Chapter Seven
On the night of Thursday, January 13, 1603, “early in the morning, roughly between two and three o’clock,” the innkeeper Barthel Dorfheilige of the Hessian town of Wanfried awoke to the sound of splintering wood.1 He quickly discovered two young noblemen, Hans Werner von Eschwege (c. 1581–c. 1624) and his cousin Eberhard von Alten (c. 1583–?), smashing in the window of the main room of his inn. Dorfheilige reported that he “hastily lit a lamp and ran into the room in his nightshirt, and shined his light out the broken window to see the malefactors.” He recognized “Hans Werner, son of Reinhard von Eschwege zu Aue” and then Eberhard von Alten. Hans Werner greeted him and apologized for the broken window while Eberhard demanded that Dorfheilige open the door. Hans Werner said he would vouch for his cousin’s good conduct, so Dorfheilige let them in and called for one of his servants to see to their horses.2
Once inside, the two young “Junkers” (as Dorfheilige called them) continued their harassment of the innkeeper, breaking another window from the inside and assaulting Dorfheilige’s wife, children, and servants. The two young men then forced the innkeeper to accompany them on a similar visit to awaken the local miller, then returned to the inn for more wine and a meal. When the servants of the noblemen began to beat one of Dorfheilige’s children, the innkeeper defended his son with a bread knife: the two noblemen and two more of their servants joined the fray and Dorfheilige fled into the streets of the town. Hans Werner and Eberhard mounted their horses and followed him. Several neighbors came out of their houses to aid the innkeeper, but paid the price as the young noblemen fired at them, broke out more windows, and screamed threats. “Finally the Schultheiss [village administrator] and soldiers came to town and sounded the bell,” and the noblemen and their servants rode off, shouting abuse behind them.3
This violent incident, in which the “Junkers” shoved Dorfheilige’s pregnant wife into a pile of manure, beat one of his children bloody, and unleashed terror on his “house and home,” reveals several fundamental aspects of the early modern rural night. We see the association of violence with the night, and importance of the public house to the life of a village, both day and night. Towns like Wanfried had no regular night watch and Hans Werner and Eberhard had plenty of time to lash out at the villagers before any local authorities appeared. From the perspective of the local authorities, the rural night was simply much harder to police.
But the assault on the inn led by the young Hans Werner von Eschwege was no random act of nocturnal violence. His father Reinhard von Eschwege zu Aue (d. 1607) was entangled in several bitter legal disputes with the peasants of Wanfried over grazing, hunting, and fishing rights.4 Early modern German law insisted on the daytime character of all legal proceedings. One could not convene a court, prepare a will, or pronounce a verdict at night.5 Parallel with the legal disputes of the day, this rural conflict was carried into the night by the actions of young men. Hans Werner said as much while drinking in Barthel Dorfheilige’s inn in the middle of the night. The complaint recorded his words in direct discourse:
In particular he [Hans Werner von Eschwege] said: “You peasants of Wanfried or Bürger – whatever you want to be – last summer you gave my father some trouble. If I had known, I had some good fellows with me back then … You’ll get very little out of it [i.e., the lawsuit], and I’ll pay back each one of you, one after the other. It’s your Vogt [county administrator] who’s leading you into this. If I run into him, I’ll put a bullet through his hat.”6
By day the lawsuits worked their way through the courts; at night – the domain of young men – other pressures were brought to bear. This incident at Wanfried suggests that despite broad attempts to regulate nocturnal disorder, in the villages of early modern Europe young “guardians of disorder” ruled the night.7 More often than in cities, their “order” prevailed over that of the church or the state when the sun went down.
The ungovernable aspects of the rural night became more prominent after 1650 as a new contrast between urban and rural night emerged. The preceding chapters on the night at royal courts and in cities have shown a series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments I describe as nocturnalization: an ongoing expansion of the symbolic and respectable social uses of the night. As we saw in the previous chapter, nocturnalization in cities evoked significant resistance from the young people who had made the night streets their domain. This dialectic of nocturnalization and resistance is best described as a colonization of the urban night. By 1700, contemporaries observed that this colonization was reshaping everyday life in the cities of Northern Europe.
