We know the lovely medieval system of hours: lauds, terce, vespers, compline, etc.
When, roughly, did Western Europe move away from this to the modern (?) 12-hour system of one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock (rock!) I’m guessing it was different in different countries, but, just roughly, when did the shift take place?
(I Googled all up and down, and couldn’t find it. But I think my Google skills could fit inside an iota and still leave room for two camels.)
I don’t think it’s correct to think that the canonical hours were used for measuring or marking time, and were supplanted in this role by the system we use today.
The system we use today is pre-Christian; it goes back to the Romans who divided the day into twelve hours and marked time as, e.g., at the third hour, at the sixth hour. The Roman day ran from sunrise to sunset, which means that the duration of an hour varied over the course of the hour. While the day was divided into twelve “hours”, the night was divided into four “watches” which, again, varied in duration over the course of the year. The hours became a standard unvarying length once mechanical clocks were developed.
The canonical hours were not units of time; they were liturgical observance. “Vespers”, for instance, is not a particular time; it’s a particular set of devotions celebrated at around a particular time. Likewise Prime, Terce, Sext and None are not times of the day; they are devotions which are so called because they are observed at the first hour, the third hour, the sixth hour and the ninth hour in the Roman system.
Well…okay… But when did church bells stop ringing canonical chimes and start ringing o’clock chimes? Or am I still barking up the wrong campanile?
If you’re in Granada in 1550, having lunch with Carlos the First, and the sundial says 12:00, what do the bells ring?
(Not homework, by the way: for a novel I’d like to try to write. Frustrated novelist. I did find a LOVELY set of references to Carlos’ palace in the Alhambra. Pretty!)
(Charles I of Spain, Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Sort of like England’s/Scotland’s King James I/VI.)
I’m pretty sure that at a place that observes those rites - like a monastery - the bells still ring to announce them rather than on the hour.
I think as suggested before that you’re conflating two different uses of church bells. One is to mark time, the other is to announce an event. Think of it like a school bell ringing to end class or begin lunch period.
Yup. I don’t know when church bell started ringing to mark the passage of time; probably at about the same time as church steeples started to incorporate mechanical clocks. The primary and, in most places, still normative use of church bells is to call people to some devotion - mass, the angelus, the divine office, whatever.
Wouldn’t noon be the same moment by the clock or by the Roman variable-length hours system? [Particularly as before standard time zones, I think noon was generally the reference point to set the local clock to, so it was 12:00 by definition].
Wouldn’t it be when Church Clocks began ? I’ve never heard of* Church Bell-Ringing* telling the time. In England at least other than weddings ( maybe funerals as in the past, but I’ve not heard that personally ) and ‘joyful occasions’, and… putatively… national invasions, church bells are there to announce services. Clocks strike the hour.
Also I imagine bell-ringing happens for practice and bell-ringers’ fun (* sounds like a 19th century medical condition* ), but in that case maybe the bells are muffled, which rather spoils it for them.
I see from wiki, they are called Turret Clocks and first became widespread in the 13th century. Those from the 1200s seem to be instanced from England ( verge and foliot mechanism ) although as with spectacles I would associate their invention [ as distinct from water clocks which it says Europe had 4000 years ago ] with Italy and development by Germany.
Grin! You know you need your ignorance fought when you can’t even ask the right question!
I had thought that in the early medieval times, there was a specific kind of ringing – like a specific “Vespers Bell” or a specific Vespers “signature” – dit dit dah? 
– that they rang when that was the hour. Something different at nones, etc. I had thought that some time in the Renaissance they switched over to ringing the number of the hour.
All of this seems wrong, but I still don’t know what I would be hearing in, say, Granada in 1550.
Twelve strokes of a big bell at noon?
In Granada today if you hear a bell at noon, it will likely be the angelus bell, since the angelus is a devotion traditionally recited at midday (and at 6am and 6pm). The angelus bell is a peal of 18 strikes of a single bell, grouped thus: 3-3-3-9.
I don’t know if there was ever a time when you would have heard the hour struck. Do they go in for church clocks in Granada?
I’m guess that if you had heard a bell at noon in 1550, it would have been the angelus. But you’d need to do your research to find out whether the angelus was a devotion practiced in Granada in the mid-sixteenth century, and whether it was signalled by bell-ringing and (for the honours students, this one) whether the conventional peal was the same as today.
