I was helping a friend write a short story set in medieval times fantasy world and one character was suppose to say that "[enemy] will be here in a few hours" but we were not sure if medieval people used hours as a unit of time so we changed that to "by sunset". Sorry that's my question did they use words or concepts like hours? Or was it just sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight etc. I'm interested in europe and middleeast mostly and if the nibility and knights used the same units of time or phrases as commoners in cities and villages or were they using more advanced/specific shit. Like how would they arrange meetings? For example with a lord. Just be here at noon? Wouldn't that make people wait in long lines. I know they had like those sun clocks but surely not everyone used those or even had access to them. Sorry for shitty English I sometimes have problems with organizing my thoughts and using the right words
>>18055602Mechanical clocks were around by the 14th century, water clocks and hourglasses long before then, and time keeping down to the hour was an important part of monastic life so people would be aware of the idea of hours.
>>18055615So did every castle had some kind of a clock or hourglass? Who was responsible for maintaining it and making sure it's accurate? The monks/priests? Like let's say I'm a knight or a noble living in a castle, who do i aproach to get accurate time?
>>18055622You can pretty easily tell when noon is just from looking at the sun. Before clocks were common people were even better at this.
>>18055703Yeah I know but let's say many people want to meet lord on certain day and a castellan is organizing those meetings for a lord. He can't just say to everyone come at the noon if they want to meet him one on one. So would he just say come here two hours after the noon? How would a knight know two hours passed and not three? Or would he just chill around the castle until someone comes and tells him lord is ready to meet you. Sorry I'm not being clear i have issues putting my question into right words
>>18055602Most towns would have had church bells that rang every hour, but they wouldn't have had smaller denominations of time. These hours wouldn't have been standard either, there were always 12 hours during the daylight hours of days, which were stretched out as the days grew longer in the summer. There were also another form of time division which you can see here>https://www.medievalists.net/2014/01/tempus-fugit/These mostly only saw used by clergymen, but might still crop up elsewhere in communities dominated by a monastery. In the Muslim world it was similar but based around the times of prayer. Outside of cities or towns however, where there was no one who's job was specifically to keep the time, more basic times like sunrise/sunset etc would be used as you suggest
>>18055732Thank you, that answers all my questions pretty much. I completely forgot about the church bells
>>18055602>Sorry that's my question did they use words or concepts like hours?I don’t know about everyday speech, but I’ve translated medieval chronicles and they use the Latin word “hora” (hour) regularly. It was certainly a concept of time which existed to them.
>>18056120Adding to this with an example from John of Fordun's Scottish chronicle, where he's talking about a battle that wads fought "ab aurora diei usque ad horam nonum" = "from sunrise to the ninth hour (9 o'clock)"
>>18056185>from sunrise to the ninth hour (9 o'clock)"Likely not 9 o'clock in our parlance, but the 9th hour after sunrise. So had the sunrise been at 6 am, he'd be talking about 3pm
Time was structured around prayer times: dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and night.