Nocturnalization affected daily life in the villages of early modern Europe as well, but with a different set of priorities and outcomes. The agents of nocturnalization were church and state, but the development was less tied to commerce and consumption than at court or in major cities. As in cities, young people resisted incursions into a time that had traditionally been theirs. Because neither church nor state could intervene in rural daily life as effectively as they could in cities, villagers young and old more successfully defended their traditional night life. City and countryside were both sites of nocturnalization, but this process unfolded very differently in rural areas.
How was the night understood and experienced in the villages of early modern Europe? Some scholars have emphasized that “The night is no man’s friend,” as a French proverb put it, and the unfortunate innkeeper of Wanfried might agree.8 But historians of popular culture and daily life such as Norbert Schindler and A. Roger Ekirch have argued that far too many common people were active at night – by choice or necessity – to allow us to characterize the early modern night as universally threatening.9 Early modern women and men did much more at night than sleep or fear for their lives and goods. As Alain Cabantous has shown, the first hours after sunset do not reveal the expected retreat into the home. In the city and in the countryside work continued, entertainment and socializing began, and groups of young people regularly disturbed the settling calm.10 The literary formula of nocturnal fear and insecurity must be balanced by an understanding of actual nocturnal activity – although this kind of rural “night life” is more difficult to assess.
When we survey the material from Ekirch, Cabantous, and others, several patterns emerge. Night life in the early modern countryside was shaped by the tensions between necessity and leisure, and between order and disorder. Here we will consider the necessities of sleep and labor, then survey a range of activities extending from leisure and sociability to disorder and crime: it is between these poles that the distinct features of the rural night emerge. Village spinning bees and public houses, as well as the courtship customs of the youth, characterized the rural night as its contrast with the night in the city began to emerge in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
7.1.1 Necessity
Labor and rest shaped the rural night. The age-old pattern of segmented sleep documented by A. Roger Ekirch (described in chapter 1) appears in rural and urban sources alike until the end of the seventeenth century. At that point, as we will see below, rural and urban sleep patterns began to diverge. Labor at night was ubiquitous. Despite the comment in the Gospel of John (9:4) – “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work” (King James Bible) – some forms of work at night were unavoidable. Blacksmiths worked at night, in part because they could.11 And as Alain Cabantous has shown, rural labor at night was on the rise at the end of the seventeenth century, encompassing a range of tasks, including fishing, sowing, or harvesting by moonlight, and spinning, weaving, sewing, or knitting by firelight.12 In winter, the hearth might provide enough light for the indoor tasks; otherwise common people would use rush lights or oil-lamps, the rich candles.13 Casual labor on long winter evenings was, as we will see below, a key feature of rural night.
The regulation of labor and rest was recognized as an important aspect of household management. The Protestant Austrian nobleman Wolfgang Helmhard von Hohberg (1612–88) explained in his well-known Georgica curiosa (1682, editions through the eighteenth century) that “The father of the house is like the clock of the house, which everyone must follow when rising, going to sleep, working, eating and all other business.”14 The immensely popular Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557, editions through the eighteenth century) of Thomas Tusser (1524?–80) advised masters to “Declare after supper, take heed thereunto / what work in the morning each servant shall do.” This guide gives us some idea what hours of sleep were expected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
In winter at nine, and in summer at ten
to bed after supper, both maidens and men.
In winter at five a clock servants arise,
in summer at four it is very good guise.15
The Tyrolean physician Hippolyt Guarinoni (1571–1654) recommended that adults retire between 8 and 9 p.m. and wake at 5 a.m.16 Across Northern Europe, the traditional curfew hour was 9 p.m., but it is difficult to say anything conclusive about the bedtimes of early modern people in the countryside. Prescriptions are common, but their relation to practice is not clear. The limited evidence we have from diaries and legal records suggests that, in practice, most country folk went to bed between 9 and 10 p.m.17But, as we will see below, when the household of John Wright of Brixworth, Northamptonshire was thrown into confusion by an errant dog at “eleven or twelve o’clock” on the night of December 13, 1672, the servant maids were still awake washing dishes, though the master of the house was already in his nightshirt and most rooms were no longer lit.
