Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/279

Charles Dickens] three of which nations torches, and rushes dipped in fat, were the only methods of lighting known, until the Roman conquest. The Picts and Scots, the Danes, and the tribes of Scandinavia, were even not so far advanced in their mode of illumination. They were not acquainted with the rushlight. When torches were wanting, they stuck a bit of wood into the carcase of a fat bird, and, supporting the stench as best they might, allowed this dismal sort of candle to burn until the bird became a cinder. Travellers in Lapland and Iceland, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, observed that this way of lighting was still common among such of the natives as were too poor to buy oil.

The lamp, as brought from Rome, continued in use, without being in any manner modified, until the time when candles were invented. This will explain how it was that our ancestors kept such early hours. During all the mediæval ages, men rose at daybreak, and went to bed at about the time when now-a-days we set off for the theatre. The curfew bell, which tolled at eight o'clock under the reign of William the Conqueror, to warn citizens to put out their fires and lights, was not such an oppressive institution as most of us have supposed in our school-boy days. It was not imposed upon the conquered English as a sort of punishment, nor to prevent factious people from meeting by night, as many people have supposed. It was a police regulation, as we should now call it: nothing else. It was promulgated in the same spirit as the modern rules in our barracks and prisons, which prescribe the extinguishing of all lights at ten o'clock, to diminish the danger of fire. Under the name of couvre-feu (from whence curfew is derived) the law had been in use in France long before it crossed over to England; and the appalling catastrophes that always resulted in those days, whenever a fire broke out, furnished sufficient reason to render its strict observance eminently necessary. Besides, as we have said, the badness of the lamps and the early hours that were kept in consequence, rendered the edict a grievance to no one. In summer time, people who had been up since four o'clock in the morning, were not sorry to go to sleep at sunset; and in winter there was very little pleasure in sitting up in a dusky hall, to be smoked black by a nickering lamp. As for the poor, the question of economy was the best of all curfews in their case; oil was too expensive for any but people of means.

The first step towards the invention of candles was taken in the twelfth century, when tallow torches came into use. A hundred years later, the tallow candle, pretty much as it exists now, made its first appearance, and was deemed so great a luxury that only people of real wealth could afford to buy it. The haughty barons who forced King John to sign Magna Charta would, probably, have considered a parcel of tallow dips as a most welcome present at Christmas time; and to have stolen one of these previous luminaries, or only the end of one, from a kitchen dresser, would have been to incur the noose without any hope of pardon. It was not until the fifteenth century, that burgesses and tradespeople were enabled to purchase candles. The price had become somewhat lower by that time. The cost of one candle (they were sold singly until the present century) was about sixpence of modern money; and for this sum, one had the wherewithal to escape darkness, for half an hour. For it must be remembered that the primitive dips differed from those now in use, in two points; firstly, in the fact that the tallow was not refined, and secondly, in that the wicks continued, in most instances, to be of flax. Cotton was more expensive than silk in those days. A pair of cotton stockings cost sixty shillings. And, under the circumstances, it would have seemed an extravagant folly to burn cotton wicks elsewhere than in palaces. On the other hand, the flaxen wicks acted very ill; there was always a great deal of trouble in lighting them, and when once the feat had been accomplished, they burned at such a terrific rate, that they melted half the tallow without consuming it. This last fact gave rise to a quaint form of economy. Instead of casing the drippings of the tallow candles into the fire, as now-a-days is done, every scrap was saved, and when two or three pounds had been collected the chandler bought them back, at so liberal a rate, that the drippings of four candles afforded the price of a new one.

Some half century or more after the invention of tallow candles, wax lights were introduced into a few palatial residences. Wax tapers had been in use in churches in the ninth century, but their cost had been so far beyond the limits of ordinary purses, that no one would have dreamed of wasting his money upon such an expensive article. The offering of a wax taper to a chapel or a shrine, was looked upon throughout the middle ages as a princely gift. A man who presented a taper weighing a pound, to his parish priest, was certain of receiving absolution; and, as every one knows, it was customary to vow a taper to the Virgin Mary, in the same way as the ancients vowed a hundred doves to Venus, or a white heifer to Juno. As a first attempt to pacify Thomas a'Beckett, Henry the Second sent two wax tapers weighing twenty pounds each to the cathedral at Canterbury, and this munificence cost him four hundred crowns of gold. When Richard the First returned to France after his release from captivity, he bestowed the first five hundred crowns he could obtain, in buying tapers for the church of Fontevrault; and Louis the Eleventh, during his reign of one-and-twenty years, spent a perfect fortune in candles for "Our Lady of Grace." Now-a-days, the practice of burning tapers as peace-offerings, or sin-offerings, still prevails in the Roman Catholic church. Two years ago, on the occasion of the Prince Imperial's illness, the Empress Eugénie went in person to offer a taper at the Virgin's shrine of Nôtre Dame. But the existing custom must be looked upon as merely a pale reminiscence of what