At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (3 page)

SHUTTING-IN

Shepherds all, and maidens fair, fold your flocks up, for the air gins to thicken, and the sun already his great course hath run.

JOHN FLETCHER,
ca.
1610
1

R
ATHER THAN FALLING
, night, to the watchful eye, rises. Emerging first in the valleys, shadows slowly ascend sloping hillsides. Fading rays known as “sunsuckers” dart upward behind clouds as if being inhaled for another day. While pastures and woodlands are lost to gloom, the western sky remains aglow even as the sun draws low beneath the horizon. Were he guided by the firmament, the husbandman might keep to his plough, but the deepening shadows hasten his retreat. Amid reappearing rooks and lowing cattle, rabbits scamper for shelter. Screech owls take wing over a heath. Whistling like conspiring assassins, they inspire equal alarm in mice and men, both taught at an early age to fear this high-pitched harbinger of death. As daylight recedes, color drains from the landscape. Thickets grow larger and less distinct, blending into mongrel shades of gray. It is eventide, when, say the Irish, a man and a bush look alike, or, more ominously, warns an Italian adage, hounds and wolves.
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The darkness of night appears palpable. Evening does not arrive, it “thickens.” Wayfarers are “overtaken” as if enveloped by a black mist, not only seen but felt as the Old Testament recounts of the darkness that befell Pharaoh’s Egypt. With the sun’s flight, noxious fumes are widely thought to descend from the sky—“night fogges” and “noysom vapours”—cold, raw, and dank. In the popular imagination night has fallen. No longer is the day’s atmosphere transparent, odorless, and temperate—washed by welcome beams of light. What Shakespeare describes as “the daylight sick” spreads contagion and pestilence, laden with malignant damps that infect the prostrate countryside. “Make haste,” warns Duke Vincentio in
Measure for Measure
(1604), “the vaporous night approaches.”
3

Gloaming, cock-shut, grosping, crow-time, daylight’s gate, owl-leet. The English tongue contains a vast corpus of evocative idioms for day’s descent into obscurity, with Irish Gaelic possessing four terms just to chart successive intervals of time from late afternoon to nightfall. No other phase of the day or night has inspired a richer terminology. Before the advent of industrialization, certainly none mattered more to the lives of ordinary men and women. For most persons, the customary name for nightfall was “shutting-in,” a time to bar doors and bolt shutters once watchdogs had been loosed abroad. For night—its foul and fetid air, its preternatural darkness—spawned uncertain perils, both real and imaginary. And, oddly, no age in Western history other than that bounded by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment has ever had more reason to dread its offspring.

PART ONE

IN THE
SHADOW OF DEATH

PRELUDE

Never greet a stranger in the night, for he may be a demon.

THE TALMUD
1

N
IGHT WAS
man’s first necessary evil, our oldest and most haunting terror. Amid the gathering darkness and cold, our prehistoric forbears must have felt profound fear, not least over the prospect that one morning the sun might fail to return.

No environs more distant from the Paleolithic age might be imagined than the Georgian chambers of Edmund Burke in London. Concerned with the relationship between obscurity and aesthetics, Burke, a young Irish émigré, took a keen interest in mankind’s age-old fear of darkness, to which even London’s enlightened citizenry still succumbed. It was a topic last visited in England with any clarity by John Locke in his famous philosophical treatise
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690). To Locke’s explanation for childhood fears of the dark, Burke, however, gave short shrift. Whereas Locke had blamed nurses for spinning ghost stories among impressionable infants, Burke, in
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), insisted that darkness remained, as always, “terrible in its own nature.” “It is very hard to imagine,” he concluded, “that the effect of an idea so universally terrible in all times, and in all countries, as darkness, could possibly have been owing to a set of idle stories.”
2
In short, terror of the dark was timeless.

One can only speculate about when an inherent fear of darkness might first have taken root in the human psyche. In view of the terror that must have struck our earliest ancestors, very likely this most ancient of human anxieties has existed from time immemorial, much as Burke contended. Some psychologists, however, have surmised that prehistoric peoples, rather than naturally fearing darkness in its own right, may have first feared specific perils arising in the dark. Only then, as night grew increasingly synonymous with danger, might early populations, across a span of many generations, have acquired an instinctive terror.
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Whatever its exact source, whether this fear originated at the outset or over time, certainly later cultures stood to inherit a pronounced aversion to nocturnal darkness. Everywhere one looks in the ancient world, demons filled the night air. Nyx, born of Chaos in Greek mythology, was the goddess of “all-subduing” night who, in the
Iliad
, makes even Zeus tremble. Among her fierce brood numbered Disease, Strife, and Doom. In Babylon, desert denizens suffered from the depredations of the night-hag Lilith. Ancient Romans feared the nocturnal flights of the strix, a witch that transformed itself into a screeching bird preying upon the entrails of infants, while to the east of Jerusalem, an “Angel of Darkness” terrorized Essene villagers in the arid environment of Qumran.
4
So, too, many early civilizations, including Egypt and Mesopotamia, equated darkness with death, as would Christian Europe. The Twenty-third Psalm speaks famously of the “valley of the shadow of death.” Christianity, from its birth, revered God as the source of eternal light. His first act of creation, the gift of light, rescued the world from the domain of chaos. “And the light shineth in darkness,” declares the Book of John, “and the darkness comprehended it not.” The Bible recounts a succession of sinister deeds—“works of darkness”—perpetrated in the dead of night, including the betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Following his crucifixion, “there was darkness over all the land.”
5

