For this ilke infinit moevying of temporel thinges folweth this presentarie estat of the lif immoevable; and, so it ne mai contrfetin it ne feynen it, ne be evene lik to it, [fro] the immoevablete (that is to sein, that is in the eternite of God) it faileth and fallith into moevynge, [and] from the simplicite of the presence of [God] disencresith into the infinit quantite of future and of preterit… and byndeth itself to som maner presence of this little and swift moment…
Boece, Book V, Prosa 6:67-8 (Italics added)
During Chaucer’s lifetime, both attitudes toward time and the methods of measuring and reporting time were rapidly changing. The Canterbury Tales reflects these changes in concrete and subtle ways, and documents the development of a paradigm shift. Some evidence of such a shift will be presented in this discussion, and this change will be treated in relative isolation. However, the evolving perception of the nature of time, with its attendant changes in language, attitude, habits and culture, was only one of the major transformations percolating in the medieval world, as it entered a new era. Time is chosen here because real and perceptual changes in timekeeping are evident in The Canterbury Tales, in a peripheral but revealing manner. Chaucer’s language clearly demonstrates how changes in “time-keeping” both shaped and were shaped by the Church, commerce, technology and human nature. I will demonstrate this by close analysis of lines 1-32 of the Introduction to the Man of Laws’ Tale (IntrMLT), lines 1-11 of the Prologue of the Parson’s Tale (ProParsT), and miscellaneous other citations of Chaucer’s work, and by some discussion of the historic and technological background of the period. All references to any of Chaucer’s work, including Boece, are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, and are cited by line number.
Setting aside temporarily the difference between “telling” time and the “understanding” of time, we must immediately acknowledge, upon even a cursory reading of The Canterbury Tales, that the rapid advance of technology meant that there were a plethora of methods to tell time in Chaucer’s day, and that many people (including Chaucer) knew several of these methods. The new technology (mechanical clocks) was so recent that it had not had time, as yet, to eradicate prior knowledge (unlike our current era, when many children growing up in the age of digital watches cannot tell time on an analogue clock). This is clear in IntrMLT, where, in one short passage, Chaucer refers to the time as a portion of the “artificial day”, by the length of the shadows, by the degrees of inclination of the sun, and by the hour of the “clokke.” Again, in the ProParsT, we see a similar redundancy of methods, with some astrological data added in: “therewith the moones exaltacion-/I meene Libra – alwey gan ascende” (X.10-11), in order, apparently, to fix the date of the Parson’s Tale on Good Friday (Cooper 59). These passages raise a number of questions, but the three major ones are 1)Why are multiple methods of telling time used? 2) Why is time deemed to be so important at the beginning of these two tales, and 3)What does this tell us about Chaucer’s attitude toward time?
While the first recorded use of the work “clokke” in English was in 1371 (OED), the word “horologe” (from the Latin horologium or Old French orloge) was much earlier and was used to “designate any timepiece with a face or dial” (Mooney 103), which would include various kinds of sun dials. Timekeeping devices were not, then, new to the fourteenth century. Sun dials were used from the earliest time; Chaucer’s use of the length of shadows of trees and of himself is simply a derivative of this ancient lore. Sun dials were still in use during the period of The Canterbury Tales. In The Shipman’s Tale, the duplicitous monk carries a “chilyndre” (VII.206) or portable sundial named for its cylindrical shape; he uses the sundial to tell that it is “pryme,” or the canonical hour corresponding to approximately 6:00AM, time for the morning prayers (matins), and time to stop embracing his friend’s wife, as the monk ironically exhorts her to “beeth as trewe as I shal be” (VII.207).
