A History of Timekeeping at St Mary of Charity
People have always looked up at the sky, listened to the bell, or glanced at a small device on their wrist to ask the same question: what time is it now? Long before atomic clocks or glowing smartphone screens, the answer came from stone, from iron, from the swing of a pendulum and the angle of a shadow. The story of how a single parish church in a Kent market town told the hour to its neighbours is really the story of how an entire continent learned to live by measured time.
Before the arrival of mechanical clocks in the late fourteenth century, medieval English communities organised their day around three overlapping systems: the rising and setting of the sun, the ringing of the church bell, and the sequence of prayers known as the canonical hours. A farmer in the Faversham area might start work when the angelus bell rang at six in the morning, pause for the noon bell, and finish when the curfew sounded at dusk. These were soft, lived rhythms rather than precise measurements, and they depended entirely on a shared sound that everyone within earshot could recognise.
By the later Middle Ages, the parish church tower had become the most visible and audible authority on time in any town. In a place like Faversham, with its quay, its market, its abbey ruins, and its tightly packed lanes of timber-framed houses, the church was the tallest structure for miles. Its bells, its weather vanes, and its clock faces were not merely decoration; they were the infrastructure of public life, coordinating worship, work, trade, and rest.
That is the world this article explores, with St Mary of Charity as the focal point. Along the way, we will look at bells and bell-ringing traditions, at scratch dials carved into the very stone of the building, at mechanical clocks installed over the centuries, at sundials and liturgical schedules, and at the quieter transition from communal to personal timekeeping that reshaped the parish in the modern era.
Bells and the Voice of the Tower
For most of the medieval period, the church bell was the clock. A bell did not just call people to worship; it was the audible marker by which the day was divided. At St Mary of Charity, the tower rises at the western end of the church and still houses a ring of bells that traces its lineage back many generations. The ringers of Faversham followed a daily programme that would have been familiar in towns from Bruges to Brisbane: a bell at first light, another for prime, the tolling of the hour, the midday bell, and the evening bell that sent workers home and signalled the closing of the gates.
Visitors who have stood in a quiet market square in towns such as Ballarat, or who have joined the dawn services on ANZAC Day in Adelaide, will recognise the way a single bell can shape the rhythm of a community. The sound is not merely informative. It gathers attention, marks a transition, and tells strangers as well as locals that something important is happening. Medieval parishioners felt this every hour of the working day, which is why the tower clock became a literal and figurative crown of the parish.
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many English towers had acquired mechanical striking mechanisms that drove the bell automatically on the hour. Faversham's own clock, mounted on the south face of the tower, has been replaced and refurbished many times, but its function has not changed: it counts out the hours in a voice that can be heard across the rooftops. The relationship between bell and clock is captured in the table below, which sets out how the principal instruments of timekeeping complemented one another at the church.
| Instrument | Earliest use at the church | Accuracy | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angelus and Sanctus bells | Medieval period, continuing today | Within a few minutes | Marking prayer times and services |
| Striking tower clock | Late 16th to 17th century onwards | Within a minute or two | Public hour-striking across the town |
| Scratch dials (mass dials) | 12th to 14th centuries | Approximate, half-hours | Morning Mass attendance by clergy |
| Mechanical clock mechanism inside | 17th century onwards, rebuilt often | Near-exact | Driving the dial and the strike |
| Sundials on buttresses | 17th and 18th centuries | Within five minutes in sun | Daylight hours, fine adjustment |
| Personal watches used in church | 19th century onwards | Highly accurate | Pew-by-pew timekeeping |
The table shows what every historian of the building eventually realises: there was no single moment at which timekeeping arrived at St Mary of Charity. It accumulated, layer upon layer, each technology adding its own voice to the chorus.
Scratch Dials and the Oldest Stone Clocks
Long before anyone in Faversham thought of mounting a clock face on a wall, the church already had a way of telling the time of day. Tucked away on the south jamb of the porch, and on other sheltered stone surfaces, are small scratched circles divided by radiating lines. These are scratch dials, sometimes called mass dials, and they are the oldest surviving timekeepers at the church. A simple vertical pin, called a gnomon, cast a shadow onto the dial, and a passing priest could estimate the hour, or more precisely the half-hour, by reading which line the shadow crossed.
Such dials were never precise in the modern sense. They depended on the season, on the brightness of the day, and on the patience of the observer. Their real purpose was practical rather than scientific. A canon or rector hurrying to say his morning Mass needed to know whether he was early or late for the liturgy. The scratch dial told him, roughly, which of the daylight offices he ought to be preparing. The slight inaccuracy hardly mattered, because the day itself was not divided into minutes.
For an Australian visitor today, walking past a heritage building in Sydney's Rocks or along the lanes of Melbourne's Chinatown, it is striking how often these scratch dials are overlooked. They look like graffiti or weathering, and only a careful eye picks out the radiating lines. Yet they are evidence of an age when the very stone of the church was a calendar and a clock face combined.
The survival of scratch dials at St Mary of Charity is a small mercy. Centuries of repointing, of rain driven in from the English Channel, and of well-meaning cleaning have erased many elsewhere. The fact that even one or two remain is a gift to anyone interested in the history of how ordinary people organised their day before the spread of public clocks.
