Night Walking, Link Boys, and Artificial Light

That Shakespeare Life

In 1552, a lexicographer gave us the word “noctivagation” which means walking around at night. The word itself was a legal term for Shakespeare’s lifetime, used to describe someone that wandered around at night without any particular purpose. Vagrancy, on the whole, was frowned upon for Shakespeare’s lifetime, but vagrancy at night was viewed with extreme suspicion. In fact, walking around at night illegitimately was so bad that in his play King Lear, Shakespeare implies that the poster boy for night walkers is Satan himself. This negative understanding of nightwalkers gets confusing though, when we consider Falstaff in Henry IV talks about walking from tavern to tavern at night with Bardolph, and mentions it as fun, certainly not anything they were worried about, and other period references from the 16th century talk about Link Boys, who were young boys paid to escort travelers as night while carrying a torch to light the way. What does this mean about travelling at night in a city like London? Were there legitimate reasons to be out after dark, and what options were available for creating artificial light prior to the advent of the light bulb? Here today to answer these questions and introduce us to the concept of night walkers, and night lights, for Shakespeare’s lifetime is our guest, Matthew Beaumont.

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