University of Washington-Seattle Campus The Monastery and Time Paper Hello i have posted everything you need in the flies that below you will need to read | Course Hero
University of Washington-Seattle Campus The Monastery and Time Paper Hello i have posted everything you need in the flies that below you will need to read the files and answer the following question.
Question:
Mumford argues that a new mechanical conception of time (abstract time) arose in part from the routine of the monastery. Explain what he means by this. In addition, what role did sound play in defining urban existence and the rise of clock thinking in the middle ages?
According to LeGoff, what was the main tension that existed between church’s time and merchant’s in the Middle Ages. How would a christian merchant resolve the tension? The Past and Present Society
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
Author(s): E. P. Thompson
Source: Past & Present, No. 38 (Dec., 1967), pp. 56-97
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749
Accessed: 15-09-2019 16:06 UTC
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TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND INDUSTRIAL
CAPITALISM
Tess … started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street
for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had va
when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day. Thomas
I
IT IS COMMONPLACE THAT THE YEARS BETWEEN 1300 AND 1650 SAW
within the intellectual culture of Western Europe important changes
in the apprehension of time.1 In the Canterbury Tales the cock still
figures in his immemorial r81e as nature’s timepiece: Chauntecleer Caste up his eyen to the brighte sonne,
That in the signe of Taurus hadde yronne
Twenty degrees and oon, and somwhat moore,
He knew by kynde, and by noon oother loore
That it was pryme, and crew with blisful stevene ….
But although “By nature knew he ech ascensioun/ Of the equynoxial
in thilke toun”, the contrast between “nature’s” time and clock time
is pointed in the image Wel sikerer was his crowyng in his logge
Than is a clokke, or an abbey orlogge.
This is a very early clock: Chaucer (unlike Chauntecleer) was a
Londoner, and was aware of the times of Court, of urban organization,
and of that “merchant’s time” which Jacques Le Goff, in a suggestive
article in Annales, has opposed to the time of the medieval church.2
I do not wish to argue how far the change was due to the spread of
clocks from the fourteenth century onwards, how far this was itself
a symptom of a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude.
However we see it, the change is certainly there. The clock steps
on to the Elizabethan stage, turning Faustus’s last soliloquy into
a dialogue with time: “the stars move still, time runs, the clock will
strike”. Sidereal time, which has been present since literature began,
1 Lewis Mumford makes suggestive claims in Technics and Civilization
(London, I934), esp. pp. 12-18, 196-9: see also S. de Grazia, Of Time, Work,
and Leisure (New York, 1962), Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 300oo-7oo
(London, 1967), and Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (New York, 1959).
2 J. le Goff, “Au Moyen Age: Temps de L’Eglise et temps du marchand”,
Annales, E.S.C., xv (196o); and the same author’s “Le temps du travail dans le
‘crise’ du XIVe Siacle: du temps medieval au temps moderne”, Le Moyen Age,
lxix (1963).
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TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM 57
has now moved at one step from the heavens into the home. Mortality
and love are both felt to be more poignant as the “Snayly motion of
the mooving hand”3 crosses the dial. When the watch is worn about
the neck it lies in proximity to the less regular beating of the heart.
The conventional Elizabethan images of time as a devourer, a defacer,
a bloody tyrant, a scytheman, are old enough, but there is a new
immediacy and insistence.4
As the seventeenth century moves on the image of clock-work
extends, until, with Newton, it has engrossed the universe. And by
the middle of the eighteenth century (if we are to trust Sterne) the
clock had penetrated to more intimate levels. For Tristram Shandy’s
father – “one of the most regular men in everything he did . .. that
ever lived” – “had made it a rule for many years of his life, – on
the first Sunday night of every month.., .to wind up a large house-
clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head”. “He had
likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to
the same period”, and this enabled Tristram to date his conception
very exactly. It also provoked The Clockmaker’s Outcry against the
Author:
The directions I had for making several clocks for the country are countermanded; because no modest lady now dares to mention a word about windingup a clock, without exposing herself to the sly leers and jokes of the family
… Nay, the common expression of street-walkers is, “Sir, will you have
your clock wound up ?”
