Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (35 page)

Early modern authorities condoned this kind of defensive or pre-emptive nocturnal violence, even at its most extreme. On April 30, 1666 William Knaggs and Thomas Bell, a blacksmith, “together with several young men and boys of the town of Birdsall [Yorkshire] … being about the number of fourteen” went into a forest belonging to the Eddlethorpe farm at “about eleven o’clock in the night.” Knaggs and Bell separated from the group, “their intention then being to choose and get a young ash tree for a Maypole to carry to the town of Birdsall.” The search proved fatal for Knaggs: he and Bell “heard someone speak but did not well understand what they said and immediately after a gun was discharged and the said William Knaggs being then close by … gave a shriek and turned around and fell down dead.” Bell could not see who shot Knaggs, but “immediately after the gun was discharged, one Mr. Edward Ruddock and another person” came up to Birdsall, saying “‘Ho rogues! Ho rogues! Have we met with you? I’ll make rogues on you. It’s more fit you were in your beds than here at this time of night.’”
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Ruddock asked Bell where the rest of the group was, then set off after them, “in his hand one gun,” and fired again a few minutes later.
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Ruddock was tried for the homicide. Despite the evidence given here by Thomas Bell, he was acquitted, underscoring the expectation of danger at night reflected in all these deadly encounters.

In addition to this interpersonal violence, the rural night also saw communal violence that enforced group identities or village boundaries. The young Thomas Isham of Lamport kept a diary of country life in Northhamptonshire in 1671–73, recording on April 30, 1673 a particularly brutal encounter between the young men of two villages:

Last night the servants of four farmers, with Mr. Baxter’s man and Henry Lichfield, went to Draughton [about a mile northwest] to bring home the first drawing of beer, which they bought from Palmer. On the way back sixteen or seventeen Draughton men met them with stakes and began to lay about them; but being few and unarmed against a greater number of armed men, they were easily beaten, and Mr. Baxter’s man has had his skull laid bare in several places and almost fractured.
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The diarist does not explain what score the Draughton men had to settle with the six young men of Lamport; a slight to village pride, or perhaps the visitors were courting the young women of Draughton. The chronicle of the Dötschel brothers of Mitwitz, a village in rural Franconia, recorded violent brawls after their village’s church fair (kermesse,
Kirchweihfest
) on August 31, 1628 and in 1670: “Anno 1670 year [sic], at our church fair in the night, Erhart Bauer … became unruly with Attam and Michael, the two Jüng brothers from Rotschreuth … and it became a great brawl.” Each of these “battles” (as the Dötschels described them) between neighboring villages ended with several men seriously injured.
⁸⁷

Nocturnal crimes against property were associated with nightwalkers, suspicious persons who might eavesdrop, “cast men’s gates, carts or the like into ponds, or commit other outrages or misdemeanors in the night, or shall be suspected to be pilferers, or otherwise likely to disturb the peace.”
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When the term first appeared in the late Middle Ages, nightwalkers were assumed to be men, but, as discussed in
chapter 6
, in seventeenth-century London the term came to refer to “lewd and idle women.” In the provinces the term retained its masculine associations through the eighteenth century: as the Justice of the Peace Robert Doughty explained to Norfolk jurors at a quarter session in 1664, nightwalkers were “rogues … such as slept on the day & watched on the night, & such as frequented alehouses &
fared well & had no visible means of livelihood.”
⁸⁹
In the countryside nightwalking shaded into poaching, a widespread nocturnal crime issuing from deep social tensions.
⁹⁰

Whatever the actual level of interpersonal nocturnal crime in the countryside, early modern villagers were quick to defend themselves against perceived nocturnal threats to themselves or their goods.
⁹¹
Thomas Isham recorded an “uproar” on the night of December 13, 1672:

About eleven or twelve o’clock tonight a noise was heard in Mr. Wright’s yard. The maids, who were washing dishes, heard someone beating on the window, breaking it as if trying to get in. They were terrified.

The entire household, and the village, sprang into action:

[O]ne beat on the bell, another blew a horn, a third put candles in every room. Meanwhile Wright, clad only in a nightshirt, ran through the house like a madman, and his son waited in the hall with a sword and holding a gun, ready to receive them with a volley … the neighbors, aroused by the horn and thinking that the house was being attacked by thieves, assembled with forks, sticks, and spits.

Armed and ready, when the villagers investigated the yard they found “a dog that had been shut out and had broken a window.” Isham notes that “this sent them away with roars of laughter,”
⁹²
but the retrospectively ridiculous preparation for violence clearly shows that such a situation could be dangerous. In the Bavarian town of Traunstein in 1698 the apprentice carpenter Ruepp Jähner lost the fingers on his right hand when he took an ill-considered shortcut over a fence late one night: he was attacked without warning by his neighbor, Sylvester Schneiderpaur. After dark, any “intruder” to a domestic space could reckon with a violent response.

The rural night belonged to the common people. When church and state authorities sought to discipline the night in the countryside, they spoke and acted as if they faced a “dark continent” of rural superstition,
excess, and intransigence. All the activities just described drew the authorities’ attention as they sought to regulate and police labor, leisure, disorder, and crime in villages and farms, and in the rural night’s uninhabited spaces, such as forests and roads.
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This focus on the rural night increased in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
⁹⁴
In Catholic areas church leaders tried to reinforce their moral discipline by co-opting or introducing nocturnal forms of popular piety.
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How does this engagement with the rural night compare with the colonization of the urban night examined in previous chapters? The same legal-disciplinary framework underlay authorities’ engagement with the night in the countryside as in the city. But the encounter of church and state with the rural night was shaped by different cultural and social forces and led to outcomes distinctly different from the colonization of the night in the cities of Northern Europe.

In these cities, the colonization of the night was based on settlement, achieved when courtiers and respectable burghers shifted their daily activities later into the evening and night. Respectable activity after dark reoriented the use of the evening and night hours away from young people and toward a new kind of homosocial, respectable man. The result was a new period of urban time based on public street lighting and private consumption. This engagement with the night sought to create an urban site of
activity
for respectable men, who eagerly occupied its taverns, coffeehouses, clubs, and theaters, now more safely connected by lighted streets.
⁹⁶
Unlike the colonization of the urban night, which was based on the expansion of the nocturnal activity of one group at the expense of another, the colonization of the rural night was a struggle to
clear
the rural night of its traditional activities (such as spinning bees, courtship customs, and popular nocturnal celebrations) and create an ordered time largely empty of activity.
⁹⁷

Efforts to colonize the rural night required a sharp focus on young people. Youth were the “indigenous” people of the early modern night, and limiting their night life was a constant concern. The Bavarian priest Christof Selhammer epitomized this view when he preached that rural servants should be locked in at night: “Among the
peasants, the master of the house should keep careful watch over his servants. At night every house-door should be locked and bolted so that no one goes out and no one can sneak in.”
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The administrators and pastors who sought to discipline the rural night had little interest in supplanting traditional village night life with their own sociability. The colonization of the rural night was not based on settlement. Indeed, as we will see below, the rural gentry began to slip out of step with the daily rhythms of their urban cousins at the start of the eighteenth century.

The means by which spiritual and secular authorities sought to colonize the rural night have been described as “social discipline.” The early modern colonization of the night – urban and rural – began on paper with a stream of legal writing on the dangers of the night and its fundamental association with sin and crime in the early seventeenth century.
⁹⁹
These works proposed, both implicitly and explicitly, that policing could and should combat the disorder of the night. In theory and practice, the colonization of the rural night sought to reclassify nocturnal leisure, sociability, and disorder as crime.

The sexuality of young adults was at the center of these attempts to discipline the rural night. As we have seen, young people in the countryside depended on the night for courtship, social exchange, and leisure, and they defended their access to the night in negotiations with their masters. In response, church and state authorities repeatedly tried to restrict all forms of rural “night life.”

The prescriptions of church and state maintained an intense focus on spinning bees and similar gatherings. Across France a succession of bishops condemned these gatherings from the sixteenth century through the end of the Old Regime.
¹⁰⁰
The statutes published by the bishop of Saint-Malo in 1619 were especially florid, describing the spinning bees as “assemblies of the night invented by the prince of darkness whose sole aim is to cause the fall of man.”
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Worse even than the public house was the “intolerable corruption and detestable, hideous debauchery committed under the guise of what is known in
this country as spinning [and] scutching [hemp] … done at night, where men, women, and girls flock.” “We have heard from reliable people,” the statutes continued, “that going to such a … spinning bee is [the same as] going to a brothel.”
¹⁰²
The parlement of Brittany prohibited them entirely in 1670.
¹⁰³
The synodal statutes issued for the diocese of Troyes in 1680 forbade

men and boys, under pain of excommunication … to be with women and girls in the places where they assemble at night to spin or work, to linger there in any way, or to wait to walk them back home. As we also forbid under the same penalties women and girls to receive [the men and boys]. We urge them to behave during the time of their work with all the modesty befitting the faithful, and even to sanctify their meetings by a few prayers.
¹⁰⁴

This statute reflects a modest hope that casual labor at night could be “sanctified” once the sexes were rigorously separated. Most other authorities, less optimistic, simply forbade the gatherings entirely.
¹⁰⁵
German authorities also focused on the sexual associations of the spinning bee, “in which all kinds of immorality and fornication are carried on.”
¹⁰⁶
In a personal plea, a Lutheran pastor bedeviled by the spinning bees begged the state authorities for a decree that “every servant who would be found on the streets or in public houses, or other such places after 9 p.m. should be condemned to pay a fixed fine.” Recognizing that masters were not especially interested in separating young people from the rural night, the pastor continued: “and those heads of households whose servants were not home at the aforementioned time, and who keep silent about it and do not report [their servants] should just as well be punished with a fine.”
¹⁰⁷

Church authorities challenged all forms of nocturnal courtship across Europe in the seventeenth century, with some success: in France bishops threatened bundling and prenuptial sex with excommunication, and they had all but disappeared by the mid eighteenth century.
¹⁰⁸
In electoral Cologne the nocturnal courtship customs of the spring, such as the
Mailehen
(a mock marriage for courting couples) were successfully separated from the church’s celebration of Pentecost, though not eliminated entirely.
¹⁰⁹

We might suspect that the focus on the sexuality of village youth made the night itself incidental to this program of social discipline.
But the official abhorrence of youthful rural night life was so prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we can see the night disciplined
as night
. As the council of Schwäbisch Hall ordered in 1684:

If any unmarried servants go out to drink wine, and otherwise do only what is right, and in the evening each one goes home alone, nonetheless the male servants shall pay 1 fl. and the maids 15 ß as punishment.
¹¹⁰

In this small city, most servants came from the surrounding countryside and continued to socialize there – hence the rural context of this decree. The authorities focused directly on the night rather than on excesses in nocturnal sociability in their attempts to contain their young servants: even if nothing improper was done and all returned home by a reasonable hour, nocturnal gatherings would still be an offense.