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Fun and games over, Michaelmas also marked the
start of Curfew (couvre feu, cover fire) when
household fires must be extinguished when a bell
was tolled at 9.00pm every night until Shrove
Tuesday. Chertsey is one of the last places to ring
the curfew bell from Michaelmas Day to Lady Day.
The Chertsey Curfew Bell dates from 1380. The day
after Michaelmas was the start of the new work year
and in the market square men and women stood with
the tools of their trades at their feet. The maids stood
with their mops hence the Mop Fair: once hired they
put the mops away and wore bright ribbons. Like the
cave men whether it was ten past two or five to nine
mattered little and until the coming of the Industrial
Revolution, of what clocks there were, few even had
a minute hand: the hour was quite enough.
Time Creeps Up On Us All
During the Renaissance, domination by time reached
a new level as public clocks now tolled all twenty-
four hours of the day and added new hands to mark
the passing seconds. The seventeenth century was
the first in which people thought of themselves as
inhabiting a particular century. Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe marooned on a desert island in the
book published in 1719 is obsessed with keeping
track of the time. Published in 1726 Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver marooned in a strange land looked at his
watch so often that the Lilliputians concluded that
the watch was his god. Some twenty years later
Rousseau, whose political philosophy influenced the
French Revolution did a Wally Webb and threw
away his watch in symbolic rejection of modern
science and civilisation. Marie Antoinette (by contrast
at the heart of the vortex of time-taxes-immortality-of -
the-memory-of-Kings) was given 51 watches as gifts
upon her engagement to Louis XVI.
Alarming Bladders
And if you did really need to get up before the sun
rose? Well you could drink a lot of water before
bedtime – the
alarm-clock
still used by Native
American Indians well into the 20
th
century.
Apparently Plato, eager to get up and start thinking
no doubt, invented a water alarm clock in precisely
427 BC but, aside from a one-off alarm clock set to
go off at 4.00am and 4.00am only that was invented
in America in 1787, alarm clocks were by and large
inventions of the Industrial Revolution. I think my
favourite has to be the
Tugaslugabed
, an anonymous
American invention of 1910. You bolted the device
to your bedroom floor and before retiring tied its
string around your big toe. If you failed to respond
to the alarm bell after eight seconds the machine
tugged on your toe! The Americans are clearly a tad
over-enthusiastic about waking people up - in 1877
a pair of brothers from Brooklyn devised a clock that
struck a match that lit an oil lamp that grew in intensity
brightening the room until the sleeper woke up or,
presumably, burned to death
.
Time Travellers
Closer to home the factory workers and miners were
more likely to rely on a human alarm clock – the
knocker-upper. With a truncheon, a long bamboo cane
or even a pea shooter to reach first floor windows the
knocker-upper, often an older man or woman was paid
a few pence a week by each household to rat-tat-tat on