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note (e) and Fig. 1E). Many of these quarter dials have few
lines (Table 9) and contain only variant mass lines. Sometimes a
church has several different quarter dials (Table 10) mapping
out the variant mass lines.37
Such quarter scratch dials represent a most
particular juxtaposition of time and place, of social and
economic circumstance. They bear testimony, somewhat
paradoxically, to both the need to adopt modern equal hour time,
but also to the absence of the associated technology – clocks
or scientific sundials. The rapid take off in Kent’s domestic
clock ownership during the second half of the seventeenth
century38 suggests it was then that equal hour time
became well nigh universal. Poorer parishes did the best they
could – they adapted scratch dial technology.39
Most probably therefore the quarter dials showing variant
seasonal mass lines on modern time were made in the second half
of the seventeenth century and constitute the last type of
scratch dial made. They convey the impression of scant regard to
decorative appearance. Individual quarter dials are rarely
bounded with a scratched circumferential arc, scratched line
lengths are often very variable, whilst multiple dials can
appear as a jumble.
Quarter, morning only, dials also bear testimony to
afternoon religious services no longer requiring their time to
be indicated. As some quarter dials are on the medieval time
system (Fig. 1D), the eclipse of afternoon services probably
commenced in the sixteenth century. The quarter medieval time
dials are of a neater appearance compared with the modern time
ones and do not occur as multiple dials on a church.
The Evolution of Scratch Dials
This paper’s deduced reconstruction of the use and appearance
of scratch dials is consolidated in Fig. 4.40
More than half a millennium of stability was followed by two
centuries of change and decline culminating in the obsolescence
of scratch dials. Prior to the sixteenth century scratch dial
use would have been almost universal and their appearance
unchanging.41 During the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries the use and appearance of scratch dials were
significantly modified by three factors:-
- religious change – accounted for the demise of
the symbolic dial (as part of the questioning of traditional
imagery) and the introduction of the quarter dial (with the
decline of afternoon services);
- adoption of new technology – as clocks and
scientific sundials progressively spread, the proportion of
churches using scratch dials declined; and
- universal adoption of the modern time system –
led to new scratch dials on the new time system being made and
used until the new technology could be procured
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