Medieval Europe
In the year 430 the Vandals, who had crossed the Mediterranean not long before, were battering at the walls of St Augustine's home town as he lay there dying. This can be regarded as symbolic. For, in its great days, particularly in the age of the Antonines in the second century, the Roman empire had been primarily a civilization of towns. These were very different from the haphazard constructions of medieval Europe. They were deliberately planned with their streets laid out in orthogonal grid-systems like the great cities of Hellenistic times, such as Alexandria and Antioch. The decay of the Roman empire was most clearly revealed by the decline of towns and increasing ruralization. This transformation occurred primarily in the northern and western provinces, which were always more of a liability and less a source of wealth and culture than the southern and eastern provinces. For example, Africa supplied Rome with two-thirds of its corn, transported in the great grain ships which must have been among the most impressive sights of antiquity. The northern and western provinces were comparatively much less developed and the principal towns in them, such as Segovia, Arles, York, and Cologne, were primarily military camps.
Among the causes of the fall of the Roman empire were successive attacks by barbarians. Although in the sixth century the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's great generals Belisarius and Narses succeeded in reconquering much of the west, so that for a time the Mediterranean again became a Roman lake, in the following century Europe faced a dangerous new enemy. Fanatical warriors inspired by a new and militaristic religion, Islam, brought about the final break between East and West. By the year 700 learning in western Europe was confined to Ireland and the coast of Northumbria. The only centres of learning were the monasteries in those remote areas, and it is in one of these, founded in 682 at Jarrow by a wealthy Northumbrian nobleman turned monk, Benedict Biscop, that we find 'the first scientific intellect produced by the Germanic peoples of Europe'.1The Venerable Bede ( 673-735) spent most of his life at Jarrow as a Benedictine monk, praying, reading, and teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He was ordained priest by St John of Beverley, so gaining the title 'Venerable', which was a rare dignity among monks, but the usual form of address for a priest at that time. A really great scholar, he had a unique opportunity to develop his abilities, because Biscop had brought back to Jarrow some 200 to 300 antique books that he had managed to acquire in southern Italy. Bede also had access to the library collected by Bishop Acca at Hexham.2 He was thus able to acquire an unusually extensive knowledge for his day of ancient literature, including the works of St Augustine and the scientific writings of the elder Pliny.
Bede's main object in life was to transmit his knowledge in intelligible form to his contemporaries and successors, and in this he was eminently successful. As Sir Arthur Bryant has so vividly put it, 'That life of scholarship and labour, with the tireless hand writing amid the intervals of prayer and teaching, sometimes so frozen that it could hardly grip the pen, is one of the proud memories of England.'3 In all Bede wrote thirty- five works, of which twenty were commentaries on Exodus, Proverbs, and other books of the Bible and six were works of chronology. His most famous book The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation was the first historical work produced in England. Written in Latin, it was translated into English towards the end of the ninth century by Alfred the Great. Containing a greater proportion of secular matter than the Church history of Eusebius, it was based partly on written material and partly on the memories of men still living. A considerable part of medieval historiography was based upon it. In particular, Bede had a direct influence on the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century through his pupil Egbert, who became Archbishop of York and trained Alcuin, who under Charlemagne founded the Frankish schools that did so much to stimulate learning on the Continent.
