At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (4 page)

Anon.,
The Influence of the Moon on the Heads of Women
, seventeenth century.

Fevers and colds were only a few of the contagious maladies ascribed to the raw fumes of night. By entering the skin’s pores, dank evening air was believed to imperil healthy organs. In
Ricordi Overo Ammaestramenti
(1554), the Italian priest Sabba da Castiglione warned of the “numerous illnesses that night air is wont to generate in human bodies.” Thomas Dekker wrote of “that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumaticke night throws abroad.” Men and women appeared more likely, after dusk, to fall sick and even die. Thus popular opinion in 1706 attributed the overnight deaths of five men in Hertfordshire to “some pestilential blast of the air.” Particularly dangerous were sultry climates, where malarial fevers, born by mosquitoes, were ascribed to night vapors. A visitor to southern Italy pronounced the air “particularly fatal at night.” But fear of noxious air pervaded most of Europe and, for that matter, colonial America well into the eighteenth century. The sun’s impact on human illness, conversely, was thought salutary, in large measure for dispersing harmful damps. “At her sight,” rhapsodized the Elizabethan Robert Greene of the sun, “the night’s foul vapours fled.”
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Fears of contagion were intensified by the common perception that illnesses worsened at night. “All sickness,” wrote the Minorite friar Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “generally is stronger by night than by day.” Observed Thomas Amory, “There is never a night passes wherein sickness and death do not afflict and lay waste many.”
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In truth, symptoms associated with many illnesses almost certainly grew worse at nighttime, much as they do today. Deaths themselves, we know, are most likely to occur during the early morning hours, often due to circadian rhythms peculiar to such maladies as asthma, acute heart attacks, and strokes brought on by blood clots, accentuated perhaps by reduced blood flow to the brain owing to the position of the body while asleep. In general, we become most vulnerable when the body’s “circadian cycle is at its lowest ebb.” There is no reason to suspect that physiological cycles were significantly different four hundred years ago. A related problem is that immune systems weaken while we sleep, thereby releasing fewer “killer cells” to ward off infection.
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Premodern families typically blamed the dangerous properties of the atmosphere for contributing to respiratory tract illnesses. Two of the most common early modern diseases, influenza and pulmonary tuberculosis (consumption), worsened after dark, whether from constricted airways, heightened sensitivity to allergens, or added stress inflicted upon the lungs while bodies lay prone. Tragically, many persons might have been saved had their chambers been better ventilated at night, especially when occupied by multiple members of a family. A single window, perched slightly open, might have countered the deadly microorganisms spread by coughing and sneezing. The late eighteenth-century reformer Jonas Hanway wrote that the poor, in particular, when sick “imagine that warmth is so necessary to their cure.” As a consequence, “they frequently poison themselves with their own confined air.”
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III

The twilight is approaching,
The night is approaching,
Let us ask God for help
and for protection
From evil spirits,
Who in darkness practise
Their cunning most.

