England in the Days of Old

by William Andrews

It is asserted that no clock in this country went accurately before the one was erected at Hampton Court, in 1540. Shakespeare, in his Love’s Labour’s Lost, gives us an idea of the unsatisfactory manner clocks kept time in the days of old. He says:—

... “Like a German clock,
Still a-repairing; ever out of frame;
And never going aright.”

Coming down to later times, we may give a few particulars of the difficulty of ascertaining the time in the country in the earlier years of the last century.

CLOCK, HAMPTON COURT PALACE.

Norrisson Scatcherd, the historian of Morley, near Leeds, gives in his history, published in 1830, an amusing sketch of a local worthy named John Jackson, better known as “Old Trash,” poet, schoolmaster, mechanic, stonecutter, land-measurer, etc., who was buried at Woodkirk on May 19th, 1764. “He constructed a clock, and in order to make it useful to the clothiers who attended Leeds market from Earls and Hanging Heaton, Dewsbury, Chickenley, etc., he kept a lamp suspended near the face of it, and burning through the winter nights, and he would have no shutters nor curtains to his window, so that the clothiers had only to stop and look through it to know the time. Now, in our age of luxury and refinement, the accomodation thus presented by ‘Old Trash’ may seem insignificant and foolish, but I can assure the reader that it was not. The clothiers in the early part of the eighteenth century were obliged to be upon the bridge at Leeds, where the market was held, by about six o’clock in the summer, and seven in the winter; and hither they were convened by a bell anciently pertaining to a Chantry Chapel, which once was annexed to Leeds Bridge. They did not all ride, but most went on foot. They did not carry watches, for few of them had ever possessed such a valuable. They did not dine on fish, flesh, and fowl, with wine, etc., as some do now. No! no! The careful housewife wrapped up a bit of oatcake and cheese in a little checked handkerchief, and charged her husband to mind and not get above a pint of ale at ‘The Rodney.’ Would Jackson’s clock then be of no use to men who had few such in their villages? Who seldom saw a watch, but took much of their intelligence from the note of the cuckoo.”

For an extended period, the curfew bell has been a most important time-teller. The sounds are no longer heard as the signal for putting out fires, as they were in the days of the Norman kings. It is generally asserted that William the Conqueror introduced the curfew custom into England, but it is highly probable that he only enforced a law which had long been in existence in the kingdom, and which prevailed in France, Italy, Spain, and other countries on the Continent. Houses at this period were usually built of wood, and fires were frequent and often fatal, and on the whole it was a wise policy to put out household fires at night. The fire as a rule was made in a hole in the middle of the floor, and the smoke escaped through the roof. In an account of the manners and customs of the English people, drawn up in 1678, the writer states that before the Reformation, “Ordinary men’s houses, as copyholders and the like, had no chimneys, but flues like louver holes; some of them were in being when I was a boy.” In the year 1103, Henry I. modified the curfew custom. In “Liber Albus,” we find a curious picture of London life under some of the Plantagenet kings, commencing with Edward I. It was against the city regulations for armed persons to wander about the city after the ringing of the curfew bell.

We may infer from a circumstance in the closing days of William I., that from a remote period there was a religious service at eight o’clock at night. It will be remembered that the king died from the injuries received by the plunging of his horse, caused by the animal treading on some hot ashes. Shortly before his death he was roused from the stupor which clouded his mind, by the ringing of the vesper bell of a neighbouring church. He asked if it were in England and if it were the curfew bell that he heard. On being told that he was in his “own Normandy,” and the bell was for evening prayer, he “charged them bid the monks pray for his soul, and remained for a while dull and heavy.”