Bede's writings are of considerable importance in the history of chronology. This had already become a subject of crucial significance in England during the course of the seventh century. Although the death in battle of Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, in 655 sealed the victory of Christianity over heathenism, this important event was overshadowed by dissension between the Roman and Celtic Churches. The principal source of discord concerned the date of Easter. Our present rules for its determination (see Appendix 3), as set out in the Book of Common Prayer, follow the Roman tradition whereby Easter Day is the first Sunday after the first full moon following (or on) 21 March. But if full moon occurs on a Sunday then Easter Day is the following Sunday. The reason for this was to avoid concurrence with the Jewish Passover. (The expression 'full moon' means the fourteenth day of the moon reckoned from its first appearance.) The Celtic Church, founded in the sixth century by St Columba with the aid of Irish-trained monks, followed Rome in always celebrating Easter on a Sunday, unlike the eastern Churches; but owing to its remoteness the Celtic Church experienced difficulty in being kept fully informed of doctrinal and other changes decided on in Rome. Consequently, unlike Canterbury, it failed to keep in line with the Roman practice when the fourteenth day of the moon fell on a Sunday. As a result, by the middle of the seventh century a peculiar difficulty had arisen in Northumbria. For, although King Oswy followed the Celtic practice, his consort, Queen Eanfleda, who had with her a Kentish priest named Romanus, adhered to the Roman practice. Most years this gave rise to no special problem, but eventually there was an occasion when the king's enjoyment of the Easter Feast was spoilt by the absence of his queen, who was still fasting because for her it was Palm Sunday.
To resolve the problem of Easter and other points of dispute between the Churches, Oswy convened the Synod of Whitby in 664. In chapter 24 of his Ecclesiastical History Bede gives an account of what took place. Oswy was probably unable to follow in detail the abstruse arguments put forward, but in the end he decided to accept the Roman practice, on the grounds that at the gates of heaven the keys are held by St Peter, and against him he would not contend. 'The king having said this, all present, both great and small, gave their assent, and renouncing the more imperfect institution resolved to conform to that which they found to be better.'4 Henceforth, the English Churches were to have the advantages of the unity and discipline that the Church of Rome had inherited from the Empire.
Bede not only compiled a detailed account of this important Synod but in another of his treatises, De temporum ratione ('On the Reckoning of Time'), written in 725 and generally regarded as his scientific master- piece, he computed Easter tables for the period 532 to 1063 and also made a first attempt at a general chronology of the world down to the reign of the contemporary Byzantine emperor, Leo the Isaurian. Chapter 29 of that work is remarkable for containing the first scientific investigation of the tides, involving the earliest 'establishment of a port', that is, the mean interval between the time of high water and that of the previous transit of the meridian by the moon.
It was also through Bede that the AD system of reckoning the years from the Incarnation of Christ, that had been devised two centuries before by Dionysius Exiguus, was introduced into England. Dionysius' cycle of the year began with 25 March, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. From the time of Bede the Christian era became established for the dating of charters, but at first only in England. According to R. L. Poole, 'It passed to the Continent by the means of Anglo-Saxon missionaries and scholars. St Boniface took it with him into the Frankish kingdom. But it does not appear to have been regularly employed in the Royal Chancery until the last quarter of the ninth century, from which time it became a fixed element in diplomas.'5 It was not until the pontificate of Pope John XIII, elected in 965, that the Papacy began dating by the year of the Incarnation, but the practice was not uniformly adopted until the time of Pope Leo IX, elected in 1048.
Chapter 35 of Bede De temporum ratione is the locus classicus of the concept of the 'ages of man', the medieval division of human life into a number of distinct periods best known to us today through the speech on the 'seven ages of man' by Jaques in Shakespeare As You Like It (Act II, scene 7). Most ancient and medieval writers thought of human life not as a continuous development but instead as punctuated by a number of sudden changes from one 'age' to the next. (This idea was extended to prehistory by the social anthropologist A. van Gennep who, in 1909, introduced the term les rites de passage for the rituals originally associated with such changes in the life of the individual.) Bede was the first Englishman to describe the theory of the four 'ages of man'. For the source of this we must go back to the Pythagoreans of the sixth century BC, whose cosmological speculations were based on the 'tetracys', that is, the geometrical symbol composed of ten discrete points symmetrically arranged in the form of an equilateral triangle with sides of four points each. The number four came to be associated with many natural phenomena, for example the four seasons, the four cardinal directions, and the four elements of the Greek theory of matter from Empedocles to Aristotle.
