Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (33 page)

Figure 7.2
The arrival of the young men at the spinning bee: “Decembre: La Veillée,” engraving by Jean Mariette, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

This – in the authorities’ view – is where the trouble began. In 1661 the bishop of Châlons issued an ordinance forbidding “men and boys” from joining or visiting “the vigils [
veillées
] when women and girls spin or do other work in the winter.” Likewise, “women and girls are not to let them in, play, or dance with them during the night.”
²⁵
In Calvinist Guernsey in 1637, the Royal Court forbade the “vueilles” “because of the regular and scandalous debauchery which is committed at the assemblies of young people … during the night.” Marriageable young people met and courted at these “vigils”; a less judgmental English visitor to Guernsey noted that “from these meetings many marriages are contracted.”
²⁶
A contemporary French engraving (
Figure 7.2
) shows the scene just after the young men have arrived. A hanging oil-lamp illuminates the young women, distaffs in hand, one at a spinning wheel, just interrupted by the swains, who have begun to dance and show their affections. The text below claims that such visits, if handled wisely, transform “the most toilsome labor” into “more even than an amusement.” Images and accounts from Germany (such as
Figure 7.1
) focus on sexual morality, adding concerns about disrespectful gossip, bawdy songs, rude pranks, and gluttony. At the spinning bees young
servants “cook, eat, and drink what they have stolen at home,” as one reported.
²⁷
French and German sources record such courting customs as the “brushing off,” in which each unmarried woman gave one of the young men the honor of brushing the stray bits of flax or wool off her lap while she worked.
²⁸

From the perspective of the participants, spinning bees combined labor, leisure, and important courtship customs; village elders tolerated them, arguing that “the young must have their diversions and merriment.”
²⁹
In
Figure 7.1
, first printed
c
. 1524 by Sebald Beham, then copied and reprinted in the mid seventeenth century with new verses, the older “shepherd’s mother Elizabeth” (figure Y) looks at the disarray around her but then “thinks back to the good old days / when she had such fun herself.”
³⁰
The spinning bees were denounced by pastors and administrators (outsiders to the village) not simply on moral grounds, but also because the gatherings sustained local nocturnal countercultures. In
Figures 7.1
and
7.2
and in many written accounts of spinning bees the authority figures of family, church, and
state are absent or obscured by the “rural plebian culture of laughter.”
³¹
In Beham’s print the village administrator (the
Schultheiss
, figure G) sits asleep beside the stove and “the priest is off taking care of his cook.” Sexual license is everywhere in Beham’s scene: the maid of the
Schultheiss
(E) is there with her lover Fritz (F); Curdt (L) “wants to sneak behind the stove and sleep with Elßgen,” and Ulrich (W) “so pleases … Appel [Apollonia, figure X] that she is about to put out her light.” The Beham print singles out each these figures for criticism, but offers no hope of any moral improvement.

Figure 7.3
shows a more orderly peasant home at night: the women are working flax while a group of men seated around the table drink. The young woman and man standing at the back converse discretely under more watchful eyes. In
Figure 7.4
we see an ideal spinning bee: an all-female scene (an author, far left, looks on) with well-lighted and industrious figures. In the accompanying text the women give their legitimate reasons for gathering to spin. Several say their husbands are out drinking; a maid explains that she has been frightened by a ghost and does not want to stay in her room alone. Other women have come to socialize, leaving snoring husbands home in bed.

Figure 7.3
Spinning bee scene; engraving by Claudine Bouzonnet Stella, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 7.4
An orderly spinning bee: Jacob von der Heyden, “KunckelBrieff oder SpinnStuben,”
c
. 1620. Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Inventar Nr. XIII,441,8; Neg. Nr. 8685.

Condoned or criticized, and despite its many local variations (it might be more or less focused on productive work, and more or less planned or scheduled) all the evidence agrees that the spinning gatherings were always held on long winter nights.
³²

These gatherings are richly documented on the Continent.
³³
In the British Isles, peasants gathered at night for spinning or knitting in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
³⁴
In England – with the exception of Yorkshire and Lancashire – spinning bees do not seem to have been an established practice,
³⁵
but their key features – women establishing an evening space for work or socializing, then inviting unmarried men to join them – do appear. In Norfolk in the spring of 1665 we learn that

Margaret Barkle, the servant of James Money of Gresham, butcher, was charged to have taken an handkerchief with flour & late in the night with Ellen Berston & Katherine Wilson to have gone to the widow Thoulder’s house in Sustead, intending a merry meeting there with some fellows.
³⁶

The gatherings of young people in the evening for work or conversation could easily turn into an impromptu dance or a “merry meeting.”
³⁷

Indeed, when young men and women met at a spinning bee, they took part in one of several related and widely documented early modern customs of nocturnal courtship. The spinning bee overlapped with the south German
Heimgarten
(in other parts of Germany,
Nachtfreien
or
Kiltgang
), an evening gathering of unmarried young men and women at the house of a married couple. The term
Heimgarten
could also refer to time spent together by a courting couple at night after the larger gathering broke up, or to night-time visits by young single men to the homes – or beds – of young women.
³⁸
Thus the
Heimgarten
could shade into the practice of bundling, the most intimate of early modern nocturnal courtship customs.
³⁹
In France examples of the custom of allowing courting couples to share a bed for the night appear in the Protestant county of Montbéliard, and in Champagne, Burgundy, and Savoy.
⁴⁰
Bundling was a rural custom, arising in part from the long distances suitors traveled to visit young women, which then necessitated an overnight stay. This seems to have been the excuse Leonard Wheatcroft used when staying overnight at the home of his future wife, Elizabeth Hawley, during their courtship in 1656–57.
⁴¹

Wheatcroft’s detailed courtship narrative describes many evening gatherings and nights spent together with his “beloved paramour, sweet Betty.” They met at the “wakes” (i.e., church ales, notorious for lasting well into the night) in Wheatcroft’s hometown of Ashover. One evening Wheatcroft waited at Elizabeth’s house for her to return from a walk, “it being a fine warm evening for maids to delight themselves in.” To Wheatcroft’s great joy she returned “when the evening drew towards an end, and the glorious sun withdrew himself from my sight.”
⁴²
They went to her uncle’s house, where they stayed the night and “did lovingly embrace each other.” On another occasion, after Wheatcroft pretended to be engaged to another woman, he reported that “these and suchlike expressions [of Elizabeth’s exasperation] did keep us waking all night. She, being then so vexed at me, would not so much as afford me one kiss.”
⁴³
Much of Wheatcroft’s courtship of Elizabeth Hawley took place at night.

Indeed, the night was the accepted time for courtship. A notary describing a street fight and ensuing homicide in the village of Septfontaines (in the Franche-Comté) on the night of December 7, 1623 acknowledged that the night was the time “for visiting homes where there were girls or widows available for marriage.” In this case an unwanted suitor named Pierre Révillon was asked repeatedly to leave a private home where he was courting a young widow, “for which … Pierre Révillon was truly dissatisfied because
it was only around seven or eight o’clock in the evening
” and “other young people were [still] drinking in the kitchen … Nothing about leaving had been said to them so that he, the said Pierre Révillon, thought that it was insulting to ask him to leave.”
⁴⁴
It was already several hours after sunset, and the gathering continued well after Révillon was expelled. The late hour was not the issue, but the frustrated Révillon started a fight outside which ended with a death, producing our record of the events of that night.
⁴⁵

In the many ways described here, young adults got to know potential sexual or marriage partners, both personally and physically. As historians of early modern marriage and sexuality have established, “the majority of the … population did not make arranged marriages.”
⁴⁶
Parental consent became more important in the confessional era, but this was consent to a match based on some kind of personal choice. With the exception of the wealthy or the nobility, young people sought out their own marriage partners within a group circumscribed by status, trade, and locale. Once mutual interest was established, courting couples enjoyed considerable physical intimacy with one another; sexual relations often began with the engagement.
⁴⁷
The night significantly facilitated all aspects of the passage from single youth to husband or wife. From meeting a group of potential spouses at a spinning bee or village dance, to getting to know a specific individual in the dim intimacy of a chamber during a
Heimgarten
visit or while bundling, to the physical consummation of the relationship (ending, it was hoped, in marriage), the night was constant companion to the couple. Church and state gave their sanction to the marriage during the day, but husbands and wives were made at night.

Seen in these terms, the night was much more than an accidental or contingent part of rural servants’ lives. In comparison with young servants in the city, rural youth had less contact with their peers during the working day, and fewer opportunities to socialize.
⁴⁸
They relied more on the evening and night hours for the serious business of meeting potential marriage partners, and for less serious pursuits as well.
⁴⁹
In Norfolk in 1665 a justice of the peace noted that he had