In 1563 Elizabeth Flynte, a servant from Haselor, Warwickshire, described the extra-marital activities of her mistress to the church court of the Lichfield diocese:
He come in here this night, remained four or five hours, left til some other time about 3 of the clock in the morning. The first night being about Michaelmas last and the second night was about a month or 3 weeks then next following and the third night was about Lenton Fayre last past.
To explain when her mistress’ lover had visited the house, Elizabeth combined complementary systems of time reckoning. She clearly knew how to use clock and calendar time but also opted for other familiar markers, such as ecclesiastical and local events. Informal references such as these were considered robust enough for court proceedings – as long as the courts could understand the dates and times they represented.
Church, or consistory, courts were held in cathedrals and large parish churches, hearing cases concerned with individuals’ immorality, tithe and probate disputes, and ecclesiastical compliance. The judge and lawyers served the diocese, often holding courts in different locations on rotation, which sometimes meant covering large distances. Witness testimonies from church court cases in the extensive Lichfield diocese – which included Shropshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and parts of Warwickshire – show how shared understandings of time were integral to communicating when crimes were observed, and thus to the working of the courts.
Some witnesses gave very vague estimations. In 1590 clergyman Thomas Kynston described two defendants’ refusal to contribute to the collection for the upkeep of their parish church in Clifton Campville ‘in summer last past was twelvemonth’ – that is, the summer before last. Other witnesses provided more detail. Also in 1590, William Lucas from Tamworth described hearing defamatory words spoken ‘upon Monday in Whitsun week last past late in the evening after supper’. He used a religious celebration that everyone in Christian England would have known and narrowed it down to a specific day within the festivities. The time was colloquially understood; local people would share mealtime terminology and timings.
One of the most common ways to describe the date of a crime was through agricultural activity. Cyclical tasks, such as sheep shearing, ploughing, and sowing, were all markers in the calendar year. The arable task most often referred to was the harvest, but exactly what witnesses meant by that could differ. According to the liturgical calendar included in almanacs, owned by an estimated one in three people, Lammas Day, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Loaf Mass’, marked the start of the harvest, when people shared bread made with the first cut of wheat on 1 August. However, other sources depicting the Labours of the Months, such as stained-glass windows, carvings, and illustrated manuscripts, instead associated harvesting with September’s labours.
To further complicate matters, as crops have different growth cycles, ‘harvest’ could also happen throughout the year. A 1731 defamation crime, described by 60-year-old Henry Byrard as committed on ‘a Saturday in past potato harvest’, was particularly problematic, as potatoes can yield two yearly crops. Their clash with customary crop rotation methods, and the initial distrust of food considered hog meal, delayed their commercial popularity, and they were not widely cultivated until after 1750. In 1731, then, the timing of the potato crop was unlikely to have been known by anyone from communities that had not pre-empted the potato’s success. To be effective in the witness testimony, the court would have to be familiar with the crop. For instance, the reference to the tidal patterns that enabled seaweed harvesting to produce fertiliser in coastal areas made by a witness in the Kirkwall Court of Orkney would have been meaningless to someone living in the Midlands; a witness using this to anchor the timing of a crime would have been futile in the Lichfield diocese.
Mutual local knowledge also extended to market days, fairs, newsworthy events, and parish customs. To clarify the proper occupant of a church pew in a 1684 dispute, 75-year-old Anna Hallsworth described the timeline of the pew’s associated property: ‘Blakenhall House stood three or four years after it was built anew or repaired before it was burnt down which was done in the late rebellion’, likely a reference to a local clash during the Civil War near Burton upon Trent. Labourer Jacob Pasland added that he ‘knows not what year Blakenhall House was burnt down but he knows it hath never been repaired since’. Each testimony needed prior knowledge of the local conflict and fire to comprehend the building’s chronology.
In 1563 Elizabeth Flynte, a servant from Haselor, Warwickshire, described the extra-marital activities of her mistress to the church court of the Lichfield diocese:
He come in here this night, remained four or five hours, left til some other time about 3 of the clock in the morning. The first night being about Michaelmas last and the second night was about a month or 3 weeks then next following and the third night was about Lenton Fayre last past.
To explain when her mistress’ lover had visited the house, Elizabeth combined complementary systems of time reckoning. She clearly knew how to use clock and calendar time but also opted for other familiar markers, such as ecclesiastical and local events. Informal references such as these were considered robust enough for court proceedings – as long as the courts could understand the dates and times they represented.
