At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (46 page)

After midnight, preindustrial households usually began to stir. Many of those who left their beds merely needed to urinate. The physician Andrew Boorde advised, “Whan you do wake of your fyrste slepe make water if you fele your bladder charged.” An English visitor to Ireland around 1700 “wonder’d mightily to heare people walking to the fire place in the middle of the house to piss there in the ashes,” something he was “forced to doe too for want of a chambrepot.”
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Some persons, however, after arising, took the opportunity to smoke tobacco, check the time, or tend a fire. Thomas Jubb, an impoverished Leeds clothier, rising around midnight, “went into Cow Lane & hearing ye clock strike twelve” returned “home & went to bed again.” The diarist Robert Sanderson, who on one occasion was awoken prematurely “on my first sleepe” by his dog, arose other nights to sit and smoke a pipe, once after first checking upon his ill wife. Counseled an early English ballad, “Old Robin of Portingale”: “And at the wakening of your first sleepe / You shall have a hott drinke made, / And at the wakening of your next sleepe / Your sorrowes will have a slake.” Some varieties of medicine, physicians advised, might be taken during this interval, including potions for indigestion, sores, and smallpox.
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For others, work awaited. The Bath doctor Tobias Venner urged, “Students that must of necessity watch and study by night, that they do it not till after their first sleep,” when they would be “in some measure refreshed.” According to a former bedfellow, Seth Ward, while Bishop of Salisbury, frequently “after his first sleep,” for purposes of private study, would “rise, light, and after burning out his candle, return to bed before day.” Such, too, was the regimen of Aimar de Ranonet, president of the parliament of Paris. The seventeenth-century farmer Henry Best of Elmswell made a point to rise “sometimes att midnight” to prevent the destruction of his fields by roving cattle.
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In addition to tending children, women left their beds to perform myriad chores. The servant Jane Allison got up one night between midnight and 2:00
A.M.
to brew a batch of malt for her Westmorland master. “Often at midnight, from our bed we rise,” bewailed Mary Collier in “The Woman’s Labour.” Of female peasants,
Piers Plo
wman declared, “They themselves also suffer much hunger, / And woe in wintertime, and waking up nights / To rise on the bedside, to rock the cradle, / Also to card and comb wool, to patch and to wash, / To rub flax and reel yarn and peel rushes.” Suffice to say, domestic duties knew no bounds.
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And some hardy souls, if rested, remained awake. Thomas Ken, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, reputedly “rose generally very early, and never took a second sleep.” In Smollett’s
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
(1751), a physician counsels the protagonist “to rise immediately after his first sleep, and exercise himself in a morning-walk.”
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Equally invigorating was Benjamin Franklin’s habit of taking cold air baths, which he considered an improvement over the vogue of bathing in cold water as a “tonic.” While in London, he rose “early almost every morning” and sat naked in his chamber either reading or writing for up to an hour. “If I return to bed afterwards . . . as sometimes happens,” he explained to an acquaintance, “I make a supplement to my night’s rest, of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined.”
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For the poor, awakening in the dead of night brought opportunities of a different sort. At no other time of the night was there such a secluded interval in which to commit petty crimes: filching from dockyards and other urban workplaces, or, in the countryside, pilfering firewood, poaching, and robbing orchards. Perhaps a Scottish court exaggerated in claiming “that it is a known artifice in thieves to go to bed at night and rise in the morning in presence of others” to conceal “actions committed by them in the night time,” but plainly an undercurrent of illegal activity reverberated through the early morning hours. In 1727, Gilbert Lambert, a laborer in Great Drisfield, summoned a friend, Thomas Nicholson, “out of his bed” around midnight, desiring him to help drive “a parcel of sheep” that were later found to be stolen. “Some wake,” affirmed George Herbert, “to plot or act mischiefe”—or more serious offenses. Reverend Anthony Horneck condemned “high-way-men and thieves” that “rise at midnight to rob and murder men!” Examples are easily found. Of Luke Atkinson, charged with an early morning murder in the North Riding of Yorkshire, his wife admitted “that it was not the first time he had got up at nights and left her in bed to go to other folks houses.” And in 1697, young Jane Rowth’s mother, “after shee had gott her first sleep, . . . was gotten up out of bedd, and [was] smoaking a pipe at the fire side” when two male companions “called on her mother at the little window, and bad her make ready & come away” according to plans all three had hatched the preceding morning. Although nine-year-old Jane was told by her mother to “lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning,” the mother’s dead body was found a day or two later.
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Is it possible that persons rose to practice magic? One does not need to believe in witches’ sabbaths to accept surviving descriptions of sorcery, some involving small groups of kindred spirits. Witchcraft prosecutions, such as those in Rémy’s
Démonolâtrie
and Francesco Maria Guazzo’s
Compendium Maleficarum
(1608), contain intriguing reports of women who left the sides of their slumbering husbands, allegedly to attend gatherings late at night. Pretending to be in a deep sleep, a charcoal burner of Ferrar, for example, claimed to have witnessed his wife rise from bed and “immediately vanish” upon anointing herself from a “hidden vase.” In Lorraine, an admitted “witch” confessed to having put her husband under a spell to prevent, during her absence, his awakening: “She had many times tweaked his ear after having with her right hand anointed it with the same ointment which she used upon herself when she wished to be transported to the Sabot.” And in the Dutch village of Oostbruck, a widow, her manservant testified, routinely went to the stables, once she thought her servants asleep, in order to practice black magic.
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None were more familiar than the Church with sinister forces in the dead of night. “Can men break their sleep to mind the works of darkness, and shall we not break ours,” asked Reverend Horneck, “for doing things, which become the children of light?” With equal fervor, the late sixteenth-century Bishop of Portugal, Amador Arrais, stressed the need for nocturnal vigilance: “Not only do princes, captains, philosophers, poets, and heads of families stay awake and arise during the night . . . but also thieves and brigands do so, . . . and should we not abhor sleep that is the ally of vice? Should we not awaken to guard against cutthroats who remain awake to murder us?” Certainly, there was no shortage of prayers intended to be recited “when you awake in the night” or “at our first waking,” a time not to be confused with either dawn or “our uprising,” for which wholly separate devotions were prescribed. Prayers reminded vigilant men and women of God’s glory, Satan’s corruption, and the need to combat “fiery darts of the Devil,” “arrows of temptation,” and “noisome lusts.”
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Anecdotal evidence suggests that many persons took advantage of early morning hours for prayer. William Cowper’s set of three poems “Watching Unto God in the Night Season” recounts his devotions in the middle of the night. A parent instructed his daughter that “the most profitable hour for you and us might be in the middle of the night after going to sleep, after digesting the meat, when the labors of the world are cast off . . . and no one will look at you except for God.” The author of Mid-
Night Thoughts
“grew to such habit of nightly meditations (at his first waking) as prov’d more pleasant then sleep.”
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Most people, upon awakening, probably never left their beds, or not for long. Besides praying, they conversed with a bedfellow or inquired after the well-being of a child or spouse. Lying with her daughter Sara, Mary Sykes, “after theire first sleepe,” upon “heareing” Sara “quakeing and holding her hands together” asked her daughter “what she ailed.”
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Sexual intimacy often ensued between couples. According to one wife, it was her husband’s “custom when he waketh to feele after me & than he layeth hym to slepe againe.” Joked Louis-Sébastien Mercier of the midnight clatter of Parisian carriages, “The tradesman wakes out of his first sleep at the sound of them, and turns to his wife, by no means unwilling.” According to ancient Jewish belief, copulating “in the middle of the night” prevented husbands from hearing “human voices” and thinking of “different women.”
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Significantly, for our understanding of early modern demography, segmented sleep probably enhanced a couple’s ability to conceive children, since reproductive fertility ordinarily benefits from rest. In fact, the sixteenth-century French physician Laurent Joubert concluded that early-morning intercourse enabled plowmen, artisans, and other laborers to beget numerous children. Because exhaustion prevented workers from copulating upon first going to bed, intercourse occurred “after the first sleep” when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better.” “Immediately thereafter,” Joubert counseled those eager to conceive, “get back to sleep again, if possible, or if not, at least to remain in bed and relax while talking together joyfully.” The physician Thomas Cogan similarly advised that intercourse occur not “before sleepe, but after the meate is digested, a little before morning, and afterwarde to sleepe a while.”
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Jan Saenredam,
Night
, seventeenth century.