ANDRZEJ TRZECIESKI,
ca. 1558
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“Night,” cautioned a proverb, “belongs to the spirits.” The uninviting climes of evening—their horrible sights and foreign sounds, their noysome vapors—beckoned a host of demons and spirits, which the Stuart playwright John Fletcher called the “blacke spawne of darknesse.” The sky was their empire, the night air their earthly domain.
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None, of course, was more feared than Satan, the “Prince of Darkness,” whose misdeeds were legion, spread far and wide with the growth of printing by popular tracts and scholarly texts. “One hears daily,” a German clergyman wrote in 1532, “of the hideous deeds effected by the Devil. There many thousands are struck dead; there a ship goes down with many people beneath the sea; there a land perishes, a city, a village.” Because of the millenarian cast of Christian beliefs and prophecies of Armageddon, Satan, now more than ever, was thought on the attack. He was just as feared for scourging sinners as for robbing mortals of their souls—“God’s hangman,” in the words of James I (1566–1625). Naturally dark in color, Satan assumed a range of clever disguises, often adopting the likeness of a black dog or crow. Although rumored to appear at all hours, he was believed to favor the darkness of night. Some writers, like the Elizabethan Thomas Nashe and the Anglican bishop Jeremy Taylor, supposed that God had forbidden his presence during daylight. Of nighttime, Nashe wrote, “Our creator for our punishment hath allotted it him as his peculiar segniorie and kingdome.” “The night, the ways of hell, the time of Satan’s reign,” warned a German evening devotion.
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Plainly, night best suited his designs. The darkness of evening closely resembled hell, Satan’s eternal home, where fire gave no light and the “foulest of fumes” blinded the eyes “with a choking smoke.” By rejecting the light of God’s word, the devil embraced darkness, literally as well as metaphorically. Night alone magnified his powers and emboldened his spirit. Conversely, at no other time was man more vulnerable, blinded as well as isolated, and likely to be taken by surprise.
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Indeed, darkness had become Satan’s unholy realm on earth, a shadow government from which to wage perpetual warfare against the kingdom of Christ. His armies included a hierarchy of demons, imps, hobgoblins, and witches, all as real to contemporaries as their leader. “The Dark World,” warned the jurist Sir Matthew Hale in 1693, “sometimes afflicting us with dreadful shapes, abominable smells, loathsome tastes, with other operations of the evil angels.” The malevolent powers of demons were formidable. Appearing before men “in divers shapes,” commented the Calvinist leader James Calfhill, they “disquiet them when they are awake; trouble them in their sleeps, distort their members; take away their health; afflict them with diseases.”
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As elsewhere in Europe, the topography of nearly every British hamlet was freighted with supernatural importance. Local lore cautioned village natives and unwary strangers alike, with numerous sites named after the Prince of Darkness himself. So at the “Devil’s Hollows” in the Scottish parish of Tannadice, it was well-known that Satan had once “given some remarkable displays of his presence and power.” Such was his reputed boldness in an Essex village that he tore down at night a church steeple that parishioners had raised during the day. Despite a local gentleman’s offer to purchase fresh materials, none dared to reconstruct the spire. Other than haunted houses, demonic sites included ponds, woods, and churchyards. “Those places are so frightful in the night time,” the French lawyer Pierre Le Loyer wrote in 1605, particularly among the “vulgar sort.” A century later, a writer in the
Spectator
opined, “There was not a village in
England
that had not a ghost in it, the churchyards were all haunted, every large common had a circle of fairies belonging to it, and there was scarce a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit.”
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Matthias Grunewald,
The Devil Attacking the Window
(detail from
St. Anthony the Hermit
from the Isenheim Altarpiece), ca. 1512–1516.

Where learned authorities spoke in generalities, demons bore distinct identities in the popular mind. Especially in rural areas, residents were painfully familiar with the wickedness of local spirits, known in England by such names as the “Barguest of York,” “Long Margery,” and “Jinny Green-Teeth.” Among the most common tormentors were fairies. In England, their so-called king was Robin Good-fellow, a trickster whose alleged pranks included leading wanderers astray at night through bogs and forests. In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(ca. 1595), he was Shakespeare’s inspiration for the pixie Puck.
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Closely allied were will-o’-the-wisps, mischievous imps that glowed at night above marshlands, which persons mistook, at their peril, for the light of a lantern. “The Devil’s lontun,” they were called in parts of England. “An
ignis fatuus
, that bewitches,” Samuel Butler wrote in 1663, “and leads men into pools and ditches.”
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Variously defined as ghosts or fallen angels, some fairies were believed benign, but others absconded with livestock, crops, and even young children. “The honest people,” if we may believe a visitor to Wales, “are terrified about these little fellows,” and in Ireland Thomas Campbell reported in 1777, “The fairy mythology is swallowed with the wide throat of credulity.” No part of the British Isles was thought safe from their kindred—brownies, sprites, colts, or pixies, as they were called. Dobbies, who dwelt near towers and bridges, reportedly attacked on horseback. An extremely malicious order of fairies, the duergars, haunted parts of Northumberland in northern England, while a band in Scotland, the kelpies, bedeviled rivers and ferries. Elsewhere, the peoples of nearly every European culture believed in a similar race of small beings notorious for nocturnal malevolence. Whether foliots, trolls, or elves, their powers far outweighed their Lilliputian size. “When ill treated,” wrote a traveler to Westphalia, “these powerful little spirits are cruelly vindictive, and will hide, mangle, and destroy everything before them.”
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Equally prevalent were disembodied spirits of the dead. Known as boggles, boggarts, and wafts, ghosts reportedly resumed their mortal likenesses at night. On other evenings, they were known to dress in white or take on the shapes of animals. Denied entry to the light of God, according to Christian tradition, they almost always appeared after dark. “The Lord gave day to the living,” observed Thietmar of Merseburg, “and night to the dead.” Some restless souls bore news of an impending death. Others were suicides condemned to wander indefinitely. Occasionally, specters returned to old neighborhoods seeking to right prior wrongs. In 1718, James Withey of Trowbridge was said to have twice witnessed, by his bedside, the ghost of a deceased girlfriend that he had deserted. “He visibly saw at 2 several times,” a neighbor recounted, “the apparition of his old sweetheart in ye dress that she ware at ye time of his courtship of her, & that after looking with a stern visage upon him, she disppear’d, & his candle was extinguished.”
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