Water clocks (clepsydrae) had been utilized for centuries. Very simple water devices had even been used from antiquity (Landes 9), with the Roman senate employing a dripping container to mark the end of a politician’s or petitioner’s speaking time, much as an hourglass would be used. This method of time marking is referenced in the Prologue to The Reeve’s Tale, as the Reeve bemoans his age:
For sikerly, whan I was bore, anon
Deeth drough the tappe of lyfe and leet it gon,
And ever sithe hath so the tappe yronne
Til that almoost al empty is the tonne. (I.3891-94)
Monks were also great users of water clocks, which they refined to include the use of gears and bells (Pacey 35). In the Middle Ages, much of the “telling” of time revolved around the canonical hours defined for prayer by St. Benedict, and used by the Church from the seventh century. The church offices were to be said at Laud (dawn), Prime (sunrise), Terce (the third hour), Sext (the sixth hour), None (the ninth hour), Vespers (sunset), Compline (bedtime), and Nocturne (middle of the night or approximately 2:00AM). The monks were called at these times by bells (sometimes generated by the water clock), and the “chymes” became, for the religious as well as their secular neighbors, a primary method of time-telling. Chaucer, for example, uses “pryme” as the time of day on many occasions, with no apparent clerical overtones, but sometimes with ironic ones, as noted above in the Shipman’s Tale. The bells used to call all good souls to prayer are heard by the adulterous couple in The Miller’s Tale, as Alison and Nicholas lay in bed, “In the bisynesse of myrthe and of soles,/Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge,/And freres in the chauncel gonne synge.” (I.3654-56). This juxtaposition of the mundane (or profane) and spiritual is surely intentional, but continual use of the church offices to denote common time also demonstrates the degree to which medieval time was God’s time. There are many other evidences of this. For example, one of the reasons that usury was considered sinful in the Middle Ages was that the lending of money for interest or the charging of a premium for late payments was considered profiting by something – time – that belonged to God (DeGoff 27). Idleness and the wasting of time were also considered to be sins. Chaucer allows the Second Nun to give a long sermon on idleness in her Prologue, contrasting the “roten slogardye” (VIII.17) of idleness with her own “feithful bisynesse” (VIII.24) in telling the tale of St. Cecilia, the saint being herself, of course, “Ful swift and bisy evere in good werkynge” (VIII.116). In The Parson’s Tale, Saint Benedict is quoted as admonishing “ne a moment of an houre ne shal nat perisse of his tyme, that he ne shal yeve of it a rekenyng,” (X.254), and the Parson elaborates on this in his section on “accidia” or sloth.
Mechanical clocks, built to serve secular functions and often installed on secular buildings, served to begin to sever the ties between time and God. It is paradoxical, then, that the very need of the Church to sound hours – particularly in the middle of the night when tired monks could not be depended upon (Frere Jacques, dormez-vous?) led, in part, to sophisticated water clocks, and, finally to mechanical clocks (Landes 66). There is some disagreement about where the impetus for clock invention and manufacture came from. Lewis Mumford, in his classic work on the subject, thought that monasteries were the driving force (Mumford 325). This was disputed by many, who credited the needs of astrologers with advancing the new invention (Gimpel 149). It is clear that both groups had an influence and were not mutually exclusive. Many of the first clocks, like that of Giovanni di Dondi in Italy (a clock which Chaucer may have seen), were elaborate mechanisms for keeping track of the moon, the sun and the planets, with time being only an incidental byproduct (Gimpel 164). The gears that clerical mechanics used on elaborate water clocks certainly helped in the development of weight-driven mechanical clocks, while careful observation of the heavens by astrologers and astronomers quantified what the mechanism had to do. The very earliest clocks probably had no faces; they simply sounded the hours. And, because it was almost impossible to design gears to divide the changing number of daylight hours by twelve, the “equal hours” were born, as opposed to the “temporal” or “unequal” divisions of the day, when daylight hours in the summer might be eight-two of our minutes, and winter hours as short as thirty-eight minutes (Gimpel 168). This standardization, of course, served to remove time from the cycles of nature, just as the advent of the municipal clock tower also removed time from the province of the Church.
Clocks were also a reflection of the changes in the “unverbalized tendencies of that age” (Whyte 125). With a renewed interest in the slowly gathering scientific force in England and building on the work of Roger Bacon and others, there was some fascination with the mathematical relationships embodied in the clock and other machines. Chaucer himself was interested enough in the astrolabe to write a treatise on it. Many of the early clocks with their astrological and astronomical indicators were models of the heavens, and much energy was expended looking for the same kind of perpetual power for these machines that was used by the heavens (Whyte 131).
