How did medieval people tell time? What devices did they use to mark its passage?
By Ken Mondschein
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we are students at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century. The Left Bank looks rather different on this spring afternoon seven and a half centuries ago than it does in modern times – the pavement replaced with mud and plank streets, the bicycles with horses, the tabacs with booksellers’ stalls, the tourists with hooded figures in academic robes, and the smells of frying crepes and auto exhaust with horse manure, woodsmoke, and unwashed bodies. The cathedral of Notre Dame is still visible, though its scaffolding would be gone after 1260 or so. What would remain the same, however, would be the sounds of church bells ringing out over the Seine. And, since Notre Dame has rung the ecclesiastical hour of none, marking the middle of the afternoon, we can file into our lecture hall.
As we pass the chapter-house of the Mathurins, however, we see a different sort of time marker being used within. A university statute specifies that elections would last while a candle burned, specifically a candle of “one pound of wax above a candle-holder of a weight of eight new silver coins… divided in 26 parts, each of which shall be an eighth of a Parisian yard.” As Aristotle said in his Physics, knowing time was possible because of observations of changing things – in this case, lacking any sort of mechanical clock, the burning of a candle was the time given for the assembly.
The Astrarium. The Astrarium was made by the Italian astronomer and physician Giovanni Dondi dell’Orologio (1330–1388). It showed the hour, calendar year, movement of the planets, and the sun and moon. The mechanism is moved by a clock placed in the lower part of the structure. The clock is regulated by a balance wheel with a rod escapement driven by a weight engine with a counterweight system (verge and foliot). This is a reconstruction of Dondi’s device, Museo nazionale della scienza e della tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan – Wikimedia Commons.
In the same way, Frère Jacques knew how to ring the bells of Notre Dame because of his observations of changeable things. The liturgical hours were not twenty-four fixed and equal periods of time like modern clock-hours, but dependent on the division of the daily periods of daylight and darkness each into twelve parts – measurements that, therefore, changed throughout the year. (The system of changing the length of hours with the length of day and night is called the seasonal hours.)
A Parisian church might employ an assistant to the sacristan, called the matricularus, whose job it was to keep a water-clock. Rather than keeping time in the modern sense, however, this was a timing device calibrated to help proportionally divide day and night. When we reach the lecture hall, a different sort of time would be under discussion within. Was the world eternal? Did time really exist, or was it only perceived in the minds of intelligent beings? Did time only exist because God moved the heavens? If the heavens ceased to move, would time stop?
All of these questions seem quite bizarre to a modern person, but they made sense within the medieval context. Just as premodern timekeeping ultimately relied on observations of changing phenomena – be it the movement of the sun across the sky, the movement of the stars in the heavens, the filling of a water-clock’s reservoir, or the burning of a candle – for medieval thinkers, time was motion. The abstruse philosophical questions debated in the University make sense when we take into account that for philosophers, the primary motion was that of the invisible outermost heavenly sphere, which, in turn, moved the sphere of the stars in their apparent 24-hour cycle of rotations around the Earth.
The “clockwork universe” was not Newton’s invention: until the invention of the atomic clock in the mid-twentieth century, the rotation of the Earth was the most reliable timekeeping device known to humanity. However, lacking Newton’s “absolute time” untethered to any material thing, the medieval philosophy of time, like everyday experience, was essentially relative. Lacking a reliable clock, medieval timekeeping relied on comparing the durations of observable phenomena rather than a device that could read out abstract, unchangeable hours based on the seemingly unchanging movement of the stars. It was the invention of the mechanical clock in about the year 1300 that brought a profound change not only to medieval lived experience, but also to thought.
Seasons of the Year
February. The calendar month of February depicts typical medieval winter-time activities. The image shows an enclosed farm with a sheep pen, four beehives, and a dovecote. Inside the house, a woman and a few young men warm themselves in front of the fire. Outside, a man chops down a tree with an axe, while another braves the cold by blowing on his hands to warm them. Further away, a farmer drives a donkey, loaded with wood, towards the neighbouring village. From Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Ms.65, f.2v. By the Limbourg brothers (fl. 1402–1416) – Wikimedia Commons.
