At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (5 page)

Ghosts afflicted numerous communities, often repeatedly, like the Bagbury ghost in Shropshire or Wiltshire’s Wilton dog. Apparitions grew so common in the Durham village of Blackburn, complained Bishop Francis Pilkington in 1564, that none in authority dared to dispute their authenticity. Common abodes included crossroads fouled by daily traffic, which were also a customary burial site for suicides. After the self-inflicted death in 1726 of an Exeter weaver, his apparition appeared to many by a crossroads. “’Tis certain,” reported a newspaper, “that a young woman of his neighbourhood was so scared and affrighted by his pretended shadow” that she died within two days. Sometimes no spot seemed safe. Even the urbane Pepys feared that his London home might be haunted. The eighteenth-century folklorist John Brand recalled hearing many stories as a boy of a nightly specter in the form of a fierce mastiff that roamed the streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
34

Other denizens of the nocturnal world included banshees in Ireland, whose dismal cries warned of impending death; the
ar cannerez
, French washwomen known to drown passersby who refused to assist them; and vampires in Hungary, Silesia, and other parts of Eastern Europe who sucked their victims’ blood. Night, a sixteenth-century poet remarked, by reviving the dead, threatened the living with death. As late as 1755, authorities in a small town in Moravia exhumed the bodies of suspected vampires in order to pierce their hearts and sever their heads before setting the corpses ablaze. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reports of werewolves pervaded much of Central Europe and sections of France along the Swiss border, notably the Jura and the Franche-Comté. The surgeon Johann Dietz witnessed a crowd of villagers in the northern German town of Itzehoe chase a werewolf with spears and stakes. Even Paris suffered sporadic attacks. In 1683, a werewolf on the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce road supposedly savaged a party that included several priests.
35

But, of course, witches in much of Christendom were thought to pose the gravest threat during the early modern era, as hunts bent on their annihilation tragically reflected. Following an initial spasm of panics in the 1400s, few parts of Western Europe, mostly Italy, Spain, and Portugal, escaped the waves of trials and executions that erupted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hunts grew most feverish in southwestern Germany, Switzerland, France, and Scotland. Within England, where witchcraft became a capital crime in 1542, the county of Essex experienced abnormally high levels of prosecution during the second half of the sixteenth century, though the greatest single outbreak occurred in East Anglia in the mid-1640s, culminating in nearly two hundred executions. There is no way of telling the total number of Europeans put to death. Upward of thirty thousand from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries might have lost their lives. To judge from contemporary reports, the most common defendant seems to have been a single woman of small means and mature years eking out a marginal existence. Besides being needy, she was also considered spiteful. “These miserable wretches,” Reginald Scot wrote in 1584, “are so odious unto all their neighbors, and so feared, as few dare offend them or denie them anie thing they ask.” Crops, livestock, not even the weather was immune to their malevolence. In Amsterdam, a maid reported being attacked with bricks one night by four oddly clad women. “Your face shall catch flies,” they repeatedly exclaimed.
36

There was nothing new, of course, about the idea of witches and other nocturnal demons. Repeated references in early Christian texts to the “outer darkness” and the “shadow of death” only served to reinforce ancient stereotypes about nighttime. In the fourth century, St. Basil the Great wrote of those who viewed “the darkness as an evil power, or rather, as evil itself.” Little wonder that so much of
Beowulf
(eighth century), one of the most violent works in Old English literature, transpires at night or that its principal villain, Grendel, is a fierce monster that waits until darkness to scour the countryside looking for fresh victims to devour—“this hugest of night-horrors, that on his people came.”
37
And yet, however disturbing, most supernatural beings did not incite widespread anxiety in Western Europe until the late Middle Ages, when nighttime became profoundly demonized—
la nuit diabolisée
, in the words of the French historian Robert Muchembled. The modern author of a study of early revenants flatly states: “We must be careful not to dramatize too greatly the medieval fear of the night. In the Middle Ages one could savor the calm of a beautiful night without fear.” Medieval witches and ghosts remained relatively innocuous. Within England, according to a leading authority, known crimes attributed to witches before 1500 consisted only of “two or three deaths, a broken leg, a withered arm, several destructive tempests and some bewitched genitals.”
Macbeth,
probably first performed in 1605 or 1606, was among the earliest English plays to portray sinister deeds of witchcraft.
38

By then, however, Satan had assumed a more menacing persona. No longer just an annoyance, the devil was viewed by Christian theologians as a powerful adversary in the struggle between good and evil. Enlisted in Satan’s service were vast hordes of witches, having each entered into a solemn covenant with the Prince of Darkness. Armed with fresh powers, they reputedly congregated to worship the devil at nocturnal festivals initially called “synagogues” and, later, “sabbaths.” Besides engaging in sexual perversions and diabolical rites, they devoured young children, whose flesh enabled them to fly. At Aix in 1610, a defendant charged with witchcraft recounted a sabbath: “Sometimes they ate the tender flesh of little children, who had been slain and roasted at some synagogue, and sometimes babes were brought there, yet alive, whom the witches had kidnapped from their homes.” Not only guilty of magic to harm their neighbors (
maleficium
), witches were condemned as dangerous heretics, especially by the upper classes—enemies of God as well as man.
39

In England, the Netherlands, and parts of Scandinavia, anxiety over nocturnal sabbaths never grew widespread. For myriad reasons, ranging from the aftershocks of the Reformation to the peculiarities of the English legal system, witches continued to be blamed for acts of personal malice, not for demonic assemblies. But, in English eyes, witches were still agents of Satan, and, as such, widely feared. One historian has quipped, “In England witches hanged, while on the Continent they were burned”—usually, it seems, at the behest of legal authorities and clerics, whereas popular fears more often propelled English prosecutions. Charges of heresy rarely arose in English trials, but apprehensions became so rife that several thousand deaths might have been ascribed to witchcraft by courts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with many more victims allegedly blinded, crippled, or rendered sterile. In Cumberland, of fifty-five deaths arising from causes other than “old age” reported in the parish register of Lamplugh during a five-year period from 1658 to 1662, as many as seven persons had been “bewitched.” Four more were “frighted to death by fairies,” one was “led into a horse pond by a will of the wisp,” and three “old women” were “drownd” after being convicted of witchcraft.
40

