Mapping the sounds of time in Bristol

 

Attention to the Senses

Whilst historians have long recognised the sensory contrasts between past and present, and have evoked contrasting everyday experiences of past environments in terms of sights, smells, and noise, such themes tended not to be central to their accounts.  On the other hand, those working in cultural studies, post-modern social theory, and certain parts of philosophy are much more inclined to place a wide range of sensory experiences – many of them only slightly evident in historical documents – centre-stage. They emphasise not only the conventional Aristotelian senses, but other embodied senses, and broader notions of ‘affect’, that is,

 

The last few years have brought the beginnings of conversations between cultural theorists and historians on the senses, despite major tensions over questions of evidence, and the (over-)privileging of theory and evidence, respectively. The likes of Woolgar’s The Senses in Late-Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2006), with its detailed grounding in various sites, behaviours, perceptions, and rituals, indicates the richness possible in going beyond a silent, odourless picture of the past.

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Figure 1: Visual time-indication, late-seventeenth century

 

Senses and Time-Signals

Over several centuries, Western societies have increasingly taken-for-granted that daily time-indication is primarily visual. Everyday environments have become increasingly saturated with the faces of clocks and watches which, whether in traditional dial-and-hands format or a digital display. The utter familiarity of telling-the-time by looking is so thoroughly grooved as to be taken-for-granted except in unusual circumstances.

Visual apprehension of time-of-day was nothing new, of course, temporal information having long come in a various ‘traditional’ or ‘natural146; forms, such as gross changes in the quality of daylight, the height of the sun in the sky, the position of the moon at night, and so on. Nor were these ways of telling the time necessarily limited to broad approximations. Capacities to make distinctions between shades of light and heat, especially around the rising and setting sun, and of a potentially rich descriptive vocabulary to identity those distinctions, are likely to have been much more sophisticated than those most of us have today.

And while most ancient and medieval sundials were modest in both scale and the precision of their construction, the creation of much more complex and accurate instruments was possible. Highly sensitive sundials, in the sense that they displayed scales against which the exact location of the sun’s shadow changed rapidly, and whose indication was reproducible and consistent, were indeed a considerable challenge both to those who calculated shadow positions and designed the instrument’s scales, and to the craftsmen responsible for the engraving or painting of those scales,= and the accurate installation of the instrument in the position where it was to be used.

Discussion of sundials still preserves the priority of the visual as the ‘sensory register of time’.

Important as visual cues were, though, early mechanical timekeeping technologies were not built around visual telling-the-time. Time-signals were heard more than seen, and the critical element in late-medieval and much early modern time-signalling was the bell rather than the clock-face. Dials appeared gradually and, for a long time, operated alongside audible time-indication. Sight and sound were not mutually exclusive in showing the time, and only later did the dial become the dominant element of time-indication that we now take-for-granted.

Nor was this irrational on the parts of either those signalling or those registering the information. Put crudely, the ‘reach’ of any visual device is limited to people having unobstructed line-of-sight to it, and who are close enough to be able to distinguish its display. It is also worth highlighting here another taken-for-granted in the modern world, namely the huge availability of sight-improving technology: while there were spectacles in early modern England, they were not generally available. Neither were those producing them part of a large network of detailed optical knowledge and sophisticated mass production, and a considerable proportion of early modern populations are likely to have had substantially restricted vision as regards seeing a large clock at a distance, or a watch at close quarters. Of course, there were also many people with greater or lesser impairment of hearing who need also to be borne in mind.

Nonetheless, there is a clear contrast between the directionally limited visibility of a dial, and the way in which hour-striking ‘broadcasts’ the time to an area in a comparatively undiscriminating way. Moreover, the area reached is also likely to have been considerably larger. Especially when raised in a tower, and surrounded by several louvred wall-openings to allow sound out, the sorts of bells on which early modern church clocks struck were audible distinctly over a considerable distance.