Just as the canonical hours changed through the year, no matter what one’s estate – noble, commoner, or clergy – one lived in obedience to annual cycles. The early fifteenth-century Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry show the cycles of both noble and common life. In February, peasants gather firewood and warm their legs by the fire. March is for plowing and seeding. June is for mowing hay. In September, they pick grapes for wine-making. October is for planting and harrowing the winter crop. December shows a boar-hunt.
Military life was based around the calendar, as well: it was foolhardy to march before the roads had cleared, and the onset of winter made feeding horses and supplying an army in the field difficult. Sieges (with some notable exceptions, such as Henry V’s siege of Rouen from 1418–19) had to be lifted over winter; if a defender could persevere until the first snows, then they would likely withstand the attack.
So, too, was the religious calendar, to which the agricultural calendar was tied, cyclical: saints’ days, Lent, Easter, Advent, and Christmas all had their dates set in a calendar that at least nominally reconciled the natural cycles of the moon and the sun. Because the Julian calendar gradually grew out of sync with the mean solar year, Pope Gregory XIII oversaw a minor modification that resulted in the calendar we live by today.
Yet, while the medieval experience of lived time was essentially cyclical, there was an awareness of the linearity of human experience. The ages of man progressed from infancy to childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and senescence. So, too, was there a concept of the linearity of the world, beginning with Creation and ending with Judgment.
The medieval conception of history, too, was essentially religious. We can’t separate one from the other: the Bible was history, and the lands of classical antiquity, such as Alexander’s empire, coexist with the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden on medieval maps of the world. The early Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea reconciled the books of the Bible and Roman history into one timeline, and Rudolf von Ems’ World Chronicle of the mid-thirteenth century spins sacred and secular history together in a continuous narrative thread of the salvation of humanity. Such a view of the past is essentially teleological: the Roman Empire, for instance, only existed so that Christ’s message could be spread.
The single thing that distinguishes medieval experiential, relative measurements of time from our modern timekeeping regimes is the invention of the mechanical clock. Today, clock-time is independent, abstracted from any observable phenomena; instead, it is the clock itself that tells us the time. This shift began around 1300 with the invention of the verge and foliot, a mechanism that regulated the falling of a weight, pulled by gravity, that in turn drove the mechanism of a clock. (This is the nature of a clock: to measure a continuous phenomenon such as the falling of a weight or electrical current and make this measurement readable to human beings.)
Medieval people always had the ability to tell the “true” time by the stars (sidereal time): astrolabes, for instance, could give a latitude- corrected sidereal time if one knew the date and was able to sight the elevation of the sun or a guide star. However, it wasn’t very convenient for people to carry astrolabes around with them all the time!
Because the further the weight had to fall, the less frequent the winding, verge-and-foliot clocks tended to be placed high up in towers – where their ringing could be heard by, and regulate, a whole city. Some clocks, like the famous one of Strasbourg Cathedral, could become objects of civic pride, but by the fifteenth century, clockmakers were experimenting with small clocks run by springs – making knowledge of time personal and intimate, as well. Of course, more traditional timekeeping mechanisms persisted alongside these technological marvels.
For shorter lengths of time, it was useful to use commonly known intervals; for instance, the writer of the fourteenth-century Ménagier de Paris instructed his wife to cook a dish for the length of a certain prayer, such as a paternoster or a misere.
The seasonal hours continued to be used for centuries, and tower clocks used faces with eccentric gearing to show them along with the equal hours – though the latter, being simpler, eventually triumphed. Then there was the question of when the day should be numbered: the systems of “Italian hours,” which counted from each day’s changeable sunset, persisted even up until the nineteenth century in some places.