How can the European witch craze be explained? Although studies have stressed conditions peculiar to the settings where witch hunts erupted, several sweeping trends have received attention, including religious conflicts, legal changes, and the birth of printing. In many respects, these societies were in the throes of rapid change, much of it naturally alarming as the feudal order gave way around them. Especially after the fifteenth century, war, famine, natural disasters, and plague only intensified feelings of distress as families struggled with their misfortunes. More helpless than ever, less able to chart their own fate, men and women increasingly personified their woes by blaming Satan and his minions, many of whom were discovered among the destitute poor roaming the countryside. Caught in the grips of despair, early modern communities projected their anxieties onto society’s most vulnerable members. Of widespread starvation in Poland, a person observed in 1737, “This calamity has sunk the spirits of the people so low, that at Kaminiech, they imagine they see spectres and apparitions of the dead, in the streets at night, who kill all persons they touch or speak to.” And, of course, it
was
at night, when persons felt acutely vulnerable, that evil spirits most frequently appeared.
41

Claude Gillot,
The Witches’ Sabbath
, eighteenth century.

A handful of skeptics openly derided the existence of demonic beings. Creaking doors and ill-fitted windows, critics insisted, lay behind most supernatural reports, with hobgoblins representing nothing more than the distant glow of marsh gas. In England, both Reginald Scot in
The Discoverie of Witchcraft
(1584) and John Webster, author of
The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft
(1677), scoffed at witches and evil spirits; like Johann Weyer in Germany, author of
De Praestigiis Daemonum
(1563), they consigned their depredations to biblical times.
42
Some critics were really agnostics at heart, ready to believe in phantoms, just not the legions claimed by proponents. Apostates, as skeptics themselves recognized, were genuinely few. “The fables of witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deepe root in the heart of man,” despaired Scot. The staunchest critics, in fact, conceded that rational persons frequently fell prey to supernatural visions. If women, children, and the “stolid and stupid vulgar” remained susceptible, so, too, were travelers and shepherds—“folk,” acknowledged the French priest Noel Taillepied in 1588, “who are brought face to face with unspoiled nature.”
43

IV

Drink less and go home by daylight.

ENGLISH PROVERB
44

What persons in their fright took for evil spirits often sprang instead from mishaps in the dark. In the countryside, near drownings, overturned carriages, and nasty falls likely lay behind many supernatural encounters. “Pixy led” was a term reserved in western England, for instance, for nocturnal misadventures attributed to will-o’-the-wisps. “When fear, weak sight, and man’s senses all combine to deceive him,” Taillepied wrote, “he may encounter any apparition, however strange.”
45

Although claimed from the wilderness as early as the eleventh century, much of the preindustrial landscape remained treacherous, even in daylight. Whereas forests cover 21 percent of modern Italy, they comprised 50 percent in 1500, though the peninsula was among the most densely settled parts of continental Europe. Steep hillsides, turbulent streams, and thick underbrush cut across pastures, fields, and villages. Even where lands had been cleared in Europe by agriculture, tree stumps and trenches scarred the rock-strewn terrain. Thick slabs of peat, cut for fuel, left deep ditches. In parts of England, Wales, and Scotland with active or abandoned collieries, quarries and coal-pits pocked the ground—“a publick nuisance, by which the lives of men are often exposed to real danger,” deplored a Scottish minister.
46
Little better were many roads. As late as the mid-1700s, Sir John Parnell complained: “There is scarce any journey can be undertaken without some remarkably inconvenient not to say dangerous spots of roads intervening even in the flattest parts of England.”
47

Poor visibility at night coupled with dangerous terrain was a formula for disaster. Numerous were the times, remarked the seventeenth-century writer Isaac Watts, when “travellers have been betrayed by the thick shadows of the night.” Making matters worse, human beings are least able to tackle physical and mental tasks late at night, not only for want of sleep but also because of changes in body chemistry. Alertness and reflexes typically deteriorate. By ignoring nature’s “commands” to sleep, the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino observed, “man without doubt fights both with the order of the universe and especially with himself.”
48
Even sure-footed natives on a dark night could misjudge the lay of the land, stumbling into a ditch or off a precipice. In Aberdeenshire, a fifteen-year-old girl died in 1739 after straying from her customary path through a churchyard and tumbling into a newly dug grave. The Yorkshireman Arthur Jessop, returning from a neighbor’s home on a cold December evening, fell into a stone pit after losing his bearings. “So extremely dark” was the night that others, too, “were lost and could not hit their way,” Jessop noted in his diary. With a bruised leg and back, he avoided any of the injuries normally crowding the pages of coroners’ reports, such as crushed skulls and broken limbs. After rambles spanning several decades, William Coe escaped with nary a fracture, he boasted in 1721. Yet the Suffolk farmer was no stranger to close scrapes at night, including not only slips and spills but also falls from his horse—once down a deep bank. Sometimes, the natural landscape swallowed up its victims without a clue, such as in the mysterious disappearance of a Wakefield man, James Wilkinson, who tarried on his way home in 1682. Anxious to drink several pots of ale, he ignored the advice of a friend to “get over the moor before it is dark.” Wilkinson never reached his destination. Weeks of searching “all along the moor and in colepits and in the river,” recorded Reverend Heywood, were “all in vain.”
49