Local area mapping

There are many ways to use these search files. The first is the most straight-forward, setting the map-mode to browse. Using the pan and zoom capabilities, you can explore the English coverage of the time databases.

By using the zoom function, the names of individual entries will be come apparent when your map is below a mapping scale (usually 1: 1 000 000). If the name of the point is not readily visible, you may have to zoom to a greater scale.

If you change the map-mode to query, you can click near at or near your chosen data point. This will then interrogate the geographical associated with that entry and return one of a series of values for the CWA (see box) that indicate the presence or absence of bells, chimes, dials, etc. for the decades between 1500-1690s.

If you are interested in more than one entry for an area, you can alter the map-mode to nquery. These will return searches for any data points within the range of the tolerance values. The tolerance values indicated for the two interrogated layers are the range in metres from the click point on the map. Increasing these values should increase the number of results that are returned.

Local area maps and searches can be accessed from left hand menu. The ‘using the searchable maps’ page provides a guide for all the specific localities, though the exact information varies among areas, according to the themes on which appropriate information is available. The first phase of local coverage involves Bristol and Bedfordshire, with other parts of England searchable via national-level mapping. The second phase extends local area mapping to Somerset, and the City of London and its immediate surrounds. Again, the latter two counties have been selected because in each case the combination of area and documentation illuminates specific themes for England at large. Further areas follow in due course.

The wider importance of Bedfordshire is that it is the only county for which there is a comprehensive contemporary record of the presence of church clocks. This is important not just for the fuller picture of Bedfordshire clocks compared with that for any other county, but as the one instance in which we can (i) gauge how the coverage provided by parishes with extant churchwardens’ accounts stands in relation to England as a whole. We can explore how far the particular samples of parishes with accounts may bias or distort an overall picture of clocks in parish churches. The map is searchable for clocks, churchwardens' accounts, and certain features of parishes.

The wider importance of Bristol involves the spatial ‘reach’ of audible time-signals. The model combines the distribution of clocks, and the audible range of signals, to estimate over how much of the city hour-striking was audible and constituing part of the everyday environment for Bristolians. Alongside the many indirect time-cues in Bristol, arising from timed work, meetings, or gatherings, and from timed movements through the streets, such as the departures of passenger coaches or freight wagons, and the collection and delivery of post, the density of hour-striking bears out the perennial contemporary identifications of towns with timed living.

London was a place apart, even by comparison with Bristol and other major provincial cities: with a prodigious number of churches in the hundred-plus parishes within the walls. London's parish records survive in unusual abundance compared with other places in late-medieval and early modern England, and for much of the period metropolitan record-keeping was more formal and detailed than that usually found outside the capital.

For Somerset, the study has been extended into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though, as elsewhere, churchwardens' accounts become progressively less detailed from the late-seventeenth century, the broad outlines of church clock history can usually be discerned, and the number of documented parishes continues to grow steadily.

Please follow this link to access the Bedfordshire Parish Clocks to database.