Curfews are older than the Norman Conquest. Why bring them back?
The Government is taking a leaf out of William the Conqueror’s book to tackle the new wave of coronavirus. Curfews are already being introduced in Covid hotspots from Wales to Bolton. Londoners have been warned by Public Health England to expect likewise, with pubs, restaurants and other hospitality venues ordered to close, maybe as early as 10 pm, to limit socialising. The measure has been in place for weeks in Belgium, which has had an even higher death rate than the UK, apparently with some success.
Opinion polls have been suggesting for some time that there is public support for the idea of a curfew. Yet the reality may be rather different. There is a reason why curfews are associated with dictatorships. In fact, curfews would be deeply unpopular with wide sections of the community, including anyone with unusual working hours, tourists and students. The prospect is already drawing the ire of bar staff and others whose living depends on nightlife returning to normal, not to mention the revellers themselves.
Such restrictions disproportionately affect the young, who are more likely to be out late, but are also the main vectors of the virus. Even if deliberate age discrimination were justifiable on public health grounds, however, it would be disastrous for social harmony. Curfews are bound to be seen by those they target as yet another example of older generations robbing the working and student population of their youth. The result might well be defiance, including clandestine gatherings at home under even less Covid-safe conditions.
Curfews play an ambiguous part in English history. The word itself is French, meaning “cover fire”, and it is associated with the draconian laws that followed the Norman Conquest. Yet its purpose — to prevent nighttime fires getting out of control in highly combustible wooden or wattle and daub towns — was older and is recorded as in use in Anglo-Saxon England in the reign of Alfred the Great. The Normans, however, imposed a much stricter curfew that applied to the whole country: a bell would be rung at 8 pm, after which log fires must be covered with ashes, with no visible flames. The smouldering logs still kept homes warm at night and could be reignited in the morning. The curfew also served a political purpose: it reminded the English subjects of the power of their Norman overlords.
Henry I, the grandson of the Conqueror and the first Norman monarch to speak English, abolished the general curfew, perhaps to indicate that he trusted the people not to rebel. Yet the practice of ringing the curfew bell continued at a local level throughout medieval and even into early modern times. It is frequently mentioned by Shakespeare: no longer as an oppressive measure, but as a neutral harbinger of the night. Curfew is memorialised in the most memorable classic of English pastoral poetry, Thomas Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Such a sentimental attitude to curfew is still apt to be rekindled in any rural idyll, where late-night light and noise pollution caused by visitors can ruin the peace and solitude of the local community. But there is no point in pretending that a curfew in any urban environment would be greeted as anything other than an anachronism, an absurdity and an abomination.
