something I found that would-be medieval writers goof on

[carlhh]

http://www.catherinehanley.co.uk/historical-background/time-in-the-thirteenth-century

Medieval people didn't have minutes and seconds, yo!

Comments

[syntinen_laulu]

We are used to our structured, scheduled days of twenty-four hours split with precision into minutes and seconds, but to those in the early thirteenth century this would have been an alien concept.

But in the early fourteenth century a mechanical clock mechanism was perfected, which wasn't too expensive to make once you knew how. Monastic institutions, whose primary role was to say the canonical services on the proper hour every day, seized with huge relief on a technology that would reliably tell them when those hours were, even when the day or the night wasn't fine enough to check the position of sun or moon, without someone having to watch a marked candle or some such. By the end of the fourteenth century virtually every monastic institution had one, and many secular churches. Only the most high-end of these clocks had dials; instead they just rang a bell - they literally 'tolled' the time. (That's why they were called 'clocks', from the French word for bell, cloche.) So anyone in a town or anywhere else in earshot of an abbey or a well-endowed church now could hear what clock-time it was.

This caused confusion, because clock-time is of course consistent; an hour is 1/24th of a day, whether in day or night, winter or summer, whereas by sun-time an hour is 1/12th of the daylight or the moonlight of a given day: sun-time equated to clock-time only on the equinox. So from the late fourteenth century onwards, when you spoke of the fifth hour of the day you had to specify whether you meant 'five by the sun' or 'five of the clock'. And we have been calling it 'five o'clock' ever since!

(You could potentially use that confusion in a murder mystery, of course….)

Professor Robert Bartlett of St Andrews has also noted that medieval people could be surprisingly vague about how old they were: not just peasants but even important nobles. People knew where they came in their family, because birth order was important, and they very likely knew the day of the Church calendar they were born (e.g. 'Lammas eve' or 'St Bartholomew'; but not the year. This was long before the notion of writing down family births in the family Bible, let alone an official register of births, marriages and deaths. For example, in one of Bartlett's 'microhistories' he found a noble household nonplussed by the vital question of whether the lord's eldest son and heir was legally of age. Their vassals were called on to testify along the lines of 'I was at his baptism, and I remember his father's father was there too; so it was certainly before the old boy got killed serving in the King's campaign in France' and gradually between them they worked it out.