I kind of imagine living in a time with relatively dim oil lights, or even before that, not much artificial light at all, and I'd figure that once the sun went down, there wouldn't be much more to do. Was it as common in the past to stay awake hours after sunset? Were there certain cultures, or roles within cultures that were more nocturnal than others? Was 'sleeping in' considered improper or a sign of laziness as we sometimes might see it today? If there has been a significant change, how much of that is owed to the electric light allowing people to continue to be productive into late night hours?
The evidence from medieval Latin Europe is mixed. While we can trace adaptations to the shorter winter days even at the institutional, official level, it's clear there was plenty going on in the dark.
I'd like to direct your attention to the wonderful discussions in this thread by me, /u/mikedash, /u/Limond, and /u/alriclofgar (truly, the whole thread is worth reading):
There is evidence, both empirical and historical, that sleep in the pre-industrial era followed a notably different pattern from our ideal today. Specifically, evidence points to a segmented or biphasic sleep pattern (Hegarty, 2012).
In research conducted by psychiatrist Thomas Wehr in the 1990s, participants were placed in a "short photoperiod" environment in which it was dark 14 hours a day. After a few weeks of acclimatization, participants developed a distinct pattern (Hegarty, 2012): They slept for four hours, woke for one or two hours, then slept an additional four hours (Wehr, 1992).
This pattern is supported by historical evidence as well. While some empirical evidence suggests that stone-age conditions encourage early bedtimes and prolonged, uninterrupted blocks of sleep (Piosczyk et al., 2014), in "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles" (2001) and the subsequent book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, Roger Ekirch shares hundreds of references to a segmented sleep pattern from multiple cultures and historiographies.
Moreover, sleep patterns appear to be bounded not just by history and biology but culture as well. Carol Worthman, an anthropologist, has done extensive work to define a "cultural ecology of sleep" (Worthman, 2011). She has found sleep to be a much more social (Worthman & Brown, 2007) and fluid construct than traditionally imagined in the West. The way some Asian cultures treat sleep as a activity to be indulged whenever the need or opportunity arises, as evidenced by people sleeping on a train or Chinese workers napping on their desks after lunch (Randall, 2012), highlights this point.
Ekirch begins his article with a quote from the German scientist and write, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, "Our entire history is only the history of waking men," which emphases how incomplete the historiography of sleep truly must be. In this book Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky points out that until the Reformation and the introduction of street lights in the 17th Century, associations with the night were largely negative (Hegarty, 2012). As a result, people were disinclined to document their nocturnal activities which, as Ekirch points out, were sometimes quite active indeed (Ekirch, 2001).
Ironically, it was an emphasis on efficiency and productivity during the Industrial Revolution that changed perceptions of the night, encouraging people to talk about their nocturnal activities, that likely led to the demise of the "first sleep" (Hegarty, 2012). Instead of rising in the middle of the night to read, eat, walk, and socialize, cultural attitudes began to view laying in bed or napping as lazy (Hegarty, 2012).
To summarize, it appears that our modern concept of good sleep is a relatively recent construct. While "staying up late" may not have been popular, waking and being active in the middle of the night likely was, at least in some European cultures before the Industrial Revolution.
As a follow up, was it Ben Franklin that had the sleep pattern involving waking up and working from 2-4 am then sleeping again until like 10am? And how common was this with his contemporaries?
I'm gonna jump well ahead of the other two responses.
Robert Caro describes life in pre-electric texas hill country (through the 30's) in his first volume of his LBJ bio. After a day of almost literal back-breaking chores and ironing that would often burn the women's hands they would spend their only free time reading.
“Evening was often the only time in which Hill Country farm couples could read (“There was no other time,” says Lucille O’Donnell. “There was never a minute to read during the day, it seemed”), but the only light for reading came from kerosene lamps.
-Ch 27
Children would do homework and women described squinting to read after their husbands fell asleep. Farmers had to get up around 3 AM to milk cows so staying up was out of the question. they had to wait to do some lighter household chores such as sewing when there weren't enough lamps to go around while the children did homework.
People cannot live on bread alone and unlike men there was almost no time to talk with friends for women.