On 22 May 1548 Robert Hoveson, a walker by trade, was convicted by the burgh court of Aberdeen of insurrection.

The details of his misdemeanours, which involved other craftsmen too, remain largely obscure, and it is not clear what prompted Hoveson and his accomplices to hurl intemperate abuse at the ruling elite of Aberdeen.

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. These are not, of course, inherently new questions of historical research, any more than the events which disturbed Aberdeen in 1548 were (seemingly at least) unparalleled elsewhere. In the Flemish textile-manufacturing town of Commines, penalties had been decreed in 1361 for workers who seized the bell which marked the start of the working day and rang it to encourage insurrection, and a few years later, in 1378, the Ciompi too had sought control of the bells across Florence in order to proclaim their revolt.² There is maybe a difference to be drawn between bells which heralded a popular rising and bells (or clocks) which were deliberately targeted for seizure or attack because they symbolised authority.

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.⁵ These skills and conventions were not suddenly abandoned when clocks appeared.

The sonic impact of the parish church penetrated the countryside more extensively. While the number of rural parish churches which possessed bells is difficult to determine exactly, many clearly did and had done so for some time. Early medieval hand bells are known of in several places, such as Fortingall and Little Dunkeld (diocese of Dunkeld), and larger bells and/or belfries dating from the early sixteenth century or before survive at several rural locations, including Abercorn (d. St Andrews), Comrie (d. Dunblane), Crimond/Rattray (d. Aberdeen), Dalgety (d. Dunkeld), Dunning (d. Dunblane), Dyce (d. Aberdeen), Errol (d. St Andrews), Fowlis Easter (d. St Andrews), Kinneil (d. St Andrews), Kirkmaiden (d. Galloway), Rayne (d. Aberdeen), Tibbermore (d. Dunkeld) and Strathbrock/Uphall (d. St Andrews).¹¹ The list is far from exhaustive, but the point to be taken from it is clear. Assuming that the bells of these parish churches marked time at least occasionally, time was not an exclusively urban concept, even though the most explicit evidence of time consciousness in medieval Scotland derives from towns.

Scotland’s urban sonic landscape was, nevertheless, probably less cacophonous than that of many continental towns. At Tournai, for example, aside from the city’s cathedral, which by the mid-fifteenth century possessed 20 bells, bells are also attested with certainty in all but 2 of the 11 other parish churches in the town by the fifteenth century, with several more located in the monasteries, friaries, chapels and hospitals which dotted the urban landscape. By the early sixteenth century there were at least 70 (and probably more) bells hung in a variety of religious establishments in Tournai. To these must be added the secular bells of the town, of which there were two by the thirteenth century and at least four (including a bell which marked the start of work) by the fourteenth century, located in the town’s belfry.

In part, of course, this was a matter of size. Tournai was a medium-sized Netherlandish town, but still with a population of possibly ten times that of Aberdeen. Aberdeen housed perhaps slightly more than 5,000 inhabitants in c. 1290, maybe only 3,000 in 1408 and around 5,500 in the 1570s.¹⁸ Of course, given the paucity of sources, evidence for Scotland is much thinner than that for many of the great continental towns and it perhaps, therefore, underestimates the sonic landscape of Scottish towns. Nevertheless, there were significant structural differences between Scottish towns and those in many other countries, notably in relation to parish size, which perhaps also partly explain the more modest number of bells recorded in Scottish towns. Aside from the dual town of Edinburgh/Canongate and the belated parochial creation of Old Aberdeen at the end of the fifteenth century, all other towns in Scotland were situated within a single parish unit and this obviously had an impact on the number of bells in Scottish towns. The sonic competition which multi-parish towns encouraged was largely absent from Scotland.

The provision of bells, meanwhile, was probably also curtailed by their expense: several were imported from the Low Countries. The cost of bells probably encouraged the sharing of sonic space by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. In Aberdeen, for example, the care and maintenance of the ecclesiastical bells and of the campanile in the parish church of St Nicholas were at least in part the responsibility of the burgh authorities.¹⁹ Such interaction was not unusual, even in very large towns such as Bruges, where the secular authorities paid for the bells of the church of St Donatian to be rung during the annual Holy Blood procession and ensuing fair.²⁰

Of course, in both large and small towns, bells served many different purposes. They might mark specific times; in the later fifteenth century Aberdeen’s bells were rung daily at noon and at six o’clock.²¹ But, as Claire Hawes has pointed out, hand bells in particular were also â€?closely tied to the decision-making processes of the burgesses and to their public assertion of authority’.²² Bells alerted the urban population to meetings of one kind or another, including commercial activities and public roups.²³ They warned the community of attack or pestilence or fire;²⁴ and on a more joyous occasion, the bells of all the churches [sic] of St Andrews were rung to mark the inauguration of the town’s university in 1414, while those in Ayr heralded the safe return of the king from France in 1537.²⁵ The acoustic reach of a town’s bells, it has been suggested, defined a town’s territorial extent, as much as did land and law.²⁶ But that many bells were bestowed with saintly names points to their role as devotional accoutrements too.²⁷ Following Old Testament scripture, bells were believed to ward off death.²⁸ When rung for liturgical purposes their peel was prolonged.²⁹ They summoned the faithful to prayer (often for the dead) and they were rung to mark religious festivities, in Ayr, for instance, on Halloween (31 October) and All Souls’ Day (2 November).³⁰ Bells thus became fitting objects of conspicuous devotional display, gifted by wealthy burgess families such as the Leiths of Aberdeen and the Spaldings of Dundee.³¹ Marking specific time, then, was only part of a bell’s function. Bells announced events as much as time; and the multi-purpose nature of bells meant that they continued to have purpose, and to be installed long after clocks had begun to usurp their function in marking hourly time. The merchant gild, for example, paid for a new bell to be erected in early sixteenth-century Dunfermline, while in the 1510s and 1520s Perth boasted several new bells and in 1556 Dundee sought to exchange a bell recently purchased in Flanders for a larger model.³² This, moreover, was not an indication of Scottish backwardness. In 1528, new bells were installed in the belfry of the great commercial emporium of Bruges, as they were in several other Netherlandish towns of this period.³³ Everywhere, bells still served an important function.

Still, â€?bell time’ was not as exact as clock time was subsequently to become: bell hours were often of unequal length, measuring one-twelfth of the day and of the night and therefore seasonably variable.³⁴ Mechanical clocks, by contrast, ultimately offered more accurate and equal measurement of the hour, even though they generally did not as yet subdivide the hour into minutes. Still, during the course of the fourteenth century they became common in many of the greater towns and churches of Christendom and by the end of the following century they could even be found in small Alpine settlements such as Münster and Ernen in the upper Valais.³⁵ Even in the largest medieval towns, however, public clocks were far from numerous. Aside from those in ecclesiastical and private space, Venice boasted only three public clocks – one on the façade of San Giacometto di Rialto, another in the clock tower at St Mark’s Square (these two close to the city’s commercial districts) and a third at its great industrial complex of the Arsenal – while until the seventeenth century Bruges had only two (one in the town house and another in the belfry).³⁶ 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. There was already a clock at Ayr, for instance, by 1429 and another in Aberdeen by 1454, and even the much smaller town of Peebles possessed one by 1462.³⁷ Elsewhere, clocks almost certainly predated their first recorded mention but by at least the mid-sixteenth century their presence was noted in several towns, including Dundee, Dumbarton, Edinburgh, Haddington, Lanark, Selkirk and Stirling, as well as in the new university town of Old Aberdeen.³⁸ Beyond the major conurbations we can be much less sure about the extent to which clocks had penetrated the rural landscape but it seems unlikely that the small settlement of Abernethy (Perthshire) or the barony of Alloway (Ayrshire) were alone in possessing a clock by the mid-sixteenth century.³⁹ To those clocks publicly displayed, we may add at least some which were in the private possession of the royal and ecclesiastical elite and very probably some in monasteries too: given that the remote English house of Farne, off the Northumberland coast, possessed a clock of some sort by 1394 it seems highly likely that wealthier establishments on the Scottish side of the border did too.⁴⁰

