Summary: Before the invention of electric light and modern bedding, nighttime offered little peace for our ancestors. Historian A. Roger Ekirch’s book reveals a world where sleep was fragmented, beds were crowded (sometimes with people and livestock), and fears of crime, vermin, and supernatural forces kept many from true rest. Far from the romantic ideal of tranquil slumber in simpler times, preindustrial nights were noisy, stressful, and often more exhausting than restorative.
The historian A. Roger Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past provides a fascinating window into our ancestors’ world. The book provides insight into everything from the nocturnal dangers they faced, such as the threats of crime and fire, to their deeply uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.
It is easy to romanticize preindustrial sleep: Surely before modern vehicular traffic, nighttime was a quiet respite, and without the blue light of smartphone screens to stimulate their brains, our ancestors were able to sink into a deep, restful state of sleep each night. “Implicit in modern conceptions of sleep before the Industrial Revolution remains the wistful belief that our forebears enjoyed tranquil slumber, if often little else, in their meager lives.” Sadly, that was not the case. Before earplugs, neck pillows, white noise machines, ergonomic mattress designs, and other modern bedtime amenities, restful slumber was often evasive. Notwithstanding idyllic stereotypes of repose in simpler times, early modern slumber was highly vulnerable to intermittent disruption, much morе so, in all likelihood, than is sleep today.” In 1657, the British writer and Anglican priest George Herbert wrote that “manie [many people] worke hard all day, and when night comes, their paines increase, for want of food or rest.”
Most preindustrial people suffered from very high levels of stress, making it difficult to relax and sleep soundly. The 17th-century healer Richard Napier recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. “Popular dread of demons kept some persons awake,” while fears of all-too-real nocturnal dangers, such as thieves, made many sleep with a weapon within reach. People also dreaded nightmares, genuinely believing them to be potentially lethal attacks by evil spirits or witches; in 1730, a guide noted that “many a life has been lost by the night-mare.” In 1621, the physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia (roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression) as “waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, [and] sorrows.” All social classes suffered nighttime disturbances due to poor mental health. “If, as early writers contended, the affluent suffered broken sleep because of mental stress, diverse psychological disorders, not least depression, afflicted the lower classes.” Of the urban poor in the early modern era, one observer noted, “They sleep, but they feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.”
“Making matters worse were the narrow lanes separating early modern dwellings, with their thin walls, revealing cracks, and naked windows. Not until the eighteenth century did curtains adorn many urban portals, while in the countryside they remained a rarity.”
Bedsharing with family members and overnight guests was extraordinarily common; most ordinary people grew up sharing a bed with several siblings. Beds were expensive, often representing “over one-third the value of all domestic assets” in a modest household. “Inadequate bedding meant that families in the lower ranks routinely slept two, three, or more to a mattress, with overnight visitors included . . . Entire households of European peasants, numbering up to five or six persons, occasionally shared the same bed.” Even well into the industrial era, such arrangements continued in impoverished communities. Of early 19th-century Irish household sleeping configurations, it was said, “They lie down decently and in order, the eldest daughter next the wall farthest from the door, then all the sisters according to their ages, next the mother, father and sons in succession, and then the strangers, whether the travelling pedlar or tailor or beggar.”
Yet sleeping in a huddled mass was not the sole purview of the destitute. “Even well-to-do individuals, when separated from home, occasionally shared beds overnight,” and among ordinary peasants, bedsharing was a given. Sharing a bed with one’s servants was also quite common. “Female domestics, when sleeping with their mistresses, afforded protection at night from abusive husbands.” A noblewoman known as Madame de Liancourt advised her granddaughter not to share a bed with female servants, as such a practice “goes against cleanliness and decency,” blurring social boundaries and diminishing “respect.” Her attitude reflects how society’s upper crust often resented communal sleep and abandoned the practice as soon as rising general prosperity gave them the means to do so. “By the eighteenth century, communal sleep inspired widespread disdain among the gentle classes . . . In no other sphere of preindustrial life did a mounting appreciation for personal privacy among the upper ranks of society manifest itself more plainly.” The average person did not have the luxury to pursue higher standards of privacy in their sleeping arrangements.
In both urban and rural areas, “peasant families at night brought farm animals under their roofs” and slept huddled together for warmth. A British term for sharing a bed with many bedfellows was “to pig,” and in some cases, the bedfellows were literal swine. In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark”—filled with a great variety of animals. “In Scotland and parts of northern Europe, curtained beds were built into walls, in part to allow animals additional room. According to a visitor to the Hebrides in the 1780s, the urine from cows was regularly collected in tubs and discarded, but the dung was removed just once a year.” One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that filled every night. The hubbub “from frogs and katydids to barking dogs, lovesick cats, and needy livestock, not all of which grew familiar with time. In the dairy region of East Anglia, ‘bull’s noon was a common expression for midnight, the hour when bullocks, in full throat, bellowed for their mates. And vice-versa.”
A passage from the poem The Complaints of Poverty (1742) by Nicholas James describes the quality of sleep suffered by the impoverished masses:
And when, to gather strength and still his woes,
He seeks his last redress in soft repose,
The tatter’d blanket, erst the fleas’ retreat,
Denies his shiv’ring limbs sufficient heat;
Teaz’d with the sqwalling babes nocturnal cries,
He restless on the dusty pillow lies.
Animals and drunken commotions were frequent sources of nocturnal clangor. Because many farm animals such as cows and pigs were kept inside cities, the din of pigsties and lowing of cows cramped in small spaces mixed with the howling of dogs to create a tumultuous chorus. From cities to villages, nighttime brought a din of animal cries. “We lost our road,” wrote a traveler in early modern France, “and about midnight, directed by the sound of village dogs, dropt upon Fontinelle.”
Where night watchmen were tasked with keeping the noise level down, “some watchmen were even blamed for causing much of the noise nuisances at night themselves. [A character in a novel published in 1771] complained, ‘I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of inhabitants.’ . . . In the Danish play Masquerades (ca 1723), by Ludvig Baron Holberg, the servant Henrich complains, ‘Every hour of the night they waken people out of their sleep by shouting to them that they hope they are sleeping well.’” Indeed, despite the clangor of numerous obnoxious sounds at night, “urban denizens reserved their sharpest annoyance for the nightwatch. Many residents never grew habituated to their cries.” Night watchmen were variously described as drunk, “decrepit,” and the “very dregs” of the “human race.” They were often viewed as incompetent or corrupt, “colluding with thieves.”
The majority of households did not dare rely on night watchmen to keep them safe. “Most households were armed, often more heavily than members of the nightwatch. Most domestic arsenals contained swords, pikes, and firearms, or in less affluent homes cudgels and sticks, both capable of delivering mortal blows.” People slept beside their weapons. “Once a family retired for the night, weapons were kept close.” Noblemen might sleep with a sword within reach, while ordinary people slumbered near less exalted weapons. “Valued as a club was the common bed-staff, a short, sturdy stick used in sets two on each side of a bed to hold-its covers in place.” For protection, households fashioned devices, such as shutters equipped with bells, to rouse sleeping inhabitants during a break-in. “Watchdogs prowled inside and out,” undoubtedly considered more reliable than watchmen by many. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of popular contempt for nightwatchmen.” Businesses such as mills, stables, and warehouses hired private “watchers” or guards, as private security was more reliable than the public night watch.
“Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, European beds evolved from straw pallets on earthen floors to wooden frames complete with pillows, sheets, blankets, coverlets, and ‘flock’ mattresses, filled with rags and stray pieces of wool. . . . ‘Whether due to sleeping on a bed fouler than a rubbish heap, or not being able to cover oneself,’” a Bolognese curate observed of insomnia among the poor, ‘who can explain how much harm is done?’” The poorest slept on the earthen floors of their peasant dwellings, with a layer of straw as their only bed:
In Scotland and Ireland, entire families slept upon earthen floors strewn with rushes, straw, and heather. Not only was the cost of bedsteads prohibitive, but they occupied valuable space in cramped dwellings. Of the “better sort of cabins,” a visitor to Ireland found in the late 1600s, “there is generally one flock bed, seldom more, feathers being too costly; this serves the man and his wife, the rest all lie on straw, some with one sheet and blanket, others only their clothes and blanket to cover them. The cabins have seldom any floor but the earth.”
Dwellings in general provided more limited shelter from the elements than modern homes. In 1703, a man named Thomas Naish related how after being awakened by a rainstorm he was unable to return to bed “for the violence of the noise, ratling of the tyles, and for fear that my house would fall down upon me.”
Ill-constructed houses generated their own cacophony, owing to shrinking timber, loose boards, drafty doors, broken windows, and open chimneys. All of which inclement weather made worse. Not only did keyholes whistle, but hinges and bolts gave way, and roofs leaked.
Many went to bed late: “Numerous people toiled past nightfall, both in towns and in the country.” In a world of intense poverty, the “pressures of subsistence . . . drove workers to toil late hours. . . . Of course, some laborers must have collapsed after returning home barely able from numbing fatigue to consume an evening meal, especially in rural regions during the summer when fieldwork grew most strenuous.” In 1777, a doctor in south-central France described peasants “returning home in the evening, harassed by weariness and misery.”
No matter how profound their exhaustion, the people of the past had little choice but to keep working late into the night. “Often there were jobs at night to do, from butchering stock to chopping wood to picking apples, all labor-intensive tasks able to be performed in poor light.” The full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox earned the name “harvest moon” because it provided illumination for farmworkers gathering their crops late into the evening.
In the Netherlands, “maidservants might not retire until two or three o’clock” at night. Bakers began their work at night in order to provide freshly baked goods in the morning. A pamphlet from 1715 in Paris by journeymen bakers fumed, “We start our days in the evenings, we knead the dough at night; we have to spend all night in captivity. Night, the time of rest, is for us a time of torture.” Weavers and lacemakers were among the workers who often labored by candlelight:
“On long winter evenings, from Sweden to the Italian peninsula, mothers, daughters, and servants turned their hands to spinning wheels or looms.” Seemingly “every peasant at night [was] a weaver, some so poor that they relied upon moonlight to card wool.” “In the Fast Anglian city of Norwich, according to a census in the early 1570s, 94 percent of poor women performed textile work of some sort.”
All women were expected to stay up late working. “The good huswive’s [housewife’s] candle never goeth out,” remarked the writer William Baldwin in 1584, capturing the popular notion that women should work at all hours. Such attitudes were stable for centuries. The Book of Proverbs describes an ideal wife similarly: “Her candle goeth not out by night.” Preindustrial men, in contrast, often went to sleep at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m.
“Before bed, doors and shutters were double-checked.” Another pre-bedtime ritual was hunting for bedbugs and fleas and lice: Families combed the pests out of their hair, picked them out of beds, and plucked them off nightclothes. “Bugs were everywhere, especially given the proximity of dogs and livestock,” even in urban settings. Early modern Britons complained of “whole armies” of bugs attacking their night chambers.
Bedbugs plagued our ancestors in all seasons, but especially the warmer months. In areas of Europe with warmer climates such as Italy, tarantulas and scorpions also plagued households. The colonies of North America contended with mosquitoes and worse. “The Virginia servant John Harrower found a snake one night under his pillow.”
Rats and mice often joined the insect swarm in pestering our ancestors at night. “We might have rested, had not the mice rendezvoused over our faces,” a traveler in Scotland lamented in 1677. Such pests were infamously noisy. “Within some homes, most notoriously those with wooden frames fixed in the earth, such was the tumult created by rats and mice that walls and rafters seemed on the verge of collapse.”
“Bedding afforded notorious homes to lice, fleas, and bedbugs, the unholy trinity of early modern entomology. . . . Bedding rife with housemites triggered asthma.”
In colonial Delaware, one lodger trying to sleep captured a wide array of common complaints when he wrote of the “stink of the candle-snuff,” bugs, mosquitoes, the “grunting & groaning of a person asleep in the next room,” a “male bedfellow,” and the noise made by a cat.
“As if illness, foul weather, and fleas were not enough. There was yet another, even more familiar source of broken sleep in preindustrial societies”—a routine interval at night of wakefulness. For millennia, people slept in two distinct phases. Ekirch discovered this phenomenon through archival research and became the first historian to (co)author an article in the discipline of sleep science. For many preindustrial people, “biphasic sleep” was the norm.
The initial interval of sleep was called “first sleep.” Early classical writers such as Livy, Virgil, and Homer all invoked the term, as did numerous medieval and early modern writers. “After midnight, preindustrial households usually began to stir” and entered a routine period of wakefulness, sometimes called ‘the watch.’ . . . Some varieties of medicine, physicians advised, might be taken during this interval, including potions for indigestion, sores, and smallpox.” Women often used this window of time to tend children and “perform myriad chores.” Men also performed chores during this interval, such as Henry Best of Elmswell, who recorded tending to his cattle at midnight.
Unfortunately, many people used the interval to commit crimes. “At no other time of the night was there such a secluded interval in which to commit petty crimes: filching from dockyards and other urban workplaces, or, in the countryside, pilfering firewood, poaching, and robbing orchards.” Others still did not fully awake after their first sleep. “The French called this ambiguous interval of semi-consciousness dorveille, which the English termed ‘twixt sleepe and wake.’”
“Far from enjoying blissful repose, ordinary men and women likely suffered some degree of sleep deprivation, feeling as weary upon rising at dawn as when retiring at bedtime.” “Chronic fatigue . . . probably afflicted much of the early modern population.” Many laborers collapsed asleep from exhaustion during the day, prompting complaints of the working class’s tendency to nap: “‘At noon he must have his sleeping time,’ groused Bishop [James] Pilkington of the typical laborer in the late 1500s.” And a laborer’s days could start quite early, further limiting the opportunity for rest.
Read part two of the book review.
