At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (7 page)

Had that menace, each night, been the worst of it, urban families would have slept more soundly. But what always they feared most was the invasion of their dwellings by burglars. Every evening, men retired with their families to the shelter of their homes, whose sanctity they were charged with preserving. Besides protection from the elements, the home provided a refuge from the dangers and disorder of daily existence. Asserted a sixteenth-century prayer, “Houses are builded for us to repair into, from the annoyances of the weather, from the cruelty of beasts, and from the waves and turmoils of this troublous world.” Critical to the offense of burglary was its occurrence at night, which the jurist Sir Edward Coke defined to be “when darknesse comes and day-light is past, so as . . . you cannot discerne the countenance of a man.” The commission of a theft was not necessary but rather the forceful entry of a “dwelling house” with “an intent to do felony.” Along with arson, burglary in English law ranked as a crime against not only property but also one’s “habitation.”
16

Many burglars, because of the planning their craft demanded, operated as professional gangs, and, worse, they struck when persons were defenseless, disarmed by sleep. Some ruffians, known as “smudges” or “night-sneaks,” gained entry during the day and hid beneath beds until families retired. “The cull is at snoos” was street slang for a sleeping target. Every portal at night offered potential access for a thief. Large homes made tempting targets, as much for their entrances as for their possessions. “My house is mighty dangerous,” Pepys bemoaned, “having so many ways to come to.”
17

There was never any guarantee violence would not erupt, particularly when families awakened to confront intruders. Not all housebreakers gained easy entry, failing either to pick door locks, a skill labeled the “black art,” or to prop open windows with iron rods. As suggested by the term “housebreaking,” doors might be forced and shutters broken. Rare was the sort of burglary reported in County Cork where thieves removed a window and its frame from a wall without the slightest sound. After two men broke into a London house in 1734, one recounted, “I wrenched open the lock of the cellar-door with a chissel; but it making a noise, we look’d up and saw a light in the window, and being afraid the people were alarm’d, we went off a little.” The thieves returned once the candle was out and the family asleep.
18
Unusual noises proved terrifying to households. Like “all rich men that are covetous,” Pepys grew anxious whenever his home contained large sums of money. Possessing £1,000 one evening, he “fell into a most mighty sweat in the night,” only, upon hearing a noise, “to sweat worse and worse” until he “melted almost to water.” Of burglars, the “dread of them is greater than can well be express’d,” affirmed the author in 1701 of
Hanging, Not Punishment Enough
.
19

Despite the risk of execution if caught, housebreaking attracted large numbers eager to reap quick rewards. Homes contained items easily resaleable to receivers of stolen goods, such as silver and jewelry. Whereas fewer than 10 percent of robberies in the London suburb of Surrey netted property worth more than ten pounds apiece, a quarter of Surrey burglaries yielded that amount or more. Princely sums of several hundred pounds were not unknown. “We have made a pretty good hand on’t too night,” a London burglar assured an accomplice in 1707, to which his friend expressed the hope that they should yet “make a better hand on’t tomorrow night.” To the pickpocket Richard Oakey, a band of burglars bragged, “We slum a ken when all’s boman [i.e., break into a house when it’s safe], and get more in one night, than you do in a month.” In Geneva, a housebreaker’s greed led him to steal items from a bedroom where two persons slept, not once but twice after an interval of just two hours—even though the victims had awakened to pursue him after the first theft.
20

Owing to the larger threat burglary posed, it became a separate offense in England, apart from housebreaking in the daytime, early in the sixteenth century. Among persons indicted by courts between 1660 and 1800, burglars exceeded housebreakers by four to one in urban Surrey. In his poem “Of Darknesse,” Humphrey Mill opined that when thieves “breake houses, ’tis not in the day, / ’Tis in thy presence, when men are asleepe.” In seventeenth-century Avignon, the inhabitants were said to “fear every night that rogues should creep in at their windows.” A visitor to Orleans in 1715 reported frequent burglaries, as did Henry Swinburne while traveling in Spain.
21