Church, or consistory, courts were held in cathedrals and large parish churches, hearing cases concerned with individuals’ immorality, tithe and probate disputes, and ecclesiastical compliance. The judge and lawyers served the diocese, often holding courts in different locations on rotation, which sometimes meant covering large distances. Witness testimonies from church court cases in the extensive Lichfield diocese – which included Shropshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and parts of Warwickshire – show how shared understandings of time were integral to communicating when crimes were observed, and thus to the working of the courts.
Some witnesses gave very vague estimations. In 1590 clergyman Thomas Kynston described two defendants’ refusal to contribute to the collection for the upkeep of their parish church in Clifton Campville ‘in summer last past was twelvemonth’ – that is, the summer before last. Other witnesses provided more detail. Also in 1590, William Lucas from Tamworth described hearing defamatory words spoken ‘upon Monday in Whitsun week last past late in the evening after supper’. He used a religious celebration that everyone in Christian England would have known and narrowed it down to a specific day within the festivities. The time was colloquially understood; local people would share mealtime terminology and timings.
One of the most common ways to describe the date of a crime was through agricultural activity. Cyclical tasks, such as sheep shearing, ploughing, and sowing, were all markers in the calendar year. The arable task most often referred to was the harvest, but exactly what witnesses meant by that could differ. According to the liturgical calendar included in almanacs, owned by an estimated one in three people, Lammas Day, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Loaf Mass’, marked the start of the harvest, when people shared bread made with the first cut of wheat on 1 August. However, other sources depicting the Labours of the Months, such as stained-glass windows, carvings, and illustrated manuscripts, instead associated harvesting with September’s labours.
To further complicate matters, as crops have different growth cycles, ‘harvest’ could also happen throughout the year. A 1731 defamation crime, described by 60-year-old Henry Byrard as committed on ‘a Saturday in past potato harvest’, was particularly problematic, as potatoes can yield two yearly crops. Their clash with customary crop rotation methods, and the initial distrust of food considered hog meal, delayed their commercial popularity, and they were not widely cultivated until after 1750. In 1731, then, the timing of the potato crop was unlikely to have been known by anyone from communities that had not pre-empted the potato’s success. To be effective in the witness testimony, the court would have to be familiar with the crop. For instance, the reference to the tidal patterns that enabled seaweed harvesting to produce fertiliser in coastal areas made by a witness in the Kirkwall Court of Orkney would have been meaningless to someone living in the Midlands; a witness using this to anchor the timing of a crime would have been futile in the Lichfield diocese.
Mutual local knowledge also extended to market days, fairs, newsworthy events, and parish customs. To clarify the proper occupant of a church pew in a 1684 dispute, 75-year-old Anna Hallsworth described the timeline of the pew’s associated property: ‘Blakenhall House stood three or four years after it was built anew or repaired before it was burnt down which was done in the late rebellion’, likely a reference to a local clash during the Civil War near Burton upon Trent. Labourer Jacob Pasland added that he ‘knows not what year Blakenhall House was burnt down but he knows it hath never been repaired since’. Each testimony needed prior knowledge of the local conflict and fire to comprehend the building’s chronology.
A wider audience would understand other references. High-profile Christian festivals, coronations, national conflicts, and Quarter Days, which were used for civic administration, would be familiar to most in England. At the broadest level, all those in Christian Europe and those whose governments had adopted the Roman calendar of 46 BC and their 24-hour clock would have understood the standard units of dates, months, years, hours, and minutes. Yet even among these universal units there were discrepancies, depending on whether the ‘old style’ Julian or ‘new style’ Gregorian calendar had been adopted. Dual dating was necessary for international papers as England adopted the Gregorian reforms in 1752, 172 years behind mainland Europe. The Treaty of Westminster, for example, drawn up to negotiate terms to end the Anglo-Dutch wars, was signed on 9 February 1673 for the English and 19 February 1674 for the Dutch.
The use of standard units by witnesses in Lichfield’s consistory courts increased throughout the early modern period by an average of 27 per cent in 1800 compared to 1550. The uptake reflected society’s growing horizons through trade, migration for employment, transportation, and changes in government, which demanded a mutual understanding of time beyond the immediate community. Rising literacy and access to timepieces also resulted in more standardised units being used closer to the Industrial Revolution. This did not render informal references obsolete, however. The continued use of non-standard methods suggests that courts were more concerned with witnesses and defendants corroborating each other’s accounts than pinning down precise times and dates. Even today, when most of us always have access to the time and date, we still relay temporal information without giving a time or date: life ‘before Covid’ or eating Christmas dinner ‘after the king’s speech’.
Susie Johns is a PhD student in History at Keele University in partnership with Staffordshire Record Office.
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