Far out in the countryside, of course, time was defined by nature. In The Canterbury Tales, the discussion of shadows and the inclination of the sun refer, in part, to measurements relating to astrolabes and/or to the published almanacs of the day detailing and translating such data. But, these instruments and reference documents only served to narrow the tolerance limits of what outdoor people already knew at a glance: the sun is high, the shadows are short, it must be noon. In IntrMLT, it is the “shadowe of every tree” (II.7) that Chaucer measures. It is not only a natural phenomena, it is a uniform and consistent phenomena (“every tree”). When the shadow is discussed in ProParsT, it is “eleven foot, a litel more or lesse,/Of swich feet as my lenghthe parted were/In six feet of equal proportion”(X.4-9). No tools here; measurements of trees and body parts emphasize the earthiness of this method of telling time. The six foot number may be a reference to the narrator’s height (and Chaucer defines it as such); however, the Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn, which Chaucer uses here and elsewhere, has charts which predict the length of shadow which would be cast by a six foot man at different times of day and on different dates, a sample of which is appended to this paper.
The Kalendarium is of critical important to the understanding of Chaucer’s “telling” of time. It is clear that he used it in both the ProParsT and IntrMLT to calculate time from the length of shadows. Or, more accurately, he used it in a backwards fashion as he decided what time and date it should be, and then looked up the appropriate documentation. The Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn (one of two almanacs in as much general use as anything could be in those pre-printing press days) was dedicated to John of Gaunt (Eisner 2), not an insignificant figure in Chaucer’s life. It detailed for the period from 1387 to 1462 the following: days of the month, Roman calendar (kalends, ides, etc.), lengths of the artificial day (sunrise to sunset), length of the vulgar day (twilight to twilight), a shadow scale (based on the shade of a six foot man), astrological data, eclipses, and various other predictable data. Significantly, each month also notes, right next to the astronomical and astrological data, the feast days of dozens of saints; appended canons indicate that one of the purposes of the almanac was to keep track of moveable feasts (Eisner 18). Thus, science, astrology, and Christian faith were inextricably intertwined in the calendar, just as they are in Chaucer’s “telling of time.” The Kalendarium also is related to mechanical timekeeping in another of Chaucer’s works. In his introduction to A Treatise of the Astrolabe, Chaucer notes the “kalendars of the reverent clerks, Frere J. Somer and Frere N. Linne” as having use in “the governaunce of a clokke” (81-85). Clearly here, as elsewhere, a clock is seen as only a secondary method of accurate time keeping. In fact, Nicholas appends a “Canon for Knowing the Hours of the Clock at Sunrise and Sunset” to his almanac, presumably to help in setting one’s timepiece. For similar reasons, the very first pocket watches (produced after Chaucer’s time) came equipped with miniature sundials in order to accurately set one’s watch (Landes 88).
The Kalendarium and Chaucer’s observations do cause some apparent paradoxes which have never been satisfactorily resolved. For example, based on the data in IntrMLT, it is April 18, a significant date because of equal-length shadows (i.e. a six foot man casts a six-foot shadow). The astronomical data in the ProParsT matches that of April 17 or earlier (Eisner 33). Is the tale sequence turned on its head? It is more likely that, as Eisner postulates, Chaucer used the April 17 date because, in 1394, this was appropriately Good Friday, and Chaucer was more interested in symbolic dates and phenomena than in consistency. It is also possible that here, as in several other places, the busy poet did not go back to tie up loose ends. The “iv” o’clock in some of the ProParsT manuscripts reads “x”, which makes no sense at all, and is a possible copy error. And, the time in the IntrMLT seems to be slightly off due to some confusion between the artificial day (sunrise to sunset) and the azimuthal day (twilight to twilight). All of this only demonstrates how slippery an element time was in Chaucer’s day, the multitude of ways it could be defined, and how precarious the tie was to any man-made definitions.
Why did Chaucer particularize so elaborately about the time as he introduced one of the first tales, MLT, and the last, ParsT? There have been a number of theories on this anomaly. Cooper postulates that “the story-telling seems once to have begun with the IntrMLT… the two passages (IntrMLT and ProParsT) look as if they could be intended as a complementary pair, opening and closing the story telling”(Cooper 63) . Owens agrees that the MLT could have been meant to lead off the tales, but it was to introduce The Tale of Melibee; and, the whole work would have been set off by two heavy prose pieces – The Melibee and The Parson’s Tale (Owens 25-31). There are numerous other speculations, but it appears that significance is placed on the marking of the hour at the beginning of these two tales, letting the reader know where the pilgrimage stands in time, if not in space. A comparison of the two passages demonstrates why readers have come to some of their conclusions, and further illustrate Chaucer’s attitude toward the measurement of time.
