At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (25 page)

Late hours typified the regimen of masons, carpenters, and other members of the building trades. Scattered workmen labored at night inside Pepys’s home on Seething Lane. On Christmas Eve in 1660, painters did not finish until 10:00
P.M.
—“this night I was rid of their and all other work,” a relieved Pepys recorded in his diary. According to the Northampton squire Daniel Eaton in 1726, joiners frequently worked by candlelight when autumn days grew short.
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Bakers labored much of the night in order to provide morning customers with warm bread. “He burns the midnight oil for me,” wrote Mercier of Paris’s bakers.
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To produce ale or beer, commercial brewers began after midnight the laborious process of grinding the malt, boiling it in water to produce mash, drawing off the wort, furnishing hops (for beer), and adding yeast.
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Shifts of glassmakers and iron smelters kept vigil beside blazing furnaces. To sustain the intense temperatures, furnaces burned around the clock, as did lime kilns and mounds of wood, covered by peat, to produce charcoal. In the coastal town of Lymington, Celia Fiennes found workers boiling large pans of sea water to make salt. “They constantly attend night and day all the while the fire is in the furnace . . . they leave off Satterday night and let out the fire and so begin and kindle their fire Monday morning, it’s a pretty charge to light the fire.” Except for cities like London with noise restrictions, blacksmiths worked late many evenings.
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Mills ran overnight in order to take advantage of the natural power, whether wind or water, propelling their wheels. Just as olive oil mills in southern France operated “day and night,” so did gristmills in England. “They keep theire mills goinge all night, if they have but whearewithall to keepe her doinge,” observed a Yorkshire farmer in 1642. (Millers, because of their nocturnal labors, were sometimes rumored to dabble in magic.)
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Mines, too, functioned through the night, for the time of day mattered little in shafts lit by miners’ lamps. Such was the regimen within copper mines in central Sweden and silver mines outside Freiburg. In Cornwall, according to a writer, “poore men” earned “their living hardly by mininge and digging tinne and metall oute of the grounde bothe daye and night.” Already, in these nascent enterprises—the mills, forges, and mines of early modern Europe—we can glimpse the profound contribution that nighttime would one day make to industrial productivity.
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Joseph Wright of Derby,
The Blacksmith’s Shop,
eighteenth century.