Although we can assume that many of the clocks recorded in Scotland by the sixteenth century were weight-driven, we know little about their appearance or (aside from that in Dundee) their technological specification. It seems unlikely that they were multi-dialled or as ornate as those still evident in Bern, Lund and Prague, though those in Dundee and Edinburgh did strike half-hourly by the mid-sixteenth century at least, and that erected in Dundee in 1543 also delivered more prolonged chimes at 4 am, 12 noon and 9 pm. We know too that in Scotland, as elsewhere, clocks appeared in both secular and ecclesiastical settings, both in tolbooths (as at Aberdeen and Edinburgh) and in churches (as at Abernethy and Stirling), though this did not necessarily reflect competition between â€?church time’ and â€?merchant time’ any more than the bells which clocks supplemented had been of exclusively religious purpose and controlled solely by the ecclesiastical authorities.⁴¹ Indeed, it is significant in this respect that in 1453, when entering office, Aberdeen’s clock keeper performed the religious ritual of swearing an oath â€?to do his diligent business’ to maintain the town’s clock; and that, as indicated at the start of this article, when Robert Hoveson broke the clock in Aberdeen’s tolbooth his misdemeanour required a punishment framed in religious ritual.⁴² Still, while bells might constitute devotional gifts, the clocks erected in Dundee at least, in 1543 and 1554, were secular and community enterprises, the first requiring a contract between the clockmaker and the town’s representatives and the second paid for by a levy imposed by the council on taxpayers.⁴³

Similar to bells, the diffusion of clocks was, however, limited at least to some extent by cost. The new clock erected in Dundee in 1543 and its replacement in 1554 each cost around £200, to which further expenditure could be expected. Clocks were not just practical instruments. They were often objet d’art, sometimes painted (as in Aberdeen, Dundee and Stirling), and they constituted fitting diplomatic gifts, presented, for example, to James IV (1488–1513) by French ambassadors in 1511–1512.⁴⁴ The maintenance of clocks required chords and copious supplies of olive oil, which had, of course, to be imported: in that sense clock time was, indeed, â€?merchant time’. Clocks also required bells to strike the hours – a new bell for Haddington’s clock cost £30 in 1557–1558⁴⁵ – and they bagged manpower too, for they rarely functioned for more than 24 hours (indeed, they often worked for only about 8 hours) before manual rewinding was required.⁴⁶ Clock maintenance was not a full-time occupation – in Dumbarton care of the town’s clock was the responsibility of the schoolmaster, while in Aberdeen its maintenance was often entrusted to a goldsmith – but the responsibilities associated with maintenance, nonetheless, added, even if quite modestly, to total costs. In Haddington the keeper of the clock received an annual fee of £3 in the early 1550s, much less than the £10 set aside for the town’s provost, the £13 6s 8d received by the town’s schoolmaster or the daily wage of around 1s 6d which contemporary labourers might earn.⁴⁷ Of course, bells too had been oiled, ideally with olive oil too, and they too had been the responsibility of paid officials – those in churches usually coming under the care of a sacrist or the parish clerk. But once raised and ringing, bells generally required less outlay than clocks because the latter broke down more frequently. In 1535–1536, the town council of Ayr forked out 12s 2d for oiling, ringing and mending the bells; in the same year, materials and repairs to the town’s clock cost £2 13s 8d.⁴⁸ Although blacksmiths, locksmiths and goldsmiths might all be able to undertake modest repairs – and in Aberdeen these craftsmen were augmented by a local friar, though significantly he was the brother of an Edinburgh goldsmith⁴⁹ – specialist clockmakers and menders were rare even in larger continental towns. Geneva, for example, had a single clock mender in 1449, but none by 1513 when its clock broke down.⁵⁰ Although there was a â€?knokmaker’ in Edinburgh by the 1540s, it is hardly surprising that when clocks stopped in Scotland it was sometimes necessary either, as at Selkirk, to wait for an itinerant clock mender or to send them abroad for repair.⁵¹ In 1498, Bishop Elphinstone of Aberdeen entrusted his clock to Andrew Halyburton, the conservator of Scottish staple in the Low Countries, who presumably found it easier to find a specialist there than at home; and in 1535 Andrew Cullan, the provost of Aberdeen, was charged by his colleagues on the council with sending the town’s clock to Flanders for repair.⁵²

