Churches and Measurement

Churches are about time and eternity. They have from time immemorial been concerned with the cycles of life and season as well as matters that are beyond time. The church calendar is marked by numerous recurrent events, most obviously Christmas and Easter. Christmas was celebrated in Rome by the middle of the fourth century, the date subsuming and displacing the pagan festival of natalis solis invicti – the birthday of the unconquered sun – or the passing of the winter solstice as we would more prosaically regard it.

Easter is more interesting from a metrological point of view as it depends on the lunar calendar and therefore does not fall on a regular date in the solar calendar. Indeed the name Easter is possibly derived from the Phoenician Astarte, goddess of the moon and of the measurement of time. Words cognate with moon occur throughout the Indo-European group of languages and seem to be derived from the Sanskrit mā, to measure. Modern city dwellers can pass weeks or months without catching sight of the moon or giving it a moment’s thought, but to our ancestors the phases and revolutions of the moon were a reliable way of counting out the passage of the days over the course of the year, providing the rhythm for planting and harvest. The cycle of phases of the moon, or ‘mooneth’, provides our month of 28 days which could conveniently be divided into quarters or weeks.

Easter is celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the northern spring equinox (or rather after March 20 which was the equinox date in 325 when the system was codified). There are some calendrical complexities to this which have resulted in the discrepancy between Orthodox and Western Christian celebrations. However the calculation is derived, it is important because of other events in the church calendar which are tied to the date of Easter.

The division of time within the day owes something to the rise of monasticism. Traditionally it was convenient to divide the daylight into 12 hours and similarly the darkness, so the length of an hour varied with the seasons. The establishment of monastic communities required a system for canonical hours. There were seven of these regulating the cycle of prayers throughout the day – matins, prime, tierce, sext, none, vespers and compline. The day began with early morning prayers – matins – before sun-up. The activities of the day were then punctuated at the first, third, sixth and ninth hours, followed by the last two prayer vigils after dark. Curiously the ninth hour – none – which originally fell between midday and dusk migrated to an earlier time, eventually settling down as noon. This was perhaps the result of fasting which could not be broken until the ninth hour, a greater trial the further north one was on long summer days in Europe.[1]

King Alfred the Great in late ninth-century England developed the means of dividing the day into 24 equal hours. As his biographer Asser records, Alfred ‘had promised to render to God … one half of his mental and bodily effort both by day and night’. But there was a problem with this. Alfred had no means for accurately marking the passage of the hours at night. And even in the daytime, the frequent occurrence of rain and cloud made the passing hours uncertain. So Alfred ‘began to reflect on how he might be able (sustained by God’s mercy) to preserve the substance of his vow unfailingly until he died, by means of some enduring principle, without any kind of uncertainty’.

When he had thought about these things for some time, he at last hit upon a useful and intelligent solution. He instructed his chaplains to produce an ample quantity of wax, and, when they had brought it, he told them to weigh it against the weight of pennies on a two-pound balance. When a sufficient amount of wax, equivalent in weight to seventy-two pennies, had been measured out, he told the chaplains to make six candles out of it, each of equal size, so that each candle would be twelve inches long and would have the inches marked on it. Accordingly, once this plan had been devised, the six candles were lit so as to burn without interruption through the twenty-four hours of each day and night in the presence of the holy relics of a number of God’s chosen saints which the king always had with him everywhere.

One can only imagine that a great deal of trial and error went into this, to produce candles of just the right thickness (and consistency of wax and so on) that the six candles would burn in succession for the twenty-four hours at the rate of three inches an hour. It is also interesting to note this association of mass and length with time. And it seems Alfred would have understood very well that operations which work in the laboratory don’t necessarily work in the field. (One might suspect that Alfred famously burnt the cakes while attempting to develop an oven timer.) Asser’s account continues:

But because of the extreme violence of the wind, which sometimes blew day and night without stopping through the doors of the churches or through the numerous cracks in the windows, walls, wall-panels and partitions, and likewise through the thin material of the tents, the candles on occasion could not continue burning through an entire day and night up to the same hour that they had been lighted the evening before.