For most tasks, semi-skilled workers found crude illuminants sufficient. Oil lamps and candles were preferred. On the Isle of Man, the word
arnane
in the Manx language signified “work done at night by candlelight.” In Sweden, masters each fall invited apprentices and journeymen to their homes for a
ljusinbrinning
, or “burning-in,” a frolic designed to inaugurate the season for laboring by artificial light. Conversely, German artisans celebrated the end of winter darkness with a meal called a
lichtbraten
(light roast), as did English shoemakers each March in a ritual known as “wetting the block.” Preindustrial workers also resorted to rushlights, candlewood, and even, on occasion, moonlight. The costs incurred by artificial illumination were another matter. An Elizabethan writer condemned the high price of tallow candles “to the great hindrance of the poor workeman that watcheth [remains awake] in the night.” The common expression, “not worth the candle,” denoted work too minor to warrant the expense. Still, for many tradesmen, profits outweighed the costs. In a popular song entitled “The Clothier’s Delight,” an employer declares, “We have soap and candles whereby we have light, / That you may work by them so long as you have sight.” Indeed, the
London Evening Post
reported in 1760, “For several months in the winter season, many working businesses are prosecuted by seven or eight hours of candle-light work in the morning and evening”—even though, the paper added, they “require a great deal of it.”
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Among the hardest workers—night in, night out—were women. Unlike men of middling or plebeian rank, who mostly worked outside the home, many urban wives and daughters confined their days to the domestic realm, except for running errands, performing outdoor chores, or visiting a close neighbor. By the late sixteenth century, women were increasingly discouraged from traveling “fro hous to hous, to heere sundry talys,” as does the Wife of Bath in
The Canterbury Tales
(ca. 1387). Rather than a “wanderer abroad,” the virtuous woman was expected to be “a worker at home.” Her moral character was thought essential to the good repute of the household, where, after all, her conduct remained under tighter control. If not the master of her home, the wife, nonetheless, was its keeper, with all the obligations that burden entailed. A full day’s labor included cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Although most women rose earlier than their husbands, they had less opportunity during the day to rest. “Some respit to husbands the weather may send,” wrote Thomas Tusser in the sixteenth century, “but huswives affaires have never an ende.”
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Nights brought little seeming relief. Often, to paraphrase a contemporary, work was exchanged for work. Domestic tasks invariably extended the day’s toil. “The good huswive’s candle never goeth out,” remarked William Baldwin in
Beware the Cat
(1584). A late July evening in 1650 found Jane Bond of Massachusetts making a cake and collecting firewood. Jane Morris of London mended linen from the early afternoon to nearly midnight. So well known was the seventeenth-century ballad “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” that the Maine midwife Martha Ballard invoked it, late one evening, when scribbling in her diary–“happy shee,” reflected Ballard, “whos strength holds out to the end of the rais.” Indeed, when the Wiltshire laborer Stephen Duck published his celebrated poem “The Thresher’s Labour” in 1739, it brought a stinging response from the poet Mary Collier. “When night comes on, and we quite weary are, / We scarce can count what falls unto our share.” Unlike the toil of men, protested Collier, “Our labours never know an end.”
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Certainly not when laundry needed washing. This task was unpleasant and laborious. Tubs of water had to be carted inside and heated, and garments scrubbed, starched, and ironed. Cleansers, in the absence of soap, included lye, urine, and even dung mixed with cold water. In propertied households, women servants bore the brunt of the labor. So time-consuming was washing that they typically began late at night to minimize domestic disruption. “A washing pickle,” Pepys called the confusion upon returning home one November night. Indigent women earned a living by washing clothes at home or, more commonly, by traveling to dwellings as laundresses. The widow Mary Stower, on “a very moon light” evening, visited a house in Leeds at 2:00
A.M.
Stated Ann Timms of London, “I wash for a living, being late at work between eleven and twelve o’clock.”
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Women augmented the family income in other ways—brewing ale and making cheese, to name two evening enterprises. Of beermaking, Collier complained, “Our wort boils over if we dare to sleep.” Above all, women devoted nights to spinning and knitting, carding wool, and weaving. Starting in the fourteenth century, the putting-out system emerged in many sections of Europe, whereby urban merchants provided households with wool, flax, and other raw materials. Making textiles was a major activity in both rural and urban households. On long winter evenings, from Sweden to the Italian peninsula, mothers, daughters, and servants turned their hands to spinning wheels or looms. Instructed the steward of a Scottish laird, “Keep the maids closs at their spinning till 9 at night when they are not washing or at other necessary work.” Of his childhood home in Bavaria, Jean Paul recalled the cattle maid “at her distaff in the servants’ room, which was lit by what little light the pinewood torches afforded.” None of these tasks required much light. Of knitting, an Aberdeen minister noted that many of his parishioners performed “their work throughout the winter evening, with the faintest light issuing from a few turfs.” So important a source of income was spinning in parts of Germany that widows were allowed to keep their wheels after selling other possessions for debt. In the East Anglian city of Norwich, according to a census in the early 1570s, 94 percent of poor women performed textile work of some sort. At times of economic crisis, spinning afforded families vital support. In 1782 during crop failures in Scotland, women, reported a local resident, contributed “more to the welfare of their families than the men” by “sitting up at their work every other night.”
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Finally, in urban communities a handful of occupations were nocturnal, limited largely to the hours of darkness. For the most part, they were jobs staffed by persons of small means who could not compete successfully in the daytime economy. Instead of rest, night offered these souls a livelihood. Together with the nightwatch, paid at public expense, scattered numbers, for example, found employment as private “watchers.” Enlisted by manufacturers and tradesmen, they guarded merchandise from vandalism, theft, and fire. Watchers protected mills, counting houses, and stables. In Florence, private guards patrolled warehouses. Having “frequently lost coals,” the proprietor of a London coalyard in 1729 hired a force of four watchmen. Servants served their masters in twin capacities. At mills near Edinburgh, for instance, it was the “custom of the miller’s servants to watch the mills nightly by turns.” In Newcastle, a butcher’s maidservant, Catherine Parker, “watch’d his stall” at night in the city’s fleshmarket. A few persons were watchers by calling. “I am watchman at the steel-yard,” declared John Stubley, testifying at the Old Bailey against a thief.
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“Nightmen,” for their part, emptied underground cesspools, or “vaults.” Over each pit stood a privy, known as a “jake” or “house of easement,” located in a cellar or garden. Advised Tusser, “Foule privies are now to be clensed and fide, / let night be appointed such baggage to hide.” With the rapid growth of cities and towns, nightmen played an essential role in urban sanitation. Already by the sixteenth century, the city of Nuremberg employed
Nachtmeister
to empty some fifty public pits. Of course, many municipalities permitted the evening disposal of human waste in streets, which, in theory, workmen called scavengers swept clean in the hours before daybreak. Cities like London, however, discouraged this practice as a danger to public health, and civic-minded households increasingly relied upon private latrines. “Night-soil” was the euphemism coined for the ordure that professional nightmen hauled in buckets to waiting carts. Some families, like the Pepys household, benefited from sharing their cellar with a neighbor. “So to bed,” Samuel wrote in July 1663, “leaving the men below in the cellar emptying the turds up through Mr. Turner’s own house; and so, with more content, to bed late.” Besides mandating the emptying of cesspools at night, Parisian officials in 1729 required that
gadouards
, or nightmen, proceed directly to dumps rather than pause at taverns for refreshment. In England, whereas the countryside initially received most urban waste, transportation costs became prohibitively high once cities increased in size and density. And, unlike other premodern peoples, such as the Japanese, who relied heavily upon human waste for fertilizer, Western households generally preferred animal excrement. In the case of London, much of its waste was dumped into the Thames.
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Anon., John Hunt,
Nightman and Rubbish Carter, near the Wagon and Horses in Goswell Street, near Mount Mill, London
, eighteenth century.

The objectionable nature of the work is suggested by the sarcastic nickname “goldfinder,” given to nightmen. In Augsburg, senior latrine cleaners were known as “night kings.” If a vault had gone long unemptied, the undertaking could be arduous. At the Philadelphia home of Elizabeth Drinker, forty-four years of “depositing” elapsed before a cesspool in the yard was cleaned in 1799. The ordeal required two carts and five men laboring for two consecutive nights until four or five each morning. Wondered Drinker afterward, “If liberty and equality which some talk much about, could take place, who would they get for those, and many other hard and disagreeable undertakings?” The dangers were considerable, including asphyxiation whenever workmen entered a vault, equipped at most with lanterns for light. At a Southwark tavern called the Tumble-down Dick, the
Gentleman’s Magazine
reported in July 1753: