At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (26 page)

The first man that went down, overcome by the stench, call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face; a second went to help him, and fell down also; then a third, fourth went down, when these two were obliged to come up again directly: and the stench of the place being by this time greatly abated, they got the two that went down first; but the second was dead, and the first had so little life in him, that he died in the afternoon.
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As with human excreta, so with bodies of the dead. Cities and towns reserved their worst tasks for night. Thus, during epidemics, municipal officials waited for darkness to dispose of their dead. With fewer citizens abroad, there was less risk, according to common thought, of spreading infection. And there was less likelihood then of public panic. During London’s Great Plague of 1665, which killed some fifty-six thousand people, “dead-carts” were stationed evenings at the entrance of streets and alleys for families to deposit bodies. Municipal officials in Bavaria muffled their wheels with rags. “All the needful works, that carried terror with them, that were both dismal and dangerous, were done in the night,” noted Daniel Defoe in his
Journal of the Plague Year
(1722). In the event of plague, night also brought the burning of victims’ clothes and bedding. Of an outbreak in Barcelona during the mid-1600s, a contemporary reported:

If anyone died of the plague they took the body at night to be buried in the graveyard of Nazareth along with the mattresses and sheets. The following night they would come to burn the wooden bed frame and curtains and the clothing and everything the sick person might have touched.

Charged with all these tasks were gravediggers known in England as
vespillons
for their evening duties (that is, at the time of vespers). In Italy, they were named
beccamòrti
, or corpse-carriers. Sometimes clad in white, gravediggers carried torches as a warning. When smallpox afflicted Boston in 1764, they were ordered to place each body in a tarred sheet and a coffin “in the dead of night,” with a man to proceed before the corpse “to give notice to anyone that may be passing.” Pepys restricted his nocturnal peregrinations in 1665 during London’s plague. On one such outing—“in great fear of meeting of dead corpses carrying to be burned”—he periodically spied “a linke (which is the mark of them) at a distance.” “Blessed be God, met none,” he confided to his diary.
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III

Many things even go best in the raw night-hours.

VIRGIL, 1ST CENTURY B.C.
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“My business drives me dreadfully,” complained the New England farmer Hiram Harwood. “Go to bed late and rise early.” From the early American piedmont to the steppes of western Russia, more than three-quarters of the population worked the soil as tenants, laborers, servants, serfs, and slaves, in addition to smaller numbers of landowning peasants, yeoman farmers, and planters. Fields produced flax and grains like oats, rye, and wheat, along with hay and other sources of animal fodder. Common were vegetable gardens and orchards. On colonial plantations, tobacco, rice, indigo, and sugar dominated. Rather than a hiatus, evenings for rural folk frequently represented a continuation of the working day. More than a few vainly struggled to eke out an existence, toiling, like one farmer, “night and day” to stave off debt and the loss of their meager plots (more often rented than owned). The London writer “Mus Rusticus” in the 1770s lamented the typical laborer’s plight, who “in order to support himself and his family” was forced to work for a larger landholder “from four
A.M.
’til eight at night, if he can get any glimmering of light.” Always pressing were the demands of farming and planting, regardless of one’s economic independence. “You will find no diligent overseer who does not stay up for the greater part of the night,” claimed the German Jacobus Andreas Crusius in 1660. For the early Roman writer Columella, an aversion to sleep in addition to wine and “sexual indulgence” was a prerequisite for good husbandry.
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Francesco Bassano the Younger,
Autumn Harvest (Grape-picking)
, 1585–1590.