How long did it take Alfred and his chaplains to realise that the draught made the candles burn faster ‘so that they had finished their course before their appointed hour’? He overcame the problem with an ‘ingeniously and cleverly devised’ plan – to make a lantern out of wood and ox-horn. The thinly shaved ox-horn was translucent so the candle’s light could be seen (and the candle replaced when necessary) while remaining protected from the draught.[2]

Churches, as the focus of communal life by the middle ages, regulated people’s days in many ways. When for most people it was sufficient to estimate the time of day from the position of the sun, churches sometimes provided a more codified system of time keeping. A number of late Anglo-Saxon sundials survive in churches in Yorkshire in the north of England. The best preserved of these is built over the south doorway of St. Gregory’s Minster in the remote valley of Kirkdale on the edge of the North York Moors. The sundial is engraved on the vertical face of a large stone slab 236 cm long and 51 cm high and bears an inscription in Old English stating ‘This is the day’s sun-marker at every hour’. Another inscription on the stone indicates that St. Gregory’s was built about 1060, replacing an earlier church that ‘was completely ruined and collapsed’.[3]

The development of the mechanical clock two centuries or so later began a marked shift in society. The fourteenth century saw the equal hours of the mechanical clock supersede the seasonally variable hours that had previously predominated. When the first mechanical clock was developed, with an escapement to regulate the falling weight which drove it, cannot be precisely determined. But churches and churchmen were prominent in the erection of clocks. These were large mechanical devices with no hands or clockface, but tolled the hours by the chiming of bells. (Indeed, ‘clock’ is related to the French cloche and German Glocke, meaning ‘bell’.)

In the 1320s Roger Stoke built an astronomical tower clock for Norwich Cathedral, and a little later Richard of Wallingford built a tower clock for the abbey of St Alban’s, of which he was abbot. These clocks no longer survive but two turret clocks from later in the fourteenth century have been preserved. It is thought that the Salisbury Cathedral clock was constructed in 1386 and installed in a thirteenth-century bell tower. In the eighteenth century it was removed to the Cathedral tower where it worked until 1884. In the 1950s it was conserved and has since been on display in the Cathedral nave. The Wells Cathedral clock dates from 1392 and, with various modifications, remained in use at Wells until 1835. It subsequently moved to London and is now in the Science Museum there.[4] In time it became commonplace for church towers, as the dominant building of towns and villages, to have a mechanical clock by which the community could regulate its comings and goings (Figure 1).

Figure 1:
Elaborate tower clock on St Mary’s Church, Rye, Sussex, from a cabinet card photograph, c. 1890. The clock face and the ‘Quarter-Boys’ above – they strike the quarters but not the hours – date from 1760 but the clock itself was constructed in 1561-62 and is said to be the oldest functioning church turret clock in England. The inscription between the Quarter-Boys reads ‘For our time is a very shadow that passeth away’, a quotation from Ch. 2, V. 5 of The Wisedome of Solomon, a book of the Apocrypha in the King James Bible.

Time has its place within churches also. Sermons were given by the hour-glass. These seem to have come into use in English churches in the sixteenth century and have been widespread by the middle of the following century. There is a record from the accounts of Christ Church, St. Catherine’s, Aldgate in London for the year 1564: ‘Paid for an hour-glass that hangeth by the pulpitt when the preacher doth make a sermon that he may know how the hour passeth away’.[5]
The hour-glass was hardly an expensive item. We find another entry – ‘Payde for an houre-glass for the pulpit, 4d’ – in churchwardens’ accounts from Abingdon, near Oxford. Yet it was a very useful one. A rector in the Gloucestershire village of Bibury, we are told,

used to preach two hours, regularly turning the glass. After the text, the esquire of the parish withdrew, smoaked his pipe, and returned to the blessing.

As the author of the 1853 article from which these accounts are quoted comments: ‘One advantage presented by this ancient and precise practice [the use of hour-glasses] was, that the squire of the parish knew exactly when it was time to put out his pipe and return for the blessing, which he cannot ascertain under the present uncertain and indefinite mode of preaching’.[6]

The use of hour-glasses continued into the eighteenth century, but by then watches were becoming more readily available and hour-glasses increasingly redundant. In 1811, or perhaps earlier, the large silver hour-glass formerly used in St. Dunstan’s, Fleet Street, London, was melted down to make two staff heads for the parish beadles.[7] By the middle of the nineteenth century, they were purely of antiquarian interest.