So for whom, then, were these costly instruments intended? In a predominantly rural society awareness of time was important at a seasonal and a daily level. The reminders of what needed doing and when were common themes of medieval calendars.⁵³ But unpredictable weather patterns made the allocation of agricultural chores to smaller units of time a largely pointless exercise.⁵⁴ Not everyone, then, needed to tell the time to the precise hour. Nevertheless, an ability to tell the time was probably not uncommon in urban Scotland (and perhaps further afield too) by at least the early sixteenth century. Indeed, we may differentiate between the ability to appreciate the duration of an activity and a particular moment. The audience which attended Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, its female component in particular, was, for example, warned â€?faill nocht to teme [empty] your bleddir’ in anticipation of a lengthy performance.⁵⁵ By contrast, a more precise time awareness was demonstrated by the Frenchmen who quarrelled in the house of an Edinburgh burgess on 5 August 1548 who not only knew that their altercation had taken place between nine and ten in the morning, but that their compatriot, John Barron, had died at â€?about the eleventh hour at the dead of night’, following injuries sustained while interceding in the dispute.⁵⁶ Perhaps more impressively still, in 1502 Margaret Gibson, who had been assaulted by a female colleague while working in Dunfermline abbey’s bakehouse, was able to time the altercation to between three and four in the morning, thanks to her own basic numeracy and to the chimes of the abbey’s bells.⁵⁷ Margaret’s accusations did not rely on the timing of the assault, but her ability to tell the time – a skill which she perhaps had learnt from the routines of work – was a convenient and persuasive embellishment to her allegations. Indeed, if we were to accept Jacques Le Goff’s arguments, it was employers and employees who first developed a particularly new time consciousness in the later middle ages. Hours and minutes meant money, whether in the form of payments made by employers or wages earned by employees.

There are significant problems with this hypothesis with regard to Scotland. The comparatively large industrial enterprises of the sort which characterised textile production in the towns of northern France and the Low Countries (where Le Goff detected hour consciousness) were absent from Scotland, where industrial production (except perhaps in the new naval dockyard at Newhaven, developed by King James IV in the early sixteenth century) remained limited, both in terms of overall production and in the unit size of production. Absent too – so far as we know – were the work bells which marked the start and end of the working day in many continental towns. The striking of Aberdeen’s bells at 12 noon and 6 pm and of Dundee’s clock at 4 am, 12 noon and 9 pm were less probably related to work times than to other routines such as the beginning and end of curfews and church services. In addition, it is difficult to find evidence from Scotland that wages were normally determined by the hour and the minute rather than by the day. Admittedly, once again, our evidence is not substantial, and largely reliant on the payments made by the crown for labour. But, as was common throughout Europe until the eighteenth century, the crown, at least, almost always paid by the week or the day, not the hour.⁵⁸ That pay was normally rendered in late medieval Scotland by the week or the day is perhaps also suggested by the parliamentary legislation of 1469 which decreed that masons, wrights and other craftsmen should work on Saturdays until 4 pm.⁵⁹ The implication is that some workmen of this sort were finishing earlier on Saturdays, and that employers of such labour wanted more hours from their labourers in return for the weekly rate of pay which they paid. This, implicitly too, is suggested by the fine which was imposed on workers who contravened the new decree: they were to lose not a sum calculated by the number of hours missed at work, but rather by the equivalent of a week’s work.

Of course, irrespective of how their pay was calculated, some workers did increasingly rely on their ability to tell the time accurately and in small units. Perhaps foremost among this group were mariners. Sandglasses are known to have been used on ships by the later thirteenth century, though the first Scottish evidence of their use, on royal ships, dates only from the early sixteenth century.⁶⁰ The precise purpose of the sandglass remains uncertain, though its use was probably not related to pay or to navigation, but rather simply to the regulation of seamen’s watches, the passing sand proving a reliable measure in the wet and undulating conditions encountered on board ship.⁶¹ Some sandglasses were used on land too – perhaps, for instance, that which is sometimes said to have belonged to Queen Mary (1542–1567)⁶² – but there is little evidence that their usage was frequent before this or that they influenced wider public awareness of small units of time. Nevertheless, the need to identify hours was not restricted to mariners.

