SAVING DAYLIGHT

We are at that time of year when the clocks are turned back, to match sun-time again for a few months. Time was that mankind’s daily life was regulated by nature’s light and dark. The sun’s progression marked where we were in a day and determined our hours of work. Night’s darkness brought time to rest (except when the full autumn moon gave ample light for working the harvest fields at night, to have the year’s food safely gathered and stored as quickly as might be). As mankind has increased ways of artificially lighting the night-time and dividing the day by ever-more complex mechanical ways, our relationship to day and night has shifted, until now we bend our days to our clocks’ time, rather than to nature’s.

That shift in psychology is a study in itself. But we’re medieval here, and it’s medieval time (as well as medieval times) I try to capture something of in my books. The medieval day was twenty-four hours long, yes -- that being an ages-old division of time -- but with twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night. Year round. So an hour on a summer’s day was far longer than the hour of a winter’s day, and the hours of a winter’s night were longer than those of a summer’s.

Among other things, that meant that if you held a job that required you to work from 6 am until 6pm, you worked a far shorter time in winter than you did in summer. Given that most work depended on daylight, this made good sense. There were even regulations in some places forbidding certain craftsmen to work by candlelight at night, lest the quality of their goods suffer.

Carrying through with the good sense, there is record of rules stating that during summer’s long daytime hours workmen were supposed to have breaks of a stipulated length for rest at mid-morning and mid-afternoon and for rest and food at mid-day. When winter shortened daytime’s twelve hours, workmen might still work from 6 am to 6 pm, but less time was allowed for the mid-day meal and there were no mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks because those twelve hours were so much shorter than summer’s, leaving so much less time for work to be done.

Of course pay would shift accordingly – less work, less pay. Medieval employers were as practical as employers ever must be.

But it is interesting to look at a day’s time from a medieval point of view and then consider how the invention and spread of mechanical clocks, dividing the day into equal pieces of time the year around, changed the whole rhythm of people’s lives and their relationship to the natural world, to the point where now we throw an hour out of our days at one time of the year and bring it back in at another, all at the shifting of numbers on our clocks. With that and the bounty of artificial light we now have, sun-time and night-time are adjuncts to our lives, not our directors. It’s interesting to sometimes step aside and see our 21st century lives against the perspective of what-has-been -- to think about the difference between living lives by sun-time (the real-time of hundreds of generations) and the constructs in which we live our present lives.