Often there were jobs at night to do, from butchering stock to chopping wood to picking apples, all labor-intensive tasks able to be performed in poor light. Having in May 1665 gathered furze all day, the Norfolk laborer Thomas Rust carted it home later that evening. Farm workers near Aberdeen, on summer nights, cut slabs of peat for fuel. Nighttime found Abner Sanger of New
Hampshire
mending fences, building hogpens, and hauling lumber. “I work until daylight,” he recorded in 1771 after digging a garden the entire evening. From late spring to fall, it was not unknown for fieldwork to be completed after nightfall, whether that meant breaking ground, sowing seed, haymaking, or harvesting a crop. “They finished my haycock at night,” noted a country vicar in his diary.
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In late summer and early autumn, harvests consumed long hours, as workers scrambled to gather mature crops. “This night we cut down all our corn,” recorded a Yorkshireman with satisfaction in late August 1691. In parts of the Continent, the vintage beckoned. Of southern France, a seventeenth-century observer wrote, “In the vintage time the people are very busy early and late.” A sudden thunderstorm could destroy a harvest left lying overnight. And there were easier pickings then for thieves. A visitor to Scotland reported, “No part is left in the field but carried home every night as it is cut down & deposited in barns.” A manorial official instructed Prussian villagers in 1728, “In the harvest, there can be no fixed hours for service with horse-teams, which must be regulated according to the work that needs doing.”
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Domestic animals also required close attention. Returning from pasture, cows were foddered, watered, and milked, nighttime as well as morning. Once cleaned, stalls needed fresh straw. Horses, hogs, and poultry, all had to be fed and put to bed. Not until eleven o’clock did the Cumberland servant John Brown on a March evening “get some straw to clean and bed up” his master’s horse. Animals occasionally fell sick, while the birth of a foal or calf could mean long hours waiting by the stall. In early spring, newborn lambs necessitated constant care.
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Stock sometimes broke loose, trampling crops and gardens. In Dorset, on a spring evening in 1698, John Richards’s dairy cow, Bexington Red, fell into a ditch. Unable to rise, it had to be watched through the night.
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Some rural tasks were specially suited to evening, from destroying slugs to shifting beehives. Wasps’ nests, too, were best burned after dark. Starlings, sparrows, and other “nuisance” birds were easiest then to catch with a combination of lanterns and nets. Although thought harmful to humans, the damp, cool night air had a variety of salutary effects, according to agricultural writers and farmers. Just as the author Di Giacomo Agostinetti in 1707 advised sowing millet “in the evening when the air is cool” to “benefit from the dew of the night,” so, too, on an April night in 1648, did Adam Eyre of Yorkshire plant mustard seed and turnips in his garden. Evening was the preferred time to water crops in order to avoid evaporation. On the Virginia plantation of Landon Carter, slaves scrupulously irrigated young tobacco plants at night to speed their maturation. “We have gangs enough to dispatch a field in a hurry,” the wealthy planter boasted in his diary. The farming book of Henry Best of Elmswell advised that straw be watered at night in preparation for thatching roofs.
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Also important, each evening, were clues that the night sky furnished of the day ahead. Displayed across the heavens were meteorological signs thought capable of forecasting everything from thunderstorms to hard frosts. As the authors of
Maison Rustique
explained in 1616, a good farmer, “although he need not to be booke-wise,” must “have knowledge of the things foretelling raine, wind, faire weather, and other alterations of the seasons.” Sundry omens existed, but most people seem to have put their faith in the night sky. Declared the London author of
A Prognostication Everlasting
(1605), “Behold the stars whose magnitude you know best. If they appeare of much light, in bignesse great, more blazing then they are commonly, it betokeneth great wind or moysture in that part where they shew.”
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Moonlight assisted many labors. When possible, men hoed, planted, and mowed by natural light. Of thatchers, Best remarked, “They leave not worke att night soe longe as they can see to doe anythinge.” Sanger in wintertime transported wood by sled, the white snow reflecting the lunar light. By contrast, when on another night Sanger carried a bushel of rye to a mill, the moon was new. “I come home in the evening through mud and mire,” he moaned. It was at harvest time, when fieldwork was most grueling, that moonlight became especially critical. For several nights every September, light from the full moon nearest to the autumnal equinox is more prolonged than usual because of the small angle of the moon’s orbit. Well known in England as the “harvest moon,” it bore the name in Scotland of the “Michaelmas moon.” Farmers on both sides of the Atlantic benefited from the moonlight to gather crops. “Sometimes,” Jasper Charlton wrote in 1735, “the harvest people work all night at their hay or corn.” Nearly as useful was the “hunter’s moon” in October, when a full moon next appeared. “The moon of September,” declared a writer, “shortens the night. The moon of October is hunter’s delight.”
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Fishing, too, drew rural folk abroad. Besides supplying food, a night’s catch might be bartered or sold to supplement meager livings. Certain types of fish, like trout, were easier after dark to catch, especially when torchlights doubled as lures. Italian peasants in small boats speared fish in the Mediterranean. In Scottish lochs, vast quantities of herring were caught with nets from late summer to early spring. “They are always caught in the night-time,” observed a resident of Lochbroom; and “the darker the night is, the better for fishers.”
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In much of the countryside, predators at night posed a worrisome threat. Accompanied by watchdogs, men guarded orchards, fields, and stock. Throughout Saxony, peasants feared deer and wild boar for their damage to cornfields. Villagers took turns “all night long” ringing bells to ward off intruders. Peasants in southern Norway guarded cattle and cornfields against bears. Worst were wolves. In France, to protect flocks of sheep, peasants were known to invoke magical charms. Armed with guns and crooks, shepherds, for protection as well as warmth, burned fires through the night, crying warnings to compatriots should a pack be seen or heard. (In the
campagna
of Italy, shepherds also lit small fires to “banish” the night air.) Dogs, too, were essential for guarding flocks—preferably ones with white coats so that they would not be taken for wolves. Some dogs wore spiked collars. According to the agricultural writer Augustin Gallo, the wise shepherd, “in order to preserve his herd from the wolf & other nasty beasts, must set up ramparts [a sheep-fold] & put a good & strong sentinel of brave & scary dogs.” New England farmers, to deter
wolves, were reputed to smear a concoction of gunpowder and tar on their
sheeps’ heads.
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Just as threatening were thieves. A visitor to France found that peasants, to protect their corn from theft, stood watch overnight until crops could be gathered and carted home. Hired to watch a small flock of sheep one winter night, Peter Butler, from behind a hedge in a London field, witnessed four thieves grab one of the animals. With the moon just rising—“it was as light as day”—Butler’s gun misfired. Badly beaten, he was tied up and left to die. Not unusual for two Italian brothers was their tedious regimen on an October night in 1555. Rising from bed after midnight, Lorenzo and Giacobo Boccardi of Fara spent the remainder of the evening patrolling an oak grove and several fields. Rather than taking separate paths, the pair, for safety’s sake, remained together. Normally armed with a battle-axe and sword, this night they took a gun instead. Among other escapades, the two had to frighten off a set of threshers that had freed their horses in the family vineyard to feed.
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