Virtuous matrons (the “clockmaker” complained) are consigning their
clocks to lumber rooms as “exciting to acts of carnality”.5
However, this gross impressionism is unlikely to advance the
present enquiry: how far, and in what ways, did this shift in timesense affect labour discipline, and how far did it influence the inward
apprehension of time of working people? If the transition to
mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working
habits – new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature
upon which these incentives could bite effectively – how far is this
related to changes in the inward notation of time ?
3 M. Drayton, “Of his Ladies not Comming to London”, Works, ed. J. W.
Hebel (Oxford, 1932), iii, p. 204.
4 The change is discussed Cipolla, op. cit.; Erwin Sturzl, Der Zeitbegriff in
der Elisabethanischen Literatur (Wiener Beitrage zur Englischen Philologie,
lxix, Wien-Stuttgart, 1965); Alberto Tenenti, II Senso della Morte e l’amore
della vita nel rinanscimento (Milan, 1957).
5 Anon., The Clockmaker’s Outcry against the Author of … Tristram Shandy
(London, 1760), pp. 42-3.
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58 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 38
II
It is well known that among primitive peopl
time is commonly related to familiar processes
of domestic chores. Evans-Pritchard has an
of the Nuer:
The daily timepiece is the cattle clock, the round of pastoral tasks, and the
time of day and the passage of time through a day are to a Nuer primarily the
succession of these tasks and their relation to one another.
Among the Nandi an occupational definition of time evolved covering
not only each hour, but half hours of the day – at 5-30 in the morning
the oxen have gone to the grazing-ground, at 6 the sheep have been
unfastened, at 6-30 the sun has grown, at 7 it has become warm, at
7-30 the goats have gone to the grazing-ground, etc. – an uncommonly well-regulated economy. In a similar way terms evolve for
the measurement of time intervals. In Madagascar time might be
measured by “a rice-cooking” (about half an hour) or “the frying of a
locust” (a moment). The Cross River natives were reported as
saying “the man died in less than the time in which maize is not
yet completely roasted” (less than fifteen minutes).6
It is not difficult to find examples of this nearer to us in cultural
time. Thus in seventeenth-century Chile time was often measured
in “credos”: an earthquake was described in 1647 as lasting for the
period of two credos; while the cooking-time of an egg could be
judged by an Ave Maria said aloud. In Burma in recent times monks
rose at daybreak “when there is light enough to see the veins in the
hand”.’ The Oxford English Dictionary gives us English examples
– “pater noster wyle”, “miserere whyle” (1450), and (in the New
English Dictionary but not the Oxford English Dictionary) “pissing
while” – a somewhat arbitrary measurement.
Pierre Bourdieu has explored more closely the attitudes towards
time of the Kabyle peasant (in Algeria) in recent years: “An attitude
of submission and of nonchalant indifference to the passage of time
6 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), pp. Ioo-4; M. P. Nilsson,
Primitive Time Reckoning (Lund, 1920), pp. 32-3, 42; P. A. Sorokin and
R. K. Merton, “Social Time: a Methodological and Functional Analysis”,
Amer. Jl. Sociol., xlii (I937); A. I. Hallowell, “Temporal Orientation in Western
Civilization and in a Pre-Literate Society”, Amer. Anthrop., new ser. xxxix
(1937). Other sources for primitive time reckoning are cited in H. G. Alexander, Time as Dimension and History (Albuquerque, 1945), p. 26, and Beate R.
Salz, “The Human Element in Industrialization”, Econ. Devel. and Cult.
Change, iv (I955), esp. pp. 94-114.
7 E. P. Salas, “L’Evolution de la notion du temps et les horlogers & l’apoque
coloniale au Chili”, Annales E.S.C., xxi (1966), p. 146; Cultural Patterns and
Technical Change, ed. M. Mead (New York, UNESCO, 1953), P. 75.
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TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM 59
which no one dreams of mastering, using up, or saving… Haste is
seen as a lack of decorum combined with diabolical ambition”. The
clock is sometimes known as “the devil’s mill”; there are no precise
meal-times; “the notion of an exact appointment is unknown; they
agree only to meet ‘at the next market’ “. A popular song runs:
It is useless to pursue the world, No one will ever overtake it.”
