Quiet histories

For most of human history, the loudest thing within a day's walk of you was a thunderstorm, a waterfall, or, if you lived near one, a bell. Wheels were wooden. Hooves were the heaviest motor most people would ever hear. Engines did not exist. There were no recordings. The silence we now associate with monasteries was, until quite recently, the ordinary acoustic baseline of being alive.

What night used to sound like

Night in a thirteenth-century English village had the sound of livestock breathing, water moving if there was a stream, and wind. If a person two fields away coughed, you would hear it. If a wolf howled, you would hear which wolf. There was no artificial light, so there was no incentive to be awake after the moon set, and most people were not. The few people who were heard the small things at full volume.

When we picture this kind of night we tend to picture it as silent. It was not silent. It was the absence of mechanical sound. There is a difference.

The decibels we lost

The unamplified human voice in conversation runs at around 60 decibels. Shouting can reach 90. A Roman crowd in an amphitheatre, even at full chant, almost certainly did not exceed 100 in aggregate, which is roughly a modern subway platform when the train comes in. A medieval market full of trading and arguing was a particular acoustic event, but it was bounded by what flesh and lung can produce.

The internal combustion engine, which appears in most rural European populations between 1900 and 1930, introduced a sustained sound class above 80 decibels into everyday life for the first time. The amplified loudspeaker, mass-produced from the 1920s, did the same to public speech. Within two human lifetimes the daily acoustic environment of an ordinary person in the West reorganised itself around sounds that no body could produce.

For most of human history nothing was loud for very long.

Bells were the loudest thing for a thousand years

In medieval and early modern Europe, the church bell was the heaviest concentrated sound a population would routinely hear. It marked the hours, the deaths, the alarms, the festivals. The historian Alain Corbin's Village Bells documents how nineteenth-century French villagers fought over the right to ring them, because to ring the bell was to claim ownership of the village's time. Two villages whose bells could be heard from each other had a shared acoustic territory that mattered politically.

The bell is the rare medieval sound that exceeds the body. It was also the only sound most people could be sure their neighbours, two hills away, were hearing at the same moment. Bells were the loudest persistent sound in Europe for nearly a thousand years.

Reading silence

Silence was not a condition of meditation. It was the default. The monk who chose a monastery was not choosing quiet. He was choosing a particular discipline within quiet that was already there.

This is the part most modern readers misjudge. We treat silence as something the medieval world possessed in special concentrations, like cold cellars in a hot country. They had it everywhere. What they had in concentration was the ordering of silence: when to speak, when not to, when to ring, when to be still. The discipline of monastic silence was not about adding silence. It was about taking responsibility for the silence that was already going to be there anyway.

What we hear instead

We hear differently because we hear constantly. The contemporary acoustic environment has a kind of permanent low ceiling: traffic, ventilation, refrigerator compressors, the hum of fluorescent lighting at fifty or sixty hertz. The absence of this hum, when you experience it on a cold rural night, can feel like sensory deprivation. It is not. It is the acoustic environment most of your ancestors lived in for the whole of their lives.

If you want to listen to history, this is one of the places to start. Stand outside, at night, and notice what you do not hear. The thing you are missing is the thing they had.