In these days of 24-hour shopping malls and neon gambling strips where there is never darkness, imagining pre-industrial days when nighttime “afforded a sanctuary from daily experience” falls to people like Roger Ekirch.
The Virginia Tech professor of history is writing a book called At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, which he has been researching for 13 years. He recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious national awards for scholarly research, to finish writing the book, which will explore nocturnal life in Europe and America between 1500 and 1830.
Normally a morning person who thinks best before noon, Ekirch spends a lot of time these days thinking about night, particularly night as experienced by people before the coming of artificial light. “Along with changes in diet, dress, and forms of communication — all nearly as different as night and day — variations occurred at night in popular mores, including attitudes toward magic, sexual relations, social authority, and the nocturnal landscape,” he says. Nighttime back then was “a rich and complex universe in which persons passed nearly half of their lives — a shadowy world of blanket fairs, night freaks, and curtain lectures, sun-suckers, moon cursers, and night-kings,” Ekirch says.
For the modern reader, a few definitions might give a better view of that world after dark. A blanket fair, Ekirch says, was a time when all those who shared a bed — including, sometimes, entire families and even strangers — climbed in for an hour or so of talk or contemplation or other activities before going to sleep. Night freaks were licentious parties. Curtain lectures were complaints by the wife when her husband lay vulnerable in bed beside her and she felt emboldened by the darkness. Sun-suckers were the dying rays of the sun. Moon cursers were people of illicit nighttime activity — whether it was street robbery or using lanterns to lure unsuspecting ships ashore for plunder — who cursed the light of the moon. In Germany, night-kings were those in charge of emptying the cesspools.
Ekirch admits that his research has centered on “men and women (backcountry rioters, exiled convicts, and nightwalkers) who lived on the borders — temporal, geographic, and legal — of colonial society.” He has written books about the convicts banished by England to colonial America and the troubled history of 18th-century North Carolina, with its reputation for mob violence. The look into the night world was a natural extension of research into the shady areas of life.
To uncover this evening world, Ekirch looked at countless local records from both sides of the Atlantic. He read the literature, proverbs, nursery rhymes, ballads, sermons, chapbooks, and folklore with nocturnal themes. He studied the laws dealing with curfews, crime, and street lighting and read the newspapers, diaries (some 400 of them), travel accounts, and memoirs of the time. For a look at middle and lower classes, he read legal depositions, working-class autobiographies, and even coroners’ reports. He studied more than 300 nighttime paintings and drawings and considered relevant studies from medicine, psychology, and anthropology. He enlisted “a small army of linguists” to translate nine languages.
The picture of nighttime life that emerged from his research revealed the perils, the activities, and the sleep habits of the people. “Likely never before in Western history had evening appeared more menacing to body and soul,” he says. Crime, fires, accidents, illness, vandalism, assaults, rapes, and murders occurred frequently at night.
To counter the violence, cities instituted creative controls — primitive street lights, night watchers, curfews, dress codes — even, in places, midnight bed checks. “Nuremberg officials closed entire streets with iron chains; illuminated Madonnas guarded thoroughfares in Venice and Rome; in St. Malo, packs of mastiffs roamed streets after 10 p.m.,” Ekirch says. “Summary justice and special tribunals” abounded after dark.
When those measures failed, people turned to magic, local lore, charms, and their knowledge of the natural world for protection. Children learned to negotiate the nighttime terrain so they would not fall into culverts or streams or wander into places of supernatural terrors. People relied on strong senses of smell and touch and invented words to describe the phases of the night — such as “day dapple,” the Irish term for the time of day when a person could no longer be distinguished from a bush.
They did not let darkness confine them. Some work continued after sunset, including fireside tasks, such as mending and spinning, such professions as baker and miller, and even some field labor by moonlight. “Outside the home, some families in rural communities retreated with neighbors to the convivial warmth of spinning bees” and other such gatherings, “where storytelling and gossip enlivened nightly chores,” Ekirch says. “The dark interiors of homes, barns, and stables gave added force to the resonant talents of storytellers.”
Evenings “brought together families and friends in intimate settings marked by fewer social constraints and greater personal license,” he says. “Close physical proximity coupled with personal vulnerability in ill-lit dwellings eroded daytime barriers, not unlike the effect felt by teenage couples today in darkened movie theaters.” It also gave cover to “groups on the peripheries of the respectable world” and gave rise to all-night taverns where even the night watch was afraid to go. “Not only was nighttime thought a distinct ‘season’ with many of its own conventions,” Ekirch says, “but for numerous persons, darkness afforded an ‘alternate reign’ that shunned established habits and values.”
As in any society, however, darkness also promoted sleep; and Ekirch looked at the bedtime rituals, sleep disturbances, dreams, and nightmares of slumber. He discovered that many people of the time were sleep deprived in spite of the lengthy darkness and that, before 1800, most “experienced a pattern of broken sleep caused by a lack of artificial light and elevated levels of the hormone prolactin.” About halfway through the night, they would wake for an hour or more of talking with bedfellows, smoking tobacco, or even visiting with neighbors. Some stayed in bed to meditate, pray, or reflect on dreams from their “first sleep” of the night; and dreams often guided their lives.
Ekirch thinks “segmented sleep” may be more natural than our continuous sleep, which he believes is caused most fundamentally by exposure to artificial lighting. Scientific studies done by Thomas Wehr of the National Institutes of Mental Health, who re-created pre-historical sleep patterns, Ekirch says, show that artificial light affects the body's hormones, proving clinically what Ekirch had been finding historically. He thinks the lack of a waking time during the night has caused modern people to lose “an ancient path to our psyche,” or the world of our dreams, which otherwise evaporate in the visual stimuli of day. He also believes sleep disturbances that modern doctors call disorders may instead be a re-creation of the older sleep-wake-sleep pattern. Some non-Western cultures today and many wild animals still experience segmented sleep, he says.
As technology allowed people to harness the night, it became less mysterious, less private, but not less interesting to Ekirch. “While scholars have chronicled change across vast expanses of time,” he says, “they have neglected the primal passage from daylight to darkness.” He hopes that At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, written for scholars and lay readers alike, will “help elucidate the forgotten half of Western history.”