The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
In 1288, during the reign of the 1st Edward, the _English Justinian_, as
he has been called, it is said that a fine levied on a lord chief
justice was applied to the purpose of furnishing the famous clock-house
near Westminster Hall with an horologe, which it is farther stated was
the work of an English artist.
Mention is also made of the setting up of a clock in Canterbury
Cathedral about the same period, and in that of Wells in 1325. So that
those three Dutch horologiers, from Delft, who came over (as Rymer tells
us) at the invitation of Edward III. in 1368, were not, as some
imagined, the introducers of the art, though they very possibly helped
us to improve it. Up to the time when Henry de Wic astonished the
Emperor Charles V. with those seemingly living toys with which he was
wont to surround himself after dinner, and watch the beating and
revolving of their curious machinery, those rude prototypes of our
subject, which are said to have resembled small table clocks rather than
watches, and yet were true specimens, we imagine, since they continued
going in a horizontal position, which is the only mechanical distinction
between a watch and clock--up to this period, we were about to say,
clocks appear to have endured a very ascetic existence, living in tall
houses, built on purpose for them, or shut up in church towers and
monastic buildings--
"Fell sickerer[19] was his crowning in his loge,
As is a clock, or any _abbey orloge_,"
wrote Chaucer in the fourteenth century. And it is not until nearly the
end of the fifteenth that we find them domesticated in houses.
From a description of some, which appear in an inventory of articles in
the king's palaces of Westminster and Hampton Court, copied by Strutt,
the pendules of the period must have been equally ornate with those in
modern drawing-rooms, and much more curious. Thus one, we are told, not
only showed the course of the planets, and the days of the year, but was
richly gilt, and enamelled, and ornamented with the king's (Henry the
Eighth's) coat of arms; it also possessed a chime.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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