For some 2,000 years great significance continued to be attributed to the number four. For example, long after Bede, in his Boke of Nurture John Russell, who had been Marshal of the household of the great patron of learning, the youngest son of Henry IV, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester ( 1391- 1447), described how the four courses of an elaborate fish-dinner that he had prepared for his master and guests was accompanied by appropriate 'subtleties', or ornamental devices. During the first course Duke Humphrey's guests were to contemplate the representation of a 'galaunt yonge man' standing on a cloud (signifying the element 'air') at the beginning of spring (associated with the sanguine humour). During the next course they were faced by the representation of a 'man of warre' standing in fire (associated with summer and the choleric humour); and while consuming the third course they were confronted by the form of a man with a 'sikelle in his hande' standing in a river (signifying water and the phlegmatic humour associated with autumn and harvest-time). The fourth and final course, which came with spices and wine, ushered in a representation of winter in the form of a man 'with his lokkys grey, febille and old' sitting on a cold hard stone (signifying the element 'earth and the melancholy humour). 'Thus,' as J. A. Burrow remarks, as Duke Humphrey's guests worked their way through this very unpenitential fish banquet, they were invited to see in it the four courses of their own life's feast.'6
Although Bede discusses the theory of the 'four ages and even refers to the alternative concept of the 'six ages' he makes no mention of the ,seven ages' later described by Shakespeare. He could not mention it because it was not known in the Latin West before the revival of learning in the 'renaissance of the twelfth century' (a useful term due to the American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins, who introduced it in 1927). The idea of the 'seven ages' unlike that of the four, was astrological in origin. It goes back to the astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria (fl. c. AD 150), seven being the number of the 'planets', including the sun and moon. This idea is fully described in Ptolemy Tetrabiblos ( iv. 10). (A translation into English, by F. E. Robbins, was published in 1940. An excerpt appears on pp. 197-8 of the Appendix to the book by Burrow cited above.)
Although through the efforts of Charlemagne, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in the year 800, the centre of European culture began to move northwards from the Mediterranean, the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries delayed the full effects of this until about the year 1000. England particularly suffered from these raids, so that by the time of the twelfth-century renaissance it was, in the words of R. W. Southern, 'a colony of the French intellectual empire, important in its way and quite productive, but still subordinate'.7 The main creative activity of the English monastic houses was in historiography. With the notable exception of Bede and the authors of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, earlier generations had not, on the whole, been greatly interested in historical records, but the Conquest brought about a great transformation. The Normans insisted on the production of titles to estates and threatened to confiscate those for which none were forth- coming. In these conditions, the Conquest convinced the English monasteries that corporate survival depended on the discovery and preservation of the past. Consequently, as Southern has argued, 'history was not simply an adornment: it was a necessity'.8
One of the principal features of the renaissance of the twelfth century was a great increase in historiography, stimulated not only by the Norman conquest of England but also by the crusades and the rise of the north Italian communes, or city-states. Moreover, men such as the great ecclesiastical architect Abbot Suger of St Denis (c. 1081-1151), who devoted his later years to composing a laudatory life of the French monarch Louis VI ( 1081-1137), effectively a second founder of the Capetian dynasty, wrote history with the object of producing favourable propaganda rather than documentary facts. Suger's historical writings led the monks of his abbey to develop a taste for history and hence to compile a series of chronicles. In the same century universal history also flourished, mainly with the object of determining the end of the world, after the year 1000 had passed without any sign of its impending occurrence. This type of history was, of course, theologically rather than politically orientated. The influence of the twelfth-century apocalyptic historians was destined, however, to be soon overshadowed by that of Joachim of Fiore (see pp. 81-2).
Among the technical arts cultivated in some continental schools that began to affect England soon after the Norman Conquest were those of measurement and calculation. Haskins has drawn attention to interesting evidence for this in an autobiographical fragment written by a Benedictine prior, Walcher of Malvern, whose tomb survives there bearing the date 1125. In it he refers to the lunar eclipse of 30 October 1091 that he happened to observe in Italy. On returning to England, he discovered that several hours appeared to have separated the time of the eclipse in Italy and in England. Puzzled by this, he was careful later to record the time as precisely as he could when, unexpectedly, on 18 October of the following year the moon underwent another eclipse:
I at once seized my astrolabe and made a careful note of the time of full eclipse, which was a little more than three-quarters of an hour after the eleventh hour of the night. If this time is converted into equinoctial time, it will be found to be shortly before 12.45. Hence, according to this rule which I have explained earlier, the lunar cycle began on 3 October at 19.30 hours.9
As Southern has remarked, this passage, only part of which I have quoted, illustrates the difficulties encountered in those days of telling the time and Walcher's anxiety for precision in seeking to establish the exact correlation between the phases of the moon and the solar calendar.
