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King Edward's clocks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

Extract

Although both short and tentative, this paper must begin formally with acknowledgements and apologies. The acknowledgements are for help generously given by our Fellows, Mr. A. J. Taylor of the Ministry of Works, and Mr. Claude Blair of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and also by Mr. H. M. Colvin of St. John's College, Oxford. The apologies turn upon the central and fundamental fact that, though I have an ill-informed interest in clocks, and own rather more clocks than my house has room for, I am not a horologist. It follows that I shall not deal with the mechanics of early clocks, with verge and foliot escapements, going and striking trains, and all the other technicalities which horologists love to discuss. And if I mention, here and now, the name of Giovanni de Dondi, this is only to emphasize that I have at least tried to read up the subject before having the temerity to write upon it.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1959

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References

page 283 note 1 Conveniently reproduced, for example, in Alan Lloyd, H., Some Outstanding Clocks over Seven Hundred Tears, 1250–1950 (London, 1958), pl. 2.Google Scholar

page 284 note 1 Lloyd, , op. cit., p. 6Google Scholar; Britten's, Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers (7th ed. by Baillie, G. H., Clutton, C., Ilbert, C. A., 1956), p. 6.Google Scholar

page 284 note 2 Pipe Roll 49 Edward III, rot. 50; Pipe Roll 41 Edward III, rot. 41; and especially Exchequer Q.R., Accounts Various (E 101), 472/14. Cf. Hunter, J. in Archaeologia, xxxvii (1857), 2326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 284 note 3 Issue Roll of Thomas de Brantingham (Record Commission, ed. F. Devon), p. 102.

page 284 note 4 Pipe Roll 41 Edward III, rot. 41.

page 284 note 5 For ‘Edward of Westminster’ and its subsequent history see Stow, , Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, ii, 121–2Google Scholar, 379–80; and, for example, Lang, Jane, Rebuilding St. Paul's (1956), pp. 211–12Google Scholar; Wren Society, xv, pl. 51. The original bell bore the in scription: Tercius aptavit me Rex Edwardque vocavit Edwardi decore Sancti Signentur ut hore.

page 285 note 1 E 101/544/22, 466/4, and 466/6.

page 285 note 2 E 101/544/22, dorso.

page 285 note 3 See Haythornthwaite, J. P., The Parish of King's Langley (1924), p. 51.Google Scholar

page 285 note 4 John Hope, W. H. St., Windsor Castle, an Architectural History, i, 152–4Google Scholar and notes. There was also a ‘cistern in the clock’, but this cannot, in the teeth of the other evidence, indicate a water-clock.

page 285 note 5 Ibid. i, 204.

page 285 note 6 An entry on the Foreign Account Roll of 42 Edward III, rot. 4d, seems to suggest the king's personal interest in his clocks: John of Derby, king's clerk, is paid his expenses in transporting the king's personal plate and other things between the castles and manors visited by the king during the year, and the expenses ‘per ipsum Iohannem fact[as] circa orlogios domini regis’.

page 286 note 1 Calendar of Patent Rolls 1367–70, p. 105.

page 286 note 2 For Italy as the suggested birth-place of the mechanical clock see Britten, , op. cit., p. 5.Google Scholar