New Discoveries

The seal of a horologiarius

Researchers from York Archaeological Trust have identified a remarkable object which shows that around AD 1300 York was at the forefront of science and engineering. The Trust undertook excavations before developers George Houlton and Sons transformed the former York College for Girls in Low Petergate into an award-winning series of luxury apartments, retail units and a restaurant. In contrast, the Trust's archaeologists revealed that in the medieval period the site contained a distinctly dirty series of metalworkers' workshops. One of the objects they recovered was a small circular copper-alloy disc. Expert cleaning in YAT's Archaeological Conservation Laboratory has now revealed that one face carries an inscription around its edge, and that the object is therefore a seal matrix that could be impressed into wax to seal documents. It dates to around AD 1300. Part of the inscription, in abbreviated Latin, can be read as SIGILLUM ROBERTI HOROLOGIARII DE IERM, and this translates as 'The seal of Robert the clockmaker from Yarmouth'.

Clocks were first made in England only a very few years before this seal may have been lost. An itinerant horologiarius is mentioned in the account books of Beaulieu Cistercian Abbey, Hampshire, in 1269-70, and there are records of a clock made by the Augustinian Canons of Dunstable Priory, Bedfordshire, in 1283. In the following few years there are records of other clocks at major English churches – Exeter Cathedral in 1284, St Paul's London in 1286, Merton College Oxford and Norwich Cathedral before 1290, Ely Abbey 1291, Canterbury Cathedral 1292, and Salisbury Cathedral before 1306. York has hitherto been missing from this list, but now it seems possible that Robert the clockmaker may have been engaged upon works in York c.1300. The most likely venue for his skills must be York Minster, although the first references to a clock there do not appear in the surviving documents until much later.

The earliest medieval clocks did not necessarily have dials; their main purpose was to strike the hours. Some were developed that would show solar and lunar data; in 1322-5 a large astronomical clock with automata was installed in Norwich cathedral, and in 1327-1336 the noted mathematician and astronomer Richard of Wallingford, Abbot of St Alban's Benedictine Abbey, designed an enormous astronomical clock that stood in the south transept there. This tradition of astronomical clocks was maintained in York after World War II, when one was installed in York Minster as a memorial to airmen killed in the war. The oldest surviving medieval clocks in England are those with very similar mechanisms at Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire, first mentioned in 1386, and at Wells Cathedral in Somerset, made at some time in the period 1344-1392.