[467] Iter Germanicum. Hamburgi, 1717, 8vo, p. 26.
[468] Lipsius De Milit. Rom. iv. 10, p. 198.—Bochart. Hierozoic. i.
[469] From the name of this instrument, called in some places of Germany a ratel, arose the appellation of ratelwache, which was established at Hamburg in 1671. In the Dutch language the words ratel, ratelaar, ratelen, ratelmann, ratelwagter (a night-watchman), are quite common.
[470] Stanihurst De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, lib. i. p. 33.
[471] Leges Walliæ. Lond. 1730, fol.
[472] The person whose turn it was to watch at the gates, was obliged to perform the duty himself, or to cause it to be performed by a fit and proper young citizen. Those who attended to trade and neglected the watch, paid for every omission one mark to the council. The case was the same with the watch on the tower in the market-place.
[473] In the Berlin police ordinance of the year 1580, it was ordered that the Raths-thurn oder Hausmann, steeple-watchman or city-musician, should attend at weddings with music for the accustomed pay, but only till the hour of nine at night, in order that he might then blow his horn on the steeple, and place the night-watch.
[474] Martini Atlas Sinens. p. 17. Matches or links, to which alarums are sometimes added, are employed in China to point out the hours; and these are announced by watchmen placed on towers who beat a drum. See Kæmpfer’s Japan, where the mention of matches is omitted. Thunberg says, “Time is measured here not by clocks or hour-glasses, but by burning matches, which are plaited like ropes, and have knots on them. When the match burns to a knot, which marks a particular lapse of time, the hour is announced, during the day, by a certain number of strokes on the bells in the temples; and in the night by watchmen who go round and give a like signal with two pieces of board, which they knock against each other.”
[475] A great deal of important information, which is as yet too little known, has been collected on this subject by Reiske, on Constantini Lib. de Ceremoniis Aulæ Byzant. ii. p. 74.
[476] This is related in the Oettingisches Geschichts-almanach, p. 7, on the authority of an account in the parish books of Oettingen, said to be extracted from an ancient chronicle of that town. The author of this almanac, which is now little known, was, as I have been told, Schablen, superintendant at Oettingen.