The closer we look at medieval timekeeping, the more we see that it was a complex intertwining of systems and concepts. Not only did it not remain constant over time, but it changed with technology and social needs – and so, too, did advancing technology affect society. However, one underpinning factor remained from the Middle Ages until the modern era: time was the measurement of moving things, and it represented an attempt to bring human activity into accordance with God’s plan for the universe.
How did medieval people tell time? What devices did they use to mark its passage?
By Ken Mondschein
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we are students at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century. The Left Bank looks rather different on this spring afternoon seven and a half centuries ago than it does in modern times – the pavement replaced with mud and plank streets, the bicycles with horses, the tabacs with booksellers’ stalls, the tourists with hooded figures in academic robes, and the smells of frying crepes and auto exhaust with horse manure, woodsmoke, and unwashed bodies. The cathedral of Notre Dame is still visible, though its scaffolding would be gone after 1260 or so. What would remain the same, however, would be the sounds of church bells ringing out over the Seine. And, since Notre Dame has rung the ecclesiastical hour of none, marking the middle of the afternoon, we can file into our lecture hall.
As we pass the chapter-house of the Mathurins, however, we see a different sort of time marker being used within. A university statute specifies that elections would last while a candle burned, specifically a candle of “one pound of wax above a candle-holder of a weight of eight new silver coins… divided in 26 parts, each of which shall be an eighth of a Parisian yard.” As Aristotle said in his Physics, knowing time was possible because of observations of changing things – in this case, lacking any sort of mechanical clock, the burning of a candle was the time given for the assembly.
In the same way, Frère Jacques knew how to ring the bells of Notre Dame because of his observations of changeable things. The liturgical hours were not twenty-four fixed and equal periods of time like modern clock-hours, but dependent on the division of the daily periods of daylight and darkness each into twelve parts – measurements that, therefore, changed throughout the year. (The system of changing the length of hours with the length of day and night is called the seasonal hours.)
A Parisian church might employ an assistant to the sacristan, called the matricularus, whose job it was to keep a water-clock. Rather than keeping time in the modern sense, however, this was a timing device calibrated to help proportionally divide day and night. When we reach the lecture hall, a different sort of time would be under discussion within. Was the world eternal? Did time really exist, or was it only perceived in the minds of intelligent beings? Did time only exist because God moved the heavens? If the heavens ceased to move, would time stop?
All of these questions seem quite bizarre to a modern person, but they made sense within the medieval context. Just as premodern timekeeping ultimately relied on observations of changing phenomena – be it the movement of the sun across the sky, the movement of the stars in the heavens, the filling of a water-clock’s reservoir, or the burning of a candle – for medieval thinkers, time was motion. The abstruse philosophical questions debated in the University make sense when we take into account that for philosophers, the primary motion was that of the invisible outermost heavenly sphere, which, in turn, moved the sphere of the stars in their apparent 24-hour cycle of rotations around the Earth.
The “clockwork universe” was not Newton’s invention: until the invention of the atomic clock in the mid-twentieth century, the rotation of the Earth was the most reliable timekeeping device known to humanity. However, lacking Newton’s “absolute time” untethered to any material thing, the medieval philosophy of time, like everyday experience, was essentially relative. Lacking a reliable clock, medieval timekeeping relied on comparing the durations of observable phenomena rather than a device that could read out abstract, unchangeable hours based on the seemingly unchanging movement of the stars. It was the invention of the mechanical clock in about the year 1300 that brought a profound change not only to medieval lived experience, but also to thought.
Seasons of the Year
Just as the canonical hours changed through the year, no matter what one’s estate – noble, commoner, or clergy – one lived in obedience to annual cycles. The early fifteenth-century Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry show the cycles of both noble and common life. In February, peasants gather firewood and warm their legs by the fire. March is for plowing and seeding. June is for mowing hay. In September, they pick grapes for wine-making. October is for planting and harrowing the winter crop. December shows a boar-hunt.