Those with leisure and light might extend the day. Mary Jepp Clarke described long winter evenings at Chipley, the Clarkes’s Somerset estate, in a letter of April 1700: “we have had all this winter our proper times for everything in our chamber, which is good, and in the evening while Nanny and I did work she [Elizabeth] read plays and what else diverted us which made the long nights pass a way the more pleasantly to us all.”18
7.1.2 Sociability
Making long winter nights pass more pleasantly was a common desire in the early modern countryside. Beyond small gatherings in private homes, two sites emerge as especially important for “night life” in the countryside: the spinning bee and the public house. Spinning bees were a peripatetic but vital place for the nocturnal courtship customs of early modern rural youth, while public houses were more fixed locations for the adult sociability of the village. Rural night life was shaped by the contrast between the mobile sociability of the young and the relative stability of mature socializing in the public house.
Spinning bees were fundamental to rural night life in many parts of early modern Northern Europe, especially in Germany, France, and the Swiss cantons.19 When a fire broke out in the Norman village of Basly late on the evening of February 4, 1684, we learn that most of the women of the village were at a spinning bee, including the unmarried Le Petit sisters and Anne Jouvin, whose homes were destroyed by the blaze.20 Such spinning bees (Spinnstube, veillée) combined labor with socializing on long winter evenings.21 Evidence from the Basle countryside and southern Germany suggests a fixed season for spinning bees, roughly from Advent to Carnival, with special celebrations on the first and last gatherings of the season; in other areas the winter gatherings appear more spontaneous.22 The form of the spinning bee varied: as many as a dozen women young and old would meet to spin wool or flax, knit, or sew by candlelight.23 “When there is a shortage of light,” as a Swabian ordinance of 1651 explained, “neighbors and their families” might gather “by a common tallow candle” to work – but in a very modest circle “not to exceed six or at most eight persons, who keep a reasonable hour and completely avoid all idle chatter and other extravagances.”24 While sharing light, heat, and conversation, the women and girls might be visited by the young men of the village. (See Figures 7.1 and 7.2.)
Figure 7.1 “Kurtzweilige Beschreibung der löblichen Spinn- vnd Rockenstuben,” broadside engraved after Sebald Beham, Nuremberg, seventeenth century.
Figure 7.2 The arrival of the young men at the spinning bee: “Decembre: La Veillée,” engraving by Jean Mariette, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
This – in the authorities’ view – is where the trouble began. In 1661 the bishop of Châlons issued an ordinance forbidding “men and boys” from joining or visiting “the vigils [veillées] when women and girls spin or do other work in the winter.” Likewise, “women and girls are not to let them in, play, or dance with them during the night.”25 In Calvinist Guernsey in 1637, the Royal Court forbade the “vueilles” “because of the regular and scandalous debauchery which is committed at the assemblies of young people … during the night.” Marriageable young people met and courted at these “vigils”; a less judgmental English visitor to Guernsey noted that “from these meetings many marriages are contracted.”26 A contemporary French engraving (Figure 7.2) shows the scene just after the young men have arrived. A hanging oil-lamp illuminates the young women, distaffs in hand, one at a spinning wheel, just interrupted by the swains, who have begun to dance and show their affections. The text below claims that such visits, if handled wisely, transform “the most toilsome labor” into “more even than an amusement.” Images and accounts from Germany (such as Figure 7.1) focus on sexual morality, adding concerns about disrespectful gossip, bawdy songs, rude pranks, and gluttony. At the spinning bees young servants “cook, eat, and drink what they have stolen at home,” as one reported.27 French and German sources record such courting customs as the “brushing off,” in which each unmarried woman gave one of the young men the honor of brushing the stray bits of flax or wool off her lap while she worked.28
From the perspective of the participants, spinning bees combined labor, leisure, and important courtship customs; village elders tolerated them, arguing that “the young must have their diversions and merriment.”29 In Figure 7.1, first printed c. 1524 by Sebald Beham, then copied and reprinted in the mid seventeenth century with new verses, the older “shepherd’s mother Elizabeth” (figure Y) looks at the disarray around her but then “thinks back to the good old days / when she had such fun herself.”30 The spinning bees were denounced by pastors and administrators (outsiders to the village) not simply on moral grounds, but also because the gatherings sustained local nocturnal countercultures. In Figures 7.1 and 7.2 and in many written accounts of spinning bees the authority figures of family, church, and state are absent or obscured by the “rural plebian culture of laughter.”31 In Beham’s print the village administrator (the Schultheiss, figure G) sits asleep beside the stove and “the priest is off taking care of his cook.” Sexual license is everywhere in Beham’s scene: the maid of the Schultheiss (E) is there with her lover Fritz (F); Curdt (L) “wants to sneak behind the stove and sleep with Elßgen,” and Ulrich (W) “so pleases … Appel [Apollonia, figure X] that she is about to put out her light.” The Beham print singles out each these figures for criticism, but offers no hope of any moral improvement.
