At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (30 page)

Night was a fertile time for romantic liaisons of all sorts, notwithstanding rigorous restrictions against sexual activity. Church and state both prohibited relations outside the confines of married life, premarital sex as well as adultery. Laws loosely enforced at the end of the medieval era received heightened attention in the wake of the Reformation by Catholic and Protestant authorities. Even public displays of affection, including petting and kissing, were thought sinful according to Christian teachings. The Genoese Ansaldo Ceba warned, “There is no passion by which the citizen is more impeded in acquiring and exercising the virtues needed to render happy his republic, than the storms of sensual love.”
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Local variations in sexual attitudes invariably existed, often between town and country. Class mattered as well. In much of Europe, propertied families adopted unusually restrictive controls for the courting of young women. “Persons of rank and figure even in this province, are desirous that their daughters should be married to men who never saw them,” remarked a Massachusetts colonist. Beliefs tended to be most conservative in Mediterranean cultures, unlike a more tolerant disposition toward sexual relations in northern and central Europe. But these were differences of degree, not substance. Nowhere was it possible for unmarried individuals to indulge their affections in public. And only once couples entered a formal courtship, by declaring their feelings openly, were regular meetings condoned. Sexual intercourse remained forbidden except, occasionally, when matrimony lay near at hand. So when Agnes Bennet of Devonshire was teased about a night’s lovemaking with her fiancé George Pearse, she replied “that it was nothing between those that were in love . . . that they were assured together meaning in marriage.”
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Flouting these conventions was risky, especially for women, for whom penalties could be severe. During the day, social oversight and the requirements of work, among the lower and middle orders, sharply curtailed opportunities for sexual transgressions. “Light and lust are deadly enemies,” observed Shakespeare. Apart from alehouses, safe havens were few, even in the country. In woods outside Tours, Jacques-Louis Ménétra and a companion “spotted a little shepherd and a young shepherd girl in action.” Panicked, the naked boy fled, leaving his lover to be raped by Ménétra—“I amused myself with the girl half willingly the rest by force.” On another occasion, Ménétra and a married woman were themselves assaulted while copulating, seemingly “out of sight” on a slope near Belleville. “That taught me a lesson,” he later acknowledged.
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In sharp contrast, night to lovers appeared vastly more inviting. “The pleasures light deny, thy shades for ever yield,” rhapsodized the poet Thomas Yalden. Put more bluntly, according to a Cambrian saying, “The lewd and naught love long nights.” Not only did nighttime give “love
that
leysure that the day cannott allow,” but darkness afforded lovers a natural refuge. “Night blinds all jealous eyes,” noted the anonymous author of
Lusts Dominion
(1657). Fields, churchyards, cellars, and stables fell prey to sexual desires. In Massachusetts, Thomas Waite and Sarah Gowing in 1682 resorted to a deserted brewhouse. In cities, parks and walks drew lovers. Of men and women along the Palle-Malle in Orleans, Peter Heylyn wrote in 1656, “At all hours of the night, be it warm and dry, you shall be sure to finde them there, thus coupled.” Ill-lit streets, too, found favor. Recorded a visitor to Rome in the eighteenth century, “In the midst of this darkness, amorous assignations in the street are not unfrequent among the inferior people.” In fact, Roman couples of all ranks, when approached by pedestrians with lanterns, routinely instructed, “
Volti la luce
” (turn the light) in order to protect their privacy.
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On top of everything else, darkness generated an intimate atmosphere in which words of affection flowed more freely. Low levels of light, whether from a candle or lamp, brought couples closer together, physically and emotionally. Declared an Italian writer, “Darkness made it easy to tell all.” With sight impaired, hearing, touch, and smell, with their greater power to arouse emotions, all acquired heightened importance. “How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night,” Romeo proclaims to Juliet. By the same token, extinguishing a candle or lamp among mixed company was an act charged with sexuality. When Hester Jackson, within a Massachusetts tavern, doused a candle, another woman exclaimed that “she was a bold slutt, or a bold housewife.” Although married, Hester quickly departed outdoors hand-in-hand with a seaman.
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Adulterous liaisons, in spite of conventional morality, were common enough. In England, “Dark Cully” referred to a married man who consorted with his mistress “only at night, for fear of discovery.” “The
adulterer
watcheth for his twilight,” warned a writer in paraphrasing a verse from the Book of Job. According to diaries, more than a few couples violated their vows. Married with two children, Batt Haler of Basle courted a young woman, dancing in her home on Catalan carpets “so that the neighbours should not be disturbed in the night.” Acts of infidelity, at night, were a persistent source of literary humor, from the comic narratives of Chaucer to the rampaging epics of Defoe and Fielding. Nocturnal liasions, with confused identities and mistaken beds, fill the pages of novels, plays, and poems. Some misadventures, naturally, were intentional. Wrote the author of “Mistaking in the Darke” in 1620, “We have divers night men now a daies, / That in the darke become such wilfull straies, / When they should goe unto their wives chast bed, / Doe get unto the maids, in mistris stead.” Rife with nocturnal trysts are tales by Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and other Italian writers. Unfaithful wives were popular protagonists, receiving lovers at home in the absence of unwitting husbands. Standard rules for clever adulteresses ranged from bribing servants to bolting chamber doors. And always lovers were instructed to arrive in the dark to evade nosy neighbors.