To men of the Middle Ages astronomy was of particular interest because it seemed to offer the best means of understanding, and possibly controlling, terrestrial events. An essential tool for enabling astronomers to advance beyond the stage reached by Bede was the astrolabe. This instrument had been introduced in the West in the eleventh century from the world of Islam, which in those days enjoyed a higher degree of civilization and of scientific and technological expertise than the West. For anyone in northern Europe to attain a proper understanding of Islamic science it was necessary to go abroad. Among the first to do so for this purpose was Adelard of Bath (fl. 1116-42). He first went to Paris, but not finding what he wanted there, he moved on to Salerno in southern Italy and then to Sicily, where he learned Arabic. Later he probably visited Spain. His outstanding role in the development of science in the Latin West was due to his translations from the Arabic, which were of a crucial and seminal nature.
The Islamic world
The origin of Islamic interest in science can be traced back to the closure by Justinian of the Neoplatonic Academy at Athens in 529. Scholars from there were invited to Iran, and they brought much Greek learning with them. Interest in the subject having thus been aroused among learned men in western Asia, a scientific institute was eventually set up in Baghdad after the Muslim conquest of much of that region. It attained its highest reputation during the caliphate of al-Ma'mun ( 813-33), son of Harun-al-Rashid of Arabian Nights fame, and himself an astronomer. By the end of the ninth century many Hellenistic scientific and technological works had been translated into Arabic, including Ptolemy great astronomical book Syntaxis, which is usually known today by its Arabic title The Almagest. As a result of all this activity, Baghdad was the true successor of Alexandria, the former intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world. Knowledge of Greek science and technology, combined with Iranian and Indian traditions and enhanced by further scientific studies and inventions, spread from there to other parts of the Islamic world, including Sicily and southern Italy and especially Moorish Spain, where by the twelfth century the main centres of learning were in Cordoba and Toledo.
Muslims in all parts of the Islamic world required mathematically educated persons who would be able to determine the astronomically defined times of prayer and the direction of Mecca. It is, therefore, not surprising that many portable instruments for the determination of time were required, including the chief instrument used by both Arabic and Latin astronomers, the astrolabe. This instrument was known to Ptolemy in the second century AD, and the underlying mathematical theory of stereographic projection can be traced back at least to Ptolemy's great predecessor Hipparchus ( second century BC).
The form of astrolabe used in medieval Europe, however, was derived from the Muslim type found in Spain. A good English account of it was given by the poet Chaucer in the second half of the fourteenth century. It consisted of a circular metal plate (usually brass) graduated in degrees around its rim. It was marked with a datum line (or diameter) and hinged to its centre was a rotating line (or pointer). Portable models could be hung from a ring on the rim so that the datum line was horizontal. By directing the pointer at a particular star, its altitude could be read off against the scale on the rim to an accuracy of about one degree. For any given latitude the Pole star has effectively a constant altitude and the other stars appear to revolve around it owing to the Earth's diurnal rotation. On the front of the astrolabe there was a thin plate (the tympan) on which was engraved a stereographic projection of the lines of altitude and azimuth (angular distance along the horizon) as they would be for an observer at a given latitude. An open-work star map in stereographic projection (known as the rete) was in front of the tympan, and could be rotated by hand over the lines of altitude and azimuth.