Synge, in his well-observed account of the Aran Islands, gives us
a classic example:
While I am walking with Michael someone often comes to me to ask the
time of day. Few of the people, however, are sufficiently used to modern
time to understand in more than a vague way the convention of the hours
and when I tell them what o’clock it is by my watch they are not satisfied,
and ask how long is left them before the twilight.9
The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough,
upon the direction of the wind. Nearly all the cottages are built.. . with
two doors opposite each other, the more sheltered of which lies open all day
to give light to the interior. If the wind is northerly the south door is
opened, and the shadow of the door-post moving across the kitchen floor
indicates the hour; as soon, however, as the wind changes to the south the
other door is opened, and the people, who never think of putting up a
primitive dial, are at a loss ….
When the wind is from the north the old woman manages my meals with fair
regularity; but on the other days she often makes my tea at three o’clock
instead of six … .10
Such a disregard for clock time could of course only be possible in
a crofting and fishing community whose framework of marketing and
administration is minimal, and in which the day’s tasks (which might
vary from fishing to farming, building, mending of nets, thatching,
making a cradle or a coffin) seem to disclose themselves, by the logic
of need, before the crofter’s eyes.11 But his account will serve to
emphasize the essential conditioning in differing notations of time
provided by different work-situations and their relation to “natural”
rhythms. Clearly hunters must employ certain hours of the night to
set their snares. Fishing and seafaring people must integrate their
lives with the tides. A petition from Sunderland in i8oo includes
8 p. Bourdieu, “The attitude of the Algerian peasant toward time”, in
Mediterranean Countrymen, ed. J. Pitt-Rivers (Paris, 1963), PP. 55-72.
9 Cf. ibid., p. 179: “Spanish Americans do not regulate their lives by the clock
as Anglos do. Both rural and urban people, when asked when they plan to do
something, gives answers like: ‘Right now, about two or four o’clock’ “.
10 J. M. Synge, Plays, Poems, and Prose (Everyman edn., London, 1941),
p. 257.
” The most important event in the relation of the islands to an external
economy in Synge’s time was the arrival of the steamer, whose times might be
greatly affected by tide and weather. See Synge, The Aran Islands (Dublin,
1907), PP. I15-6.
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60 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 38
the words “considering that this is a seaport in w
obliged to be up at all hours of the night to atte
affairs upon the river”.12 The operative phrase
the patterning of social time in the seaport follow
the sea; and this appears to be natural and comp
men or seamen: the compulsion is nature’s own.
In a similar way labour from dawn to dus
“natural” in a farming community, especially in
nature demands that the grain be harvested befo
set in. And we may note similar “natural” w
attend other rural or industrial occupations: sh
at lambing time and guarded from predators; c
the charcoal fire must be attended and not bu
turfs (and the charcoal burners must sleep besid
the making, the furnaces must not be allowed to
The notation of time which arises in such contexts has been
described as task-orientation. It is perhaps the most effective
orientation in peasant societies, and it remains important in village
and domestic industries It has by no means lost all relevance in
rural parts of Britain today. Three points may be proposed about
task-orientation. First, there is a sense in which it is more humanly
comprehensible than timed labour. The peasant or labourer appears
to attend upon what is an observed necessity. Second, a community
in which task-orientation is common appears to show least demarcation
between “work” and “life”. Social intercourse and labour are
intermingled – the working-day lengthens or contracts according
the task – and there is no great sense of conflict between labour
“passing the time of day”. Third, to men accustomed to labo
timed by the clock, this attitude to labour appears to be wasteful
lacking in urgency.13
12 Public Rec. Off., W.O. 40/17. It is of interest to note other exampl
the recognition that seafaring time conflicted with urban routines: the Cou
Admiralty was held to be always open, “for strangers and merchants, and
faring men, must take the opportunity of tides and winds, and cannot, wit
ruin and great prejudice attend the solemnity of courts and dilatory plead
(see E. Vansittart Neale, Feasts and Fasts [London, i845], p. 249), while in so
Sabbatarian legislation an exception was made for fishermen who sighted a
off-shore on the Sabbath day.
