Day in the Life of a Nidderdale Lay Brother Hour of day Activity Get out of bed in the dark 2.45 a.m. Wake up ready for Vigils. 3.00 – 3.30 a.m. *Vigils Prayers Work in fields, mines, 3.30 – 8 a.m. Working smelthouses or bakehouse from first light. Stop for prayers and then 8.00 a.m. *Terce back to work. Novices and elderly lay 10.00 – 11 a.m. Mixt brothers have a snack. Most lay brothers do not. Then...back to work. Put away tools and say five 11.00 a.m. *Sext psalms. Then back to work. Eat in the grange hall / 11.30 a.m. Lunch refectory in silence. 12.00 – 2.00 p.m. Working Return to work after lunch. Gather for prayers at place 2.00 p.m. *None of work. Working with possible break 2.15 – 6.00 p.m. Back to work. for ale if working within the monastery itself (NOT the Granges where beer is not allowed). 6.00 p.m. *Vespers Say 10 psalms out loud. Eat in silence. Use sign 6.45 – 7.30 p.m. Supper / snack language to pass things. 7.30 p.m. *Compline Last prayers of the day. Only permitted 5-6 hours of 8 p.m. Sleep sleep.
Information based on ‘The Cistercians in Yorkshire’: http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk
*These are six of the eight ‘Offices’ (said or sung prayers and worship of the monastic community). Lay brothers were expected to take part in as much of this worship as was possible according to their job. The full offices were: Matins or Vigils, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline.
Telling the time in the Middle Ages
Lay brothers and monks in Nidderdale could not complete their daily tasks of prayers and labour without some way of telling the time.
A B C
Look at each of the pictures above. What do they show and how do you think these things could be used to tell the time? A B C
Notes for teachers:
A: This is a diagram of a ‘water clock’. This is a container filled with water with a small hole in the bottom. The water was allowed to come out through the hole over a day. Marks were then made on the container to divide the time equally. 12 marks would divide the day into 12 hours, so you could see when one hour or even half an hour had passed by looking at the water and the division marks.
B: This is a simple clock candle. Once it was known how long it took for a particular size of candle to burn, it could be marked with equal divisions. If the markers were nails, these would drop onto the metal candle holder with a clattering noise like an ‘alarm’.
C: This is a picture of the stars and the constellations in the sky. People knew which star was which in those days and would know what time it was by observing where certain stars were in the sky. However, it was a problem to use this method on a very cloudy day.
Image Attributions:
We gratefully acknowledge the use of the following images in this document:
Water clock: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASimple_water_clock.svg by Sharayanan [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Constellations: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AThe_story_of_the_sun%2C_moon%2C_and_stars_(1898)_(147 78558682).jpg by Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
Photo of Orion by Till Credner - Own work: AlltheSky.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20041769