Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [9]
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