Less frequent in the countryside, burglaries were scarcely unknown. In eastern Sussex from 1592 to 1640, sixty-seven instances were reported to courts (9 percent of all thefts). And rural crimes more often assumed a brutal cast. Bands of a half-dozen or more members were typical, as were violent break-ins, sometimes called “faggot and storm.” Wooden doors were smashed open with battering rams and shutters bashed apart by staves. Gaping holes were cut through walls of wattle and daub. Nine thieves in 1674 stormed into the Yorkshire home of Samuel Sunderland. After binding every member of the household, they escaped with £2,500. At full strength, the Hales-Burley gang in the Midlands comprised upward of forty men armed with bows and guns.
22

On the Continent, some bands boasted several hundred members. French gangs, known as
chauffeurs
, grew notorious for torturing families with fire. Even villages, if isolated, were not safe from raiders. In the country, distance as well as darkness aided a band’s flight. “What would it avail there to cry help! Murder!” asserted a writer. “Murder might be perpetrated a dozen times before help could come!” Typically, in the urban province of Holland, burglars tunneled under doors and cut holes in roofs, but in the rural stretches of Brabant, bands ransacked homes and assaulted families with impunity. Burglaries were more serious in the open countryside, declared a Dutch court in 1620, “where people are less able to defend themselves against thieves and violence than in enclosed towns.” A German innkeeper on the outskirts of Oberau welcomed the construction of a nearby forge, since being “all alone every night he had to fear being plundered by evil folk.”
23

Essaias van de Velde,
A Village Looted at Night
, 1620.

Thefts occurred with greatest frequency from late fall to early spring, when dearth was greatest and nights longest. A Venetian official in the thirteenth century wrote anxiously of “this time of long nights,” a concern that prevailed throughout the early modern era. “The season chiefly for breaking into houses is during the winter, and long nights,” noted Daniel Defoe. Pedestrians, too, made tempting targets, forced in the first hours of evening to run errands or make their way home in darkness. “It is then that most murders, robberies, and other brushes with danger occur,” observed a Parisian in 1643.
24

Whatever the season, thieves prized nights with little or no natural light. In the
cant
pidgin of habitual criminals, “a good darky” meant “a fit night for stealing.” Least desirable were nights when the “tattler” (moon) was up. Invited to rob a night coach near Nottingham, Charles Dorrington refused because “it was too light.” On several occasions, the London thief Joseph Davis and his partner hesitated to break into a home owing to the “moon shining so bright.” Only after becoming intoxicated in a brandy shop one night did they summon the courage. Even on moonlit evenings, towns offered thieves alleys, courts, and alcoves for shelter. “It was indeed a moonlight night,” testified the victim of an assault in 1732, “but I was robb’d on the dark side of the way.” On the Hampstead Road from London, a notorious spot for robberies, a band grabbed a man off his horse to assault behind a haycock, “because it was then a moon-light night.”
25

Criminals took added steps to conceal their identities. Besides blacking their faces, some wore hats and heavy cloaks, even on warm summer nights. His bedchamber invaded in August 1738 by two burglars, the Penrith yeoman John Nelson described one as “pretty tall in a dark coulered coat with his hat pulled over his face & the other of lesser size with a white horseman’s coat with the cape buttoned under his chin & his hat pulled also over his face.” Thieves masked their voices and, at most, carried “dark lanterns,” which emitted light from just one side.
26
When clashes erupted, in burglaries or robberies, they immediately extinguished their victims’ lights. “Linkboys,” lighting pedestrians through city streets, were the first knocked off their feet. Lamps and lanterns were smashed, candles blown out, and torches snatched. “D
—
—n your Eyes, . . . put out the light, or we will blow your brains out,” was an oft-repeated command,
27
as was the demand to keep silent, lest cries for help breech the darkness. Robbed at knifepoint by a man and a woman, William Carter had his candle doused and an apron pressed against his mouth. Handkerchiefs made handy gags and even dung mixed with straw. When Humphrey Collinson was confronted by three young robbers one October evening, his jaw was pried open and his tongue held to enforce silence. One band of London robbers, anxious to drown out cries for help, shouted for a coach.
28

