ew points of national history have given rise to so much discussion as the facts and inferences connected with what is known as the curfew law. The testimony of the various writers on ancient jurisprudence differs widely as to the period at which the law originated, and yet more widely as to the object and intention of those who imposed it upon the people of England. We will first briefly outline the regulation or custom as we find it under the Normans. At eight in the evening, a bell was rung, the sound of which was the signal for everyone to put out, or rather cover, their fires, extinguish all lights, and go to bed. This was the curfew law, which it has been the custom to regard as a repressive measure adopted by the tyrant Conqueror to prevent seditious meetings of the turbulent Saxons. We “find the name of curfew law employed as a bye-word denoting the most odious tyranny, and historians, poets, and lawyers, speaking of it as the acme of despotism, levelled alone at the vanquished English.” We will endeavour to show that, on the contrary, the law was in existence and force before the Normans trod the conquered fields of Angle-land, and that its intention was to cherish the good of the country by preventing the rise of conflagrations.
Throughout the north of Europe, in monasteries and towns, a bell for covering of fires was in common use; a regulation which reason cannot but approve, for most dwellings, even those of the higher classes, were built, for the greater part, of timber, the Saxon term for building being an expression meaning to “make of wood.” We read that London and other towns were frequently subject to fires. In England, the curfew law is said to have been made an established institution by King Alfred. When that monarch restored the University which had been founded at Oxford by St. Frideswide, he ordained, among other thoughtful regulations, that a bell should be rung every night at eight, when all the inhabitants of Oxford should cover up their fires and go to bed. The intention was not that the fires should be put out, but merely deadened. As Mr. Lomax observes, “The old fires were made in the centre of a large hearth, and the accumulated ashes were swept to the back and sides. At the curfew, the large logs were removed, and the cold ashes raked over the fire so as to cover it. A fire so covered will often keep smouldering for days, and can be re-lighted by adding fuel and admitting air, a most important consideration in the days of tinder-boxes. The same custom is still pursued in the backwoods of America, in the Australian bush, and in our own ‘black country,’ where the great coal fires are ‘raked’ in the old fashion nightly.”
The word curfew is derived from the old French carre-feu or cerre-feu, which afterwards became couvre-feu, and lastly curfew. Each of these terms, meaning to cover fire, indicates the intention; and there was a utensil known as the couvre-feu, a kind of metal cover, somewhat resembling a shield in form, the use of which was to be thrust over the fire when the bell rang. This probably would only be found in the houses of the wealthy.
COUVRE-FEU.
King Alfred the Great passed away, and all the line of Saxon and Danish monarchs after him; yet probably the curfew, under one or another of its ancient names, was kept up as a national observance in each of their reigns, with more or less laxity. At last the Conqueror came, and after that sanguinary struggle, which had to roughly pave the way for England’s advancement, he set himself the task of governing the people he had overcome. Whether he found the law of the curfew still feebly kept up, or whether it had died out we cannot tell, but we know that two years after the battle of Hastings—in 1068—he ordered fires to be covered at the ringing of an eight o’clock bell, and the people to retire to rest. He had probably been accustomed to a similar regulation in Normandy; and it is evident the enactment, however more severely enforced than the Saxons had previously experienced, could not have been purposed as a suspicious and contemptuous safeguard against them, for the haughty robbers called nobles were as subject to the curfew as the meanest swineherds they owned. There seems to have been, from an indefinitely early period, a religious service at eight in the evening. When William, after the injuries received by the plunging of his horse as it trod upon hot ashes, lay dying, the vesper bell of a neighbouring church aroused him from the stupor which had gathered round his sinking mind. He asked if he were in England, and if that were the curfew ringing, and on being told he was in “his own Normandy,” and the bell was for evening prayer, he “charged them bid the monks pray for his soul, and remained awhile dull and heavy.” Polydore-Vergil tells us that William, to convert the native ferocity of the people to indolence, ordained that the head of each family should retire to rest at eight in the evening, “having raked the ashes over the fire; and for this purpose a sign should be made through every village, which is even now preserved, and called in the Norman, cover-feu.” Mr. Hutchinson, in his “History of Durham,” speaks of the curfew with great bitterness: he says that William “under severe penalties, prohibited the use of fire or candles when the curfew bell should ring, to prevent associations and conspiracies. This bell was heard by the English as the knell of their departed liberty, and a repeated testimony of slavery.”
We learn from Du Cange, that the ringing of the couvre-feu, ignitegium, or peritegium bell, as it was called in mediæval low Latin, prevailed generally in Europe during the Middle Ages as a precaution against fire; and this fact is alone sufficient to justify William in reviving and extending the law in this country.
Voltaire, in his “Universal History,” ridicules the notion of the curfew being a badge of degradation; he observes that “The law, far from being tyrannical, was only an ancient police, established in almost all the towns of the north, and which had been long preserved in the convents.” And he adds this reason for it: “That the houses were all built of wood, and the fear of fire was one of the most important objects of general police.” Throughout the reigns of William I., and his son, William II., the curfew law was rigidly enforced, and, however good its intentions were, the rigour of its administration rendered it increasingly obnoxious. The politic Henry I., in 1103, wisely repealed the enactment, modifying the law, which, however, though not compulsory, “settled into a cherished custom.” Though perhaps no longer as Thomson describes: