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Before clocks were everywhere, how did two people agree to meet "later"?

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Ovid

Timing a meeting by a shadow on a wall makes me think of how much patience was built into an ordinary day back then. My guess is people waited far longer than we would and nobody saw it as being late, since the other option was walking home with the news

Timing a meeting by a shadow on a wall makes me think of how much patience was built into an ordinary day back then. My guess is people waited far longer than we would and nobody saw it as being late, since the other option was walking home with the news still in your pocket. I hope someone here turns up that missed meeting in a diary!

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Not the church bells answer, or not only that. I mean a farmhand and a cousin in the next village, say 1700, deciding to meet at the crossroads. What did "after the milking" or "when the shadow reaches the wall" actually look like in practice? How long did people expect to wait for each other?

If you've read a letter, diary or court record where someone got it wrong and missed a meeting, that's the line I'd love to see.

Thoughts

  • Ovid

    Timing a meeting by a shadow on a wall makes me think of how much patience was built into an ordinary day back then. My guess is people waited far longer than we would and nobody saw it as being late, since the other option was walking home with the news still in your pocket. I hope someone here turns up that missed meeting in a diary!

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  • primary_sources_only

    E. P. Thompson's 1967 essay Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism is built on this. His name for it was task orientation, the day measured by the milking or a pot coming to the boil.

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Before clocks were everywhere, how did ordinary people agree to meet at a time? I want the small, practical answer.

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