At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (9 page)

Fire, a persistent threat after dark, terrified preindustrial populations even more than crime and violence. Not only were precautions weaker at night, but the need for heat and light was greater. A source of anxiety since time immemorial, the peril of fire—“that most terrible and ruthless tyrant”—acquired new urgency in tightly packed urban areas, where for cheapness and ease wood and thatch still dominated new construction, especially in northern and central Europe. Only the plague, which offered greater warning, instilled as much fear. As late as 1769, “Palladio,” writing in the
Middlesex Journal
, complained, “The English dwell and sleep, as it were, surrounded with their funeral piles.” Congested rows of homes and shops created a maze of narrow lanes and winding alleys highly vulnerable to conflagrations. Iago in
Othello
(ca. 1604) speaks of fires “spied in populous citties” by night, and Sir William Davenant in 1636 wrote of the horrible dangers “which mid-night fires beget, in citties overgrowne.”
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A strong breeze could make matters worse. During a fire in 1652 that consumed much of Glasgow, the wind changed direction five or six times. “The fire on the one syde of the street fyred the other syde,” reported the minister of New Kilpatrick parish. A visitor to Moscow found, “Not a month, nor even a week, goes by without some homes—or if the wind is strong, whole streets—going up in smoke.” The sacred suffered with the profane, the rich with the poor. Innocent lives might be lost to flames normally reserved by towns for heretics and witches. Fire, unlike other predators, noted the writer Nicolas de Lamare, “devours all and respects neither churches nor royal palaces.” Within minutes, one’s home and property, the labor of a lifetime, could be destroyed, as could future opportunities for subsistence.
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Among other ill consequences was the damaging impact large fires had on local economies. Beset by as many as four fires from 1594 to 1641, Stratford-upon-Avon was already described in 1614 as “an ancient but a very poore market towne.”
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Little wonder that just the alarm of fire at night could strike a person dead with fright, or that a mob in 1680, upon learning that a woman had threatened to burn the town of Wakefield, carried her off to a dung heap, where she lay all night after first being whipped. A worse fate befell a Danish boatman and his wife, upon trying to set the town of Randers ablaze. After being dragged through every street and repeatedly “pinched” with “glowing tongs,” they were burned alive.
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Despite the introduction of fire engines in cities by the mid-seventeenth century, most firefighting tools were primitive, limited largely to leather buckets, ladders, and “great hooks” to tear down timbers and thatch before sparks could spread. Often, barely a year passed before some town or city in England experienced disaster. From 1500 to 1800, at least 421 fires in provincial towns consumed ten or more houses apiece, with as many as 46 fires during that period destroying one hundred or more houses each. “In some great town a fire breaks out by night, /” wrote Sir Richard Blackmore in 1695, “And fills with crackling flames, and dismal light, / With sparks, and pitchy smoak th’ astonish’d sky.”
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Of course, London’s Great Fire, originating in a bakehouse in the early morning hours of September 2, 1666, still ranks among the worst in human history. At first, the flames appeared manageable, prompting the Lord Mayor to opine that “a woman might piss it out.” But fanned by an east wind, the fire consumed four-fifths of the city over the course of four days. Reduced to ashes were Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, 87 churches, more than 13,000 houses, and such public buildings as the Guildhall, Custom House, and the Royal Exchange. The diarist John Evelyn wrote, “The stones of
Paules
flew like grenados, the lead mealting downe the streetes in a streame, & the very pavements of them glowing with fiery rednesse, so as nor horse nor man was able to tread on them.” In its wake, the city would endure forty more serious fires in the years before 1800.
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No other metropolis suffered London’s ordeal, but fires spread terror from Amsterdam to Moscow, where an early morning blaze in 1737 took several thousand lives. Few cities escaped at least one massive disaster. Paris was unusually fortunate, with a writer in the eighteenth century estimating that at least fifty houses ordinarily burned in London for every five lost in the French capital. But Toulouse was all but consumed in 1463, as was Bourges in 1487, and practically a quarter of Troyes in 1534. The better part of Rennes was destroyed in 1720 during a conflagration that raged for seven days.
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In colonial America, as cities grew, so did fire’s threat. Boston lost 150 buildings in 1679 after a smaller blaze just three years before. Major fires again broke out in Boston in 1711 and in 1760 when flames devoured nearly 400 homes and commercial buildings—the “most amazing fire ever known in this age in this part of the world,” recorded a diarist. While New York and Philadelphia each suffered minor calamities, a fire gutted much of Charleston in 1740.
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Jan Beerstraten,
The Great Fire in the Old Town Hall, Amsterdam
, 1652, seventeenth century.