Perhaps even more commonly, persons used this shrouded interval of solitude to immerse themselves in contemplation—to ponder events of the preceding day and to prepare for the arrival of dawn. Never, during the day or night, were distractions so few and privacy so great, especially in crowded households. “As I lay in bed sleepless, I was ever meditating upon something,” remarked the Italian scholar Girolamo Cardano. Thomas Jefferson before bed routinely read works of moral philosophy “whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep.” For the moralist Francis Quarles, darkness, no less than silence, encouraged internal reflection. In order “to take the best advantage of thy selfe (especially in matters where the fancy is most imploy’d),” he recommended:

Let the end of thy first sleep raise thee from thy repose: then hath thy body the best temper; then hath thy soule the least incumbrance; then no noyse shall disturbe thine ear; no object shall divert thine eye.
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Naturally, midnight reflections sometimes proved painful. A character in the Jacobean comedy
Everie Woman in Her Humor
(1609) “everie night after his first sleepe” wrote “lovesicke sonnets, rayling against left handed fortune his foe.” For better or worse, this interval was yet another reason for night’s far-flung reputation as the “mother of counsel.”
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The seventeenth-century merchant James Bovey, reputedly from age fourteen, kept a “candle burning by him all night, with pen, inke, and paper, to write downe thoughts as they came into his head.” Meanwhile, a German lawyer, beside his bed, attached a black marble table on which to record his reflections. Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century, in order to better preserve midnight ruminations, methods were devised to “write in the dark, as straight as by day or candle-light,” according to a report in 1748. Twenty years later, after first obtaining a patent, a London tradesman, Christopher Pinchbeck, Jr., advertised his “Nocturnal Remembrancer,” an enclosed tablet of parchment with a horizontal aperture for a guideline whereby “philosophers, statesmen, poets, divines, and every person of genius, business or reflection, may secure all those happy, often much regretted, and never to be recovered flights or thoughts, which so frequently occur in the course of a meditating, wakeful night.”
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Still, one should not be misled by Georgian ingenuity. For every active intellect following first sleep, there were others initially neither asleep nor awake. The French called this ambiguous interval of semi-consciousness
dorveille
, which the English termed “twixt sleepe and wake.” Unless preceded by an unsettling dream, the moments immediately following first sleep were often characterized by two features: confused thoughts that wandered “at will” coupled with pronounced feelings of contentment.
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“My heart is free and light,” wrote William Cowper. In his evocative description of awakening from “midnight slumber” in “The Haunted Mind,” Nathaniel Hawthorne insisted, “If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this. . . . You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present.” Less sanguine about “our solitary hours” when “waking in the night or early in the morning” was the Hammersmith minister John Wade, who complained in 1692 of men’s “unsettled independent thoughts,” “vain unprofitable musing,” and “devising mischief upon their beds.”
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