Brilliant (3 page)

Still, people devised ways to increase what little light they had. Sometimes they would focus and magnify their lights by setting a water bottle in front of a flame. In European villages, women would gather at one cottage in the evening and position themselves around a raised lamp that had been surrounded with globes of tinted blue water. (Women in cold countries used snow water.) The color, it was said, tempered the glare. Though all kinds of close work was done by such light, this was called a lacemaker's lamp. The workers gathered "in orderly rows," Gertrude Whiting explained, "the best lacemakers on the highest stools nearest the lamp or candle-stand. Thus, we are told, some eighteen workers can be accommodated, the outer row of stools or chairs being lower to catch the falling rays of light shed from the pole-board. This graded arrangement is spoken of as
first, second
and
third lights
." Third light would have been particularly ghostly: the women facing the inky backs of their companions, gleaning light from the diffuse rays that fell from above or between those in front of them. It illuminated little more than their hands and work.

Is it any wonder that in good weather women sat at the door of their homes and sewed, mended, or made lace in broad daylight? Although in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, large windows lightened the interiors of homes and showed up the dirt in the corners as never before—spurring housewives to sweep and scrub all that much harder—rooms were still consumed by shadows. In Vermeer's
The Little Street,
the inside of a home glimpsed through glass windows appears dark in day, as it does through the open door where a woman in a white cap sits, intent on the white work in her lap. She's framed in whitewash, then in sturdy, centuries-old brickwork, which has settled and cracked and been patched. The high façade makes the Dutch street seem akin to the shallow rock shelters of the last Ice Age, where women—bent over sinew, stone, and bone—also sat in the open, patiently tending to fleeting life.

L
IGHT—SO PRECIOUS WITHIN
—was even rarer on the streets of the cities, towns, and villages of the past, for before the seventeenth century, street lighting was almost nonexistent everywhere in the world. A fourth-century inhabitant of the Syrian city of Antioch claimed, "The light of the sun is succeeded by other lights.... The night with us differs from the day only in the appearance of the light." And geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes that in China, "Hang-chou boasted a vigorous night life along the crowded Imperial way before the Mongols invaded the Sung capital in
A.D.
1276." But other Chinese cities were dark except during the New Year and on the emperor's birthday, when torches lined the roads and the skies flared with fireworks. Renaissance Florence had no streetlights, nor did imperial Rome, of which Jérôme Carcopino wrote:

No oil lamps lighted [the streets], no candles were affixed to the walls; no lanterns were hung over the lintel of the doors, save on festive occasions when Rome was resplendent with exceptional illumination to demonstrate her collective joy, as when Cicero rid her of the Catilinarian plague. In normal times night fell over the city like the shadow of a great danger.... Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and barricaded the entrance. The shops fell silent, safety chains were drawn across behind the leaves of the doors; the shutters of the flats were closed and the pots of flowers withdrawn from the windows they had adorned.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, the close of day was unmistakably announced with the clanging and groaning of bells. Bells were always ringing from ramparts and cathedral towers, from the belfries of convents, monasteries, and country churches—to warn of invasions, fires, and thunderstorms; to announce the celebration of marriage, the arrival of royalty, and the impending death of a parishioner; and after death, to solicit prayers for the departed soul. Their sounding shaped time into holy hours—matins, lauds, prime—and marked the ordinary—the start of work, the opening of markets, the respite of noon. Come dusk, the vespers bells rang, calling for the holy office of the lights, when the candles and torches of the churches were lit. Vespers, meaning "evening star," the word itself dying on a silky whisper: hour for prayers of thanksgiving, and for prayers to the Virgin Mary, since people believed that the Annunciation took place in the evening.

