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Knowing the time of the day only became important
to man when someone was in charge and wanted to
be paid taxes and to be remembered long after their
deaths. These three factors, hierarchy, taxes and
reverence of ancestors are absent in the timeless
(and peaceful) Amazon tribes.
A Vast Technology
Beginning the trend for technology starting out very,
very big and growing smaller over time early
Egyptian sundials were massive obelisks, one of
which, Cleopatra’s Needle, now stands on the
Victoria Embankment. Already 2000 years ago men
were becoming exasperated by the pressure that time
put upon them. The Roman poet Plautus railed
against the proliferation of sundials:
The gods confound the man who first found out how
to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, who in this
place set up a sun-dial,
to cut and hack my days so
wretchedly into small portions.
There are obvious shortcomings in relying on the
sun or celestial bodies to measure time so water
clocks were invented and the obvious draw backs
with water led to sand clocks – hour glasses that
survive today only in kitchens and board games.
In 17
th
century London some vicars were wont to
time their sermons by hourglasses attached to the
pulpit. Samuel Pepys records that having sat through
a particularly dull sermon in a freezing church he
began to rise to his feet ready to hop off as the last
few grains of sand fell only to sink back into the
pew in despair as the cleric flipped the thing over
to begin the next hour! You can see a rare surviving
clerical hourglass in old Ivinghoe church if you go
Cruising in the Chilterns
.
The Bells, The Bells
Old churches are also good places to look for old
sundials as in Europe for many centuries it was only
the church who required regular time keeping.
Mediaeval mass dials and scratch dials dating between
1100-1600 are usually found, unsurprisingly, on the
south walls of churches at about four to five feet above
the ground. It is thought that they were to show the
clergy the time when the mass would start so they
knew when to ring the bells to call the faithful to
prayer. You might have seen one at Little Missenden
Church on a tour of The
Buckinghamshire Chilterns.
It is thought that Bendictine monks invented the first
mechanical clock somewhere in France or England in
the early 1200s to ring a bell at the correct time for
St Benedict’s Liturgy of the Hours - Matins, Lauds,
Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline.
The earliest clocks had no clock face, it was all about
the bells, indeed clock comes from the Latin for bell,
clocca. The oldest surviving mechanical clock in the
world is Salisbury Cathedral Clock. Faceless, it was
built in 1386. The astronomical clock at Wells
Cathedral is only slightly later and although it’s
original innards are now at the Science Museum in
London, it is still considered to be the 2
nd
oldest clock
in the world.
Une Vaste Indiffrance Au Temps
The growth in international trade throughout the 13
th
century created a demand for consistent measurement
of time with regular 60-minute hours day and night as
opposed to the varying lengths of the canonical hours.
For the mediaeval merchant time was money so during
the late Middle Ages, the time that had previously
belonged only to God became the property of man.
August 2010: Paul Fisher, the 5th generation of Fisher family to
wind the Wells Clock by hand performs the task for the last time.