It was certainly assumed that the burgh authorities would be cognisant of hourly time. Parliamentary legislation took it for granted that such an awareness existed when it decreed, for example, in 1428 that lepers might only be admitted to burghs on three days in the week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) from 10 am until 12 noon.⁶³ Similarly, it was decreed in 1436 that urban taverns should be closed â€?after the strike of nine hours’, and in 1504 that malt should not be sold before 9 o’clock in the morning.⁶⁴ National legislation of this sort was supplemented by many hour-specific local regulations too. Hucksters were not permitted to sell their goods in Aberdeen before 11 o’clock, while the Perth guild recorded in 1453 that â€?no wheat be bought before xi hours … and that no meal be bought before xii hours’, and in 1515 Edinburgh’s council decreed that â€?no stranger or outdwellar bringing meal to the market to sell make any merchandise thereof until the hour of xi before noon’.⁶⁵ Yet, while merchants (broadly defined) clearly required some hour awareness, if only to comply with commercial regulations, it is far from clear that the hour was central to all of their business considerations. The uncertain duration of sea voyages, for example, made it impossible to regulate international deliveries or dispatches by the hour, or even by the day or week. Debt repayments were normally timed to the day, but not the hour; and there was often considerable latitude over several days for rent payments too.⁶⁶ Hour awareness, it may be inferred, was more likely a matter of legal regulation than of business practice.

It follows that time was important to the law and to lawyers. Paul Brand has outlined the rhythms of the legal year in England, and Scotland adhered to its own annual norms.⁶⁷ Beyond this, as we have seen, the law sometimes stipulated specific times at which commercial activities, in particular, should begin or end. Courts, meanwhile, constituted public gatherings which convened, of organisational necessity, at preordained times which were, presumably, historic and well known to a local community and which it was not, therefore, necessary to record routinely.⁶⁸ Certainly the written records of neither burgh courts nor sheriff courts specify when exactly courts convened, nor when decisions were reached. The hour of cause (hora causarum) in ecclesiastical courts is also uncertain, though here too it seems likely that business began at a set hour in the morning.⁶⁹ More specific information survives for the highest secular courts. The details of specific cases, where they survive, often indicate a specific hour at which proceedings were to begin.⁷⁰ In the earlier sixteenth century the lords of council convened routinely in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. Afternoon sittings were more common in summer than winter, but generally unusual, occurring, for instance, on only just over 10 per cent of days on which the court sat in 1524–1525.⁷¹ When the college of justice, Scotland’s highest judicial court, was established in 1532, its judges were required to â€?enter the tolbooth and council house at viii hours in the morning daily and shall sit until xi hours is struck’.⁷² It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that such a schedule had been inherited from the body which it succeeded, the lords of council. Nevertheless, the specific time at which the lords of council began their proceedings, when the court reassembled after its break for lunch and when it concluded its business for the day went largely unrecorded in the official record.⁷³ Although hour consciousness was important for the routine organisation of judicial business, it was not sufficiently important to be recorded in the court’s official records.

Hour consciousness was, however, evident in another quasi-legal environment – that of the notary. Notaries, though not necessarily trained in law at a university, were both literate and in possession of some legal knowledge. Their work took them into churches, where they might formally record the election of a parish clerk or the repayment of debts at the altar, but they also performed their duties in secular habitats and in the open air, where they certified agreements relating to property, trade, marriage and other matters.⁷⁴ The documents which they drafted and authenticated were characterised by detail and linguistic precision and became a point of legal reference. Increasingly frequently, the detail which was recorded included reference to the hour at which the notary’s business had been conducted. As early as 12 August 1371 a Moray notary had recorded an instrument at the â€?hora tertiarum’.⁷⁵ Although edited out of most of the published protocol books, such exactness – though not uniform and usually approximate, as indicated by the frequent use in the records of the word â€?quasi’ – was common in notarial instruments drawn up around the country in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁷⁶ Since we know that there was a public clock in the vicinity, it is perhaps not surprising that an Edinburgh/Canongate notary such as John Robson almost always recorded his protocols by the hour.⁷⁷ Some notaries were even more precise than Robson. William Gray, who spent much of his working life in St Andrews, almost always recorded a specific time on the protocols which he drafted between 1553 and 1559; unusually, some of his records were timed to the half-hour, and one, indeed, to between noon and 12.15 pm.⁷⁸