Figure 7.3 shows a more orderly peasant home at night: the women are working flax while a group of men seated around the table drink. The young woman and man standing at the back converse discretely under more watchful eyes. In Figure 7.4 we see an ideal spinning bee: an all-female scene (an author, far left, looks on) with well-lighted and industrious figures. In the accompanying text the women give their legitimate reasons for gathering to spin. Several say their husbands are out drinking; a maid explains that she has been frightened by a ghost and does not want to stay in her room alone. Other women have come to socialize, leaving snoring husbands home in bed.
Figure 7.3 Spinning bee scene; engraving by Claudine Bouzonnet Stella, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 7.4 An orderly spinning bee: Jacob von der Heyden, “KunckelBrieff oder SpinnStuben,” c. 1620. Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Inventar Nr. XIII,441,8; Neg. Nr. 8685.
Condoned or criticized, and despite its many local variations (it might be more or less focused on productive work, and more or less planned or scheduled) all the evidence agrees that the spinning gatherings were always held on long winter nights.32
These gatherings are richly documented on the Continent.33 In the British Isles, peasants gathered at night for spinning or knitting in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.34 In England – with the exception of Yorkshire and Lancashire – spinning bees do not seem to have been an established practice,35 but their key features – women establishing an evening space for work or socializing, then inviting unmarried men to join them – do appear. In Norfolk in the spring of 1665 we learn that
Margaret Barkle, the servant of James Money of Gresham, butcher, was charged to have taken an handkerchief with flour & late in the night with Ellen Berston & Katherine Wilson to have gone to the widow Thoulder’s house in Sustead, intending a merry meeting there with some fellows.36
The gatherings of young people in the evening for work or conversation could easily turn into an impromptu dance or a “merry meeting.”37
Indeed, when young men and women met at a spinning bee, they took part in one of several related and widely documented early modern customs of nocturnal courtship. The spinning bee overlapped with the south German Heimgarten (in other parts of Germany, Nachtfreien or Kiltgang), an evening gathering of unmarried young men and women at the house of a married couple. The term Heimgarten could also refer to time spent together by a courting couple at night after the larger gathering broke up, or to night-time visits by young single men to the homes – or beds – of young women.38 Thus the Heimgarten could shade into the practice of bundling, the most intimate of early modern nocturnal courtship customs.39 In France examples of the custom of allowing courting couples to share a bed for the night appear in the Protestant county of Montbéliard, and in Champagne, Burgundy, and Savoy.40 Bundling was a rural custom, arising in part from the long distances suitors traveled to visit young women, which then necessitated an overnight stay. This seems to have been the excuse Leonard Wheatcroft used when staying overnight at the home of his future wife, Elizabeth Hawley, during their courtship in 1656–57.41
Wheatcroft’s detailed courtship narrative describes many evening gatherings and nights spent together with his “beloved paramour, sweet Betty.” They met at the “wakes” (i.e., church ales, notorious for lasting well into the night) in Wheatcroft’s hometown of Ashover. One evening Wheatcroft waited at Elizabeth’s house for her to return from a walk, “it being a fine warm evening for maids to delight themselves in.” To Wheatcroft’s great joy she returned “when the evening drew towards an end, and the glorious sun withdrew himself from my sight.”42 They went to her uncle’s house, where they stayed the night and “did lovingly embrace each other.” On another occasion, after Wheatcroft pretended to be engaged to another woman, he reported that “these and suchlike expressions [of Elizabeth’s exasperation] did keep us waking all night. She, being then so vexed at me, would not so much as afford me one kiss.”43 Much of Wheatcroft’s courtship of Elizabeth Hawley took place at night.
