Tuesday Talk - A Little Bit of Time

Time. 

We never seem to have enough of it. The alarm goes off at silly o’clock, we get up, go to work, come home, cook dinner, go out, go to bed, can’t sleep… until it’s time to get up again. But are we ruled by Time? Is Time the master? How many times (LOL) do we hear ‘Oh if only there were thirty-six hours in a day!’

But how was it in the past? How much did Time – the telling of it, or lack of it, affect our ancestors?

Most ancient civilizations kept track of the hours and seasons via the sun and moon, with the first ‘calendars’ created by stone-age hunter-gatherers: Stonehenge in England’s Wiltshire as a possible example. (I say ‘possible’ because we don’t actually know for certain what Stonehenge was for!)

Sundials were among the first timekeeping tools, the oldest known being discovered in# Egypt's Valley of the Kings in 2013 and dating back to circa 1500 BC. Egyptian shadow clocks divided daytime into twelve parts with each further divided into more precise parts, the sun cast a shadow over the marks as it moved across the sky. The drawback for sundials is that you need the sun to create a shadow in order for them to work. OK for Egypt, not so good for Britain. Ancient dials had straight hour-lines of varied lengths with a day divided into twelve equal segments regardless of the season, therefore, some hours were shorter in winter and longer in summer. Using hours of equal length throughout the year was adopted in 1371, and appeared in Western sundials from around 1446. 

 To deal with the night or overcast days, there were water clocks and a system for tracking star movements. Water clocks were much used in ancient Greece and the Romans adopted a similar idea. An advantage of the water clock (apart from the weather or night) was that they could function indoors. 

Clocks have used a variety of power sources aside from the sun and water - gravity, springs, and electricity. Mechanical clocks were widespread during the 14th century when they were used in medieval monasteries to keep to the scheduling of and calling to prayers.

The earliest mention of candle clocks comes from a Chinese poem, written in ad 520 with similar candles being used in Japan until the early 10th century.The candle clock most often mentioned is attributed to King Alfred the Great, consisting of six candles made from seventy-two pennyweights of wax, each twelve inches (30 cm) high, and of uniform thickness. These were marked at every inch (2.54 cm). The candles burned for about four hours, so the marks conveyed a time keeping of about twenty minutes. They were placed in wooden framed boxes to prevent the flame from blowing out. Al-Jazari had highly sophisticated candle clocks by 1206. 

The hourglass was a reliable method of measuring time while at sea, possibly used on ships from as far back as the 11th century, although undisputed evidence dates back to 1338. From the 15th century, hourglasses were used at sea, in churches, industry, and cooking; they were dependable, reusable, fairly accurate and constructed easily. Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan used eighteen hourglasses on each ship when he circumnavigated the globe in 1522.

Medieval European clockmakers were Catholic monks. The Church required accurate

clocks to regulated daily prayer. Mechanical clocks were often wound at least twice a day to ensure accuracy. Monasteries also broadcast important times and durations by the use of church bells, which was the start of a wider-spread method of time-keeping for those living outside of the more personal sphere of timekeeping. With the coming of the need for regular prayer came the need to be aware of the hours of the day, throughout the day – and night.

Salisbury cathedral’s clock, dating to circa 1386, is one of the oldest working clocks in the world. It retains most of its authentic parts, although its early mechanism was converted to a pendulum, which was then replaced with a replica of the original in 1956. It has no dial, as its purpose was to strike a bell at precise times. 

Salisbury Cathedral

and the clock

Early clock dials showed only hours with minutes and seconds evolving much later. A clock with a minutes dial is mentioned in a 1475 manuscript, and clocks indicating minutes and seconds existed in Germany in the 15th century. Timepieces indicating minutes were not common until an increase in accuracy became possible by the pendulum clock. Astronomer Tycho Brahe used clocks with minutes and seconds in the 16th century to observe the position of the stars.

One of the earliest references to an 'arm watch' was given to Queen Elizabeth I by Robert Dudley with the idea for wristwatches dating back to the 16th century and almost exclusively worn by women. Men had the pocket-watch. Watches were highly prone to damage from the elements, so were kept safe in a pocket, particularly when the waistcoat came into fashion at the court of Charles II. 

In England, the pendulum longcase clock (the grandfather clock) was created by William Clement in 1670/71, with a concentric minute hand added soon after by Daniel Quare, a London clock-maker, and then the Second Hand was introduced. The minute hand was added to pocket watch faces around 1680 in Britain, 1700 in France.

A major need to improving the accuracy and reliability of clocks was for precise time-keeping where navigation at sea was concerned, but this did not come about until 1761.

One debate for the writers of historical fiction is whether to use the expression of seconds or minutes in narrative and dialogue. The concept of ‘seconds’ was rarely used prior to the early 1700s, minutes perhaps by the mid-1600s. But did ordinary everyday folk use, or even have need of, minutes and seconds? Dawn, noon and dusk were the essentials. Without education – or accurate clocks – timekeeping outside of the hour, quarter-hour and half-hour were meaningless. So dialogue of things like “I’ll be there in a minute" for a 14th-century character is an anachronism. Maybe use ‘moment’ instead? And "she froze for several seconds" prior to the mid-1700s is again, not a good idea – heartbeats instead of seconds perhaps?

But what about narrative? Is it acceptable for us to use “he stood and watched her for several minutes" in a novel set in Tudor times OK? Or isn't it?

What do you think?

Helen Hollick