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The marital infidelities of Samuel Pepys were legion, for he seldom missed an opportunity to fondle a willing wife or widow. Easy prey included maidservants like Deb Willett, who at bedtime combed his hair for lice. “This night yo did hazer Deb tocar mi thing with her hand after yo was in lecto—with great pleasure,” he wrote in a mix of several languages in August 1668. Even by the relatively carefree standards of the Restoration era, many of Pepys’s adventures were impulsive and reckless. During the years of his diary (1660–1669), he had sexual contact with more than fifty women, some on repeated occasions, and intercourse with more than ten. As a man of affairs with frequent cause to visit different London neighborhoods, he was peculiarly advantaged to avail himself of secluded locations; some of Pepys’s assignations were conducted in transit behind the drawn curtains of hackney coaches. Still, Pepys often reserved his most passionate liaisons for the cover of darkness. Visits to the Deptford home of “Mrs. Bagwell,” the wife of a ship’s carpenter, were made at night, the darker the better. Of one June evening, Pepys wrote, “It being dark, I did by agreement andar a la house de Bagwell; and there, after a little playing and besando, we did go up in the dark a su cama and there fasero la grand cosa upon the bed.” On another visit, he first “walked up and down in the fields till it was dark night.” Less successful was an evening stop at another port of call—the Old Swan on Fish Street Hill—where he found his beloved Betty Mitchell sitting at the door. “It being darkish, I stayd and talked a little with her, but no oasis bezar la.”
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More troubling to elders than their own moral lapses was sexual activity among the young. Adolescent conduct after dark prompted widespread concern, less the risk of midnight elopements and clandestine marriages than opportunities for carnal license. No age group was thought more susceptible to sensual passions. Outside the routine of work, single youths socialized on festive and ceremonial occasions. Adult supervision at night was erratic. Of the traditional gathering of flowers on the eve of May Day, the Puritan Philip Stubbes complained in 1583, “I have heard it credibly reported . . . by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.” In addition to fairs and festivals, wedding celebrations attracted young persons, with dancing and singing lasting into the night. “Look how much shameless and drunken the evening is more than in the morning, so much the more vice, excess, and misnurture,” railed the sixteenth-century cleric Miles Coverdale. In the Netherlands, a passing visitor found couples “dancing all night” after “theire fathers, mothers, and all other were gone to bedd.”
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No less raucous were funeral wakes, designed by the High Middle Ages to console the dead (and presumably the living) with food, drink, and good cheer. Prevalent throughout early modern society, those in Ireland and Scotland grew notorious for drinking bouts, dancing, and “mock marriages.” In 1618, the Catholic Synod of Armagh in Ireland condemned the frequency of “improper songs and gesticulations” that “would even be unlawful in festive rejoicings.” “Works of darkness,” it declared, “are united with darkness.”
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Spinning bees, in much of Europe, afforded a more regular setting during long winters for conviviality and courtship. In homes and stables, male adolescents joined female companions to work, listen to stories, and perhaps find suitable marriage partners. Of unmarried women on Guernsey, a visitor wrote in 1677, “In these watches they have a further design, and that is either to meet with or draw in gallants, who are never wanting to make up the consort, and from these meetings many marriages are contracted.” Even at single-sex gatherings in France, young men occasionally received permission to attend. Remarked Etienne Tabourot during the sixteenth century, “In these assemblies of girls, one finds a great number of young striplings and lovers.” As the hours advanced, knitting and spinning gave way to games like “blindman’s buff,” and talk laden with “dirty
double entendres
.” Singing was popular, though not so loud as to frighten the livestock. To the unease of adults, some songs were openly erotic. A favorite ritual called for a girl to drop her distaff to see which suitor picked it up. More seriously, one or more boys might suddenly extinguish the lights, “shewing thereby that their only aim is to accomplish works of darkness,” claimed a French curé in the late seventeenth century. Authorities spoke anxiously of the potential for “sowing” circles.
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Hans Sebald Beham,
A Spinnstube
, 1524. A carricature, from an urban perspective, of peasants at a spinning party, with both adults and adolescents cavorting with unbounded license.

Still, most spinning parties enjoyed some degree of parental supervision. In contrast, informal dances among the young, in stables and barns, escaped such scrutiny. “Come let’s drink the night away, let the married sleep it out,” declared a seventeenth-century ballad. Couples in the Spanish city of Cuenca spent entire nights dancing and feasting inside shrines. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, twenty youths, mostly white and black servants, frolicked at night over a period of four months, dancing and consuming kegs of cider and rum. (During the day, stated a contemporary, “Ere long the young men must pass by the mayds like quakers and take no notice of them.”) Religious and civic officials criticized youth dances as secret and illicit. Just as a Berne edict in 1627 condemned “indecent songs and dances, in the evening and at night,” so an English writer demanded, “What kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering one of another, what filthie groping and uncleane handling is not practised everywhere in these dancings?” Varying shades of obscurity magnified opportunities for mischief. “Never dance in the dark,” cautioned a seventeenth-century proverb. It is not surprising that village authorities occasionally tried to restrict adolescent meetings to daytime, believing, like a German pastor, that “girls and boys” at “the right time of the day” should “go home again to their masters, lords and mistresses.” In the early 1600s, the Swiss town of Wil attempted to limit to five the number of visits girls could annually receive at home from suitors, with all respects to be paid before nightfall.
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One may marvel at the willingness of young couples to brave the darkness. Of her son, Elizabeth Drinker fretted, “When young men go a courting so far from home, they should make their visits shorter, and not walk two miles in a dark night alone; the resk of meeting with mischievous persons, or of taken cold this season of the year, should have some weight with ’em.” But such dangers seldom did. Dark nights afforded little deterrence to the young. According to an eighteenth-century ballad, “The Roving Maids of Aberdeen’s Garland,” maidens wore white aprons to signal suitors. “There’s lasses bright, turns out at night,” declared a verse. In the Gloucestershire community of Dursley, men “pulled out the tails of their shirts.” These so-called Dursley Lanterns reportedly helped to guide female companions.
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