These devices were also viewed as public utilities that benefited citizens by encouraging industriousness. A petition to the Town Council of Lyon in 1481 says that the town ‘sorely felt the need for a great clock whose strokes could be heard by all citizens’,50 while the inscription next to a clock installed in Caen in 1314 reads: ‘I shall give the hours voice / To make the common folk rejoice.’51 How the ‘common folk’ actually felt isn’t clear, as the records we have from this period capture mostly the thoughts and feelings of the rich and powerful. But it seems that timekeeping inspired the
...more
