Bells, clocks and the beginnings of ‘Lawyer Time’ in late medieval Scotland

Abstract

On 22 May 1548 Robert Hoveson, a walker by trade, was convicted by the burgh court of Aberdeen of insurrection. The violence which scarred Aberdeen in 1548, and its recriminations, begs questions about how time was measured; who measured time; why time was measured; and the ways in which time was understood by late medieval and early modern societies. Long before the invention of mechanical clocks towards the end of the middle ages, medieval societies had devised means by which to tell the time. While the arrival of clocks in Scotland was almost certainly later than in the major towns of Christendom – the paucity of the Scottish sources is again unhelpful in this respect – they can certainly be identified in Scotland by at least the mid-fifteenth century. Still, clocks had appeared in late medieval and early modern Scotland for reasons other than an intellectual curiosity in time.