Indeed, the night was the accepted time for courtship. A notary describing a street fight and ensuing homicide in the village of Septfontaines (in the Franche-Comté) on the night of December 7, 1623 acknowledged that the night was the time “for visiting homes where there were girls or widows available for marriage.” In this case an unwanted suitor named Pierre Révillon was asked repeatedly to leave a private home where he was courting a young widow, “for which … Pierre Révillon was truly dissatisfied becauseit was only around seven or eight o’clock in the evening” and “other young people were [still] drinking in the kitchen … Nothing about leaving had been said to them so that he, the said Pierre Révillon, thought that it was insulting to ask him to leave.”44 It was already several hours after sunset, and the gathering continued well after Révillon was expelled. The late hour was not the issue, but the frustrated Révillon started a fight outside which ended with a death, producing our record of the events of that night.45
In the many ways described here, young adults got to know potential sexual or marriage partners, both personally and physically. As historians of early modern marriage and sexuality have established, “the majority of the … population did not make arranged marriages.”46 Parental consent became more important in the confessional era, but this was consent to a match based on some kind of personal choice. With the exception of the wealthy or the nobility, young people sought out their own marriage partners within a group circumscribed by status, trade, and locale. Once mutual interest was established, courting couples enjoyed considerable physical intimacy with one another; sexual relations often began with the engagement.47 The night significantly facilitated all aspects of the passage from single youth to husband or wife. From meeting a group of potential spouses at a spinning bee or village dance, to getting to know a specific individual in the dim intimacy of a chamber during a Heimgarten visit or while bundling, to the physical consummation of the relationship (ending, it was hoped, in marriage), the night was constant companion to the couple. Church and state gave their sanction to the marriage during the day, but husbands and wives were made at night.
Seen in these terms, the night was much more than an accidental or contingent part of rural servants’ lives. In comparison with young servants in the city, rural youth had less contact with their peers during the working day, and fewer opportunities to socialize.48They relied more on the evening and night hours for the serious business of meeting potential marriage partners, and for less serious pursuits as well.49 In Norfolk in 1665 a justice of the peace noted that he had
sent Robert Coe, Sir John Palgrave’s man, to Bridewell for having on two nights run out to dancings, & the first time he was out all night & the last time till midnight, for he would not come home until the dancing was over, though Sir John sent for him. The last time he carried away the key of the hall door to get in again.50
Here we catch a glimpse of the struggle between servants and masters over access to the night. Coe’s insistence on having his night life reflected a frequent demand by servants. In Bavaria, for example, the Bishop of Augsburg complained in 1603 that when servants negotiated their contracts, they demanded (and received) explicit permission to go out at night and meet with unmarried persons of the opposite sex, or at least to talk with one another at night through a window.51 These are all well-known aspects of rural courtship, of course, but the servants’ contracts and authorities’ complaints make the importance of the night explicit. A shortage of servants made these negotiations possible, as a Bavarian mandate of 1635 explained: “so too the farmers, if they want to keep their servants, are expected to allow [morally] suspect gatherings and Heimgarten, both day and night.”52 In his collection of sermons for country folk, the Tuba rustica (1701), Bavarian parish priest Christoph Selhamer gave several examples of courtship by night, all of which ended badly for the young women involved. In a sermon titled “The Bedroom Window” he came to the root of the problem: “I know quite well: in some places wicked servants set the terms when they enter into service, saying: ‘Yes, farmer, I will serve you well for a year … but I’ll tell you right now: you won’t forbid me from running around the streets at night.’”53 An Augsburg print of the seventeenth century shows this nocturnal courtship at a maid’s window (Figure 7.5).
Figure 7.5 “Nacht”: lovers meet at a window (“Fensterln”). Augsburg print, seventeenth century.
In 1760 the Lutheran pastor in Swabian Oberrot (near Hall) complained bitterly to the territorial authorities about the spinning bees and unrestrained night life of the local youth and begged them to impose some discipline: “You can start with my own servant, who is a nightwalker. I am at my wit’s end trying to contain loose servants: as soon as an honest man says something [to them], they simply quit, and no one else wants the job.”54 At the end of the century, Graf Preysing reported the same problem on his Hohenaschau estate in 1796.55 He also blamed the shortage of servants for this demand, suggesting that when their bargaining power rose, rural servants tried to secure their access to the spinning bees and “merry meetings” of the social night.
