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

[sollersuk]

Alas, a very much needed resource!

I've had a further problem in writing about the 5th century: what year is it?

Most used: names of the consuls, reignal year of the Emperor, even (heaven help us) counting from the Olympiad, even though the games had been abolished. None of these helpful to the average reader.

Sometimes used: years from the founding of Rome, years from the Crucifixion. Both need some arithmetic to be meaningful.

Never used: years from the Incarnation, i.e. our reckoning.

Incidentally (and a bit OT), there's a potential problem over seasons in Britain. English usage tends to be Spring starts in March, Summer in June, Autumn in September, Winter in December. Welsh usage: Spring starts in February and so forth (Gorffenaf, the word for July, actually means "end of Summer". Beware which side of Offa's Dyke your story is set (OK, for other reasons too!)

[r_blackcat]

From the Crucifixion, not the Incarnation! I'd never guessed! Thank you!

[sollersuk]

Dionysius Exiguus calculated the date of the Incarnation in 525, but it was some time before it was actually used to express dates. Very useful as it made it clear that the expected date for the End of the World, 500 years after the Incarnation, had already passed.

[r_blackcat]

What a great thing, thank you very much!

[tabaqui]

Oh, wow, neat! I did not know. Thanks!

[featherfire]

Oh wow. I didn't know that, though it makes perfect sense. I once made the joke "time hadn't even been invented yet!"... I didn't realize how accurate I was!

[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