Apart from time, churches have sometimes been associated with other types of measurement. Jakob Köbel, in his Geometrei published in Frankfurt in 1535, has a delightful illustration showing the method of constructing a rod measure. Sixteen men in their Sunday best – including soft leather shoes which they leave on – are lined up heel to toe as they emerge from church.[8]

Churches could also house more permanent indications of linear measure. At some time towards the end of the twelfth century, as the building of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral was well advanced – building had been going on for about 100 years although it was not finished until 1310 – a charter referred to ’57 feet by the foot of Algar which is sculptured on the base of a column in the church of St. Paul’.[9] Algar is thought to have been a prebendary in the early twelfth century and was perhaps responsible for incorporation of this useful feature in a convenient public location. It was more generally referred to as the foot of St. Paul’s and seems to have been identical with the royal standard foot of twelve inches. As with ensuring the consistency of weights and measures in trade, this public ‘foot of St. Paul’s’ seems to have been particularly relevant in land transactions. References to the foot of St. Paul’s continue with diminishing frequency up to the end of the fifteenth century and by the time the cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 the inscribed column was perhaps considered no more than its neighbouring columns. Still, such a public standard of measure was a novel innovation. A number of public standards of length were erected on buildings in Victorian Britain, such as the one that can still be seen by the entrance to the old Royal Observatory at Greenwich in London.

‘A false balance is abomination to the Lord but a just weight is his delight.’ These words look down on the shoppers browsing through tee-shirts and cheap jewellery in the market hall in Greenwich, just down the hill from the old Royal Observatory. Originally they looked down on bakers and butchers supplying more fundamental needs to the local people. The sentence is the first verse of chapter XI of Proverbs in Noah Webster’s 1833 edition of the Bible.

Churches have played some role in maintaining just weights. The photograph in Figure 2 is from an old postcard captioned ‘Ancient Weights and Measures in Brookland Church’. Brookland is a little village lying between Romney Marsh and Walland Marsh, Kent. Edward Hasted described Brookland at the end of the eighteenth century:

The village is neat and rather pleasant, considering the situation, and the houses, as well as inhabitants, are of a better sort than are usually seen in the Marsh. The church stands in the middle of it.[10]

Figure 2:
Weights and Measures at St Augustine’s Church, Brookland, Kent, from an old postcard, c.1910. Brookland is a few kilometres to the north east of Rye.

The Church of St Augustine was built in the mid thirteenth century. The feature which first strikes the visitor is the detached wooden belfry to the left of the porch. On entering one is immediately drawn to the twelfth century lead font which bears the signs of the zodiac and occupations of the months, a feature of medieval calendars. Turning to the right, to the west end of the church, the ancient weights and measures are still to be seen, now secured behind glass. These were made by Vincent of London Bridge in 1795 for the Hundred of Aloesbridge which includes the parish of Brookland.

The iron-banded wooden corn measures, liquid measures and brass ell are overshadowed by the great beam scales. This is said to be the only set in existence in a church in Kent and the oldest Hundred set that remains.[11]

Whether these weights and measures were specifically related to tithes as the guide book suggests, I am not so sure. They may have been, like the foot of St. Paul’s, intended to provide consistent and reliable measures for commercial transactions in the district. Hasted recorded that ‘A fair is held here yearly on the feast of St. Peter ad Vincula, or Lammas-day, being August 1, for toys and pedlary’. Coming at the end of summer, this was a harvest celebration with traders coming to buy produce as well as those selling ‘toys and pedlary’, meaning small manufactured goods such as metal tools and woven cloth that could not be produced locally. This was probably the chief occasion when the weights and measures of the Hundred of Aloesbridge were at their most active. Hasted tells us that

The lands towards the south [of the parish of Brookland] are by far the most fertile, for towards Snargate they are very poor and wet, and much covered with rushes and thistles. It consists in general of marsh-land, there not being above thirty acres of land ploughed throughout the parish, which altogether contains about 1730 acres of land.

The tithe regulations dating back to the fourteenth century indicate the variety of produce of such a marsh-bound community: ‘hay, calves, chicken, lambs, pigs, geese, hens, eggs, ducks, pidgeons, bees, honey, wax, swans, wool, milkmeats [cheese], pasture, flax, hemp, garden-herbs, apples, vetches, merchandizes, fishings, foulings, and all other manner of small tithes arising from all things whatsoever’.[12]

So as you sit down to your next feast, give a thought for those who have feasted before you, what it was they were celebrating, and how, in a world before supermarkets, the feast marked the cycles of the seasons and of people’s lives.

