When parents impose a curfew on their teenagers it means they want them home by a certain time.

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If the government imposes a curfew it means that authorities don’t want people out roaming the streets after a certain hour.

According to Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable the word curfew came to England as a French word with William the Conqueror in 1066.  This arrival isn’t specifically claimed in The Oxford English Dictionary although the OED does give as its first citation a French usage just over 200 years afterwards.

By this time the word curfew meant to the people of England “the ringing of the evening bell.”

This bell would have in earlier times been the signal for lockdown by the French conquering aristocracy over their newly subordinate English subjects.

The word does not go any further back into Latin or Greek since it is an alteration of two French words still in use today.  Couvre is easily recognizable as “cover” and feu is the French word for “fire.”

But the earlier French concept of curfew was not like England during the Second World War when blackout conditions were instituted to keep bombers from spotting their targets.

Instead the idea seems to have been that fires were to be put out so that none would be left unattended and burn down the town.

There were two equivalent words in Latin ignitegium and pyritegium, ignite and pyro being recognizably fire related and the ending meaning “to cover.”

Thus curfew may have been a sensible approach to public safety.

There have been other municipal control measures instituted after fires that had interesting results.

In the city of Copenhagen a notable feature of the old downtown buildings is their diagonally faced corners. The reason for this is that during one fire in that town it was found that fire brigades with long ladders were unable to get around the corners of narrow streets because the buildings were in the way, so a bylaw was enacted to chop off all the building corners to allow ladders to get through.

In the same city at one time it was decreed that wooden houses were forbidden so that today one can admire the beautiful stone frontages of some old structures and then wander into their back courtyards to see the old half-timbered rest of the building that their owners raised at reduced costs out of sight of the city fathers.

Finally, Quebec City is known to be one of the most European-looking cities in North America.  Part of its charm comes from the old stone buildings that were built so that, by law, their adjoining walls extended above their roof lines.  That way if one caught fire, the flames could not spread directly.