At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (14 page)

Certainly, most courts and tribunals fell silent each evening. Proceedings were barred not just by fatigue and hazardous travel but also by a belief among officials in night’s inviolability. As early as the
Twelve Tables
, the ancient foundation of Roman law, judges were instructed to render decisions by “the setting of the sun.” And, too, darkness connoted deceit and secrecy. The famous Roman advocate Quintilian observed, “‘With bad intention, then, means something done in treachery, at night, in solitude.” As a guiding precept of Roman law, which experienced a resurgence in the late Middle Ages, the conviction that nighttime fostered duplicity exerted an enduring influence across continental Europe. Some localities prohibited civil transactions after dark; and even when permitted, their validity remained suspect. Contracts, covenants, and codicils all aroused suspicion when executed at night. Beginning in the sixteenth century, pawned goods in sections of Switzerland, according to a regional code, could not be appraised after the “sunshine disappears behind the mountain top.” In some places, the selection of beneficiaries by testators was forbidden, whereas wills themselves could be read only in the presence of “three lights.”
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One suspects that similar attitudes informed English courts, though the common law contained few explicit restrictions. A noteworthy exception concerned the right of landlords to seize the property of tenants for nonpayment of rent. After dark, common law expressly forbade this practice, permitting only the overnight confinement of livestock that strayed from a neighbor’s fields. In addition to customary prejudices against nocturnal transactions, personal dwellings, in the eyes of English courts, constituted protected sanctuaries at night. “Every man by the law hath a special protection in reference to his house and dwelling,” observed Sir Matthew Hale in the
History of the Pleas of the Crown
(1736). “Every English,” John Adams of Massachusetts proclaimed, “glories justly in that strong protection, that sweet security, that delightful tranquility which the laws have thus secured to him in his own house, especially in the night.”
58

Still, Carbonnier’s skepticism about the law’s reach is only partially merited. How greater, by comparison, the compass of criminal justice at night became. Just as evening announced the cessation of civil society, it signaled the increased danger of crime. True, the response of authorities could have been more energetic—employing trained police rather than constables and watchmen with the added responsibility of fire prevention. On the other hand, no officers at all regularly patrolled urban streets by day. Their presence at night represented a singular assertion of government power. Then, too, these “midnight magistrates,” as a critic called constables, possessed considerable legal authority. In England, unlike daytime officers with restricted powers of arrest, watchmen and con-stables enjoyed wide latitude. In the absence of police, inflating their powers offerred a way to compensate for the weaknesses of an amateur constabulary.
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Other steps, too, were taken to stem nocturnal crime. In places that permitted the limited use of torture in criminal interrogations, judges relaxed restrictions for offenses after dark. Within Italy, summary courts arose in the late Middle Ages for the investigation and prosecution of nighttime offenses. Foremost among these tribunals were the
Signori di Notte
(Guardians of the Night Watch) in Venice and the
Ufficiali di Notte
. (Officials of the Night) in Florence. Towns in Denmark occasionally granted citizens the right to convene their own courts in order to try offenders at night. Nor were evening executions unknown, sometimes following immediately after convictions in order to quell popular discontent or to underscore the importance of swift justice. In August 1497, for example, five prisoners in Florence were quickly executed after a trial lasting from morning until midnight. Noted the Milanese law professor Polydorus Ripa in 1602, “A punishment is able to be performed even at nighttime if there is danger in delay.” Darkness also magnified the horror of the death penalty. When Dublin fell prey in 1745 to a rash of street robberies, officials hanged seven criminals by torchlight. “The unusual solemnity of such an execution,” a contemporary remarked, “struck such a terror in the minds of the populace” that the number of robberies fell.
60

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon,
Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime
, 1808.

