At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (17 page)

For families farther down the social ladder, rushlights (rushes coated in fat) provided a crude substitute. Although similar in design to candles, they were exempted from taxation. Homemade, rushlights were fashioned from meadow rushes for which Britain’s moist climate was well suited—both the soft rush,
Juncus effusus
, and the common rush,
Juncus conglomeratus
. Dried and peeled, except for a single strip of bark for support, the pith was repeatedly dipped in hot kitchen tallow and allowed to harden. “The careful wife of an industrious
Hampshire
labourer,” noted the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, “obtains all her fat for nothing; for she saves the scummings of her bacon-pot for this use.” Suspended horizontally in an iron holder at a slight angle, the typical rush, measuring over two feet, burned for nearly an hour, about half the time of a tallow candle. The reformer William Cobbett later wrote of his childhood, “I was bred and brought up mostly by rush-light.” His grandmother, married to a day laborer, “never,” to Cobbett’s recollection, “burnt a candle in her house in her life.” Reported the minister of a Highlands parish, “When the goodman of the house made family worship, they lighted a rushy, to enable him to read the psalm, and the portion of scripture.” Middle-class homes, to varying degrees, utilized rushlights to save the expense of candles. Observed White, “Little farmers use rushes much in the short days [winter], both morning and evening, in the dairy and kitchen.”
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In large parts of continental Europe, families relied upon oil lamps. Outside the British Isles, there were fewer flocks of sheep to supply tallow but abundant sources of oil. Moreover, warmer temperatures, at least in Mediterranean countries, made the use of tallow candles problematic, with their low melting point; conversely, in Britain and other northern climes some varieties of oil ran the risk of congealing during winter months. Oil lamps ranged from scallop and conch shells to the common cruisie or cresset lamp, an elongated iron vessel of French origin with a handle at one end. At the opposite end lay a wick of soft cord partially submerged in the oil. Wicks required trimming, but just one pint of oil could sustain a flame for many hours. Plants and trees afforded sources of oil for lamps, including flax and rapeseeds, olives, and walnuts. In coastal areas, fish livers were treasured for their oil, as was fat from seals in Scandinavia. An especially unctuous sea bird, the fulmar, made its home on the outer islands of St. Kilda, Borrea, and Soa in the North Atlantic. When disturbed, it regurgitated a liquid from its beak suitable for lamps. So oily was the stormy petrel in the Shetland Islands off northern Scotland that residents used its carcass for a lamp by sticking a wick down its throat.
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Trophîme Bigot,
A Boy Pouring Oil into a Lamp
, 1620.

