Early Modern Timekeeping


Timekeeping on various scales has been important to many people in many societies for many different reasons, over several millennia. Nonetheless, so embedded have clock-times become in peoples' lives, in technologies, and in everyday environments, that it is easy to treat contemporary temporal practices as a natural outcome of more urgent lives against a background of more and better clocks and other timekeepers. However, these “natural” practices and dispositions have their own specific histories and geographies. This is not to say that their history is a chapter of accidents, but they have formed in many decidedly non-inevitable ways.

Timekeeping in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England presents an intriguing blend of the seemingly familiar and the strange.

  • Clocks and clock-times were more familiar in the everyday lives of many English men, women, and children than is generally supposed. There were many ways in which clock-times entered everyday lives to become part of a widespread tool-kit of everyday social skills, and part-and-parcel of small-scale, local sociality.
  • Such a view contrasts with conventional narratives of clocks that emphasise one or both of mechanical technology, and the increasing accuracy and precision of clocks and watches, or social technology, and uses of time to discipline people into the fast rhythms of industrial society, especially mechanised factory work. Both mechanical and social technologies were certainly important, but their historiographical prominence in the historiography owes much to their visibility in historical records, many of which were generated by precisely those activities
  • Public-ness was central to clocks and clock-time. For much of the period, clocks were apprehended more through hour-striking on bells than through dials (most of which had only an hour-hand, in any case. Privately owned domestic clocks and watches were unusual before the late-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries respectively.

 

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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