For simplicity’s sake, consider a dial-face two metres across, with a hand one metre long, on a church on a flat site with no obstructions to vision, and suppose the dial to be raised twenty metres above ground level. At a range of two hundred metres, the length of the hand sub-tends fifteen seconds of arc at the viewer’s eye. In viewing a clock from distance one must be able to identify the orientation of the hand, not just its presence. If an ability to distinguish one-third of the length of the hand is taken as enough to identify its orientation, the required resolution is between five and six minutes of arc.

This is still considerably above the distinguishing capabilities of unimpaired human vision, which is often reckoned to be able to distinguish (in ideal observational conditions) to about two minutes of arc, equivalent to seeing something fifty centimetres across at a range of one kilometre, a capacity not surpassed until about 550 metres in this example. But even slight deficiencies in vision take the capability to read this large dial beyond the observer’s reach.

Two hundred metres, though, is a comparatively modest distance over which to have heard a medieval or an early modern church clock bell.

 

Mapping the ‘Reach’ of Aural Time-Signalling

In this section, attention focuses on clock-bells and chimes, but there were other aural time-indicators, too. Some were deliberate, such as the calling-out of criers or town nightwatchmen, while others were not intended as explicit signals but occurred consistently enough to serve as indirect time-cues, such as movements of people around markets, work-places, or churches, or of children into or out of school. While any of these could enable the performance or coordination of other activities, and their local importance might be considerable, discussion here is confined to the audibility of bells associated with public clocks.

If obvious, the starting point in attempting to indicate the ‘reach’ of time-signalling is the presence of public clocks, and the means via which they indicated the time. Not all Bristol’s churches had clocks, including some of the best documented; parishes whose documentation shows them to have been well capable of affording a clock had they chosen, and with the resources and local expertise to keep it running successfully.

Among them were three central parishes, All Saints’, St Ewen’s, and St. Werburgh’s, all in the heart of the city a short distance west of Bristol Bridge. Their centrality, their dense populations, and their diverse activities might suggest them as obvious candidates to have possessed church clocks.

On the other hand, they were not the only parishes within a city centre packed tight with churches as well as people. All three churches were within just over 100 metres of St Nicholas, the church from which the bell to regulate times of market activity was rung from at least the 1220s, first using the canonical hours, but switching to ringing hours of the clock in the fourteenth century. With official quayside- and market-time throughout the period being that “smitten on St Nicholas’, there was an active reason for adjacent parishes not to have clocks whose striking would confuse the temporal soundscape.

Although St Nicholas’ timekeeping role for Bristol’s quays was diminished as late-medieval and early modern port traffic concentrated on Broad Quay, Narrow Quay, and other quays on the artificial channel dug for the River Frome, its local role passed to Christchurch – quite literally ‘across the road’ from All Saints and St Werburgh’s, which had not only a clock-bell but a set of chimes and two elaborate figures that struck the quarter-hours. Again, that some churches lacked clocks seems unsurprising, it did not mean that time-signalling was not happening in close proximity.

From the churchwarden’s accounts that record parishes’ spending, supplemented where necessary by fleeting glimpses from other sources, several features are clear. Bristol was well-provided with church clocks, notwithstanding the exceptions mentioned above, and considerable time and effort were devoted to keeping them running, from the daily winding, to regular greasing, and from routine renewal of small parts to occasional major overhauls. All the clocks had bells, but dials were unusual until the eighteenth century. Quarter-striking was found on several, often pre-dating the provision of a clock dial, or being installed together as parts of a major upgrading or refurbishment. Moreover, all the church clocks with dials had just one (rather than having dials on two or more faces of their tower), and until 16__ all their dials carried an hour hand only.

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

 

Estimating ‘reach’

For dials

There at all? how high? where facing?

For sundials ---

Nature of instrument? How widely visible?

For hour-striking

Location and height/elevation? Volume (bell-size, pitch/tone?)

Direct evidence on audibility?

Contrast between the very limited reach of visual signals, even where large elevated dials, on the most visible side of a church tower, and the area covered by several bells, even if their individual range was quite limited.