Like the spinning bee, the night life of the public house was condemned from the pulpit. But the importance of the public house was also well recognized: these institutions served the village throughout the day and evening.56 Even in a single region they showed great variety, including alehouses, taverns (originally associated primarily with the sale of wine), and inns authorized to provide meals and lodging.57 Subject to licensing and regulation in all European polities, public houses were of tremendous economic importance locally and served as hubs for communication and travel.58 The men (and often the women) of a village spent much of their leisure time there, and public houses were at their busiest on Sundays, feast days, and in the evenings.59 Closing times were an issue at all public houses, underscoring their association with night life. Mandated closing times were remarkably consistent across early modern Europe, generally 8 p.m. in the winter and 9 p.m. in the summer.60 These mandates were honored only in the breach, however.61 Patrons leaving public houses at closing time (or after) were the most common disturbers of the peace in early modern Europe, urban or rural.62 As we will see below, the evening hours of the public house correspond with the higher incidence of violent crime in the evening rather than late at night.
Dancing linked all sites and forms of nocturnal sociability, from the spinning bee to the public house and beyond. Young and old took part in dances scheduled and spontaneous. We learn from court records of a late-night “dancing match” in 1639 at a mill in Wiltshire. When examined, Jane Lawes explained “that on St. John’s Day last at night she was invited to the mill at Broad Chalke to a dancing match where there were diverse of the young men and maidens of the p[ar]ish, where she saw no abuse offered or incivility committed by any.” Another examinant gives us an idea how these impromptu dances ended: “Joane Deane confirms the above and says further that ‘about two hours before day, the candles being burnt out, she heard some of the maids cry out, but who they were or what caused them to cry out she knows not, being in the dark’.”63 Again we see youth-centered night life as more itinerant than that of married folk.64
7.1.3 Disorder
From distracted spinners to violent suitors and riotous dancers out all night, the rural night was a time of disorder. Of course, “disorder” is in the eye of the beholder; here it refers to the category used by church and secular authorities. Some of the night-time practices classified by authorities as disorder, such as the charivari, were seen by the participants as in fact affirming a village order which had been upset by a problematic marriage. Other sources of disorder, such as spinning bees, were important to villagers for economic and social reasons. Beyond these group practices, disorderly individuals appear across the rural night. By examining what constitutes “disorder” in the rural night we can better understand the conflicting claims made on it.
As Norbert Schindler has observed, in towns or villages the disturbers of the nightly peace fell into two distinct groups: young men and tavern visitors.65 The two groups were separated by the cost of drinking in the tavern, which exceeded the means of most young men. As Beat Kümin has shown, drinking beer or wine at a public house regularly was a luxury for most peasants: a few glasses could easily exceed a day’s wages.66 Those who could afford to drink at a public house often left singing, shouting, blaspheming, or quarreling, often well after the mandated closing time.67 For the young men of the village, on the other hand, the sheer disruptive exuberance of making noise under the cover of darkness sometimes bursts out of the records, as in a 1732 church council report from Gruorn, a Württemberg village in the Swabian Alps: “The servants from the Aglishardt farm raced through the village at eleven-thirty at night with bellowing cries, which greatly angered the residents.”68 Singing also could disturb the relative peace of the village at night. The 1732 church council report from Gruorn mentions “Johannes Grießinger, mason” who “almost every night, and especially on Sundays, sings improper street songs.”69 These songs might be as lewd as the “The Chimney-Sweep” (a “knave’s ditty” sung by servants at spinning bees across southern Germany in the first half of the seventeenth century) or pious but unorthodox, such as the “Jörg Wagner,” an Anabaptist hymn sung by Hans Ankelin at the top of his lungs one night in 1598.70
When night fell the contrast between the order of the state and the order of the village became especially clear.71 The various shaming rituals of early modern rural society, such as the charivari (also “skimmington” or “riding”) or the “groaning” were meant to restore order upset by some individual or relationship. In France the charivari was typically nocturnal, but the best-documented “ridings” and “groanings” in early modern England were all daytime events.72 The cover of darkness allowed individual villagers to reproach their neighbors anonymously, and these practices could be quite refined. In 1639 a tavern servant named Bastian Scheckenbach was fined heavily by the parish of Frickenhausen (near Würzburg) for “strewing straw at night as mischief.”73 This sounds insignificant to modern ears, but in fact the practice was well known: villagers would awake one morning to find their muddy lanes marked with paths of straw connecting various houses, suggesting or revealing illicit relationships among their inhabitants – the rural equivalent, one might say, of posting political placards at night in London or Paris.