Criminals guilty of like offenses in the daytime were occasionally thought deranged. At a minimum, they ran the risk of witnesses. After viewing a thief steal a pair of shoes “one by one” from a shop display, an employee testified at the Old Bailey, “I think he did not look like a man in his senses, to take the shoes in the day-time and come by the door [where I stood] with them.” This poor soul was found guilty of a reduced charge of petit larceny. A highway robber in 1727 was ruled
non compos mentis
after halting a coach one Sunday near Hackney. Besides being “on the back of a horse that was thought not worth 20 shillings,” he was found to have stopped the coach “at noon day, when people were coming from church.”
29

Secrecy was not the only dividend darkness paid. Thieves readily exploited fears of evil spirits; to avoid pursuit, some rogues masqueraded as demons. According to the Zürich pastor Lewes Lavater in 1572, criminals “under this colour have many times robbed their neighboures in the night time, who supposing they heard the noyse of walking spirites, never went about to drive the theeves away.” In Dijon during the fifteenth century, it was common for burglars to impersonate the devil, to the terror of both households and their neighbors. Sheep-stealers in England frightened villagers by masquerading as ghosts. Of German burglars who wore white shirts and coated their faces with flour, Johanna Elenore Peterson recalled, “They would carry lights around the house, break open closets and cupboards, and take what they wanted. We were so scared that we would crawl behind the stove, trembling.” Members of the Nickel List gang, on the other hand, in central and northern Germany, were thought blessed with supernatural powers, due to their ingenuity and skill.
30

In fact, rogues routinely resorted to magic of all sorts, which at night was thought especially potent. “Experience shows that very often famous thieves are also wizards,” observed the German legal scholar Jacobus Andreas Crusius in 1660. By the late Middle Ages, charms exerted a broad appeal among criminals. Moonwort, for instance, was reputed to open locks when placed within keyholes, as did mandrake, a narcotic plant that supposedly flourished in the pools of urine and excrement beneath a gallows. In Denmark, burglars felt they could elude detection by leaving at the scene a small quantity of coins. Often for the same reason, there and elsewhere in Europe, they left behind their feces. Some murderers hoped to escape capture by consuming a meal from atop their victim’s corpse. In 1574, a man was executed for slaying a miller one night and forcing his wife, whom he first assaulted, to join him in eating fried eggs from the body. “Miller, how do you like this morsel,” he taunted.
31

The most notorious charm, the “thief’s candle,” found ready acceptance in most parts of Europe. The candle was fashioned from either an amputated finger or the fat of a human corpse, leading to the frequent mutilation of executed criminals. Favored, too, were fingers severed from the remains of stillborn infants. Because they had not been baptized, their magical properties were considered more powerful. To enhance the candle’s potency, the hands of dead criminals, known as Hands of Glory, were sometimes employed as candlesticks. Not unknown were savage attacks on pregnant women whose wombs were cut open to extract their young. In 1574, Nicklauss Stüller of Aydtsfeld was convicted of this on three occasions, for which he was “torn thrice with red-hot tongs” and executed upon the wheel. (In Germany, a thief’s candle was called a
Diebeskerze
.) Burglars used these gruesome amulets to make certain that families remained asleep while homes were plundered. Imitating a magician, the seventeenth-century French satirist Cyrano de Bergerac declared, “I cause the thieves to burn candles of dead men’s grease to lay the hoasts asleep, while they rob their houses.” “Let those who are asleep, be asleep” began a typical spell employed by English thieves. Before entering a home in 1586, a German vagabond ignited the entire hand of a dead infant, believing that the unburned fingers signified the number of persons still awake. Even in the late eighteenth century, four men were charged in Castlelyons, Ireland, with unearthing the recently interred corpse of a woman and removing her fat for a thief’s candle. Her husband had grown suspicious after fishermen, looking for bait, found an amputated hand along the seashore.
32