The Mechanical Clock Comes to Kent
Mechanical clocks first appeared in English church towers in the second half of the fourteenth century, and by the fifteenth they were spreading through the larger parishes of the southeast. Kent was an early adopter, partly because of its wealth from wool and shipping, and partly because its proximity to London and the Continent allowed new fashions in ironwork and bell founding to arrive quickly. St Mary of Charity, as a prosperous town parish serving the port of Faversham, was well placed to acquire one of these early mechanisms, and documentary traces suggest a clock on the tower from at least the late medieval period.
The earliest tower clocks were remarkable feats of engineering but humble in display. They had no dial; they simply struck the hours on a bell. The crowd below counted the strokes. A dial came later, allowing the clock to be read silently and at a glance. By the seventeenth century, Faversham's clock had acquired the painted iron face that would have been visible from the market place, the guildhall, and the lanes leading down to the creek.
The clock mechanism itself sat high in the tower, a forest of iron wheels, weights, and a pendulum that beat out its steady rhythm. Keeping such a clock going was a constant labour. The clock keeper had to wind it, oil it, replace worn teeth, and occasionally reset the hands after a long stoppage. In many parishes, this role was paid as a small stipend, sometimes combined with duties as the sexton or the bell-ringer. The history of the clock at St Mary of Charity is therefore also the history of a small community of craftsmen who kept the town's hours honest, year after year, generation after generation.
Sundials and the Authority of Daylight
Even after tower clocks had taken over the public striking of the hour, sundials continued to play a quiet but persistent role at the church. A painted or carved sundial on a buttress or porch pillar gave a finer reading of the hour than the bell could, and it could be checked against the clock for accuracy. In a maritime town like Faversham, where shipmasters and merchants cared deeply about the exact hour of high water, having a reliable noon reading was genuinely useful.
The sundial also carried symbolic weight. It reminded the passer-by that time was a gift from God, governed by the motion of the heavens, and not something that human craft had invented. Inscriptions around the dial often quoted scripture or moralised about the brevity of life, a habit shared by sundials across Reformation and post-Reformation Europe. A visitor from Perth, for instance, who pauses to read the sundial on the cloisters of a heritage church will recognise the same gentle warning: the shadow passes, the hour returns no more.
At St Mary of Charity, the painted column inside the church, which carries its own programme of religious imagery, belongs to this same tradition of turning ordinary features of the building into silent teachers. Like the sundial, the column does not so much instruct the mind as steady the attention, drawing the eye from the rush of the day towards something slower and older.
The Liturgical Hours Inside the Walls
Public timekeeping on the tower is only half the story. Within the walls of the church, another clock was running: the sequence of the Divine Office, the cycle of psalms and prayers that structured the working and praying day of clergy. The seven canonical hours gave the building its inner rhythm, and the bells of the tower simply announced them to the outside world.
For a medieval priest or chantry chaplain serving at St Mary of Charity, the day was less a single timeline than a series of small seasons. Each hour had its own character, its own psalms, its own colour if the office were sung. The architecture of the church supported this rhythm: the chancel for the more intimate offices, the nave for processions, the porch for the occasional blessing of the people as they passed. A brass set into the floor of the chancel marked the place where a priest was to kneel for a particular anniversary; a memorial on the wall recorded a bequest for so many masses to be said over a year.
In this sense, time inside the church was not owned by any individual. It belonged to the liturgy, and through the liturgy to the whole community. Even those who never entered the building felt its pressure, because the bells that announced the hours also announced the obligations of charity, fasting, and rest that shaped parish life.
Pocket Watches and Personal Timepieces
The slow shift from communal to personal time arrived at the parish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As pocket watches became cheaper and more accurate, parishioners no longer relied solely on the tower clock to know the hour. They could check their own timepiece against it before walking to chapel, to a meeting, or to the wharf. The tower clock, in turn, had to be more accurate than it had been in the past, because people now noticed if it was a minute slow.
This is the period when the public clock face of St Mary of Charity began to acquire its modern appearance. The dial was enlarged, repainted, fitted with minute hands, and lit at night so that late travellers could still read the hour. Inside, a more accurate mechanism replaced the older verge-and-foliot, and then the pendulum, with the steady tick that has since become part of the town's background music.
The same period saw the rise of the wristwatch in the twentieth century, and with it the quietest change of all. Even the tower bell became, for many, an interruption rather than a necessity. People walked past the church with their own time already in their pocket, glancing at a screen rather than up at the dial. Yet the bells still ring on Sunday, for weddings and funerals, and for civic occasions, because the parish understands that time is not only a measurement. It is also a memory.
The Modern Era and the Quiet Tower
Today the timekeeping story at St Mary of Charity is one of continuity and quiet change. The bells still ring. The clock still strikes. The scratch dials still catch the morning sun on quiet days, and the sundials still throw their shadows across the stone. Visitors who climb the tower or simply sit in the nave will notice that the building continues to tell the time in more ways than one, and that each of those ways belongs to a different layer of its long history.
The heritage resources gathered on the Built To Inspire project pages make it possible for anyone, whether they live in Faversham, in Canberra, or in a small town in the Wheat Belt, to follow that history in detail. The clocks and bells of St Mary of Charity are not just relics. They are working instruments, still doing the job they were made to do, and still teaching anyone who listens how a community once learned to live, hour by hour, in the company of its church.