker bewailed all his “sour sweat and so many sleepless nights.” Because of anxiety, the Scottish parson George Ridpath once complained that he had enjoyed “scarce half my ordinary sleep for 9 or 10 days.” “If bodily disease abates,” lamented Cowper, “pain of the mind succeeds” to “break my rest in the night.”
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If, as early writers contended, the affluent suffered broken sleep because of mental stress, diverse psychological disorders, not least depression, afflicted the lower classes. Likely, those with the fewest resources to cope with life’s problems remained most “wakensome,” or vulnerable to insomnia. Of the urban poor, an observer remarked, “They sleep, but they feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.”
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The immersion every evening of poor households into ill-lit obscurity could only have deepened gloom and unease, particularly in wintertime,
la mauvaise saison
. Well before the clinical diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, whereby depression in northern climates has been linked to abnormal levels of the brain hormone melatonin due to a paucity of light, observers sensed a connection between depression and darkness. “A grosse, darke, gloomish, stinking ayre, is very contrarie,” noted the sixteenth-century French physician André Du Laurens. For the medical scientist Benjamin Rush, depression was one reason physical illnesses seemed worse at night to sufferers. “How often,” he declared, “do the peevish complaints of the night in sickness give way to the composing rays of the light of the morning!”
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