For the poor, rushes and hearth fire served for light; for the yeoman and squire, smoky tallow candles; for the rich, candelabra of beeswax backed by mirrors.

From Energy by Richard Rhodes.

Eight hundred hours of light, but no more than a candle flame’s worth at a time. Oil lamps, like miniature gravy boats, burned even more feebly with their wicks of twisted rag. The oil might be flax, rape, walnut, or fish liver, and, around the Mediterranean, the industrious olive. On St. Kilda, in the Hebrides west of Scotland, the stomach oil of the fulmar, an oily, all-purpose seabird, made lamplight. “The Shetland Islanders,” writes a folklore historian, “as recently as the end of the nineteenth century, threaded wicks through stormy petrels [killed and dried for the purpose], birds so fat and oily that they eject oil through the digestive tract when caught.”  For the poor, rushes and hearth fire served for light; for the yeoman and squire, smoky tallow candles; for the rich, candelabra of beeswax backed by mirrors.

Without adequate lighting, the country night was dark, though lustered by starlight or full moon. Eighteenth-century Birmingham’s Lunar Society—country neighbors Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, and chemist Joseph Priestley—convened when the moon was full, bright enough to cast shadows, so they could walk to their meetings.  But night in the city was dark and threatening. In ancient Rome, a historian warns, “night fell over the city like the shadow of a great danger. . . . Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and barricaded the entrance.” John Stow, the Elizabethan chronicler, says that in the eleventh century, King William I—William the Conqueror—“commanded that in every town and village, a bell should be nightly rung at eight o’clock, and that all people should then put out their fire and candle, and take their rest.” We call such a prohibition a curfew, a word derived from Norman French covre le feu: “cover the fire!” Henry I lifted his father’s curfew, Stow adds, but “by reason of wars within the realm, many men . . . also gave themselves to robbery and murder in the night.”