The concept of Time

We all expect to be able to tell the time instantly. Monks will have had a completely different idea of time. I like to think that I know the time throughout the day and during the night too. I am often correct in daylight and during the night have developed an uncanny knack of being mostly surprisingly accurate. This is partly because I am used to referring to a watch or clock so often. I can remember at work when the office clock was broken how often  I kept looking at it! Quite shameful.

Clock Museum, Furtwangen in the Black \Forest, Germany

Consideration of the concept of time could invoke yawn. The more I have considered it, the more fascinated I have become. Our visit to the Deutsches Uhrenmuseun (German Clock Museum) at Furtwangen in the Black Forest, Germany in the summer of 2017 is to blame for kindling my interest.
I began to appreciate the importance of sundials, water clocks, candles and the role of the Church. Furthermore the Abbey in the village where we were camping had a famous 18th centuryBaroque wooden gear clock with the seven days of the week and the planets. (A successor to our own early 14th centuryWllingford clock).

We have to understand that before the 13th century monasteries were very often in charge of telling the time, not just for themselves but for people in many towns and villages. The canonical hours by which monks knew when to hold their offices (services), eat, sleep and pray were also  being used by everyone else as a yardstick to mark the passing of time. Medieval times could be filled with chaos and violence and monasteries alone could provide some stability. Merchants in 12th century Genoa, for example, referenced times of major business transactions, births and deaths by the use of canonical hours.

Next we have to understand these canonical hours were fluid by our standards. Not really fixed at all. It has been hard for me to grasp this. Canonical hours are about scheduling a series of particular events (ora et labora = praying and working) so the length of hours was geared to accomodate these. In addition day and night were divided into hours separately with the length of the day altering according to the seasons, particularly in northern Europe. Hours became signaled by bells manually.

Think of  the poor guy who had to ring them know when to do it? There must have been mistakes!

Great material for a Monty Python sketch....

It was the responsibility of the sacristan and he would need a kind of alarm to do his job. This was before the mechanical clock.....so he might use candle clocks, sundials, and the stars, possibly  using an astrolabe. Clearly errors would be made and time therefore was fluid in a way we would not understand or tolerate.

Christian philosopy also supported this fluidity : St Augustine saw creation and God eternally linked. There developed a view that time and natural cycles of season, sun and heavenly bodies were given by God to use to measure time. Observation of nature became key. Sundials measured the position of the sun, astrolabes the heavenly bodies. Even waterclocks, as we shall see, had to be reset every morning with a sundial. These devices just reflected the natural order rather strictly measuring it.

.An 11th century document tells how a sacristan stood at a designated spot and would know from the position of a paticular constellation of stars when to ring for the Vigil. For example when the Twins were just about over the monk's dormitory and Orion was over the All Saints chapel on 25 December it was time : earlier in fact than usual because it was a Feast day with a longer liturgy.

Sundials had been used since the time of the ancient Greeks. Use .of a sundial divided a day into twelve sections  regardless of the season. This meant shorter days in winter and longer in the summer. Of course sundials require sunlight and are not good in cloudy conditions or at night. There are very ancient examples of use by monks in Ireland. Made of stone, they were set in open areas on ground well clear of shadows with face to the south. A horizontal hole in the centre of the stone face held a pointer made of iron or wood called a gnomen. This cast a shadow along lines on the stone indicating the time of day.  Nine of these ancient sundials have survived. Their main purpose was to indicate canonical hours (when the  offices of the church were to be said). : for example at Kilmalkedar on the Dingle Peninsula, Co. Kerry.from the 9th century.

Sundial at Kilmelkadar

More common from 7th to 14th centuries were Tide Dials (or scratch or mass dials) on the south wall of churches  : again marked with canonical hours rather than (or  in addition) to daylight hours. These were certainly used in Saxon times becoming less popular after 1066 with the coming of te Normans. There are some 3000 examples in England. We came across a tiny one outside the priest's entrance to the chancel at Burford church  last year!

Here is a much later one at Sherborne Abbey showing the gnomen very clearly.

Sundial at Sherborne Abbey

Photo from flickr © Becky Williamson (cc-by-sa/2.0)

I must share this image : today by an amazing coicidence I was researching for my other blog Baroque Churches about a church in southern Mexico called Tlacochahuaya and on their web site I was greetetd by this sundial from the late 16th century in the churchyard put there presumably by Dominicans when they colonised the area and built the church!

16th century sundial at Tlacochahuaya, Mexico

Below is another rather more picturesque example of a sundial on the side of  a small chapel we saw  on a walk  near Meersburg, in south Germany., in summer 2018.

So how about at night or on cloudy days? The measuring of time was also done by using candle clocks and water clocks. The candle clock is sometimes connected to King Alfred the Great. A particular sized candle is found to take a measurable time to burn and thence time can be measured by burning a set number of these. This little video summarises the good and bad points of candle clocks rather well.

Water clocks (or clepsydra) were useful at night  except in very cold weather when the water might freeze! Using the same principle as a sandtimer or hour glass, they operated by filling and emptying a vessel at a controlled rate. It's the way I used to time my boiled egg with a sand--driven egg timer!
A source from Gottweig (Austria) says the sacristan would set the device carefully and when in the morning it "fell" he was to rise and if the sky was clear, check the time against the stars. Then if satisfied he was to open the door, light candles and set the clock by pouring water from he smaller to the larger basin, pulling the rope and the lead up and striking the bell. Possibly te device had    a float on the dropping surface of the water connected to a counterweight. Thus the wake up call to the sacristan was acoustic but not yet connected to the bell.
Premonstratensian statutes mention a device that made a sound and awoke the sacristan, who could set it so that it could be tripped to ring at certain times.
Evidence of their use in monasteries can be verified by Jocelyn de Brakelond using the water to put out a fire in his abbey at Bury St Edmunds  in 1199!

I think  monks used a combination of water, sundials and marked candles to measure time. But it still must have been approximate by our standards.

Now we will look at how time was relayed. Bells! But which bell? What did it mean? It would have been much quieter in the Middle Ages (no traffic noise...)and bells would have been more audible. Also I think a tolling bell would have gone on long enough to be heard.

The sacrist in a monastery was responsible for communicating the daily routine, when to get up, when to go to an Office, when to go into the chapter house, when to eat, and also when an important guest arrived, or the death of a monk. This meant choosing a bell or device and ringing or striking it in such a way that it conveyed the message. A large bell might denote major Hours like Lauds, Compline, Nocturns  or Vigils. A smaller bell might denote thde less important Hours : Prime, Terce, Sext, None. A little bell might denote time to eat or drink. A full peal of bells would be used for an important visitor. The death of a monk might be announced by using a wooden board - struck with sharp hard blows. Such a device was used at Bury St Edmunds. This may have been unusual because it is the Orthodox who used wooden boards called semantrons, from the 6th century before bells. There were even far more wooden semantrons in Constantinople than bells in 1453.

Bells were important and do we all remember "Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques. Dormez-vous, dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines, Ding dong ding ! Ding dong ding!" because that is what it is about!

Another example of how monks have got linked to ringing bells is this early Black Forest Monk Clock which I cann ot resist showing you!

There were cases of monasteries containing different orders of monks with differing timetables and therefore bells being rung and causing consternation and confusion!  This might even be done deliberately!

I suspect this may have been happened in St Albans with the town clock tower and Abbey bells. But I am jumping ahead. I shall cover this in a later post. The first known bell in St Albans Abbey was in Saxon times and given by a Wynfled in 1043. Abbot Paul de Caen put in 2 bells in the new Norman tower in the later 11th century and in succeeding centuries 3 more were donated. We can presume a maximum of 6 bells in the Middle Ages.



I

Introduction

What is this blog going to be about? Why am I doing it?

I want it to be fun. I have no wish to write a learned treatise. A quirky blog is more my style. I want to engage your interest in how monks actually lived and operated. My posts will not be referenced :

I' ve had enough of that  from teaching it when I was a librarian! (maybe I'll do a list of items used sometime). Instead I hope you will trust that  my stuff  is based on wide reading from the growing collection of  Monky Books in my man cave and some happy hours  eating and researching in the British Library.