Notes
[1] Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality – Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 33-34. As a child, watching the matinee movie on TV in the afternoon was a puzzle I have still not solved!

[2] Asser’s Life of King Alfred, sections 103-104, in Alfred the Great, translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Penguin Classics, 1983), pp. 107-09.

[3] Richard Fletcher, St. Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale (1990).

[4] F.A.B. Ward, Time Measurement (London, 1966), pp. 31-32.

[5] Quoted by A.W.S., ‘On the use of the hour-glass in pulpits’, Notes and Queries, Vol. 7 (18 June 1853), p. 590.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Notes and Queries, Vol. 8 (23 July 1853), p. 83

[8] This is illustrated in R.D. Connor, The Weights and Measures of England (London: 1987), fig. 21; see p. 44 for discussion.

[9] Quoted by Connor, op. cit., p. 85

[10] Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol. 8 (1799), p. 382.

[11] Anne Roper, The Church of St. Augustine Brookland, Thirteenth Edition (1997), pp. 11-12.

[12] Hasted, op. cit., pp. 385-86.

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	Figure 1: Elaborate tower clock on St Mary’s Church, Rye, Sussex, from a cabinet card photograph, c. 1890. The clock face and the ‘Quarter-Boys’ above – they strike the quarters but not the hours – date from 1760 but the clock itself was constructed in 1561-62 and is said to be the oldest functioning church turret clock in England. The inscription between the Quarter-Boys reads ‘For our time is a very shadow that passeth away’, a quotation from Ch. 2, V. 5 of The Wisedome of Solomon, a book of the Apocrypha in the King James Bible.
Time has its place within churches also. Sermons were given by the hour-glass. These seem to have come into use in English churches in the sixteenth century and have been widespread by the middle of the following century. There is a record from the accounts of Christ Church, St. Catherine’s, Aldgate in London for the year 1564: ‘Paid for an hour-glass that hangeth by the pulpitt when the preacher doth make a sermon that he may know how the hour passeth away’.[5] The hour-glass was hardly an expensive item. We find another entry – ‘Payde for an houre-glass for the pulpit, 4d’ – in churchwardens’ accounts from Abingdon, near Oxford. Yet it was a very useful one. A rector in the Gloucestershire village of Bibury, we are told, used to preach two hours, regularly turning the glass. After the text, the esquire of the parish withdrew, smoaked his pipe, and returned to the blessing. As the author of the 1853 article from which these accounts are quoted comments: ‘One advantage presented by this ancient and precise practice [the use of hour-glasses] was, that the squire of the parish knew exactly when it was time to put out his pipe and return for the blessing, which he cannot ascertain under the present uncertain and indefinite mode of preaching’.[6] The use of hour-glasses continued into the eighteenth century, but by then watches were becoming more readily available and hour-glasses increasingly redundant. In 1811, or perhaps earlier, the large silver hour-glass formerly used in St. Dunstan’s, Fleet Street, London, was melted down to make two staff heads for the parish beadles.[7] By the middle of the nineteenth century, they were purely of antiquarian interest. Apart from time, churches have sometimes been associated with other types of measurement. Jakob Köbel, in his Geometrei published in Frankfurt in 1535, has a delightful illustration showing the method of constructing a rod measure. Sixteen men in their Sunday best – including soft leather shoes which they leave on – are lined up heel to toe as they emerge from church.[8] Churches could also house more permanent indications of linear measure. At some time towards the end of the twelfth century, as the building of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral was well advanced – building had been going on for about 100 years although it was not finished until 1310 – a charter referred to ’57 feet by the foot of Algar which is sculptured on the base of a column in the church of St. Paul’.[9] Algar is thought to have been a prebendary in the early twelfth century and was perhaps responsible for incorporation of this useful feature in a convenient public location. It was more generally referred to as the foot of St. Paul’s and seems to have been identical with the royal standard foot of twelve inches. As with ensuring the consistency of weights and measures in trade, this public ‘foot of St. Paul’s’ seems to have been particularly relevant in land transactions. References to the foot of St. Paul’s continue with diminishing frequency up to the end of the fifteenth century and by the time the cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 the inscribed column was perhaps considered no more than its neighbouring columns. Still, such a public standard of measure was a novel innovation. A number of public standards of length were erected on buildings in Victorian Britain, such as the one that can still be seen by the entrance to the old Royal Observatory at Greenwich in London. ‘A false balance is abomination to the Lord but a just weight is his delight.’ These words look down on the shoppers browsing through tee-shirts and cheap jewellery in the market hall in Greenwich, just down the hill from the old Royal Observatory. Originally they looked down on bakers and butchers supplying more fundamental needs to the local people. The sentence is the first verse of chapter XI of Proverbs in Noah Webster’s 1833 edition of the Bible. Churches have played some role in maintaining just weights. The photograph in Figure 2 is from an old postcard captioned ‘Ancient Weights and Measures in Brookland Church’. Brookland is a little village lying between Romney Marsh and Walland Marsh, Kent. Edward Hasted described Brookland at the end of the eighteenth century: The village is neat and rather pleasant, considering the situation, and the houses, as well as inhabitants, are of a better sort than are usually seen in the Marsh. The church stands in the middle of it.[10]
Figure 2: Weights and Measures at St Augustine’s Church, Brookland, Kent, from an old postcard, c.1910. Brookland is a few kilometres to the north east of Rye.
The Church of St Augustine was built in the mid thirteenth century. The feature which first strikes the visitor is the detached wooden belfry to the left of the porch. On entering one is immediately drawn to the twelfth century lead font which bears the signs of the zodiac and occupations of the months, a feature of medieval calendars. Turning to the right, to the west end of the church, the ancient weights and measures are still to be seen, now secured behind glass. These were made by Vincent of London Bridge in 1795 for the Hundred of Aloesbridge which includes the parish of Brookland. The iron-banded wooden corn measures, liquid measures and brass ell are overshadowed by the great beam scales. This is said to be the only set in existence in a church in Kent and the oldest Hundred set that remains.[11] Whether these weights and measures were specifically related to tithes as the guide book suggests, I am not so sure. They may have been, like the foot of St. Paul’s, intended to provide consistent and reliable measures for commercial transactions in the district. Hasted recorded that ‘A fair is held here yearly on the feast of St. Peter ad Vincula, or Lammas-day, being August 1, for toys and pedlary’. Coming at the end of summer, this was a harvest celebration with traders coming to buy produce as well as those selling ‘toys and pedlary’, meaning small manufactured goods such as metal tools and woven cloth that could not be produced locally. This was probably the chief occasion when the weights and measures of the Hundred of Aloesbridge were at their most active. Hasted tells us that The lands towards the south [of the parish of Brookland] are by far the most fertile, for towards Snargate they are very poor and wet, and much covered with rushes and thistles. It consists in general of marsh-land, there not being above thirty acres of land ploughed throughout the parish, which altogether contains about 1730 acres of land. The tithe regulations dating back to the fourteenth century indicate the variety of produce of such a marsh-bound community: ‘hay, calves, chicken, lambs, pigs, geese, hens, eggs, ducks, pidgeons, bees, honey, wax, swans, wool, milkmeats [cheese], pasture, flax, hemp, garden-herbs, apples, vetches, merchandizes, fishings, foulings, and all other manner of small tithes arising from all things whatsoever’.[12] So as you sit down to your next feast, give a thought for those who have feasted before you, what it was they were celebrating, and how, in a world before supermarkets, the feast marked the cycles of the seasons and of people’s lives. Notes [1] Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality – Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 33-34. As a child, watching the matinee movie on TV in the afternoon was a puzzle I have still not solved! [2] Asser’s Life of King Alfred, sections 103-104, in Alfred the Great, translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Penguin Classics, 1983), pp. 107-09. [3] Richard Fletcher, St. Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale (1990). [4] F.A.B. Ward, Time Measurement (London, 1966), pp. 31-32. [5] Quoted by A.W.S., ‘On the use of the hour-glass in pulpits’, Notes and Queries, Vol. 7 (18 June 1853), p. 590. [6] Ibid. [7] Notes and Queries, Vol. 8 (23 July 1853), p. 83 [8] This is illustrated in R.D. Connor, The Weights and Measures of England (London: 1987), fig. 21; see p. 44 for discussion. [9] Quoted by Connor, op. cit., p. 85 [10] Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol. 8 (1799), p. 382. [11] Anne Roper, The Church of St. Augustine Brookland, Thirteenth Edition (1997), pp. 11-12. [12] Hasted, op. cit., pp. 385-86. Visit the Metrology Society of Australia web site