Soon after, the curfew bell tolled, often more than a hundred times. In the early Middle Ages, it sounded just after dusk; in later centuries, especially in winter, it rang several hours after sunset. But always it held an unwavering meaning: in a time before street lighting or organized police forces, the only way to maintain order was to strictly control people's comings and goings, so at curfew all the day's labor stopped. Blacksmiths lay down their bellows, and goldsmiths ceased beating out metal. Trading halted in the markets, and the cries of butchers and fishwives subsided. The sounds of clinking harnesses, creaking wagons, and the plodding tread of oxen decayed into silence as almost everyone—per order of the authorities—returned to their dwellings, locked their doors, and shuttered their windows.

If inhabitants of fortified cities and towns found themselves beyond the gates at the sound of curfew, they made true haste, since officials, to prevent intruders from entering under the cover of dark, locked the perimeter gates. Anyone caught beyond them risked being fined or shut out for the night. Such a practice persisted in some places even into the eighteenth century: "About half a league from the city [of Geneva]," Jean-Jacques Rousseau attests, "I hear the retreat sounding; I hurry up; I hear the drum being beaten, so I run at full speed: I get there all out of breath, and perspiring; my heart is beating; from far away, I see the soldiers from their lookouts; I run, I scream with a choked voice. It was too late."

Not only were gates closed; in order to prevent vandals from running freely through the streets, officials laid chains across the roads, "as if it were in tyme of warr." The city of Nuremberg, notes A. Roger Ekirch, "maintained more than four hundred sets [of chains]. Unwound each evening from large drums, they were strung at waist height, sometimes in two or three bands, from one side of a street to the other...[and] Paris officials in 1405 set all the city's farriers to forging chains to cordon off not just streets but also the Seine." In some cities, residents, once home, were required to give their keys over to the authorities: "At night all houses ... are to be locked and the keyes deposited with a magistrate," a Paris decree of 1380 charged. "Nobody may then enter or leave a house unless he can give the magistrate a good reason for doing so." Cooking fires, often the only interior light many could afford, were ordered extinguished soon after the evening meal, since among the innumerable night fears in the huddled wooden-and-thatch world of the Middle Ages was that of conflagration. "Curfew" comes from the Old French
covre-feu,
meaning "cover fire."

Yet even with such strict regulations, and in spite of all the tolling bells and clanking chains, the close of day was not always an iron hour. The absolute enforcement of curfew would have been impossible, since the night watch was often all that stood between order and disorder in the dark, and watchmen weren't at their posts voluntarily. In many European cities and large towns, all households were required to contribute a man between the age of eighteen and sixty to the watch, and neither widows nor clergy were excepted from the ordinance: they had to sponsor an eligible man from another household. Unpaid, unarmed (save for a trumpet and banner), and having worked all day as laborers, goldsmiths, or cloth makers, the standing watch kept a lookout for fire or invasion at the towers and gates, having climbed to their posts on ladders, "whose feet in many towns were protected by a locked barrier. Thus, the watchers ... would not be tempted—or more precisely would not be able—to abandon their post under cover of darkness. Installed in sentry boxes, suffering in winter from cold and bad weather, they waited more or less patiently for night to pass." A rear watch spent the night patrolling the streets, listening for trouble and questioning anyone found abroad. They had the additional duty of checking on the standing watch to make sure one or more of them hadn't dozed off or returned home.

All watchmen had the authority to arrest and imprison those out in the night without just cause, though they might be a little lax in the first few hours after curfew, especially in times and places that were relatively free from strife. The taverns, though ordered closed, might have stayed open so workmen could stop in for a drink or two before returning home. In small towns and villages, people visited other households to talk by the light of the hearth. Bakers worked their ovens so they could have bread ready for the break of day. And the night had its own tradesmen who were about then—ragpickers, manure and night soil collectors—with their furtive scrapings and footsteps. But as night deepened, the streets mostly belonged to vandals, footpads, and other thieves, and anyone abroad in the later hours except those with a legitimate purpose—midwives, priests, or doctors called out to emergencies—was regarded as a "nightwalker" and subject to interrogation.