My man cave

 I shall primarily be referring to the Benedictine tradition from  1066 to the 1530s, but I am not limiting myself too much at this stage. Crucially I want you also to know about our St Albans experience so every post  will contain this in italics.

I live in St Albans : within a few yards of the foremost English Abbey of the early Middle Ages. Every day I see the huge gatehouse of the former Abbey, as I walk into the town. I can easily take a walk across the vast green space beside the abbey church where the  monastic buildings stood. So much has disappeared, but for me the atmosphere is still there. Go inside the former abbey church (now the Cathedral since 1877) and there is a real presence - this building is alive - and what was it like for the monks here? How did they live? Going wider why did men (and women) dedicate themselves to God in such an extreme way?  It was so hard!

St Albans Abbey as it is today

Today there are still monks. I first realised this when I observed the plethora of orders spread about in front of me on St Peter's Square in Rome in 1975. Soon after that I was living in Enfield, north London and worshipping at the Priory of Christ the King, Cockfosters, run by Olivetan Benedictines. They wore white robes rather than the usual black and I was fortunate to hear Dom Edmund Jones preach regularly (usually between 5 and 10 minutes! Brilliant). I was first  married by a Benedictine. The communities at Cockfosters (unusually men and women) have  since moved to Turvey in Bedfordshire.

Earlier than this I can remember while visiting the great Baroque Abbey at Einsiedeln in Switzerland defending the monastic life to a group of young students with whom I was staying. I had already experienced the Baroque abbeys of Birnau (Germany) and St Florian (Austria) and was overcome by their exuberance and atmosphere. How did they relate to the usual austere view of monasteries? Seeds were being sown and now that I am retired and under the influence of that hulking great building over the road I am reflecting on what all this means.

I regret that the image of monasteries is being sullied now by the revelations of child abuse in Roman Catholic schools there. Ampleforth and Downside are the latest to hit the headlines. Ettal in Bavaria was some years ago. This is deeply shocking. This blog is not going to be an apologia : there were many dedicated monks in the Middle Ages as well as plenty of examples of where things went wrong. Indeed the whole history of monasticism is a succession of new beginnings with new orders of monks seeking to get back to a purer form of monasticism abiding by the rules.

The most famous set of rules  of these was the Rule of St Benedict from the 6th century. Yes, 6th century Italy!This was not the first set of rules and was not the only one used by monks thereafter but It became the most important and I shall refer to it occasionally. It was only by reading it (107 pages) that I realised how far short my own belief and practice as a Christian are  from it. But then I am  a lay person : to be a monk required vows and discipline!

But what use were monks? I can remember arguiung about this at Einsiedeln. I believe that it requires us to try to get into the mindset of the Middle Ages. Monastic foundations were usually paid for by royalty or nobiity as a kind of insurance policy against their sins in this world and hope for the next.Yet these places were the great centres of learning and produced chronicles : without them culture and society would not have developed at the same pace. Also it was here that bands of dedicatedt individuals prayed to God for the health and fortunes of their benefactors, and the whole world. The results can be seen in the magnificent buildings that they left behind behind : now sometimes cathedrals  and local churches. But the number  that were destroyed in England and Scotland is huge and many of us have no idea that a monastic foundation was in our own neighbourhood. eg

I am primarily interested in England but will not resist bringing in Scotland and some examples on the continent so we can appreciate the contrasting experience in Catholic countries. eg the story of Cluny has to be told.

Now the nub of all this : I am interested in practical everyday things like how they managed to get

up ; beer ; food ; toilets ; music.

I shall move in each post from general remarks on the topic and concluide with our likely St Albans experience in the Middle Ages. And occasionaly I will not resist going to other countries and later periods as a fascinating contrast. eg  how it all turned out in 18th century Germany in Baroque times.

Finally I said I wanted it to be fun. The video I am posting below from Youtube IS very informative and a good introduction. (it was made in 1950 for schools)You may not get through it all but the VOICE is so like Harry Enfield and one of his spoof films that I have to share one of these with you too.......