What would you have heard at 1pm or 2pm? Most likely nothing. You would have heard bells before the start of mass, but mass was always celebrated in the morning. The peal to signal the start of mass is a minute or two of steady ringing, but no particular number of strikes.
Cool beans: thank you for the hints! I really did try to research this, but the details always seem hard to come up with!
Well, plus or minus half an hour. Noon was the actual time when the sun was highest in the sky, not fixed to be the same time throughout a 15 degree band of a modern time zone.
My understanding was that throughout most of the US the change to actually caring exactly what time it was came with railroads. They had reasonably accurate clocks before that but no real reason to care about the specifics. The first public clock in most towns in this era was in the train station.
Plus, actually measuring noon with the technology of the time would have been fairly tricky. The “highest point” is a different point each day of the year, so you don’t know that the sun has reached its highest point until it has started to descend discernibly, at which point, obviously, it’s past noon. and what can you do on an overcast day?
So, before the modern era and the invention of reliable clockwork timepieces, any signal rung at noon (whether a chime of hours or an angelus bell or anything else) would be rung at noon-ish.
So I carried on reading this stuff and came across this page: A Chronology of Clocks
linked from NAWCC History of Timepieces
1284 - Repairs done to the church bells, musical instruments and clock in Exeter Cathedral.
1300 ca. - Pierre Pipelart built the first recorded public clock in Paris.
1322 -1325 - A large astronomical clock with automata installed in Norwich Cathedral Priory.
1336 - Galvano Fiamma Hour striking described in the clock of San Gotardo in Milan. The clock is described as having a very large bell which is struck 24 times with one at the first hour, two at the second and so on.
1348 - A striking clock recorded in London.
1512 - Cocchleus in Cosmographia Pomponii Melae notes that in Nuremberg, striking clocks were being made small enough to be worn in a purse or pouch. He also refers to Peter Hele (Henlein) making timepieces which, without any weights and in any position, indicate and go for forty hours.
1535 - 1538 - Juanelo Torriano makes clocks for Emperor Charles V.
1575 - Ambrosio de Morales. Las Antiquedades de Las Ciudades de Espana records that Juanelo, clockmaker to Charles V used a machine to cut teeth on wheels.
1598 - King Philip II of Spain offers a substantial reward of cash and a life pension for anyone who can discover the longitude.
etc. etc.
So they could have had tower clocks in Granada if England and Paris had them in the 13th century. Spain was probably richer, though of course they had only just taken back Granada, which would have had few church towers prior to the Moor’s Last Sigh.
Thank you, you’ve just solved a years-old mystery for me!
I used to live near a Catholic church and used to hear this pattern of chimes every day. I always wondered why the number of chimes didn’t match the hour.
I live in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County in California; I attended Redondo High in Redondo Beach. Right across Pacific Coast Highway from the school was ( and still is) St. James Catholic Church, whose bell tower rings quarter hours like Big Ben and marks off the hour, except that noon and midnight are announced with six sets of three rings each.
It’s not as hard as you seem to think. You don’t have to know when the sun has reached its highest point, because that happens precisely when it crosses the local meridian, the north-south line that, by definition separates morning from afternoon (hence Ante Meridian and Post Meridian). On days with clear skies, that can easily be observed using a sundial or any stucture that is aligned with the meridian, such as a Ptolemy Stone.
Accurate clocks were very important for navigating the open sea, and were an important contribution to the age of exploration. In addition to being a boon to scientists. You’re right that the average person didn’t care so much until regular train service came along, though.
Humorous author Richard Armour, commenting on the play “Julius Caesar,” quotes Brutus at one point “Caesar, 'Tis strucken eight,” and notes that Brutus, whose native language is Latin, can be excused an occasional monstrosity in English. Armour adds, “What is less excusable is is saying that the clock has struck, since they were using sundials in those days. He may have heard a shadow tapping lightly on the VIII.”
The change with railroads was not so much a matter of the accuracy of anyone’s timepieces, which were extremely precise by the mid-19th century. It was that every town had a different time, i.e., used its own version of local noon. Keeping trains “on time” required that everyone at all the stops along the way agreed on what time it was, so that when you went to the station to catch the 12:05, you wouldn’t discover that it had left 15 minutes earlier. This led to the creation of standardized time zones.
But before that, anyone with a decent clock or watch could know fairly precisely what time it was. He/she just wouldn’t necessarily have agreed with someone from another place some distance away.