240 Notes 07i a Sun- Dial from the Monastery of 



Here we have a large sharply-cut crescent recumbent on the convex 

 side ; if this was used at all for indicating the hours (which I much 

 doubt) it could only be by showing the junction on the concave side 

 of the shadows thrown from the top and bottom. 



The age of this dial must remain a matter of conjecture, but we 

 may attempt to bring it within definite limits. The early Saxon 

 dials are of a very different character, being based on a rude division 

 of the hours of sunlight. The Grseco-Latin method, originating 

 with the Egyptians, of dividing day and night into twenty-four 

 hours, was not introduced into England until after the eleventh 

 century, and then made its way but slowly. The excavated dial is 

 a specially Greek construction, and was adopted from them by the 

 Arabs. Abul Hassan, in the thirteenth century, gave an impetus 

 to the science of gnomonics by constructing dials on various kinds 

 of curvilinear surfaces ; and it is, I believe, to Saracenic influences, 

 which permeated Spain and Southern France during the middle 

 ages, and still linger in place names, that we must attribute the 

 introduction of the excavated dial into England.^ We should not, 

 I think, be far wrong in placing this dial at about the middle of 

 the fourteenth century. Clocks on foreign buildings had for some 

 time been introduced from abroad, but the foreign invention was 

 not eagerly adopted. Monastic conservatism no doubt held out 

 long against the innovation. It was incredible that the sun should 

 have evidently culminated and the gnomons be indicating noon 

 while the abbey clock gave the time as a quarter to, or a quarter 

 past twelve. The natural inference was that the clock was wrong, 

 and the clock-maker an impostor.' Surely the real sun, irregular as 

 it might be asserted to be, was a better guide for the chapel, the 

 scriptorium, and the refectory, than a mean sun which was 



* As an argument in favour of this view I may mention that the Dover dial 

 was constructed for a latitude of 47°. 



^ Over and above the difficulty of the equation of time, there was some real 

 ground in the monastic objections if we can depend on the statement in Haydn's 

 Dictionary of Dates, s. v. clocks, " that the clock set up at Hampton Court in 

 1540 was the first in England that told accurate time." 