The size of early clock dials from direct evidence

surviving examples in use, or remains stored in parish churches after their replacement, or from the size of associated architectural features; or indirect indications, such as the materials involved in their construction.

of hour-striking depends on four main factors, namely volume, location, obstruction, and competition. A bell’s volume depends on a combination of factors to do with the bell, including its weight and composition, and its tone or pitch, interacting with factors to do with how it was struck, such as the weight of the hammer, the force of the strike, and the location of the strike on the bell. Several of Bristol’s seventeenth-century (or older) church bells survive, especially at St _______________, while the weights of others appear in churchwardens’ accounting of the costs of bronze and casting. The weights of many Bristol church bells were impressive, though not unusual for early modern England.

Occasionally churchwardens were also forthcoming about the weight of the hammers. These were also rather substantial objects, weighing between twelve and twenty pounds (six to nine kilogrammes).

Second, relevant facets of the bell’s location include its elevation above thr ground, and the presence or absence of physical obstacles to sound transmission.

 

Estimating the ‘reach’ of hour-striking

Direct evidence on audibility?

Contemporaries’ concern with bells being audible is manifest long before the introduction of mechanical clocks. Clocks had many other uses, not least in sustained ringing from churches prior to the main weekly services, and urban authorities used bells to signal the start of the working day, the curfew, the opening of markets, and the restriction of the first period of markets to private customers.

The bulk of the early evidence about audible bells, at least that which survives, concerns cathedrals and other major centres, and certainly cannot be taken as typical of parish hour-striking. Though bells at York Minster, or Exeter Cathedral were clearly noticed over a radius of several miles, most parish church bells were smaller, and in smaller towers, and extreme range was not a priority in most cases.

In the absence of fuller contemporary information about availability, it is often possible to record the range of bells today, since hundreds of parish churches still contain several of the bells that hung in their towers in the seventeenth century.

Factors like traffic and other environmental noise obviously restrict audibility now, and the noise of traffic, workplaces (including streets and public spaces) and the like did so in the past.

Contemporaries were clearly aware of competing and distracting noise in their provision of, and expectations of, the bells they installed.

The carrying of sound is obviously affected by wind speed and direction, reducing the range of bells below that in perfectly calm conditions, or extending it in downwind direction. Then as now, again, topography has effects in channelling sound, both natural slopes and valleys, and the buildings of urban landscapes.

So there are many factors whose effects can be identified in broad terms, but whose precise incorporation into specific patterns of audibility involves some speculation

Therefore, the assumptions made in these pages are deliberately cautious about the geographical range of time signals. Viewers therefore know that they show a lower-bound estimate of the = range of signalling. Those curious to do so can experiment with changing the model’s assumptions to see the effect on the density of time signals.

Model with various ranges for different churches according to their importance in near-contemporary accounts of the importance and use of their signals. For example, in Bristol, the parish church of St Nicholas, adjacent to Bristol Bridge, was the longstanding prime clock for port and market regulation, and the four churches of St Philip, St Stephen, St Mary Redcliffe and St James were regarded as key locations of hour-striking for different parts of the city (decades later, the same four were identified as the key sites of quarter-striking).

On the other hand, several central parishes were so small and close together as to present much smaller problems in signalling to parishioners.

Based on the audibility of those with surviving early modern bells today, treat the four churches just named as striking the hours on a bell with a minimum range of 300m, except for St Mary Redcliffe for which 400 metres has been used, the same figure as for Bristol cathedral. The range of hour-striking for other parishes si set, very conservatively, at a minimum range of 150 metres. Likewise assume the secular buildings had a smaller range.

It would be a mistake to regard sundials as primarily having been an alternative to clocks, because clocks had major implications for both the provision of sundials and their nature as instruments. In this contexts, three main types of sundials need to be distinguished from one another:

(a) the often rather more limited devices usually referred to as mass dials or scratch dials. Typically these involve an almost horizontal gnomen in a wall, with a handful of scratched or incised lines radiating from it, within a sector of upto about 120 degrees. These lines were approximate cues for mass, hence their name.

(b) instruments specifically installed to facilitate the accurate setting of clocks. Particularly telling instances occur high up on some church towers, invisible from ground level, but intended for a person in the clock chamber as they set the clock.

(c) those which functionned as independent instruments, such as Bristol’s large harbour-side sundial on Broad Quay (– where exactly?).