More commonly, courts everywhere exacted stiffer punishments for nighttime offenses. If not stipulated by law, this calculation usually occurred in the normal course of deliberations by judges and juries. During the late Middle Ages, numerous nocturnal offenses were punished with added severity. A woman in Siena in 1342, found guilty of an assault, first had her punishment halved because her victim was male, then doubled “because she struck him in his house,” and doubled yet again because the crime took place at night. Such, too, was the predominant pattern in early modern courts, where thefts routinely crammed dockets. “A nighttime thief must be punished more than a daytime one,” wrote Ripa. For thefts committed after the curfew bell, towns in Sweden decreed the death penalty, while in the Sénéchaussée courts of eighteenth-century France, darkness was the most common aggravating circumstance in the sentencing of thieves. Just as bills of indictment in English courts, as a matter of course, specified whether a crime occurred at night, Scottish proceedings pointedly noted offenses committed “under cloud and silence of night.”
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Especially serious was burglary. Under the Tudors, it became one of the first crimes in England removed from the list of those which allowed a felon to escape the death penalty by claiming literacy. In the county of Middlesex during the second half of the 1500s, over four-fifths of convicted burglars were sentenced to hang. Death by hanging or the galleys for life was standard punishment in France. Colonial American assemblies left English law intact, with only slight changes. In Massachusetts, where the Puritans initially proved reluctant to execute property offenders, the government in 1715 declared burglary a capital crime, even for first-time offenders.
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In the view of courts, only one deed, if committed at night, merited lenience: the slaying of a domestic intruder. Early legal codes from the
Twelve Tables
to
Rothair’s Edict
in the mid-seventh century to the Coutumes de Beauvaisis in 1283 recognized this basic principle, as did St. Augustine and English law. What by day constituted homicide, even if the victim were a housebreaker, by night became a justifiable act of self-defense. So in 1743, a Geneva prosecutor declined to charge a peasant for shooting a burglar. Besides citing Mosaic law, the
procureur général
explained that it had been impossible for the peasant to know at nighttime whether the intruder had theft or murder in mind. “In the day time,” a correspondent to the
London Magazine
reflected in 1766, “it might possibly be discovered who he [the thief] was, and it might be presumed he intended only to steal not to kill.” “In this case,” the writer explained, “a man should not avenge himself, but have the thief before the magistrate.” But at night, everything was different. The “master of the house could
then
neither know who he was, nor expect, or have the help of others to secure him.”
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It should not surprise us that procedures and penalties, indeed basic rights and privileges, changed from day to night. The arrival of darkness placed heightened emphasis upon the preservation of public order. A French prosecutor in 1668 bemoaned that two thieves from Lieges were merely sentenced to hang. “Public safety during the night is so important that one would think they would be condemned to the wheel.” Not only did nighttime afford criminals a cloak of secrecy, but it hindered the ability of persons to defend themselves, particularly when home asleep—or to come to the assistance of their neighbors. “Stealing in the night time is certainly ane aggravation of theft,” observed a Scottish prosecutor, “because then people are most unguarded.” In the case of burglary, the availability of moonlight, unlike daylight, did not obviate the terrible nature of the crime, even when an offender’s identity was known. Sir William Blackstone declared in 1769, “The malignity of the offence does not so properly arise from its being done in the dark as at the dead of night, when all creation except beasts of prey are at rest, when sleep has disarmed the owner and rendered his castle defenceless.”
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So it was. At that late date, most persons at night still remained on their own, confronting crime and other dangers with, at best, the aid of family and close neighbors. Despite the steadily rising powers of the state, nighttime defied the imposition of government authority. Acknowledging this reality, early modern laws vainly sought to deter criminals from exploiting night’s natural advantages. Without the support of daily institutions and controls, authorities relied upon repressive penalties and procedures to keep the worst excesses of criminal violence at bay.

All to little effect. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, a Londoner complained of the “armies of Hell” that “ravage our streets” and “keep possession of the town every night.” So, too, in Paris, observed a lawyer in 1742, “no one was out past 10
P.M.
,” even though a professional
garde
by then supplemented the city’s watch. Instead, criminals with clubs,
assommeurs
, roved the main streets. The best that can be said is that, in the absence of watchmen and rudimentary lighting, urban conditions would have been worse. Ultimately, night lay beyond government control, a natural law that neither courts nor constables could change. A tenacious fatalism, grounded in an awareness of God’s omnipotence and man’s frailty, undergirded the official mindset. Hence the well-known psalm, inscribed on an ancient building in the Danish town of Aalborg, “Unless the Lord watches over the city, in vain the watchman stands on guard.”
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CHAPTER FOUR

A MAN’S HOUSE IS HIS CASTLE:DOMESTIC FORTIFICATIONS

I

Thro God’s great mercy we were safe at my house before the day light was gone.

EBENEZER PARKMAN,
1745
1

W
ELL BEFORE TOWNS
barred their gates, nature signaled day’s retreat. For many families, the rural environment, not watches or clocks, kept life’s daily pulse. Only parish church bells, periodically rung during the day, rivaled nature’s precision. Innumerable omens foretold evening’s advance, many of them routinely decipherable, others intuited by the received wisdom of bygone generations. Toward sunset, marigold petals began to close. Flocks of crows returned to their nests, and rabbits grew more animated. The pupils of goats and sheep, normally oval in shape, appeared round. “The goats’ eyes were my clock,” recalled Ulrich Bräker of his labors as a young Swiss shepherd.
2

