Did you have one? Do your kids have one? What's this about fire?
According to the Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology the English word curfew is based on an old French word, covrefeu, literally
meaning cover fire. The Oxford English Dictionary gives many variations
in spelling such as curfle, curfeu, coeverfu, etc., all dating to the
late 12th or early 13th centuries. English spelling was not
standardized until the 18th century so words were spelled in a variety
of ways however the writer wished to spell them or whatever the
prevailing local custom was.
In the days when household cooking
and heating was done using an open fire, covering the fire in some way
was essential for safety before everyone went to sleep at night. The
curfew was variously a bell rung by a town crier or waite at a certain hour, usually eight or nine o'clock, or the actual device used to cover the fire.
The
curfew was often a rounded steel dome-like device with air holes which
was laid over the hot coals. There needed to be some air flow to
prevent the fire from going out altogether so one could fan it up
quickly in the morning. Some curfews were decorated domes with a handle
on top and an open side facing the back of the fire place. There are
even accounts of using shields as curfews.
The curfew is most
often referred to as the signal or bell to cover or extinguish fires.
The assumption is that once the fires were covered people went to bed
and were no longer roaming around outside, hence the modern usage of
the word. By the 1800's the word meant an official regulation to keep
off the streets at fixed hours.
The curfew bell is still used in
some English towns as a signal for town meetings and official functions
An early use of curfew in print can be found in Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales, The Miller's Tale, "The dede sleepe . . . fil on this carpenter
. . . Aboute corfew tyme." Another example is in the Bury Wills from
1509, "I gyve toward ye ryngers charge off the gret belle in Seynt Mary
Chirche, callyd cor-few belle."
There are even references to a
curfew bell being use in the morning as a signal to get up as in
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, scene 4: "Come, stir, stir,
stir, The second Cocke hath crowd, The Curfew Bell hath rung, 'tis
three a clock.'"
The word curfew does not appear in English
until after the Norman Invasion of 1066, but there is no evidence to
suggest that the curfew was used by William the Conqueror as a means of
repression as once thought. The custom of covering fires at night
probably existed all over western Europe and beyond as far back as the
building of wood, thatch and wattle houses.
