We are told by the chroniclers that, as early as 1416, the mayor, Sir Henry Barton, ordered lanthorns and lights to be hanged out on the winter evenings, betwixt Allhallows and Candlemass. For three centuries this practice subsisted, constantly evaded, no doubt through the avarice or poverty of individuals, sometimes probably disused altogether, but still the custom of London up to the time of Queen Anne. The cry of the watchman, “Hang out your Lights,” was an exhortation to the negligent, which probably they answered only by snores, equally indifferent to their own safety and the public preservation. A worthy mayor in the time of Queen Mary provided the watchman with a bell, with which instrument he accompanied the music of his voice down to the days of the Commonwealth. The “Statutes of the Streets,” in the time of Elizabeth, were careful enough for the preservation of silence in some things. They prescribed that, “no man shall blow any horn in the night, or whistle after the hour of nine o’clock in the night, under pain of imprisonment;” and, what was a harder thing to keep, they also forbade a man to make any “sudden outcry in the still of the night, as making any affray, or beating his wife.” Yet a privileged man was to go about knocking at doors and ringing his alarum—an intolerable nuisance if he did what he was ordered to do.
The Watch—Shakespeare’s London.
But the watchmen were, no doubt, wise in their generation. With honest Dogberry, they could not “see how sleeping should offend;” and after the watch was set, they probably agreed to “go sit upon the church bench till two, and then all to bed.”
The Bellman—from Dekker, 1608.
We have observed in our old statutes, and in the pages of authors of various kinds, that separate mention is made of the Watchman and the Bellman. No doubt there were several degrees of office in the ancient Watch and Ward system, and that part of the office of the old Watch, or Bellman, was to bless the sleepers, whose door he passed, which blessing was often sung or said in verse—hence Bellman’s verse. These verses were in many cases, the relics of the old incantations to keep off elves and hobgoblins. There is a curious work by Thomas Dekker—otherwise Decker,—entitled: “The Bellman of London. Bringing to light the most notorious Villanies that are now practised in the Kingdom, Profitable for Gentlemen, Lawyers, Merchants, Citizens, Farmers, Masters of Households and all sortes of servants to Marke, and delightful for all men to Reade, Lege, Perlege, Relege.” Printed at London for Nathaniel Butter, 1608. Where he describes the Bellman as a person of some activity—“the child of darkness; a common nightwalker; a man that had no man to wait upon him, but only a dog; one that was a disordered person, and at midnight would beat at men’s doors, bidding them (in mere mockery) to look to their candles, when they themselves were in their dead sleeps.” Stow says that in Queen Mary’s day one of each ward “began to go all night with a bell, and at every lane’s end, and at the ward’s end, gave warning of fire and candle, and to help the poor and pray for the dead.” Milton, in his “Il Penseroso,” has:—
| “Far from the resort of mirth, Save the cricket on the hearth, Or the bellman’s drowsy charm, To bless the doors from nightly harm.” |
In “A Bellman’s Song” of the same date, we have:—
| “Maidens to bed, and cover coal, Let the mouse out of her hole, Crickets in the chimney sing, Whilst the little bell doth ring; If fast asleep, who can tell When the clapper hits the bell?” |