Since the watch—and any travelers abroad—had no stationary street lighting to help them, what little light shone on the streets was portable. The torches and lanterns carried by the watch not only illuminated their way but also made them visible to others and recognizable as enforcers of order. Since any travelers without lights would have had an advantage—they could see the watch but could not be seen—anyone on the streets after dark was also required to carry a lamp or torch. Leicester, England: "No man [may] walke after IX of the belle be streken in the nyght withoute lyght or without cause reson-able in payne of impresonment." The city of Lyon: "Let no one be so bold or daring to go about at night after the great
seral
of Saint Nizar without carrying lights, on pain of being put in prison and of paying sixty sous of Tours each time he is found to have done so."

The wealthy—whom watchmen could distinguish from a distance by their dress—always traveled with servants to hold their lanterns and with guards to defend them. They were also exempted from nighttime restrictions that others were subject to. For instance, in many cities night travelers were forbidden to wear hoods or cloaks, and they could not carry weapons or gather in groups of more than three or four.

Almost everyone gladly left the streets to the thieves, the scurrying of rodents, and the lingering smells of the day—rotting food, old straw, and horses' sweat and dung: "It has been said in describing the conditions of the age of dark streets that everybody signed his will and was prepared for death before he left his home." Women would have been particularly vulnerable in the night, and any women on the streets after nightfall, save for midwives, would have been deemed to be prostitutes.

People who had to travel hoped that their business would coincide with a clear night and a full moon, which thieves often avoided. The full moon also gave travelers enough light to see the outlines of the landscape and the road ahead. The eye functions differently at night than during the day. In the dark, people see with their retinal rods rather than their retinal cones, and complete adaptation to night vision takes a full hour. Even then, human sight is much less acute at night, and the eye can't distinguish color. On a night with no moon or heavy cloud cover—a lantern or torch lighting the way only directly ahead—travelers relied on their other senses. Most knew the country intimately by day, and such familiarity would have helped in the dark. Although they could not see landmarks, they could orient themselves by the feel of the road underfoot—the gravel crunching with each step or the give of soft sand; by the sound of the wind soughing through the trees or rushing across an open field, or by church bells, falling water, or bleating sheep; by the smell of hay or freshly cut wood. Anything light-colored helped—a pale horse, a sandy path, snow. Still, people had to negotiate the curfew chains or the logs that were sometimes placed across the streets as barriers. On the uneven, muddy roads, they fell off bridges and into canals and coal bins; they stumbled over cobbles; they tripped on woodpiles and stones.

In an age of scarce and rarely squandered light, any substantial illumination at night would have been imbued with great meaning. At times it signaled a crisis: during conflagrations or conflicts, city officials required citizens to muster their lamps and candles as an aid to defense or firefighting. At other times, it signaled power: when royalty arrived in a city, they were often ushered in with displays of torches along the streets and on rooftops, or with bonfires: "On the twenty-sixth day of April 1430, the authorities of Paris had great fires lit, just as at Saint John in the summer ... and informed the people that it was for the young King Henry, who proclaimed himself king of France and England, who had landed at Boulognes, he and a great horde of mercenaries, to fight the Armagnacs, who were nothing to him." The church also marked its holy days with fire and used light extravagantly in its buildings. Of St. Mark's in Rome on Christmas Eve, one onlooker remarked, "A man would thincke it all on fire." While such light reinforced the church's eminent place in society, candlelit processions through the streets and squares also imbued those times with a sense of solemnity and mystery.

Even in the heart of a bustling city, night must have retained its age-old feeling of enormity, with the stars distinct above and people hiding in their homes. Over time, though, as cities grew and commerce between and within them increased, daily life inevitably extended more and more into the dark hours. By the late 1600s, authorities in large European and several American cities began to require householders to hang a lamp or place a candle on their street-facing windowsills for a few hours after winter sunset and during the dark of the moon. Like the lights required of travelers, the sill lights were meant to help the authorities. The lamp on the sill was also "a lamp that
waits,
" notes Gaston Bachelard. "It watches so unremittingly that it
guards.
" And it was regarded in return. There would always be something of the cold taste of order in public lighting.