Susie Johns
School of Humanities
Fields , Fairs and Festivities : Telling the Time Before the Industrial Revolution
It is often assumed that consistent timekeeping was synonymous with industrialisation ; that the change from reliance on natural routines to accurate timepieces was swiftly adopted due to the creation of railways and factory shifts . My PhD research will demonstrate the extent to which this widely accepted narrative represents the true history of time telling . Using witness testimonies from court cases between 1550 and 1800 to explore how everyday people placed events in time , it is recording the temporal language used and tracking its development in the context of wider societal influences . The telling of time with reference to religious celebrations , agricultural tasks , fairs and markets , and national events can all provide an insight into the organisation and synchronicity of a community and how this relates to the demography of its population while the use of universal units of time and calendrical dates indicates access to technology and communal standardisation . Previous research has focused on either rural or urban communities , often using documents from a relatively narrow time period . My longitudinal research covers a broad area of the English Midlands which includes cities , rural settlements and industrial areas allowing for direct comparisons to be made over two and a half centuries .
Postgraduate Conference 2021 Page 27