Telling Time… the Old-Fashioned Way

[Creed]

While this isn't essential to my WIP, I'm rather curious and it seems to be something that many fantasy authors don't go into.*
How do people tell time in fantasy series or in ancient cultures?
Here's what I know:*
The sundial. It works! Not the best, but it works.*
In The Long Price Quartet (I read the first one, can't wait to get the second!) the Cities of the Khaiem and remnants of the Old Empire use candles during the night. During the day they just measure with the width of their hands and the position of the sun- no mystery there.*
In the Malazan Book of the Fallen Icarium Lifestealer was a little obsessed with time and he made a clock for a city (before it suffered a terrible fate, if I recall).*
Going along with the above, how common are clocks in fantasy?*
I'm aware of the bell tower where someone rings a bell every hour- but how did they know when to ring the bell?*
And are there any other ways cultures used to tell time?

 

[Butterfly]

Hourglasses - Hourglasses. The flow of sand from top to bottom takes an hour. Bit like an egg timer but much bigger.

Hourglass - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I can easily imagine there being huge ones for a 24hr period. Not sure if they ever existed though.

 

[Creed]

Ah, the poor hourglass! How could I forget?
Wikipedia says that it was used to measure hours and such on board a ship (I do not envy the man who had to watch and turn them every hour) so it could be the same for a bellman. It seems a little tedious, but I suppose it was important. I wonder if there were more practical methods…
Thank you, Buttlerfly!

 

[PaulineMRoss]

There were water clocks, too (similar principle to the hourglass, except with water passing through at a regular rate). Anything that moves or is consumed at a predictable rate. You could have a ball dropping slowly through a viscous liquid, for instance. But only the elite needed to know the time of day, or religious orders who have to worship at set hours. Peasants got up and went to bed with the sun, like their animals - much simpler.

 

[skip.knox]

There were water clocks, but there were less formal methods. One thing modern folks don't know is that an hour hasn't always been sixty minutes. An hour was simply a division of the day, and hours were shorter in the winter and longer in the summer.

Noon is when the sun is at its zenith. Evening starts at sunset, regardless of what we call time of day. Midnight is exactly that: the mid-point of night.

People learned to tell time by these markers. In medieval Europe, churches had their hours (that word again) and rang bells to mark those, but again vespers or compline happened at a relative time, not an absolute time.

Marc Bloch, in his book Feudal Society, tells a wonderful story about two men who were to meet at a certain time to fight a duel. One fellow didn't show; the other left; then the fellow showed up. Both men claimed the other had forfeited. They went to the local monastery to get the dispute settled.

Time was not the simplest thing!

 

[Creed]

I never knew that about hours! But I did know that millions of years ago a day was only 21 modern hours long. I don't intend to write about the slowly expanding orbits of the realms in my writing, but it's interesting.
Thank you for the details, and the fun anecdote! I can only imagine how troublesome it must have been, especially in this ordered world we live in.

 

[The Unseemly]

A wizard is never late. Neither is he early. He is precisely when he wants to be.

EDIT: *Clears throat*.

Anyhow...

Time telling can be a difficult one, and if anything, you can invent your own system of time which uses minutes and hours and so forth. Magical devices have been used to good effect for telling time, especially when "Time" has, in the world of wizardry (I paraphrase Dumbledor) "powerful, and dangerous if misused". You could sort of combine time telling with magic, I suppose.

Also, remember that conventional "granddaddy" clocks were already in use around the 16/17th centuries, but owned more so by rich people who could afford the technology.

 

[Nameback]

Pretty much what others have said, but match the technology to the level of technology of your fantasy world. Waterclocks are very very old, basically as old as the sundial, but were relatively rare because of the precision required, and the need to reset them.

Sundials were pretty much the most common way of telling time from 4000 BC until the 1300s AD. As others have mentioned, the length of an hour varied based on the time of year--and the latitude! Remember, at the equator, a sundial would keep the same time all year round, and near the poles the length of an hour would vary tremendously. Determine the latitude of your fantasy society (assuming it has the same seasons as Earth), and you can determine the length of an hour. In ancient Rome, for example, an hour could be anywhere from 45 minutes to 75 minutes, depending on the time of year.

Hourglasses, however, did not really come to exist until the 14th century, going hand-in-hand with longer-ranging sea travel. Hourglasses frankly didn't really rule as timekeepers for very long--the mechanical clock replaced them within a couple centuries. So for the most part, in a fantasy setting, people are going to be using sundials.

While the concept of minutes is indeed very old, almost no one used them. Most people did, however, use notions like "quarter of an hour" or "half an hour" or "quarter 'til" in the ancient world. It would not be anachronistic to have a fantasy character say that they will meet someone in half an hour--however, it would be unrealistic for them to say they'll meet someone in twenty minutes.

Sundials were common and easy to find in any place where you'd need to know the time (and of course it wasn't hard to make your own), but time was often announced by bells nonetheless, so that one did not necessarily need to find a sundial to know th time.