The learned Lorente has reprinted the "Concilium" also in his work entitled Monumens Historiques concernant les deux Pragmatiques Sanctions. There can, therefore, be no just grounds for doubting the character of this precious article.
Bibliothecar. Chetham.
PULPIT HOUR-GLASSES.
(Vol. viii., pp. 82. 209. 279. 328. 454. 525.)
I should be glad to see some more information in your pages relative to the early use of the pulpit hour-glass. It is said that the ancient fathers preached, as the old Greek and Roman orators declaimed, by this instrument; but were the sermons of the ancient fathers an hour long? Many of those in St. Augustine's ten volumes might be delivered with distinctness in seven or eight minutes; and some of those of Latimer and his contemporaries, in about the same time. But, Query, are not the printed sermons of these divines merely outlines, to be filled up by the preacher extempore? Dyos, in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross, in 1570, speaking of the walking and profane talking in the church at sermon time, also laments how they grudged the preacher his customary hour. So that an hour seems to have been the practice at the Reformation.
The hour-glass was used equally by the Catholics and Protestants. In an account of the fall of the house in Blackfriars, where a party of Romanists were assembled to hear one of their preachers, in 1623, the preacher is described as—
"Having on a surplice, girt about his middle with a linnen girdle, and a tippet of scarlet on both his shoulders. He was attended by a man that brought after him his book and hour-glass."—See The Fatal Vespers, by Samuel Clark, London, 1657.
In the Preface to the Bishops' Bible, printed by John Day in 1569, Archbishop Parker is represented with an hour-glass at his right hand. And in a work by Franchinus Gaffurius, entitled Angelicum ac Divinum opus Musice, printed at Milan in 1508, is a curious representation of the author seated in a pulpit, with a book in his hand; an hour-glass on one side, and a bottle on the other; lecturing to an audience of twelve persons. This woodcut is engraved in the second volume of Hawkins' History of Music, p. 333.