Clocks and Clock-time in England


This site exists to bring together and make available findings and materials from several related research projects on clocks and clock-time in late-medieval and early modern England.

The principle features of this site are:

  • Spatially accessible and searchable databases of the development of public time keeping in England between the fourteenth century and circa 1700.
  • User-driven mapping tools allowing the creation of bespoke maps and data retrieval for these periods.
  • Selected regional/local scale full-resolution datasets.
  • Map-based searching of comprehensive survey of churchwardens' accounts in public records.
  • Supporting discussions of sources and methods both in the archive and in the creation of this site.

Church clocks in early modern England

Churches were the pre-eminent location of public clocks. These maps are based on spending on clocks and their maintenance, and on time-signalling, as recorded in churchwardens’ accounts from the fifteenth century to 1700.

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Timekeeping Institutions in the Later Middle Ages

Medieval sources are more fragmented and problematic, and systematic mapping or analysis of them is often intractable. The approach taken here is to map some of the institutions most strongly associated with timekeeping, using this framework to organise the available evidence on mechanical clocks and the use of clock-time.

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Associated publications

Some of the findings from this project are the basis of chapter 5 in Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift's

    Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300-1800,
published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Available from bookshops, or order it here: