Markets

Towns were strongly associated, in many medieval minds, with time, with a particular consciousness of time, with active attention to timekeeping, especially related to security, public order, and markets. Like monasteries, urban communities absorbed mechanical clocks into their existing use of several such purposes, on which clock-times were rapidly brought to bear. The picture is clearest for the larger European cities, especially those of Italy and southern Germany that are the focus for Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum›s magisterial History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Yale University Press, 1996).

By European standards London was England’s only major city. While England contained several hundred weekly markets, only a handful of provincial cities sustained populations larger than ten thousand people. And even where the medieval population peak exceeded or even approached that number - such places as Bristol, Norwich, York, Exeter, Newcastle, and Oxford - populations were much lower into the early sixteenth century.

Van Rossum

Most weekly markets took place in settlements of well under one thousand inhabitants, and often no more than a couple of hundred people, though many of the smallest markets had always been very small-scale affairs, and withered away during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while population remained far below its medieval peak. .

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.

Evidence for clock-time

No medieval source has the potential to provide a systematic survey of market clocks. Evidence for clock-time use in late-medieval towns and markets varies from that explicitly focused on clocks and time-signalling (such as the arrangements through which the start and end of market-trading were sounded, and the end of the period early in the day during which trading was reserved for private householders) to that in which clocks or clock-times crop up entirely incidentally in documents, such as court depositions narrating witnesses’ accounts of possibly criminal activity.

There may be direct evidence of the keeping of a mechanical clock to provide an hourly signal. This evidence may take various forms:

The physical survival in situ of parts of a medieval clock. Instances are very rare, and include archaeologically excavated clock. components, as well as clocks or clock parts remaining in churches.
Records of expenditure, usually overseen by a sacristan (or a sub-sacristan in larger monasteries) in charge of church fabric.
Complaints that the performance of clocks has deteriorated, or is neglected.
Reference from external sources and narratives to people in the surrounding area knowing the clock-time because of the striking of hours (and sometimes quarters) on a church clock.

There may be direct instructions that a clock be amended or installed, issued to an abbot, prior, or nunnery from the relevant holder of a Visitation, usually a Bishop, but sometimes another head of monastic house appointed by the monastic order in question.
The existence of a mechanical clock may be implicit in the routine use of clock-time in ordinary activities. This may appear in various types of formal and informal narratives and letters.

The information traceable through the maps below derives from various published and documentary sources.

Accessing and reporting information on market clocks

The maps show the current state of accumulating anecdotal references to clocks and clock-times in markets. The information has been found opportunistically, and is certainly not exhaustive. Additional information will be gratefully received, and added to the site with full acknowledgement both to the sender, and on this website.

Please email information to: clocks@bristol.ac.uk (new address active from 5th January 2008)