OLD ENGLISH CLOCKS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 3, 5 January 1926, Page 9

OLD ENGLISH CLOCKS

A FOUR CENTURY RECORD?

SOME ANTIQUE TIMEPIECES.

A village in the Berkshire' Downs reports that its church clock^. which has told the time aright day in day out for four centuries,"^ now at last stopped for repairs, says the "Daily Telegraph." The peaceful charm of East Hendred 13 doubtless healthy for clocks, and permits them to maintain an accuracy impossible in more febrile atmospheres. It is,, however, to inaccurate human nature rather horrible to think that a piece of machinery which was telling the time arigW when Elizabeth was crowned, was still going, and right, when we last changed summer time. East Hendred's, of course, is not the only old clock in the world or the oldest. Most well-to-do parishes had put one up in church before the Befoimation. Few of these, inde>d, survive in going order. The clock at Hampton Court, with its sun and moon and signs of the Zodiac, was made about 1540. But it has been turned inside out sinca then. When they overhauled it in 1835 they put in it the works of a clock "made for the Queen's Palace in St. James's Palace." In the corridor at Windsor Castle is a clock which, as they say, Henry VHI. gave to Anne Boleyn on her wedding morning. It still goes. King Henry affected clocks, not only for wedding presents to his own wives. He bought more than a dozen in oae half-yerr, which was well in excess of even his matrimonial needs. But we can look farther back than the days when '' gospel light first shone from Bolc)'n's eyes." Exeter Cathedral had a clock two hundred years earlier. In 1376 .money was spent on a room "pro Horlogio quod vocatur clock, '■'■ which is the earliest use of the word wo know. No part of the fourteenth century clock ticks now at Exeter. In 1480 was put up the quaint dial wbich still telis the hour of the day and the age of the moon, but the works behind' are modern. Some time early in the fourteenth century a monk of Glastonbury, called Petsr Lightfoot, built a clol*k for his abbey, which at the Reformation was taken to Wells Cathedral, where still its dial may be seen. The works went steadily for nearly five centuries, from about 1335 to 1835. In that latter year they were found worn out and removed to- the Science Museum. A run of 500 yeais is good evidence of the quality of the old monk's workmanship. But Light-, foot's was certainly not the first clock in England. Canterbury had one before Edward I.'s reign was over, and so had Westminster. But how long before that men had clocks is uncertain. Some sort of a clock struck the hour of matins at Citcaux in. liaO. Pope Sylvester 11. when he was mo;ifc is said to have put a clock in Madgeburg' before 1000, but it ,is alleged that was only a sundial; and a mere water clock or clepsydra, like Charlemagne's, can be made to strike. When the chronicler tells us that St. Gregory in 606 "commanded clocks an.l dials to be set up in churches," wo may suppose that Gregory never thought of anything but a sundial. Who made the first clock moved by weights no man knows. So are our benefactors forgotten.