GREAT CLOCKS of CHRISTENDOM: RICHARD of WALLINGFORD







Nicholas Whyte:

Indeed, when on one occasion the most illustrious King Edward III from the Conquest came to the monastery to pray, and saw that so sumptuous a work had been put in hand while the church was still not rebuilt since the ruin it suffered in Abbot Hugh's time, he discreetly rebuked Abbot Richard on the score that he had neglected the fabric of the church, and spent so much on a less important work, namely the aforesaid horologium. To this reproof it was replied with due reverence that abbots enough would succeed him who would find workmen for the fabric of the monastery, but no successor after his death would be able to finish the work that he had begun. Indeed, he was quite right; for in that art nothing of the kind remains, nor was anything similar invented in his lifetime.

Anyone reading J.D. North's excellent edition of the works of Richard of Wallingford cannot help but ask the same question as Edward III; why should the leprous abbot of England's premier monastery spend his declining years designing an elaborately accurate clock? I hope to be able to shed some light on Richard's motives by looking more closely at the mechanism of his clock and particularly at the possible sources of inspiration for it.

Richard of Wallingford owed much to the Benedictine Abbey of St. Albans. His father, a blacksmith, died when Richard was ten, and he was then adopted by William of Kirkeby, the Prior of the subordinate cell of St Albans in Wallingford. The Prior supported him and eventually sent him to Oxford, where he gained his Bachelor of Arts after six years of study at the age of twenty-three in 1314. Richard then spent three years as a novice and monk at St. Albans, and had been ordained by the time he returned to Oxford to study theology.

The Abbey Chronicles tell us that Richard himself felt that he had neglected theology at Oxford, preferring to concentrate on mathematics and astronomy. Certainly none of his surviving spiritual writings, three and a half short prayers preserved in the Abbey chronicles and translated by North, is particularly uplifting. His mathematical and astronomical writings while at Oxford were rather more significant. His work on trigonometry was the first to be written in Latin, and his Albion is one of the first equatoria known in Christian Europe. In late 1327, Richard qualified as a Bachelor of Theology, and on his return to St. Albans he found the Abbot, Hugh of Eversdon, very ill. According to his fellow monks, he predicted by astrological means not only the Abbot's death on 7 September but also his own election as the twenty-eighth abbot of St. Albans on 29 October...

Richard gained a reputation of keeping a tight rein on the monastery. There are two recorded instances of plots to overthrow him by disaffected members the chapter, in 1328 and in 1332. By 1333 Richard's leprosy... had disabled him to such an extent that he had to appoint a coadjutor, Nicholas of Flamstede. His death in 1335 is attributed in the Gesta Abbatum to a rapid decline brought about after his bedroom had been struck by lightning the previous year.

Richard's lasting memorial in the Abbey was the enormous clock which he had constructed in the south transept. The clock itself was presumably lost when Henry VIII dissolved the monastery in 1546, and the only contemporary description apart from the Gesta is that of Leland a few years earlier. Fortunately a manuscript containing Richard's notes on the mechanism for the clock is preserved in the Bodleian Library, and it is this that North translates and that Watson used as the basis for his 1979 model, as presumably did Harvard Horological for their full-scale reconstruction:

The wheel with 120 teeth... rotates once in 24 hours, and drives everything else.

The wheel with 115 teeth rotates once in 23h 56m 4.12s, only 0.03s longer than the sidereal day, so within one part in 3 million of the correct value, turning the star plate (marked with a star) and driving all the wheels above it.

The wheel with 331 teeth is not circular, but shaped in such a way as to drive an image of the sun with the sun's true equatorial velocity, i.e. automatically compensating for the equation of time.

The moon is represented by a sphere which rotates to show the lunar phases, and whose mean motion is within 1.8 parts per million of the true value.

The nodes of the moon's orbit on the ecliptic are represented by the head and tail of the dragon at the top of the diagram. The accuracy here is only to 1 part in 700 of the known value for the motion of the nodes at the time, but as the period of the nodes is 18.6 years this would hardly have been noticeable...

There was a black anti-solar disc as well as a solar disc, under which the moon was drawn when it was full and near the nodes. This corresponds to the conditions for a lunar eclipse...

Eight missing leaves from the manuscript may have concerned gear trains to show planetary motion in some way...

At the time of Richard of Wallingford's accession to the Abbacy of St. Albans, there was already a tradition at least forty years old of installing large clocks in religious buildings. Although the canons of Dunstable had built their own, craftsmen had been employed to build most of the others. Norwich cathedral had put much time and effort into building a clock with an astronomical dial, and probably were not the first to have done so. Richard of Wallingford must have been aware of all these developments, and must also have felt that St. Albans could not afford to lose further prestige after the disasters of the mid 1320s. It is unlikely that the Norwich clock was very accurate. Richard knew that he could design a far more accurate mechanism to show lunar phases and the position of the sun, using the technology of the geared astrolabe but taking it to unprecedented heights.

I have not discussed here the question of any spiritual meaning of the St. Albans clock. The mechanical clock had already been used as a symbol of divine harmony and order by none other than Dante Alighieri in the Paradiso, written between 1316 and 1321. The Wheel of Fortune, often found in stationary form around early rose windows and known to have been added to the St. Albans clock after 1350, showed how the proud and rich would be downcast and the humble exalted. But there is no great sense of spirituality from Richard's writings; he himself regretted his lack of theological learning.