In more recent times, in lands far removed in longitude and age from the ancient world, nighttime has continued to inspire intense apprehension. Paul Gauguin discovered in Tahiti, for example, that Kanaka women never slept in the dark. As late as the twentieth century, the Navaho recoiled from nocturnal demons, as did the Pacific natives of Mailu. In African cultures like the Yoruba and Ibo peoples of Nigeria and the Ewe of Dahomey and Togoland, spirits assumed the form of witches at night, sowing misfortune and death in their wake. Significantly, where day-witches were believed to exist, such as among the Dinka, their conduct was thought less threatening.
6

Not that every society since the dawn of time has viewed night with similar revulsion. To underscore man’s instinctive fear of the dark, originating somewhere in the primordial past, does not preclude the fact that night has aroused greater dread in some cultures than in others. Ancient Greek cults staged all-night religious festivals called
pannchídes
. And while, according to Juvenal, pedestrians prowling the streets of early Rome after sunset risked life and limb, the city, at the inception of the second century a.d., enjoyed a rich night life. In Antioch, wrote Libanius, residents “shook off the tyranny of sleep” with the aid of oil lamps—as did societies like the Sumerians and Egyptians, similarly blessed with this early source of artificial illumination that permitted greater freedom after dark. Nor were they the first. In France, the remains of some one hundred lamps from the late Paleolithic period have been unearthed in the vicinity of the Lascaux cave paintings.
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All forms of artificial illumination—not just lamps but torches and candles—helped early on to alleviate nocturnal anxieties. “Evil spirits love not the smell of lamps,” declared Plato. Still, technological innovations only played a partial role. Cultural differences no doubt help to explain, for example, why some peoples avoided military engagements at night, while others did not. The Vikings appear to have relished nocturnal assaults, as European coastal communities sadly learned. Rather than access to lighting, perhaps habitual exposure every winter to Scandinavian darkness steeled Norsemen to its terrors. Equally stark were the contrasting reactions of Indian tribes along the eastern seaboard of North America that English settlers encountered centuries later. In New England, William Wood advised fellow colonists not to fear Indian assaults at night: “They will not budge from their own dwellings for fear of their Abbamocho (Devil), whom they fear especially in evil enterprises.” Still, a visitor to North Carolina, John Lawson, reported that the members of a local tribe “are never fearful in the night, nor do the thoughts of spirits ever trouble them, such as the many hobgoblins and bugbears that we suck in with our milk”—for which, like Locke, he blamed the “foolery of our nurses and servants” who “by their idle tales of fairies and witches makes such impressions on our tender years.”
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Sundry influences have shaped the reactions of past cultures to nighttime, including, for that matter, the ways in which children have been acclimated at an early age to the dangers of darkness. These, the genuine hazards that night has posed across time, have in their own right colored perceptions, often more profoundly than other circumstances. Equally apparent, the past does not reveal a chronological pattern to our fears. Instead of any simple linear evolution, the tides of human adrenaline have ebbed and flowed over the course of many years. With the modern age, man’s aversion to darkness has, of course, progressively diminished, particularly in industrialized societies owing to electric lighting, professional police, and the spread of scientific rationalism. Yet in the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution, evening appeared fraught with menace. Darkness in the early modern world summoned the worst elements in man, nature, and the cosmos. Murderers and thieves, terrible calamities, and satanic spirits lurked everywhere.

CHAPTER ONE

TERRORS OF THE NIGHT:
HEAVENS AND EARTH

I

So when night in her rustie dungeon hath imprisoned our ey-sight, and that we are shut seperatly in our chambers from resort, the divell keepeth his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.