An early form of analogue computer, the astrolabe was primarily designed to solve problems of spherical trigonometry to shorten astronomical calculations.10 From the scales engraved on it, it was possible to determine the positions of the so-called 'fixed stars' in relation to the horizon and of the sun, moon, and planets in relation to the stars. Designed for the latitude of a particular place, its most important use was to determine the precise time of day or night from an observation of the altitude of the sun or one of the stars mapped on the rete, but of course by modern standards the result was not very accurate. Moreover, although the astrolabe enabled long calculations to be avoided, the computing of planetary positions, for example, for casting a horoscope, still involved a considerable amount of work.
As regards other time-measuring instruments, extensive remains of two monumental Islamic water-clocks still survive at Fez in Morocco.11
A book in Arabic On the Construction of Water-clocks, believed to be partly based on the translation of a Hellenistic treatise in Greek, preserves the idea of the invention of the basic machinery of a water-clock by Archimedes, together with later ingenious additions to the mechanism made by either Byzantine or Islamic craftsmen. It was probably composed after 1150. It has recently been edited and translated into English by D. R. Hill, who points out that 'horologically, it provides an important link between the water-clocks of the Hellenistic world and those of Islam'.12 Detailed discussion of some other Islamic clocks will be found in a book written in Baghdad about 850 and also translated by D. R. Hill.13
One special case in which the influence of Islam made an important cultural contribution to the development of temporal concepts in Europe concerns music. Early medieval church music was all plain chant, in which the notes had fluid time values. Mensural music, in which the durations of the notes had an exact ratio among themselves, seems to have been an Islamic invention. It was introduced into Europe about the twelfth century. It was at this time too that there appeared in Europe the system of notation in which the exact time-value of a note is indicated by a lozenge on a pole.
As regards the theoretical and philosophical analysis of time, the most important and original contribution of medieval Islamic thinkers was their theory of discontinuous, or atomistic, time.14 The most famous exponent of this concept, but not its originator, was the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, who wrote in Arabic although he was a believing Jew. In the most celebrated of his works. The Guide for the Perplexed, he said: 'Time is composed of time-atoms, i.e. of many parts, which on account of their short duration cannot be divided. . . . An hour is, e.g. divided into sixty minutes, the second into sixty parts and so on; at last after ten or more successive divisions by sixty, time-elements are obtained which are not subjected to division, and in fact are indivisible.'15 This atomistic view of time was associated with a drastically contingent and acausal concept of the world, its existence at one instant not implying its existence at any subsequent instant.
D. B. MacDonald has speculated on the difficult question of the origin of this view in Islam and has suggested that it arose from a Muslim heresy 'in that dark but intense period of theological and intellectual development which stretched from the death of Muhammad for at least two and a half centuries'.16 The atomistic theory of Epicurus, the methods of the Greek sceptics, and Zeno's paradoxes concerning time and space may all have influenced the heretics concerned, but MacDonald could find no trace of any Greek theory combining material and temporal atomism and sought instead to attribute the occurrence of the latter in Islamic thought to Indian influence.
The Islamic calendar is one of the few remaining purely lunar calendars, the year being just over ten days shorter than the tropical year, or year of the seasons. The Islamic era began on 16 July 622, the first day of Muhammad's flight to Medina. The circumstances in which this was adopted as an epoch, instead of the time when the Prophet was either born or entrusted with his divine mission or died, are explained by al-Biruni ( AD 973-c. 1050) in his great work The Chronology of Ancient Nations.17 The fundamental instant in Islamic life occurs with the new moon, which must be watched for and established by two 'witnesses of the instant'.18 The 'perfect instant', however, is the Hour of the Last Judgement, for the 'witness' of this instant is the divine Judge himself.
The periodization of history and millenarianism
This type of eschatological view of time was, of course, not confined to Islam, for we find it also in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and early and medieval Christianity. In the Christian case, it led to the periodization of history, a chronological method that we still use, although nowadays we approach history from a purely secular point of view. Medieval historians followed the scheme devised by St Augustine for dividing world history into six ages corresponding to the six days of Creation described at the beginning of Genesis. Living in the troubled times of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, St Augustine regarded the Christian era as the age of senility and decay that would lead to the seventh age when time would end, although he was careful not to forecast a definite date for this. The most important change in the Christian outlook on history between the Apostolic age and that of St Augustine was the gradual realization that the end of the world was not at hand. He laid particular emphasis on those passages in the New Testament (e.g. Mark 13: 32) that emphasize our total ignorance of when the Second Coming will occur. Bede too believed that the time of Doomsday is concealed from mankind.