Military life was based around the calendar, as well: it was foolhardy to march before the roads had cleared, and the onset of winter made feeding horses and supplying an army in the field difficult. Sieges (with some notable exceptions, such as Henry V’s siege of Rouen from 1418–19) had to be lifted over winter; if a defender could persevere until the first snows, then they would likely withstand the attack.
So, too, was the religious calendar, to which the agricultural calendar was tied, cyclical: saints’ days, Lent, Easter, Advent, and Christmas all had their dates set in a calendar that at least nominally reconciled the natural cycles of the moon and the sun. Because the Julian calendar gradually grew out of sync with the mean solar year, Pope Gregory XIII oversaw a minor modification that resulted in the calendar we live by today.
Yet, while the medieval experience of lived time was essentially cyclical, there was an awareness of the linearity of human experience. The ages of man progressed from infancy to childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and senescence. So, too, was there a concept of the linearity of the world, beginning with Creation and ending with Judgment.
The medieval conception of history, too, was essentially religious. We can’t separate one from the other: the Bible was history, and the lands of classical antiquity, such as Alexander’s empire, coexist with the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden on medieval maps of the world. The early Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea reconciled the books of the Bible and Roman history into one timeline, and Rudolf von Ems’ World Chronicle of the mid-thirteenth century spins sacred and secular history together in a continuous narrative thread of the salvation of humanity. Such a view of the past is essentially teleological: the Roman Empire, for instance, only existed so that Christ’s message could be spread.
From Medieval to Modern Times
The single thing that distinguishes medieval experiential, relative measurements of time from our modern timekeeping regimes is the invention of the mechanical clock. Today, clock-time is independent, abstracted from any observable phenomena; instead, it is the clock itself that tells us the time. This shift began around 1300 with the invention of the verge and foliot, a mechanism that regulated the falling of a weight, pulled by gravity, that in turn drove the mechanism of a clock. (This is the nature of a clock: to measure a continuous phenomenon such as the falling of a weight or electrical current and make this measurement readable to human beings.)
Medieval people always had the ability to tell the “true” time by the stars (sidereal time): astrolabes, for instance, could give a latitude- corrected sidereal time if one knew the date and was able to sight the elevation of the sun or a guide star. However, it wasn’t very convenient for people to carry astrolabes around with them all the time!
Because the further the weight had to fall, the less frequent the winding, verge-and-foliot clocks tended to be placed high up in towers – where their ringing could be heard by, and regulate, a whole city. Some clocks, like the famous one of Strasbourg Cathedral, could become objects of civic pride, but by the fifteenth century, clockmakers were experimenting with small clocks run by springs – making knowledge of time personal and intimate, as well. Of course, more traditional timekeeping mechanisms persisted alongside these technological marvels.
For shorter lengths of time, it was useful to use commonly known intervals; for instance, the writer of the fourteenth-century Ménagier de Paris instructed his wife to cook a dish for the length of a certain prayer, such as a paternoster or a misere.
The seasonal hours continued to be used for centuries, and tower clocks used faces with eccentric gearing to show them along with the equal hours – though the latter, being simpler, eventually triumphed. Then there was the question of when the day should be numbered: the systems of “Italian hours,” which counted from each day’s changeable sunset, persisted even up until the nineteenth century in some places.
The closer we look at medieval timekeeping, the more we see that it was a complex intertwining of systems and concepts. Not only did it not remain constant over time, but it changed with technology and social needs – and so, too, did advancing technology affect society. However, one underpinning factor remained from the Middle Ages until the modern era: time was the measurement of moving things, and it represented an attempt to bring human activity into accordance with God’s plan for the universe.
Ken Mondschein is a scholar, writer, college professor, fencing master, and occasional jouster. Ken’s latest book is On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping. Click here to visit his website.
Click here to read more from Ken Mondschein
Top Image: Temperance bearing an hourglass; detail Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government, 1338
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