In both instances (IntrMLT and ProParsT), we are told the length of shadow, the degree of ascension of the sun, and a surmise on the time by the clock. The Host “concludes” the time of the clock in IntrMLT; in ProParsT, the narrator “gesses.” In the MLT, we are told it is April 18, “He wiste it was the eightetethe day/Of Aprill”(II.5-6) – a very specific date which seems out of place in the middle of the tales. We might have expected to find such a date in the General Prologue, where we do find only a generalized and traditional spring opening, noting only the month. The reason for the specific date may be the unusual phenomenon of the equal-length shadows, but this is not a satisfying explanation. While no specific date is given in the ProParsT, the astrological information is clear enough for the date to be identified by some as Good Friday, April 17, 1394, as stated earlier. While this makes sense as a setting for the Parson’s Tale, it makes no chronological sense.
The narrator informs the reader in IntrMLT that the Host “was not depe ystert in loore” (II.4), but he apparently knew enough to take into account “that latitude” (II.13). Latitude, of course, affects the length of days and the altitude of the sun, and is the subject of one of Nicholas of Lynn’s canons. Many critics have seen the use of such scientific lore by the Host as unlikely, and as tongue in cheek. Both passages also give the degrees of ascension of the sun , twenty-nine degrees in ProParstT (the same as the number of pilgrims) and forty-five in the IntrMLT. In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (NPT), of course, Chaucer reminds us that fifteen degrees movement marks an hour, with the presumption of a twelve-hour daylight stretch and a 180 degree arc of the sun (VII.2857).
In IntrMLT and ProParsT, the time (and date) are noted in the very preface, and serve to set the action off. Also in both passages, the Host uses the time to hurry the action along. In the IntrMLT, the marking of the hour sets off a long proverb-filled homily by the Host on the irretrievability of time, accompanying an injunction against idleness. “ Lat us nat mowen thus in idelnesse” (II.32). In the ProParsT, we also get an admonition, but the Host’s words to the good Parson are shorter, less earthy, and more attentive to the divine:
“Telleth,” quod he, “youre meditacioun
But hasteth yow; the sonne wole adoun;
Beth frustous; and that in litel space,
And to do wel God send yow his grace! (X.69-73)
Here, then, we have a difference in tone between the two introductions. There is also a difference in who is doing the telling of the time. While it is the Host who marks the time in the IntrMLT, “Our Hoost saugh wel”(II.1), it is the ever-present narrator that tells the time in ProParsT. The Host, in the ProParsT, seems more influenced at first by the fact that the group was passing a “thropes ende”(X.12) than by the time of day, seeming to note by their location that the pilgrimage was almost over and that “fulfilled is my sentence and my decree” (X.18). He later, at the end of the Prologue, references the passing of the day (“the sonne wole adoun”) after the Parson sets up his purpose, “to shewe yow the wey, in this viage/Of thilke parfit, glorious pilgrymage” (X.49-50). Show us the way, the Host seems to say, but do it quickly. Of course, there has been little prior empathy between the Parson and the Host.
While the dates given or inferred may be specific, much of the information given is not. In both cases, measurements are admittedly approximate. In IntrMLT, the day was one quarter and “an half houre and moor”(II.3) gone. In ProParsT, the shadow was “ellevene foot, or litel moore or lesse”(II.6). There was a judgment call to be made: “…By the shadowe he took his wit,” (II.10) in the IntrMLT, or in the ProParsT, “Foure of the clokke it was thos, as I gesse” (X.5), and the sun is “nat to my sighte/Degrees nyne and twenty as in hyght” (X.3-4). There is not a high degree of certainty here. Nor, is there concern that assumptions may be slightly inaccurate.