As Beryl Smalley has said, 'The concept of the six ages saddled medieval historiographers with a gloomy picture of their times.'19 But, even though it discouraged optimism and ruled out the possibility of progress, it did not weigh too heavily on medieval historians, particularly because the year 1000, which had been awaited by many with a mixture of hope and trepidation, had passed without any sign of the world coming to an end. Many prophets in the tenth century believed that the world would come to an end in the year 1000, but according to A. J. Gurevich the legends concerning mass psychoses in Europe as the year 1000 approached originated at the end of the fifteenth century when people really were afraid that the end of the world was imminent. 20
Millenarian belief arose from combining the idea expressed in Psalm 89: 4 that 'A day with the Lord is as a thousand years' with the interpretation of the Sabbath, or seventh day, as a symbol of heavenly rest in accordance with Hebrews 4: 4-9. The most influential exponent of millenarian beliefs in the Middle Ages was Joachim of Fiore ( 1145- 1202). He was a Cistercian monk who became Abbot of Curazzo in Calabria, in southern Italy. This was a part of the world where Greek culture and the Roman Church met and where there was a strong Saracen influence. Consequently, it was a region subject to many cross- currents of thought and belief. Joachim eventually broke away from the Cistercians and retired to a lonely spot in Calabria where disciples gathered around him and he was given papal permission to found his own congregation. Joachim's idea of a completely unworldly religious order nearly found expression in the confraternity that began to form around the followers of St Francis of Assisi shortly after Joachim's death, but the main body of Franciscans soon made concessions to the demands of everyday life.21 Eventually, in 1570, Joachim's community was absorbed by the Cistercian order.
Joachim called his monastery San Giovanni in Fiore in expectancy of the new life that must come to flower.22 He was a keen student of the scriptures, particularly the Book of Revelations, and while meditating in his Calabrian retreat on the mystery of the Trinity and how it related to the time-process he had moments of intense spiritual illumination that led him to formulate a new millenarian philosophy of history. He laid great emphasis on the unity of the Trinity, arguing that root, stem, and bark together form one tree. Joachim claimed that there are, however, three distinct ages or states: that of God and the Old Testament, which was the age of fear and servitude; that of Christ and the New Testament, which is the age of faith and submission; and the Third Age of the Everlasting Gospel, or Age of the Holy Spirit, that will supersede the Old and New Testaments and be the age of love, joy, and freedom. His fervently expressed hope in the coming of the Age of the Holy Spirit may have had its origin in the Jewish concept of the Messianic Age, for like the latter it was regarded by him as lying essentially within history and not beyond it, being indeed the climax of history. This belief was totally irreconcilable with the Augustinian view that, in so far as it is possible for the Kingdom of Heaven to occur here on earth, it has already been realized in the Church.23 Joachim's concept of history was far more dynamic than St Augustine's. As an authority on the influence of Joachimism has remarked:
'What characterizes this Christian revolutionary tradition from Joachim of Fiore to John Huss, from Thomas Münzer to the theologies of hope and political theologies of our own day, is that the Kingdom of God is not conceived as another world in space and time, but as a different world, a changed world, a world changed by our own efforts. . . . This means that human history is where all the issues are settled.'24
Joachim had a profound influence on later prophecies down to the end of the seventeenth century. It is difficult for us now to understand how it was that so many serious thinkers in those days were prophetically- minded. Even Isaac Newton ( 1642- 1727), although not directly influenced by Joachim, devoted much of his time to the correlation of prophecy, history, and the end of the world.25Granted his initial assumptions, however, he was in fact just as scientific in his calculations in that field as in his famous contributions to mathematical physics and astronomy.