THOMAS NASHE, 1594
1

I
T WAS AN
era of dire apocalyptic visions. “This abominable age, where of the Scripture so clearly speaks,” bewailed Jean-Nicholas de Parival, a French writer in the 1600s. Dearth, disease, death, and damnation. As European paintings and literature beginning in the late fifteenth century grimly suggest, the natural world seemed as merciless as it did cruelly unpredictable—a perpetual struggle, to paraphrase a later writer, between the whims of the heavens and the wants of the earth. “A man’s destiny is alwayes dark,” rued a seventeenth-century proverb. Only salvation—the Kingdom of God, not of man—offered mortals certain sanctuary from fear. These were not faint tremors born of timidity but tangible anxieties rooted in danger and uncertainty, as subsequent generations appreciated. “Our ancestors,” recalled a London newspaper in 1767, “spent one half of their life in guarding against death . . . they dreaded fire, thieves, famine, hoarded up their gains for their wives and children, and were some of them under terrible apprehensions about their fate in the next world.”
2

It would be difficult to exaggerate the suspicion and insecurity bred by darkness. “We lie in the shadow of death at night, our dangers are so great,” remarked the author of The Husbandmans Calling in 1670. Numerous Shakespearean characters plumbed the depths of night’s “foul womb.” “O comfort-killing night,” Lucrece exclaims after her rape, “image of hell! / Dim register and notary of shame! / Black stage for tragedies and murders fell! / Vast sin-concealing chaos! / Nurse of blame!”
3
Just as heaven glowed with celestial light, darkness foreshadowed the agonies awaiting transgressors after death. Often likened to hell (“eternal night”), nighttime anticipated a netherworld of chaos and despair, black as pitch, swarming with imps and demons. Declares the King of Navarre in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
(1598), “Black is the badge of hell, / The hue of dungeons, and the suit of night.” Indeed, it was the conviction of some divines that God created night as proof of hell’s existence. “Like the face of hell,” was how a seventeenth-century Venetian described the advance of evening.
4

Night brutally robbed men and women of their vision, the most treasured of human senses. None of sight’s sister senses, not even hearing or touch, permitted individuals such mastery over their environs.
5
Were early modern communities not so dependent upon personal interaction, the power of sight would have been less critical. But these were small-scale, traditional societies in which face-to-face encounters predominated, in urban as well as rural settings. Vision allowed people to gauge character and demeanor, vital aspects of identity in the preindustrial world. Carriage and posture revealed inner qualities, as could the expressiveness of a person’s eyes. Claimed a seventeenth-century Polish aristocrat, “When a rustic or cowardly person wants to say something seriously, what do you see? He squirms, picks his fingers, strokes his beard, pulls faces, makes eyes and splits every word in three. A noble man, on the contrary, has a clear mind and a gentle posture; he has nothing to be ashamed of.”
6
Dress sharpened social contrasts. Some cities, by virtue of sumptuary legislation, permitted just the gentle classes to wear silk or satin. Fashion and color, whether clothing appeared plain or extravagant, bespoke age and occupation as well as rank.
7

But at night, lamented the Scottish poet James Thomson, “order confounded lies; all beauty void; distinction lost; and gay variety one universal blot.”
8
Friends were taken for foes, and shadows for phantoms. Natural landmarks—hedges, coppices, and trees—acquired new life. “When men in darknesse goe, /” Humphrey Mill wrote in 1639, “They see a bush, but take it for a theefe.” Hearing, too, played tricks. Passing noises during the day demanded to be heard in the darkness. “The night is more quiet than the day,” observed the Jacobean writer George Herbert, “and yet we feare in it what we doe not regard by day. A mouse running, a board cracking, a dog howling, an owle scritching put us often in a cold sweat.”
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By day, safety was found in numbers. In large towns and cities, the “multitude effectually guard and protect individuals,” a London newspaper correspondent noted. After dark, with families forced to fend for themselves, yet deprived of the protection of sight, threats to body and soul multiplied. When else but in the black of night might evil thrive unmolested—unbridled by the customary restraints of the visible world? “Here never shines the sunne of discipline,” moaned Thomas Middleton. “At night,” allowed Dame Sarah Cowper, “I pray Almighty God to keep me from ye power of evil spirits, and of evil men; from fearfull dreams and terrifying imaginations; from fire, and all sad accidents . . . so many mischiefs, I know of, doubtless more that I know not of.”
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II

There is no doute, but that almost all those things which the common people judge to be wonderfull sightes, are nothing lesse than so. But in the meane season it can not be denied, but that straunge sightes, and many other suche lyke things, are sometymes hearde and also seene.