Rural localities experienced less crowding, but fire still posed a serious menace. Most hamlets, however ordered or haphazard, were sufficiently compact for flames to spread among houses, barns, and other buildings; open fields, both private and common lands, lay outside the village center. Once ignited, a thatch roof, made from reeds or straw, was nearly impossible to save, as is evident from the dramatic paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Egbert van der Poel. In Denmark, noted Ludvig Baron Holberg, “Villages were laid out with the houses so close together that, when one house burned down, the entire village had to follow suit.” Crops, livestock, and stables strewn with straw all stood at risk, particularly when seasons remained dry. One of the most horrific rural disasters occurred on a night in 1727 in the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Burwell. A barn caught fire with more than 70 persons trapped inside watching a puppet show. Because the doors had been bolted, nearly everyone perished. So indistinguishable were the remains that they were interred in a common grave denoted by a tombstone still standing in the Burwell churchyard.
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With good reason, fears mounted after nightfall. The Restoration playwright John Bancroft wrote of “old kingdom night, / Where the fierce element of fire ne’r fades.”
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Even before being rendered defenseless by sleep, households became vulnerable when families lit hearths to escape the cold and the dark. As Benjamin Franklin observed, “Accidental fires in houses are most frequent in the winter and in the night time,” and a London newspaper one January spoke of “the frequency of fires at this time of the year.” Open hearths threw sparks onto wood floors, or worse, onto thatch roofs, when belched from chimneystacks. Clothing and flax hung dangerously next to fireplaces in order to dry. Chimneys themselves were a persistent hazard. Not only did they blaze out when clogged with soot, but cracks within chimneys and hearths permitted flames to reach a house’s joists. Some homes lacked chimneys altogether, to the consternation of anxious neighbors. Complaining that John Taylor, both a brewer and a baker, had twice nearly set his Wiltshire community ablaze from not having a chimney, petitioners in 1624 pleaded that his license be revoked. Of their absence in an Irish village, John Dunton observed, “When the fire is lighted, the smoke will come through the thatch, so that you would think the cabin were on fire.”
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Candles, oil lamps, and other sources of artificial illumination posed perils of their own. Fire, to paraphrase an English proverb, could change quickly from being a good servant to an ill master. Clothing was highly combustible: the neckcloth of Reverend Ralph Josselin’s daughter, Mary, suddenly burst into flames from a candle in 1669, as did, another evening, the head cloth of Elizabeth Freke of County Cork while she was reading in her chamber. Just to carry a naked brand outdoors courted disaster. Newmarket’s Great Fire of 1683 began on a March night when someone’s torch accidentally set a rick of straw ablaze. In New York City, a cartman lost his home as well as his stable after his children’s candle ignited a fire when they were putting horses up. “Feare candle in hayloft, in barne, and in shed,” instructed Thomas Tusser.
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Most blazes began less dramatically, with untended candles causing the greatest devastation. Untrimmed wicks dropped cinders onto tables and floors. “A snuffe of a candle will set a whole house on fire,” warned an Elizabethan writer.
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Lit candles also made tempting targets for hungry rats and mice. Samuel Sewall of Boston attributed a fire within his closet to a mouse’s taste for tallow. “If sickness or any other cause should oblige you to leave a candle burning all night,” advised
The Old Farmer’s Almanack
, “place it in such a situation as to be out of the way of rats.”
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Another refrain faulted the mishandling of candles by servants. In the Netherlands, the
Ervarene Huyshoudster
lectured, “Darning hose, done by the maids in their bedrooms by candlelight, is very dangerous, for when such a maid, being fatigued, falls from her chair, thus fire can start from the candle.” Domestics were condemned for using candles in bed, always a perilous risk. “It is a dangerous fire begins in the bed straw,” asserted a proverb.
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In truth, there was ample blame to go around in view of people’s late-night predilections for reading in bed and consuming alcohol, sometimes simultaneously. Several homes on London’s Albermarle Street burned to the ground in 1734 after a gentleman fell asleep reading.
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Also vulnerable at night were workplaces. Along with candles for lighting, many tradesmen, including brewers, bakers, and tallow-chandlers, employed “constant large and violent fires,” with wood, coal, or other fuels stockpiled nearby. Too costly to extinguish, fires in ovens and furnaces often burned through the night. “No sensible person ought to live in an house contiguous to those trades,” exhorted a contemporary. Judging from the numbers of reported blazes, bakeries and malthouses seem to have been peculiarly vulnerable to accidents. Of brewers,
Piers Plowman
complained in the fourteenth century, “We’ve all seen sometime through some brewer / Many tenements burnt down with bodies inside.”
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Gerard Vlack,
Sleeping Servant
, n.d.

If most nighttime fires arose from human negligence, and lightning caused sundry more, an alarming number were intentional. Certainly no more frightening crime existed—the “most pernicious to society,” declared a Scottish pastor in 1734. In English criminal law, nearly all forms of arson, directed against a home or a haystack, were punishable by death. In Denmark, whether or not lives were lost, beheading was the penalty for a
mordbroender
, meaning literally a murderer by fire. The crime endangered lives and property on a horrific scale, as both innocents and incendiaries understood.
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Some persons, seeking to exploit public fears, extorted money from property owners in anonymous letters threatening arson. You will be “woken up by the red cock” was a favorite taunt. Named
le capitaine des boutefeu
, a twenty-four-year-old student at the University of Paris was convicted of both arson and extortion in 1557, for which he was burned alive. Years later, several residents of Bristol received letters threatening fire, including a merchant, whose defiance resulted in the destruction of his brick home shortly past midnight. Warned a letter in 1738 to a London ironmonger in Holborn, “We are all resolutely determined to kill you and yours by consuming your house to ashes.”
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Burglars employed arson, hoping to disguise their crimes. In old regime France, this was a known ruse among thieves. Even in a small Scottish village late one night, a woman set a cottage afire after first combing its belongings. A full-scale blaze was averted only when a passerby alerted the community. Less fortunate was the owner of a London home consumed by a fire set to hide a theft of nearly £1,000 in banknotes. In Piccadilly on a Sunday night in 1761, the servant of a grocer stole clothing and linen before setting lit pieces of coal in three different spots of his master’s home. Alerted by smoke, family members barely escaped.
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A variation on this ploy occurred when thieves pillaged homes amid the confusion accompanying fires that they themselves set. Observed the seventeenth-century jurist Roger North, “It is believed that houses are often fired by thieves for opportunities of stealing.” In Muzzle-Hill, outside London, a gang ignited a barn containing a large quantity of hay. As the frantic farmer and his family worked to extinguish the flames, the incendiaries stole money and goods from their home.
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