The measurement of time
In his well-known book Feudal Society, the historian Marc Bloch has laid particular emphasis on the fact that in the Middle Ages men found it difficult to appreciate the significance of time because they were so ill- equipped to measure it. For not only were water-clocks rare and costly, but in countries such as England, northern France, the Netherlands, and Germany sundials were inadequate because skies were so often cloudy. According to Asser Life of King Alfred, that intellectual monarch had candles of equal length lit successively to mark the passing of the hours; but, as Bloch remarks, 'such concern for uniformity in the division of the day was exceptional in that age.'26 To illustrate the point, he describes an incident recorded in a chronicle of Hainault concerning a judicial duel that was to take place at dawn. Only one contestant appeared and at the end of the prescribed waiting period, the hour of nine he asked for the non-appearance of his adversary to be legally recorded. The judges had to decide whether the time limit had been reached. They deliberated, looked at the sun and then questioned the clerics, since the practice of the liturgy and the regular tolling of church bells had accustomed them to a more precise knowledge of the rhythm of the hours than the judges themselves possessed. As Bloch has commented, 'To us accustomed to live with our eyes constantly turning to the clock, how remote from our civilization seems this society in which a court of law could not ascertain the time of day without discussion and inquiry!'27
One of the peculiarities revealed in many surviving documents from the Middle Ages is the lack of precision with which the times of events and measurements of duration were recorded. John Nef, in his Wiles Lectures of 1956, concluded that, if we seek the origins of our modern quantitative-mindedness, we must concentrate on the last decades of the sixteenth century.28 Earlier we find little trace of it generally, and so we ought not to be surprised to find it missing from the ordinary person's consciousness of time in those days. In his book Time in French Life and Thought Richard Glasser has drawn attention to the fact that nowhere in the Chanson de Roland do we find any indication of time. The epic poet 'was aware neither of the falling of leaves in autumn nor of the passing away of generations. These were phenomena which in no way attracted his attention. The essential quality of the world was its transitoriness vis-à-vis God, not the visible change which went on unceasingly in the world.'29 Until the fourteenth century only the Church was interested in temporal measurement and division. Even the concept of the hour was not used as a unit of duration before the time of Middle French. In the popular tongue it was used only to indicate a point in time.30
In view of the slowness with which changes of mental outlook came about in those days, it is not surprising that even after the introduction of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century most people, including many of the more sophisticated, were far less concerned in their daily life with the passage of time than we are. A striking example is provided by a famous maker of astronomical instruments, Jean Fusoris, who was arrested on suspicion of treason in 1415, during the invasion of France by Henry V. Interrogated twice in a single year, on the first occasion he claimed to be 'fifty or thereabouts' and on the second 'sixty or thereabouts'!31
In England, parish registers providing dates of birth were instituted by law in 1538. Previously when someone's age had to be formally determined it had to be done in the presence of a sheriff of the county and a 'jury' composed of local people who knew the person concerned. This procedure was followed when a minor inheriting property claimed to have become of age, or when it was thought necessary to determine legally that someone had attained the age when he or she was allowed to marry. Of course, the indifference to time generally attributed to medieval people was not absolute. Already by the year 1200 there were numerous signs of economic pressure on time, and even two centuries earlier it appears that peasants and artisans near Fleury tended to ignore feast-days through a need to work in their fields.32
Another indication that our medieval forebears had very different standards from ours for recording the lapse of time is revealed by the way in which they dated their letters. As late as the fifteenth century it is doubtful whether people in general knew the current year of the Christian era, since that depended on an ecclesiastical computation and was not used much in everyday life. They seldom dated their letters and when they did it was by the year of the king's reign. Even when chroniclers of the period gave the year of our Lord it was often wrongly stated. This is not surprising since different numbers were assigned to the year in different places. R. L. Poole has given the following hypothetical example to illustrate this:
If we suppose a traveller to set out from Venice on March 1, 1245, the first day of the Venetian year, he would find himself in 1244 when he reached Florence; and if after a short stay he went on to Pisa, the year 1246 would already have begun there. Continuing his journey westward he would find himself again in 1245 when he entered Provence and on arriving in France before Easter (April 16) he would be once more in 1244.33
This seems a bewildering tangle of dates, but as a rule the traveller would take note only of the month and the day. If, however, he did consider the year it would be that of the place where he usually lived. In practice, only writers of documents and chronicles were concerned with the number of the year.