Chaucer shows little respect for the accuracy of the “clokke;” he relies more often on the natural world. Chauntecleer “Wil sikerer was in his crowying in his logge/Than is a clokke in an abbey orolgue” (VII.2853-54); and, the poet notes in The Parliment of Fowls that the cock “that orloge is of thorpes lyte” (350), without disparaging the full utility of the cock for this purpose. All of this would be enough for us to assume what the scientific literature of the time would confirm; clocks of this period were notoriously inaccurate (Gies 214). Not only were clocks inaccurate, different towns often told time under different systems, some starting the day at noon, some at midnight, and some with sunrise (Mooney 92-96). In addition, clocks were expensive and not universally available. Towns that used to spend civic resources on cathedrals (God’s work) were now spending them on tower clocks of “workglokkes”, and not every community had the desire or the resources to make the investment. In some areas, laborers fought the “workglokke” fiercely, resenting the control and regimentation it represented (Landes 72-75). Clocks were making inroads, however, and by Chaucer’s time there were town clocks at Salisbury, Wells, Durham, and Canterbury – just for a start (Mooney 105). Still, it is curious that Chaucer references clock time as often as he does. He was one of the first to do so; the terms “clock” and “o’clock” enter the English language during this period. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first occurrence of the word was in 1371; Chaucer is comparing Chauntecleer to the clock before the end of the century, and the phrase “of the clokke” occurs for the first time in the ProParsT. We know from his Treatise On the Astrolabe and other references, that Chaucer was interested in mechanical and scientific lore. When he mentions the clock, he does it naturally and with no explanation; clearly the new technology was becoming a presence in England during the poet’s lifetime. Clearly, also, it was not one to rely on for two reasons: 1) a clock was not always available, and 2) clocks were still inaccurate and inconsistent.
All of the indications of time specified by Chaucer, all indications of time by definition, are relentless. The sun never stops in its path, the length of the shadow has changed by the time it is measured, the zodiac goes around and around like the hands of a clock. The time meted out to man is “this little and swifte moment” according to Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Man’s time, measured by any method, is not the “eterne” time of God, but the God -given “perpetuel” time of man (BoVpr6.98). The journey of the pilgrims is a journey within time; it is closely grounded in the month of April, and within the natural, canonical, and man-made timeframes which emphasize the relentless running of the “tappe of lyf” (I.3892). There is, however, a difference in the context within which these various indicators are used. Canonical time is used in an ironic way (as in The Miller’s Tale) or in the telling of a noble or spiritual tale (as in the many references to prime in The Knight’s Tale); mechanical time is referenced but always with substantiating data from the natural world, or sometimes (as in NPT) as a poor substitute for the natural world. The natural world itself is the source of the primary data, as it would be for a group of pilgrims traveling out of doors, and certainly not always within earshot of clock bells. This, of course, was changing rapidly, and within one hundred years, men of Chaucer’s class were traveling with portable clocks. But, at the turn of the fifteenth century, the world is at a crossroads; it stands physically on its original path, but facing a new path and a new direction; and, there seems to be no going back. Changes in timekeeping in Chaucer’s era, which seem to have only tangential importance, would have major significance over the next centuries, as time changed hands, so to speak, from nature and God to man:
…the regular striking of the bells brought a new regularity into the life of the workman and the merchant. The bells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence. Timekeeping passed into time-serving and time accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human nature. (Mumford 326)
Of course, many other changes were incubating during this period. Within the century, printing presses would have printed and reprinted many copies of The Canterbury Tales. Mechanical printing was a change of such a magnitude that it is hard for us to comprehend; Chaucer cannot help us because it was beyond his time. He can, however, help us with the change in the nature of time, because he existed and wrote while in the midst of it. Without addressing the issue in a direct way, his peripheral and occasional references to time-telling open up for us a way to begin to understand some of the changes that the late Middle Ages were experiencing. Our comprehension of this specific shift at this specific time is valuable, also, in that it impels the modern reader to think about the myriad of technological changes that we exist with, and how they are changing our paradigms.
Works Cited
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Eisner, Sigmund, ed. The Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn. Athens:
U of Georgia Press, 1980.
Gimpel, Jean. Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution in the Middle Ages.
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Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago:Chicago UP, 1980.
Mooney, Linne R. “The Cock and the Clock: Telling Time in Chaucer’s Day.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 91-109.
Mumford, Lewis. The Lewis Mumford Reader. Ed. Donald L. Miller.
New York: Pantheon, 1986.
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Dialectic of “Ernest” and “Game.” Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 1977.
Pacey, Arnold. The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of
Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974.
White, Lynn Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change. London: Oxford University
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When I Come To Be Old 