Such precision (at least to the hour) was not confined to notaries who worked in busy urban areas. Alexander Gow, who was active between 1540 and 1558 in Edinburgh, but also in Fife, Kinross-shire and Perthshire, often included a specific hour of the day in his protocols.⁷⁹ Many of these protocols were drafted at Abernethy, where another notary, Thomas Dalrymple, also recorded an hour-specific protocol, with specific reference to the local clock, in 1555.⁸⁰ Dalrymple, who in 1555 was mainly active in the small settlements and countryside around Markinch in Fife, almost always hour-dated his protocols whether they recorded business in churches or cemeteries, houses or hostelries, in his office or even on a public road.⁸¹ Meanwhile, a third of the deeds recorded between 1511 and 1547 by the Selkirk notary John Chepman included an hour-specific element to the dating clause.⁸² While some of these documents were witnessed in urban locations, such as the courthouse of Lauder or the mercat cross of Selkirk – where Chepman no doubt was able to see or hear the town’s clock – other business was transacted in rural locations, including around a dozen protocols attested, usually in the afternoon, at Farnylee in Selkirkshire.⁸³ That Chepman almost always noted the time when at Farnlylee indicates that he had a reliable means of telling the time even in a remote location, perhaps drawing on his own clock, or alternatively a clock which had been installed by the rising and affluent Kerr family which owned an estate there.⁸⁴

FIGURE 12.1 Hour-dating of protocols in selected notaries’ protocol books.

The notary’s working day was lengthy. As indicated in Figure 12.1, a few protocols were recorded as early as six o’clock in the morning and some as late as eight and nine o’clock in the evening, though there was a clear tailing off in the middle of the day, presumably to allow for a midday meal. None of Thomas Dalrymple’s protocols, for example, were timed between 12 noon and 1 pm. Why, however, did notaries bother recording the hour? One possibility is that hour consciousness was simply a product of training and tradition, and indicative, therefore, of an international legal culture in which the earliest Scottish notaries learnt their craft. Notaries were originally authorised either by imperial or by papal authority; only in 1469 did parliament quash imperial authorisation, replacing it by that of the king.⁸⁵ This suggests that, initially at least, notaries were trained according to international norms and given that notaries could be approved by papal authority, Italy is one possible source of influence for Scottish practice. Certainly, even in the thirteenth century, protocols drafted in Genoa were usually dated by the canonical hour. It was not, however, customary, even in later centuries, to follow this practice in many other Italian towns, including Florence, Lucca and Pisa, in spite of the increasing precision which was often taken to describe the location at which notarial acts were witnessed in these towns.⁸⁶ More study needs to be undertaken of practice in the papal centres of Rome and Avignon,⁸⁷ but as things stand it is difficult to see why or how Genoese practices might have influenced those in Scotland, since this was not a town which maintained significant Scottish links.⁸⁸ Besides, papal authorization to create notaries was at least sometimes delegated to bishops in Scotland; even papal notaries need not, therefore, have had any close connections with Italy.⁸⁹

