In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the French President has declared a state of emergency and the French interior minister has authorised local authorities to impose curfews if necessary.
In generally, a curfew is an order establishing a specific time after which certain special regulations apply. The term can be equally used for parents’ rules that their children must be home by a certain hour along with a region- or country-wide order which requires that all civilians or certain groups of unauthorised persons stay indoors and places of public assembly stay closed after a prescribed hour.
Curfew practices exist since long gone times, as one of the most popular works of medieval literature The Seven Sages of Rome, adapted from the 5th century BC The Book of Sindbad narrates that: “Then was the law in Roman towns, that, when a man or boy is found roaming about after curfew, men should take and bind him fast”.
The word curfew originates from the French phrase “couvre-feu,” which means “cover the fire,” and which was adopted into Middle English as curfeu to later became the modern curfew.
The curfew practice in England started around the 5th century, when it was a signal for everybody, except the nobility who were exempt from the regulations, that it was time to go to bed. Curfew bells used to ring across the United Kingdom to tell the citizens that it was time to cease their working day and it became a custom those who stay outdoors after the prescribed hour to carry a light and have a really good excuse.
The first time a curfew regime was imposed in England with the aim to cut fire risks was back in 872 when the British King Alfred the Great introduced a curfew in the city of Oxford.
But the “father of the curfew law” is the first King of England, William the Conqueror, who in 1068 introduced a law according to which all lights and fires should be covered at eight o’clock, announced by the local curfew bell. The national curfew aimed at both reducing fire risks and possibilities of revolts.
In the following centuries, the regulations lost its fire-fighting link but became popular among the Jewish administrators in central Europe, slave-owners in the southern United States and coup leaders worldwide.
The first time our word appeared in print in Anglo-Norman, was back in 1258 Statutes of London: “After Curfew person on Saint Martin the great”.
The curfew bell, in its meaning of a town bell which rings announce an even hour or call for a special event appears in Shakespeare‘s Romeo and Juliet: “Make haste, make haste..The Curfew bell had rung, it is three o’clock”.
And the phrase curfew-law seems to had firstly appeared in print in only 1897, in James Bryce’s Impressions of South Africa: “Cape Colony has a so-called ‘curfew law’, requiring natives who are out of doors after dark to be provided with a pass”.