No time of the day aroused greater anticipation than the onset of darkness. Nor did any interval merit more careful calibration. On clear days, guidance came from the heavens—the sinking course of the sun, leaving streaks of light across the sky. Wrote a seventeenth-century Neapolitan, “The sky was darkening to the colour of a wolf’s snout.” Still, nature’s most reliable timetable lay in shadows cast by the sun’s descent. As daylight dimmed, darkness to the human eye advanced in stages. Day in, day out, fields fell to the shadows in unerring succession.
Brune
, a French term for dusk, testified to the altered hue of the evening landscape. In contrast to Mediterranean latitudes, twilight in northwestern Europe was prolonged. The typical countryman, Thomas Hardy remarked in
The Woodlanders
(1887), “sees a thousand successive tints and traits in the landscape which are never discerned by him who hears the regular chime of a clock.”
3

Rarely did preindustrial folk pause to ponder the beauty of day’s departure. In contrast to the praises sung of dawn, neither in literature nor in letters and diaries did contemporaries marvel at the sun’s decline. Feelings of insecurity more often than awe swept the terrain. “Begins the night, and warns us home repair,” wrote a Stuart poet. Eager to avoid nightfall, numerous men and women hastened homeward, hoping to return in “good season.” Some, tarrying too long, lodged at the house of a relation or friend rather than brave the night. Detained by a court hearing, Matthew Patten, a farmer in colonial New
Hampshire
, observed, “It was so near night when it was done that we could not come home.”
4
As evening blanketed the countryside, tardy travelers wrote of being “covered” or “overtaken.” “Night overtook us, and made the remainder of the journey disagreeable and dangerous,” recounted one. Sometimes night’s miasmic atmosphere seemed impenetrable to sight. “Come, thick night,” implores Lady
Macbeth,
“And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.”
5

II

Theeves, wolves, and foxes now fall to their prey, but a strong locke, and a good wit, will aware much mischiefe.

NICHOLAS BRETON,
1626
6

Easily, the most common idiom in English for nightfall was “shutting-in.” More than other expressions, it captured popular apprehensions. After a short trip, the Puritan minister Samuel Sewall jotted in his diary, “Got well home before shutting in. Praised be God.” In part, this oft-repeated term signified the metaphorical “shutting-in” of daylight—“I returned home on foot, just as day light shut in,” recounted a London resident. But on a practical level, “shutting-in” emphasized the need for households to bolt portals against the advancing darkness. The fifteenth-century poet François Villon instructed, “The house is safe but be sure it is shut tight.” Attested an English proverb, “Men shut their doors against a setting sun.”
7

The saying that “a man’s house is his castle” assumed profound importance at night. This timeworn expression, at least as old as the 1500s, applied alike to turf huts and brick manor homes. According to Sir Edward Coke, the home served as much for man’s “defense against injury and violence as for his repose.” A sacred boundary, the domestic threshold was demarcated by a door and a sill of stone or wood. However exposed during the day, thresholds represented frontiers at night that unexpected visitors were not to cross. The reaction of a rural household in Scotland when approached by a rider would have been a common one: “Upon the trampling of my horses before the house,” discovered Edward Burt, “the lights went out . . . and deafness, at once, seized the whole family.”
8

Despite prevailing fears, families at night were far from powerless. Without the protection afforded by institutions, they relied heavily upon their own resources. Everyone assisted, but care and protection of the family lay with the
paterfamilias
, the male head of the household. First and foremost, evening saw quarters made fast once laundry and tools were brought inside. Doors, shutters, and windows were closed tight and latched. A London wine merchant observed, “I never keep the door open after ’tis dark.” “Barricaded,” “bolted,” and “barred,” as an English playwright described a Georgian home—“backside and foreside, top and bottom.” Of his Bavarian childhood, the writer Jean Paul reflected, “Our living room would be lit up and fortified simultaneously, viz, the shutters were closed and bolted.” A child, he noted, “felt snugly preserved” behind “these window embrasures and parapets.” The working poor also took precautions, for even the most mundane items—food, clothing, and household goods—attracted thieves. Richard Ginn, who worked for a coachmaker, testified, “My house is constantly locked up half an hour past 8, when I return from my business, for I may be killed as well as another man.” As one who earned her bread from washing, Anne Towers had a “great charge of linen” besides personal belongings in her London home on Artichoke Lane—“I always go round every night to see that all is fast.”
9

In well-to-do homes, large wooden doors, set in frames of stone or wood, guarded the front entrance. Iron hinges and latches gave added strength to the thick wood. All the same, many locks provided scant security. The standard mechanism, common since medieval times, permitted a key to push a bolt into a groove in the frame, thereby fastening the door. Not until the introduction of the “tumbler” lock in the eighteenth century would keyholes better withstand the prowess of experienced thieves. In the meantime, families resorted to double locks on exterior doors, bolstered from within by padlocks and iron bars.
10

More vulnerable were windows. Despite their small size by modern standards, at night windows represented the weakest points in a home’s perimeter. Whereas the lower orders covered openings with oilcloth, canvas, or paper, aristocratic housing began to boast glazed windows by the late Middle Ages. Only in the sixteenth century, however, did glass panes spread to middle-class dwellings. Besides confining heat, windows lent protection from the wind and rain, and also from the night air. Wooden shutters afforded a safeguard against both intruders and the elements, especially if caulked during the winter with soil or moss.
11
Often, in preindustrial homes, iron grates and bars protected windows on the ground floor, prompting frequent comparisons with convents and gaols—“more like prisons,” observed a visitor to Madrid, “than the habitations of people at their liberty.” Even where living conditions were meager, iron bars, in the absence of glass windows, were thought a necessity. A traveler in northern France remarked, “The people are very poor, and live in most dreadful huts, . . . no glass in the windows but iron bars, and wooden shutters.” Although barred windows were most common on the Continent, visitors noted their presence in parts of England and the Scottish lowlands. In London, the magistrate Sir John Fielding endorsed the practice of securing windows with bars in the shape of a cross; he also recommended that each door have double bolts along with a bar and chain.
12

Naturally, families took extra pains to protect such valuables as money, plate, and jewelry. Within propertied households, oak chests, fitted with locks and iron bands, were common. Counseled Paolo da Certaldo in the late fourteenth century, “Close up all your day-time things always, whenever you go to sleep at night.” Samuel Pepys concealed valuables throughout the rooms of his house, including his dressing room, study, and cellar, where he stored sundry chests constructed of iron. “I am in great pain to think how to dispose of my money,” he fretted, “it being wholly unsafe to keep it all in coin in one place.” Blessed with one hundred and fifty pounds, Anne Feddon of Cumberland always locked her fortune in a drawer during the day but “took it to bed with her at night.” John Cooper in Yorkshire hid ten pounds beneath a large stone in a corner of his home. As reflected in fairy-tales, hiding places were not restricted to dwellings. In addition to closets, chests, and beds, they included dry wells and hollow tree trunks. Among villagers in eighteenth-century Languedoc, burying the family treasure in a nearby field was a favorite tactic.
13

All these steps constituted a family’s preliminary line of defense. There were also precautions designed to alert slumbering households, such as equipping shutters with bells. Servants, too, knew to sound an alarm. Late one evening in 1672 when three maids, washing dishes in a Northamptonshire home, heard a noise in the yard, they promptly awakened the household—”one beat the bell, another blew a horn, a third put candles in every room.” Wealthy estates occasionally employed guards and, by the late seventeenth century, spring-traps. The author of
Systema Agriculturae
in 1675 advised placing sharp iron spikes in the ground, surrounded by brass trip-wires, “which wire and spikes are not visible by night.” In 1694, an English inventor even devised a “night engine” to be stationed “in a convenient place of any house, to prevent thieves from breaking in.” The exact nature of the device remains a mystery, but it likely anticipated another “machine,” advertised a century later by William
Hamlet
of London. A spider’s web of bells and rope stretched across a broad frame,
Hamlet
’s design promised to sound an alarm against both thieves and fire.
14

Most households were armed, often more heavily than members of the nightwatch. Domestic arsenals contained swords, pikes, and firearms, or in less affluent homes cudgels and sticks, both capable of delivering mortal blows. In the country, sickles, axes, and other farm tools made convenient weapons. Having passed through a cornfield, the Oxfordshire adolescent Thomas Ellwood was attacked at night by husbandmen wielding staves “big enough to have knockt down an ox.” Once a family retired for the night, weapons were kept close. A Middlesex squire, his house invaded by five masked burglars in 1704, immediately snatched a sword “that always lay at his beds-head”—only to be stabbed from behind. Valued as a club was the common bed-staff, a short, sturdy stick used in sets of two on each side of a bed to hold its covers in place. The staff enjoyed a widespread reputation as a handy weapon—hence, in all likelihood, the expression “in the twinkling of a bed-staff.” When a
Hampshire
apprentice in 1625 attacked his sleeping master with a hatchet, he was quickly beaten off with one.
15

Firearms, owing to advances in accuracy and other technological breakthroughs, grew more prevalent among homeowners after the mid-seventeenth century. Whereas in Kent, guns figured in fewer than 3 percent of all violent deaths between 1560 and 1660, shootings claimed more than one-quarter of such fatalities by the 1720s. Many of these, arising from the protection of home and family, ended at court in acquittals. Anxious to light his candle late one evening, James Boswell desisted from searching for a tinderbox for fear that his landlord—“who always keeps a pair of loaded pistols by him”—would mistake him for a thief. Few London households were as well armed as that of Charlotte Charke, who as a young girl grew fearful that her home would be burglarized. Stashing her parents’ silverware by her bedside, she assembled a personal armory, containing “my own little carbine,” a “heavy blunderbuss, a muscatoon, and two brace of pistols”—“all which I loaded with a couple of bullets each before I went to bed.”
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