Time in the Middle Ages: An Early Personal Daily Schedule

Successful mechanical clocks were first installed some time before 1350AD in Europe. Before then there were water clocks and sand clocks used to record the passage of equal amounts of time and sundials to measure the passage of the hours of the day. Until the mechanical clock, hours were not uniform things, except within a day. An hour had been more or less defined as one-twelfth of the time between sunrise and sunset at a given location. This would lead to some significant variation in the length of an hour in, say the cities of the Hanseatic League and other northern cities around the North Sea and the Baltic which were increasingly important to Christendom with the loss of so many lands around the eastern and southern Mediterranean to Islam.

In addition, sub-freezing weather made water clocks high-maintenance devices in these areas and in the mountains elsewhere. The long periods of cloudiness away from these Mediterranean also made sundials not very useful.

At the same time, keeping time was increasingly important in the monasteries where the monastic disciplines laid out in some detail how the monks' days were to be spent. That some of the day was to be spent in prayer gave religious import and the sanction of sin to departures from the disciplines. In a monastery a great deal of responsibility fell on the shoulders of the monk who was supposed to ring the morning bell that woke everyone else. Some ingenuity was devoted to water-clock driven alarm clocks for this purpose. The mechanisms of these alarm clocks were important models for components of the earliest meachanical clocks.

Once the mechanical clock was somewhat reliable, it became an important fixture in many towns, occupying a prominent place in watch towers, bell towers, or newly built clock towers. As the cost came down, it became nearly universal not just in large or rich towns, but in smaller and poorer towns and eventually in villages. At first it may just have been a low-labor cost means of signalling time, but it came to be used for measuring labor time. Sometimes the workers wanted regularization of pay and hours; sometimes it was employers who sought to impose time discipline.

Around this period 1300-1342AD, a famous preacher, Domenico Calva, devoted two chapters of his book on spiritual discipline to the "waste of time" and to ht duty to "save and take account of time." One of the earliest personal daily schedules ever found dates from around 1500AD setting out the ideal day of an Italian businessman/merchant of the time.

Some conclusions from all of this and on other points in my readings: A community standard of times (not just days) was of sufficient benefit to monastic communities and towns that bells had been rung to mark some of those times. The mechanical clock was soon used for community time. It led to the shift from seasonally varying hours to uniform hours. In turn, this seems to have led to the idea of working by the hour instead of by the day or half-day. Within 200 years of the mechanical clock in the West, at least some Western businessmen found it important to think about scheduling their time.