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Episode 116: Clocks in Tudor England. Show Notes
From Historic Royal Palaces:
King Henry VIII ordered this astronomical clock for the decoration of Hampton Court Palace in around 1540 – right after Cardinal Wolsey had fallen from power and Henry VIII began to rebuild his newly-acquired palace. Within the clock there are three bells of which the oldest is from 1478. The clock is very complicated compared to the clocks we use today and it shows:
- The hour
- The month
- Day of the month
- The position of the sun in the ecliptic
- The twelve signs of the zodiac
- The number of days that have elapsed since the beginning of the year
- The phases of the moon
- It’s age in days
- The hour in which it crosses the meridian which means that it tells the time of high time in London
Since Henry VIII often used to travel by barge to Hampton Court Palace it was practical to know when it was high tide and thereby the best time to travel by. The earth is centred in the middle of the clock because the clock was made before Copernicus and Galileo began to doubt the heliocentric world-image (where the sun is the centre of the universe). The minor circle is the sun that was said to circle around the earth at the time.
More info from Tudor Times about the clock:
http://tudortimes.co.uk/places/5-the-astronomical-clock-at-hampton-court-palace
The Anne Boleyn Clock
https://www.rct.uk/collection/30018/anne-boleyn-clock
Clocks in Tudor Portraits
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328288158_Tudor_time_machines_Clocks_and_watches_in_English_portraits_c1530-c1630_Tudor_time_machines
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
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Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is Episode 116, and it’s on time keeping in medieval and Tudor england.
I’ve said before that the aspect of the 16th century that most interests me is this change that England goes through, moving from a medieval society to an early modern one. The 16th century is basically the birth of modern england, and we see the early signs of so much of the England we know now, including the industrial revolution. One of the aspects that most reflects these changes is telling time. I’ve long been interested in how people kept time, and this is one of those things that you read in passing, for example, the idea that daylight hours were shorter in the winter than in the summer. I read things like this, and I wonder how that worked for your average Tudors. In 1485 time was fluid, and hours changed depending on the season. By the end of the period, there were pocket watches (first introduced in 1511), and wall clocks ringing out the hours 24 hours a day.
Of course, something else that changed during the Tudor period was the days and when the new year began. Up until the 16th century, Europe was operating under the Julian Calendar that the Romans began. But as time passed, it wasn’t in alignment with the sun any longer, which was important for calculating Easter, which was potentially coming earlier and earlier thanks to the Julian calendar being just a little bit off. The Pope, Leo X, asked all the European rulers to send astronomers to Rome so they could calculate a new calendar year. But it didn’t seem to be a priority for most people.
Even Henry VIII, who was still a favorite of the Pope at this time, didn’t bother to send anyone. As it went, the changes didn’t take place until well after Leo’s time, in 1582, at which point both the solar and lunar calendars. To make up for the changes that the new calendar would cause, ten days were removed, and in 1582 the 4th of October was followed immediately by the 15th. It was like when we spring ahead with daylight savings, only with ten days in between rather than an hour. To add to the confusion, not every country went with the changes right away. France did, but England didn’t. Which meant that it was tough to figure out when a letter was written, if it came from France.
Still, as interesting as that calendar change is – and I might wind up doing an entire episode on it – in this episode I want to talk specifically about clocks, and keep track of time during the day.
We think of time as this fixed unit of measurement. A minute is a minute is a minute. And that is largely because we have clocks to measure the time. This can get quite philosophical – the idea that measuring something makes it more real. And we could wax philosophical about that for ages. But the gist for our purposes is that time was changeable for our Tudor friends. We have clocks on our wrists, in our pockets with our cell phones, up in the right hand corner of our computer screen. We think in terms of precise minutes. When you say you’re going to start a meeting at 9am, starting at ten past makes you late. But in an age that started with the most accurate clocks still being off by 15 minutes or so, your 9:15 could be my 8:45 if we were both off by 15 minutes in different directions. People often didn’t even know what year they were born in, and you see instances where, when people needed to know their birth year exactly, maybe for legal purposes, midwives and women who were present at the birth would be called to testify.
The day was split into hours primarily in order to keep track of prayers. The morning prayer was prime, followed by terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline. What time of day that was according to our civil clocks could change during the seasons because daylight and nighttime were both divided up into 12 hours. So the 12 hours at night during the summer (which, in England in June is around 7 civil hours) would be different than the 12 hours of daylight in the summer.
In 2002 Scientific American did a full issue on the history of timekeeping, and one of the main takeaways from the articles in that issue was that our conception of time changes as we change the way we keep track of it. Most rooms have clocks. We set alarm clocks to wake up. We exercise on machines that keep track of how many minutes we’ve been walking or running.
There have been many ways to keep track of time over the years. As early as 1500 BC people used water clocks, and they were in popular use by the Greeks around 325BC. They would use a bowl with markings on the inside and a hole in the bottom to mark the passage of time. Kind of like a basic hourglass or egg timer, they were useful for marking how much time had gone by. But they couldn’t tell you what time it was. For that, you had sundials, which would measure what time in the day it was based on the shadow that the sun cast on the dial. The problem with that, of course, was that the sun casts different light as the angle changes throughout the year. The shadow cast in January would be very different than that in July.
Before clocks became common in England, people used to say that an hour was the time it took to walk three miles in the summer, or two in the winter. Medieval manuscripts explain how to turn your hand into a basic sundial, or even suggestions as to how to use local landmarks and the way the sun would shine on them, and the length of their shadows, to tell the time. In addition, in Chaucers Canterbury Tale, one of the pilgrims figures out the hour by using the shadow of a six foot tall man. Of course all of these methods depend on a clear sky in order to be able to tell the time. Something which is in short supply in England, especially in the winter.