Months and days were, of course, more likely to be correctly stated, and letters were frequently dated in this respect but much more use was made of festivals and saints' days. In his Introduction to the Paston Letters J. Gairdner pointed out that letters were often dated as being written on a particular day of the week, say Monday or Wednesday, before or after such a celebration. For example, Agnes Paston even dated a particular letter (No. 25) during the week by reference to the Collect of the previous Sunday: 'Written at Paston in haste, the Wednesday next after Deus qui errantibus.'34 The modern practice of numbering the days of the month consecutively from the first to the last came to the West from Syria and Egypt in the second half of the sixth century. Pope Gregory VII introduced it into his chancery, but his successors reverted to the old Roman style. The revival of learning under Charlemagne (c. 800) was in the Latin tradition, and so there was an official reversion to the Roman style in the Imperial chancery too which persisted for centuries.
A far more modern attitude to time and dates was adopted in the previous century by the famous Italian poet and reviver of classical literature Petrarch ( 1304-74). Time was the theme that fired his heart as a young student and affected him for the rest of his life. Because he kept a detailed record of the temporal milestones in his life we have more precise information about him than of anyone who lived before him. In all his writings, poetry as well as prose, he maintained what has been described as 'an attention nothing less than astounding to exactitude in date'.35 Moreover, unlike most medieval letter writers--and, for that matter, even unlike most of us today when we dash off our epistles without much thought about the time--Petrarch 'spells out the dates (including the hour) with weight and deliberation, as if to stress the importance of taking one's bearings in time'.36 For example, in a letter written in 1364 he was careful to give the precise hour of arrival of the boat that brought news of the Venetian victory against Crete. 'It was, I believe, the sixth hour of June 4, this year 1364.' Although time seems always to have been important for Petrarch, he tended to value it even more as he got older because he realized that, as with other things, it becomes more precious as it becomes less plentiful. In his responsiveness to temporal processes he differed from many of his contemporaries and we can look upon him as the forerunner in literature of those, like Spenser and Shakespeare in the late sixteenth century, who were greatly concerned with the irreversible effects of time on the human mind and spirit. Although western-European society in the Middle Ages developed no general concept of progress, many important innovations were made. Indeed, in technology western Europe advanced far beyond the Roman empire. The Romans were in some respects good engineers, as is evident from their sophisticated heating systems involving plumbed hot water and their networks of roads, but in other ways they were often surprisingly primitive. Apart from those transmitted from China, medieval inventions included, for example, spectacles for reading, the spinning wheel, stronger iron tools than had been previously available, the heavy plough, and the use of coal as a fuel. Moreover, in the building of the great Gothic cathedrals many new devices were introduced, including flying buttresses. Some of the most important innovations in the Middle Ages were connected with the use of the horse as a source of motive power. A more efficient harness than the crude yoke, which had been so well suited for draught-oxen, was introduced about the ninth century. Late that century Alfred the Great noted, with apparent surprise, that horses were used for ploughing in Norway.37 This would have been impossible with the yoke-harness, because as soon as the horse begins to pull with it the neck-strap presses on the animal's windpipe and thus tends not only to restrict the flow of blood to its head, but also to suffocate it!
Another important development was the iron horseshoe that was nailed on to the hoof. Previously, the shoe had only been tied on and this greatly impeded the animal's progress. The first indisputable evidence of the use of nailed horseshoes goes back to the ninth century. The development and the elaboration of metal armour for protection in warfare and jousting gave considerable impetus to the craft of the blacksmith. This was destined to be of particular importance to the measurement of time, because the blacksmith was the forerunner of those who constructed the first mechanical clock. It is surely significant that one of the greatest of these, Richard of Wallingford, Abbot of St Albans in the early fourteenth century (see ch. 7), was the son of a blacksmith.