If Genoese (and Roman) influence remains unproven in Scottish notarial practice, we might look elsewhere for precedents, especially to Scotland’s immediate neighbours in England and the Low Countries. Exact times were occasionally noted in English notarial records, and more usually still in Flemish notarial documents, which (as in Genoa) might intimate the canonical hour, some other liturgical occasion or even a mealtime.⁹⁰ Notaries in both areas were, however – as in Scotland before c. 1370 but less exclusively thereafter – mostly of clerical standing and largely concerned with ecclesiastical business. While Flemish notaries did handle more commercial business by the fifteenth century, they (and the protocol books in which they recorded their transactions) seem never to have developed the significance which both attained in Italy and Scotland.⁹¹ Notaries were, indeed, relatively rare in both England and the Low Countries. Even in the great emporia of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres only 52 have been identified between 1280 and 1440 compared with at least 75 known to have been active in Scotland between 1370 and 1420 alone.⁹² Influence from abroad in Scottish notarial practice – including hour consciousness – is, then, possible. Against this, however, it should be remembered that just as it became more common for Scottish notaries to add mention of the hour to their documents, so they were less and less likely to have been trained abroad. Many, though far from all, Scottish notaries were graduates, but those that were, were increasingly able to study at one of the three Scottish universities founded in the fifteenth century. Their apprenticeship was more likely to have been undertaken in the diocesan courts of Scotland than abroad.⁹³ Of course, we cannot rule out significant foreign influences in both Scottish universities and episcopal courts, but it seems just as likely that seemingly idiosyncratic notarial practices in Scotland coincided with a revolutionary expansion in notarial activity in Scotland from the later fourteenth century.⁹⁴ It should perhaps be added that Bill Scott, the scholar who identified this â€?revolution’, was not someone prone to unwarranted exaggeration.

Whatever drove the inclusion of hour timing in Scottish protocols – whether it was foreign influence or an indigenous development – Scottish notaries could only record the time on their documents if they had a means by which to tell the time and if they were personally able to tell the time. They were clearly not alone in this skill, as clocks had been erected even in some rural areas and even women of relatively humble status, such as Margaret Gibson in her Dunfermline bakehouse, could count the hours. Hour consciousness was not, then, exclusive to towns, to men or to legal professionals. But the exclusively male and predominantly urban-based notarial branch of the legal profession was the first to deem it important to record the specific hour at which business was transacted. This is not necessarily to refute the deterministic and oft-quoted assertion by David Landes that â€?the clock did not create an interest in time measurement; the interest in time measurement led to the invention of the clock’.⁹⁵ Still, clocks had appeared in late medieval and early modern Scotland for reasons other than an intellectual curiosity in time. They were fashionable and prestigious items as well as functional instruments, which required significant technological and financial investment. As demonstrated by the incident in Aberdeen with which this article commenced, they were not just machines which enabled individuals to mark moments in their daily lives. They symbolised communal identity and they constituted an ostentatious display of status and authority.

That, moreover, notaries could tell the time is an insufficient explanation for them demonstrating that skill in their notarial practice. So why did they? It is difficult to link their awareness of the hour to Le Goff’s arguments about the secularisation of time. It is not clear that notarial practice was related to monetary considerations. Notaries set down a marker, not an account of the extent of their labour for which they might be billed. Only rarely did notaries record more than one instrument per day, so it seems unlikely that noting the hour was an organisational matter, to distinguish quickly between one protocol and another. Indeed, noting the hour may not have been primarily for the advantage of the notary at all. In most (though not all) protocols, the hour clause appeared not at the beginning of the record, along with the other markers of time (the day, the month, the year, the papal year and the indication), but rather towards the end of the document, immediately before the naming of witnesses.⁹⁶ This perhaps suggests that noting the hour was as much for the benefit of witnesses as it was for that of the notary. We may speculate that the hour and the location acted as a reminder to otherwise busy witnesses of what they had witnessed, should their memory be called upon at a later date. This is not, of course, to argue that late medieval and early modern people had suddenly become busier than those who lived in the pre-clock centuries. Rather, it is to suggest that hour timing – especially perhaps in towns where curfews, market regulations, work and church services were all, to some extent, framed by reference to the hour – had now become a social and cultural tool, designed to assist both the secular and clerical population in the ordering of their lives and memories.⁹⁷ Indeed, it is significant that in 1554–1555 the authorities of Edinburgh deemed it necessary to spend £39 5s 6d on the installation of a temporary bell and a borrowed clock while repairs were undertaken on the town’s principal clock. In Edinburgh at least, the burgh council was acknowledging that even the temporary absence of a clock constituted a significant inconvenience. Reference to the hour had become an important element in how many people, notaries and their witnesses included, now framed their daily life.⁹⁸ And if so, it might be concluded that, in the myriad of private agreements which they recorded, notaries had become the guardians of private memory.