In France, a rushlight made from kitchen fat was known as a
meche de jonc
and in Germany as a
Bisenlicht
. Indigent families had an alternative in candlewood wherever there was an abundance of pine and fir trees. Often trunks were stripped bare of their bark and allowed to die standing upright. Once felled, splinters of the dead wood, full of a dark, tarry resin, burned as small torches in iron holders. The lit end of a splinter pointed downward in order to preserve its flame. Pine knots, too, were burned as both kindling and a source of light. There was widespread use of candlewood from Sweden to the Canary Islands. Russian archaeologists researching medieval sites in Novgorod uncovered pine chips and splinters, bound together to make torches. A variation of candlewood, known as bogwood, was available in northern England and Scotland. Along with branches pulled from dead fir trees, residents unearthed decaying trunks from bogs—not just firs but also elm and oak trees, all packed with resin. “Instead of candle,” noted a visitor to the Scottish Highlands, “the common people here, and thro’ most of the highlands, use chips of fir dug out of the mosses. These chips being full of resin, burn generalie with a bright flame.” Tenants sometimes paid part of their rent by supplying cartloads of “candle fir.”
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Perhaps nowhere was candlewood more widely used than in early America, where thick pine forests blanketed much of the eastern seaboard. No doubt, English colonists, in their adoption of this technology, profited from the experience of Indian tribes. An early description of New England proclaimed, “Here is good living for those that love good fires. And although New-England have no tallow to make candles of, yet by the abundance of fish thereof it can afford oil for lamps. Yea, our pine trees that are the most plentiful of all wood doth allow us plenty of candles, which are very useful in the house, and they are such candles as the Indians commonly use, having no other.”
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Myriad conventions governed the use of artificial lighting. Preindustrial families were constrained by concerns for both safety and frugality. Rules controlled not only access to candles and lamps but also the time and location of their use. Not all persons, hours, and places were equal. High on the list of iniquities was “burning daylight,” resorting to artificial light unnecessarily during the day. Wasting candlelight was synonymous with extravagance and dissipation. Individuals thought naturally profligate, such as children, servants, and slaves, received special scrutiny. Such was the outrage of the Virginia planter William Byrd II upon discovering his slave Prue with “a candle by daylight” that he “gave her a salute” with his foot.
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Normally, not even twilight brought the first glimmer of household lights. The interval between sunset and nightfall in Iceland and most of Scandinavia was called the “twilight rest,” a hiatus during which it was too dim to ply one’s trade and too light to warrant candles or lamps. Persons instead reserved this hour before the evening’s tasks for rest, prayer, and quiet conversation. In Britain and colonial America, only once darkness descended did the time widely known as “candle-lighting” arrive. Jonathan Swift advised cost-conscious servants “to save your master’s candles, never bring them up until half an hour after it be dark, although they be called for ever so often.”
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Most dependents were not permitted their own lighting, even to guide one’s way to bed. In Joseph Addison’s comedy
The Drummer
(1715), the mistress of a household explodes with indignation over her servants’ use of night-lights in their chamber. “Are the rogues afraid of sleeping in the dark?” she demands of her steward. Of the mathematician William Oughtred, John Aubrey wrote that his wife, “a penurious woman,” would “not allow him to burne candle after supper, by which means many a good notion is lost.” Compounding the expense, transporting an open flame burned fuel more rapidly. And there was always a risk of fire, en route to bed and then afterwards.
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At all hours of the evening, families often had to navigate their homes in the dark, carefully feeling their way through familiar rooms and halls. “Man’s best candle is discretion,” declared a Welsh proverb. The sense of touch was critical. Individuals long committed to memory the internal topography of their dwellings, including the exact number of steps in every flight of stairs. Others, finding themselves in an unfamiliar setting, had to cope as best they could. In
Emile
, Rousseau advised, in a strange room, clapping one’s hands. “You will perceive by the resonance of the place whether the area is large or small, whether you are in the middle or in a corner.” Forced to take “miserable” lodgings one evening along the Italian coast, a nineteenth-century traveler “took a very accurate survey” of his chamber in order “to pilot” himself “out of it” before daybreak. The absence of lighting in homes spawned a number of ingenious techniques, most no doubt passed from one generation to another. Within the elegant two-story house that once dominated Sotterley Plantation in colonial Maryland, there remains to this day a handmade notch in the wood railing leading to the second floor, located at an abrupt right turn up the stairs. Furniture in Scandinavian homes was placed at night against walls in order to avert collisions. And everywhere it was important to maintain a tidy home, lest a tool or weapon needed to be located in the dark. The saying “everything has its place” took on added importance at night. Of servants, Robert Cleaver wrote in
A Godly Forme of Houshold Government
(1621), “If it be in the night season, and that without a light, they then not only can say, in such a place it lyeth, but also, if they be required, they can presently fetch the same.”
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Too much should not be made of domestic lighting before the Industrial Revolution. An immense gulf separates modern lamps from their precursors. Light from a single electric bulb is one hundred times stronger than was light from a candle or oil lamp. Premodern observers spoke sarcastically of candles that made “darkness visible.” “A constant dimnes” was another’s description. Stated a French adage, “By candle-light a goat is lady-like.” Feebler was the faint glow cast by rushlights. In homes at night, small islands of light pulsed amid the shadows. Wicks not only flickered but often spat, smoked, and smelled. “Always ready to disappear,” an essayist in 1751 lamented of artificial or “borrow’d” light. Rather than flooding every nook and corner of a room, as it does today, light cast a faint presence in the blackness. Unlike overhead fixtures in modern homes and offices, candles and lamps sat at lower heights, allowing convenient access to wicks. Familiar faces and furniture, as a consequence, took on an altered appearance. Visibility was limited to an object’s façade, not its top and sides. Ceilings remained preponderantly dark, and often one could barely see from one end of a room to the other. According to Fynes Moryson in the early 1600s, Irish peasants, due to an absence of tables, set rushlights on the floor.
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On the other hand, domestic needs were far simpler then. So long as families could eat, socialize, perform basic chores, and negotiate the interiors of their homes—so long, in short, as they could tend to nightly necessities—conditions were far from intolerable.

V

The solitary man becomes wolves meat.

FRENCH PROVERB
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During the day, a complex web of intersecting ties bound citizens together. Networks of mutual assistance typified not only organized institutions such as guilds and religious fraternities but also less formal bodies. Family connections and neighborhood loyalties formed the most important support systems. Most Europeans resided either in tightly knit villages or in compact urban neighborhoods. Until the mid-eighteenth century, provincial towns and even large cities like London and Paris contained a patchwork of well-defined wards and parishes in which residents knew one another by sight if not by name. Italian cities were frequently divided into sections with their own insignia and patron saints. Parisians lived “in one another’s almost constant presence,” remarked the lieutenant general of police. And in one another’s debt. Being a trusted neighbor entailed working together, worshiping together, and attending one another’s weddings, baptisms, and funerals. “We are all brothers in this parish. We must all watch over what belongs to others,” urged the priest of a small French village. This is not to deny the daily existence of backbiting gossip, violent assaults, and other eruptions of interpersonal discord. Some individuals relied solely upon their extended families, believing neighbors to be “foreigners,” as the Amsterdam resident Hermanus Verbeecq called them in his autobiography. But if men and women occasionally neglected their civic responsibilities, the large majority placed their faith in the imperatives of good neighborliness.
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Nor were social obligations suspended by darkness, notwithstanding the absence of organized institutions. Although duties were fewer and families more isolated, people continued to help one another at all hours. Some performed small acts of kindness, such as lending a candle to a neighbor. Late one spring night in 1645, the Essex household of Reverend Ralph Josselin received two pounds of fresh butter. “Here was a providence suited to our necessitys,” Josselin delighted.
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Unlike the reception given strangers after dark, friends and relatives were normally welcome, all the more when visits were expected. On particularly foreboding nights, neighbors occasionally gathered together, sleeping under the same roof if not the same covers to allay their fears. With James Gregory, a Yorkshire staymaker, absent from home, his wife requested a friend to “lodge with her that night.” Of a solitary evening in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Drinker noted, “I was favour’d with a good night, void of fears, ’tho that is not the case with all of us, when alone as we call it—
donnez cet maten
.” Alternatively, Reverend William Cole despaired of remaining alone at his Blecheley home with just his servant Tom, whose courage he very much doubted. If Tom’s father could not join them, Cole resolved to enlist the company of a neighbor for “these dark & long nights.”
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