In this case, the young Scheckenbach seems to have gone too far: someone turned him in for creating a disturbance at night.74 These nocturnal disturbances threatened the order of the day, as the local clergy felt most keenly. For priests, pastors, and preachers all this disorderly night life resulted in drowsy churchgoers who fell asleep during services. Among the published sermons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sleeping in church was a familiar topic. In 1709 the Swiss Reformed pastor Conradin Riola published a “spiritual trumpet” against the habit of sleeping during services. Riola, writing from the village of Sent, explained that God had ordained the night for rest and the day for labor: those who roamed about at night like wild animals and slept during the day disturbed the divine order.75 Catholic preachers in Bavaria repeated such condemnations, as did the Reformed Scottish kirk sessions studied by Margo Todd.76 All referred to the misuse of the night as the cause of daytime slumber.
7.1.4 Violence and crime
Sociability at night flowed easily into nocturnal violence. On December 9, 1666 in the Hessian village of Ebsdorf, two men emerged from a house “in the evening in the twilight.”77 Andreas Keiser, a Lutheran, and Hans Caspar Hägelich, “calvinisch,” had been drinking beer in the house of Hans Kiß. They had begun to argue about religion and had already come to blows. They each left the alehouse to go home but met up outside, where the dispute continued. Hägelich, the Calvinist, pulled a hatchet out from his tunic and swung; Keiser, unarmed, tried to flee but received a deep wound in the back, from which he died two days later.
The victim Keiser was the husband of the niece of Caspar Preis of Stausebach, a pious Catholic peasant whose diary recorded this typical outburst of “one-on-one” nocturnal violence.78 Robert Muchembled was one of the first to note that dusk, rather than the late night, was the critical time for violent crime in the countryside. Based on a study of judicial records in Artois from 1401 to 1660, he observed that among cases of homicide in which the time of the violence is indicated (37 percent of the total cases), about 17 percent of these deadly encounters took place in the afternoon, 22 percent at night, and 55 percent in the evening.79 Alain Cabantous has made a more detailed comparison of eight studies of rural crime at night in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and England and concluded that about half of all crimes recorded took place at night, about equally divided between the evening hours and later at night.80 In other words, the rural night was no more criminal than the rural day.
But nocturnal crime was more frightening, if not more frequent, than crime during the day. Records of criminal proceedings confirm the real potential for violence in any encounter involving young men in the evening or after dark. In the Artois village of Lorgies in 1602, on March 17 at around eight in the evening, the young Pierre Soix mistakenly attacked Philippe Carpentier, the village farrier, mortally wounding him. Their exchange captures some of the tension of these nocturnal encounters. Soix was walking along, singing, when he heard someone approaching and called out “Who goes there?” Carpentier, well known to Soix but unrecognized in the dark, responded with “What have you?” [“Que veux-tu avoir?”] Soix responded hopefully “friends,” but Carpentier replied “I know of no friends” [“Je ne cognois nulz amis”] and knocked Soix to the ground. In defense, Soix fatally stabbed him.81 In 1616 in the upper Bavarian village of Siegsdorf, a certain “Wolf, servant of Pämer” stabbed another young servant “for no other reason” than that they came together in the lane and did not recognize each other. Earlier that year in the same village Adam Aufhaimer attacked the weaver Stephan Peutner “at night in the street,” breaking one of his ribs with a stone.82 In the dark villagers tended to attack first, assuming that anyone whom they did not recognize had shadowy intentions.83
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.’”84 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.85 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.86
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.”88 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.