13 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (Paris, 1958), ii, pp. 5
prefers a distinction between “cyclical time” – arising from changing seaso
occupations in agriculture – and the “linear time” of urban, industrial
organization. More suggestive is Lucien Febvre’s distinction between “Le
temps v6cu et le temps-mesure”, La Problame de L’Incroyance an XVIe Siecle
(Paris, 1947), P. 431. A somewhat schematic examination of the organization
of tasks in primitive economies is in Stanley H. Udy, Organisation of Work (New
Haven, 1959), ch. 2.
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TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM 61
Such a clear distinction supposes, of course, the independent
peasant or craftsman as referent. But the question of task-
orientation becomes greatly more complex at the point where labour is
employed. The entire family economy of the small farmer may be
task-orientated; but within it there may be a division of labour, and
allocation of r6les, and the discipline of an employer-employed
relationship between the farmer and his children. Even here time is
beginning to become money, the employer’s money. As soon as
actual hands are employed the shift from task-orientation to timed
labour is marked. It is true that the timing of work can be done
independently of any time-piece – and indeed precedes the diffusion
of the clock. Still, in the mid-seventeenth century substantial
farmers calculated their expectations of employed labour (as did Henry
Best) in “dayworkes” – “the Cunnigarth, with its bottomes, is 4
large dayworkes for a good mower”, “the Spellowe is 4 indifferent
dayworkes”, etc.;14 and what Best did for his own farm, Markham
attempted to present in general form:
A man… may mow of Corn, as Barley and Oats, if it be thick, loggy and
beaten down to the earth, making fair work, and not cutting off the heads of
the ears, and leaving the straw still growing one acre and a half in a day: but
if it be good thick and fair standing corn, then he may mow two acres, or two
acres and a half in a day; but if the corn be short and thin, then he may mow
three, and sometimes four Acres in a day, and not be overlaboured …. 15
The computation is difficult, and dependent upon many variables.
Clearly, a straightforward time-measurement was more convenient.16
This measurement embodies a simple relationship. Those who
are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time
and their “own” time. And the employer must use the time of his
labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time
when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is
not passed but spent.
We may observe something of this contrast, in attitudes towards
both time and work, in two passages from Stephen Duck’s poem,
14 Rural Economy in Yorkshire in 1641 … Farming and Account Books of
Henry Best, ed. C. B. Robinson (Surtees Society, xxxiii, 1857), PP. 38-9.
15 G.M., The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent, Ioth edn. (London, 166o),
ch. xii: “A generall computation of men, and cattel’s labours: what each may do
without hurt daily”, pp. 112-8.
16 Wage-assessments still, of course, assumed the statute dawn-to-dusk day,
defined, as late as 1725, in a Lancashire assessment: “They shall work from five
in the morning till betwixt seven and eight at the night, from the midst of March
to the middle of September” – and thereafter “from the spring of day till
night”, with two half hours for drinking, and one hour for dinner and (in
summer only) half hour for sleep: “else, for every hour’s absence to defaulk a
penny”: Annals of Agriculture, xxv (London, 1796).
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62 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 38
“The Thresher’s Labour”. The first describes a work-situation
which we have come to regard as the norm in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries:
From the strong Planks our Crab-Tree Staves rebound,
And echoing Barns return the rattling Sound.
Now in the Air our knotty Weapons Fly;
And now with equal Force descend from high:
Down one, one up, so well they keep the Time,
The Cyclops Hammers could not truer chime ….
In briny Streams our Sweat descends apace,
Drops from our Locks, or trickles down our Face.
No intermission in our Works we know;
The noisy Threshall must for ever go.
Their Master absent, others safely play;
The sleeping Threshall doth itself betray.
Nor yet the tedious Labour to beguile,
And make the passing Minutes sweetly smile,
Can we, like Shepherds, tell a merry Tale ?
The Voice is lost, drown’d by the noisy Flail….
Week after Week we this dull Task pursue,
Unless when winnowing Days produce a new;
A new indeed, but frequently a worse,
The Threshall yields but to the Master’s Curse:
He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day,
Then swears we’ve idled half our Time away.
Why look ye, Rogues! D’ye think that this will do ?
Your Neighbours thresh as much again as you.
This would appear to describe the monot…
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