LEWES LAVATER,
1572
11

At night, bizarre sights and queer sounds came and vanished, leaving widespread anxiety in their train. On some evenings, deafening bangs and strange music broke the silence. In the English village of Wakefield, a tenant reported hearing “a great noyse of musicke and dancinge about him,” followed another night by the “ringinge of small bells.” The sound of “deepe groneing” could also be heard. The evening before a woman at Ealand died, servants grew terrified by “a great knocking and variety of music.” Common omens of ill-fortune included loud thunder and the cries of screech owls.
12

For people steeped in biblical wonders and supernatural lore, alterations in the night sky, including the aurora borealis in northern latitudes, carried even greater portent. “Terrible sights were in the sky all night,” George Booth of Chester recorded in 1727. “All my family were up and in tears, or there prayers, the heavens flashing in a perpetual flame.” As in the Middle Ages, comets, meteors, and lunar eclipses inspired awe and trepidation, as either omens of God’s will or marks of his wrath. Known as “blazing stars,” comets, it was said, foretold “destruction & corruption of earthly things,” whether from tempests, earthquakes, wars, plagues, or famine. In 1618, an entry in the parish register of Nantwich noted, “Many times there appeared eastward a blazing star, betokenninge godds judgements towards us for sine.” “Gods preaching visibly from the heavens by a late astonishing comet,” the Yorkshire minister Oliver Heywood wrote of a marvel—most of which were vastly more visible than celestial phenomena today owing to “light pollution” from the glare of modern street lamps.
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Frequent outbursts of hysteria followed these sensations, with reverberations felt for days afterward. Early modern woodcuts bear witness to their impact. In England, the descent on a March night in 1719 of a great “globe of fire” reportedly “struck all that saw it into a strange terror.” According to the Wiltshire vicar John Lewis, “Many who were in the open air fell to ye ground, & some swooned away; & the children & some of ye common people imagin’d the moon was dropt from its orb, & fallen to ye earth.” A colonist in Connecticut, viewing a bright light in the sky, reportedly sacrificed his wife to “glorify God.”
14
Such exclamations as “dreadful,” “remarkable,” and, most commonly, “strange” colored the testimony of eyewitnesses; even more when fantastic apparitions flooded the sky, whether images of coffins, crosses, or bloody swords. These, by all accounts, were horrifying to behold. On a summer night in Prague, residents saw a horrendous scene that included a marching column of headless men. Elsewhere, sightings occurred of shimmering clouds and streams of blood. Shortly after the Great Fire of 1666, terror seized the people of London upon viewing gleams of light one evening—“their apprehensions,” observed Samuel Pepys, being that “the rest of the city” was “to be burned, and the papists to cut our throats.” These marvels never grew commonplace. No less ghastly than wondrous, they constituted the most spectacular of night’s mysteries.
15

Georg Mack the Elder,
Comet Seen at Nuremberg during November, 1577
, seventeenth century.

Most evenings, if seemingly serene, required vigilance against other celestial perils. Best-known of the many “planets” said to influence the rhythms of everyday life was earth’s closest neighbor, the moon. While a welcome source of light, the moon reputedly affected the internal workings of the human body much as it did the flow and timing of ocean tides and the course of the weather. France’s “first philosophe,” Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, was one of many learned authorities to perpetuate the medieval theory stressing the moon’s importance to physical health: “As it passes through its phases, it exerts a great influence for better or worse over the course of illnesses.” So potent was its power that the moon could alter the amount of moisture within a person’s body, including the brain, thereby driving some individuals insane or “moon-struck.” Observed the authors of
Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme
(1616), the moon was the “governesse of all such humidities as are in earthly bodies.” When the moon was full, women were thought at particular risk to become “lunatics.” Some victims died on the spot. In London’s St. Botoloph’s Parish between 1583 and 1599, as many as twenty-two deaths were attributed to planetary influence.
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The moon also impregnated the night air with pestilential damps, widely deemed an even graver menace to human health. Darkness signified more than the temporary absence of light. According to popular cosmology, night actually fell each evening with the descent of noxious vapors from the sky. Night, wrote Richard Niccols in 1610, “did powre grim darknesse downe.” Kept at bay by daylight, descending mists reportedly contributed, no less than the sun’s departure, to the onset of darkness. In Herefordshire, nightfall was known as “drop night.” Some individuals described themselves “within night,” as if enveloped by a mammoth black cloud; in fact, criminal prosecutions in Scottish courts routinely referred to offenses having been committed “under cloud of night.”
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Certainly, educated elites, well versed in the principles of Renaissance astronomy, by this time knew better. “Night,” wrote one person, “is nothing, but th’ absence of the sun; and darkness, but the privation of light.” In his essay “On Nightfall, What It Is, and Whether It Falls on Us,” the sixteenth-century French physician Laurent Joubert derided popular fears. Convinced of the moon’s ability to affect the brain, Joubert kept one foot squarely in the past. But he disputed the prevailing notion that “nightfall is a certain rheumatic quality in the evening and night air that falls from the sky.” “There is no evil quality in nightfall air,” he insisted, with night itself being “nothing more than the obscurity or darkness of the air as a result of the absence of the sun.”
18
All the same, the traditional wisdom about nightfall persisted for many years. The night “demitting unwholesome vapours, upon all that rest beneath,” wrote the seventeenth-century moralist Owen Feltham.
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