Animation: documented church clocks, 1500-1699

The data underlying this sequence of twenty maps is based on all the available detailed churchwardens’ accounts for early modern England I have been able to trace, and are drawn from nearly 1100 early modern English parishes. There are a handful of parishes whose accounts are too frail to be examined until they have been conserved, and that information may become available in due course if archives’ budgets permit.

The maps shows whether churchwardens'‘ accounts survive, and whether those that do survive contain evidence for working church clocks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Data are shown for the twenty 10-year periods from 1500-1509 to 1690-1699.

Solid symbols denote a working clock; hollow symbols denote either no clock or (very occasionally) a broken clock that remained unrepaired. The small dots denote parishes with no surviving churchwardens' accounts for that decade.