Historian Jacques le Goff suggests that mechanical clocks were developed in part as a way for merchants to clock the time of their workers in the cities, which were developing during this time period. When you’re a farmer, you don’t really need to know what time it is. You wake up and work in the daylight, then go to sleep at night, taking breaks along the way to eat and rest. But if you are employed for someone in a workshop in a city, your boss needs to know how long you’ve been working.
And this is when we start to see the development of the mechanical clock, which relies on weights to move a tooth wheel. The mechanical clock at Salisbury Cathedral dates from 1386, and is often cited as the oldest mechanical clock in the world. But even the mechanical clocks still relied on sundials to sync them up from time to time. This then leads to the distinction between time keeping devices, and time finding ones. Mechanical clocks are excellent at time keeping, but useless at time finding – marking the passage of time, but not able to figure out the time by the position of the sun.
Other large clock towers were built in England during the late 14th century, such as the one at Wells Cathedral. And we start to see the distinction between church time, which is of course the hours of the church when prayers were said, and clock time, when people would mark their working day.
But as with any new technology, the clock itself received mixed reviews. Some raved about how useful it was to be able to tell time, even at night. While others, like the English writer of a manuscript called Dives et Pauper, suggest that while planets do not rule men, neither should the clock. We are already seeing people fearing that men and women are becoming slaves to time. By the 16th century we have standard periods of time for a school day, and the measurement of hours begins to be consistent, during summer and winter. During the 16th century we start to see clocks in paintings, usually in portraits of scholars, as a reminder that time passes, and we need to not waste it. We even see this in Shakespeare – For Olivia in Twelfth Night, ‘The
clock upbraids me with the waste of time’. It’s also in Richard II in the soliloquy
shortly before his murder ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; / For now hath time made me his numbering clock ’.
In the 16th century we start to see clocks with skulls carved on them, yet another reminder of how time passed, and we should make the most of each day. It could be argued that clocks, with their constant reminder of our time running up and moving us closer to death, played a small role in the developing humanism of the time as well.
Most towns during this period had a town clock that would strike the hours, as I said, and by the 16th century they were quite common. Less common were the smaller pocket watches which required very small springs to work the gears, and a level of goldsmithing capabilities that England didn’t yet have at this period.
Christina Juliet Faraday writes, Tudor time machines: Clocks and watches in English portraits c.1530-c.1630: “Yet the need to import clocks increased their desirability. Linda Levy Peck has shown that luxury consumption emerged in the Tudor and Jacobean periods; clocks are just one example of the goods imported for the developing consumer market. According to
Peck, luxury was morally ambivalent in this period, with its associations of excess, effeminacy, Catholicism and the evils of social mobility. However, in
contrast to other imported items, clocks had an enormous variety of addi-
tional associations, allowing them to be interpreted in terms other than deca-
dent and trivial.”
That said, there are some very famous smaller clocks that play a role in English history. For example, the golden clock that Henry VIII gave to Anne Boleyn when they were first married – I link to it in the show notes. As described by the Royal Collection Trust, it is, “ a gilt-bronze wall hung clock, the striking movement with a single steel hand, in a square tabernacle case, the top pierced with foliage and scrolls containing the bell, surmounted by a leopard holding a shield with the Royal coat of arms and Garter.”
Henry VIII also ordered the famous astronomical clock for the decoration of Hampton Court Palace in around 1540, this is as he is rebuilding the palace after Wolsey’s fall. Within the clock there are three bells of which the oldest is from 1478. The clock is very complicated compared to the clocks we use today and it shows:
- The hour
- The month
- Day of the month
- The position of the sun in the ecliptic
- The twelve signs of the zodiac
- The number of days that have elapsed since the beginning of the year
- The phases of the moon
- It’s age in days
- The hour in which it crosses the meridian which means that it tells the time of high time in London
Since Henry VIII often used to travel by barge to Hampton Court Palace it was practical to know when it was high tide and thereby the best time to travel by.
The earth is centred in the middle of the clock because the clock was made before Copernicus and Galileo began to doubt the heliocentric world-image (where the sun is the centre of the universe). The minor circle is the sun that was said to circle around the earth at the time.
—–
I think it’s worth inserting here a quote by the historian and philopsopher Lewis Mumfort who wrote in his 1934 classic, Technics and Civilization that the clock was the key machine of the modern industrial age. He writes, “the effect of the mechanical clock is more pervasive and strict: It presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest. When one thinks of the day as an abstract span on time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter’s night. One invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it. One ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock. One slept not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it.”
Of course, by the 1650s we would have the pendulum clock, which remained the most precise time keeping machine for three centuries. In 1983 the Harvard economic historian David Landes wrote a book called Revolution in Time, Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, in which he argued that it was the clock that led to advanced capitalism. He wrote, “the mechanical clock was self contained, and once horologists learned to drive it by means of a coiled spring (which is what happened in the 16th century) rather than a falling weight, it could be miniaturized so as to be portable, whether in the household or on the person…. It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.”
In 1513, a laborer named John Townesend was holding an iron clock mechanism when it slipped from his hand, hitting five-year-old William Bret in the forehead. The child died the next day.
So I’m going to leave it there for this week – The book recommendation is History of the hour
CLOCKS AND MODERN TEMPORAL ORDERS
By DOHRN-VAN ROSSUM, GERHARD
There are links to that, as well all the sources and articles I used on the website at Englandcast.com.
. And you can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or through twitter @teysko or facebook.com/englandcast. And remember to get your Tudorcon tickets at Tudorfair.com.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
