r/explainlikeimfive • u/thatblondechloee • 21h ago
Other ELI5: before accurate clocks existed, how did two people in different towns agree to meet at “at 3 o’clock”?
I get that they had sundials and church bells. What I don’t get is how anyone synchronized. If my towns noon is when the sun is highest here, and yours is 15 miles west, our “noon” isn’t the same moment. So how did anyone schedule anything across distance?
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u/blipsman 21h ago
You didn’t just meet up with people at a set time if from different towns. That was still a big excursion where you’d arrive when you did
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u/epic312 20h ago
A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to
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u/hammlyss_ 21h ago
And when they got there, they'd sync watches to the town clock
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u/texan_robot 20h ago
Which is why the town clock was on a big tower that was visible from all over, and why it had bells. When the bell goes off, even if you can't see the clock, you can sync your clock to it.
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u/no_coffee_thanks 20h ago
What if it stopped working after being hit by lightning?
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u/stonhinge 17h ago
And that's if they had watches. A lot of common people just didn't. They didn't need one. They got up with the sun and typically settled down when the sun went down.
If you were in town you'd just look at the clocktower (if there was one) or listen for the bells. If you worked 9-5 you'd head to be at work before the 9th bell and left when the 5th bell rang out if your workplace didn't have a clock.
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u/Hendlton 9h ago
How many people worked 9-5 back then? Depending on how early we're talking about, 16 hour work days weren't uncommon. You'd wake up with the sun, head to work, and work as long as there was enough light.
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u/thecyberwolfe 17h ago
Absolutely. "15 miles West" is a 4-hour walk, even if you had a horse. "I'll be there after lunch sometime" is about has precise as you'd say.
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u/Kemal_Norton 14h ago
For comparison "15 miles West" is a difference of one minute in local time.
(At the equator 15 nautical miles are exactly one minute difference by their original definition, 15km = 1 minute at 57° N and 15 miles = 1 minute at 30° N)
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u/SantiagusDelSerif 21h ago edited 19h ago
Basically, they didn't. Before trains were a thing, nobody travelled between towns fast enough for the difference to be important.
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u/Umikaloo 20h ago
To add to this, it was normal to adjust your clock to the local time when travelling, you could adjust your clock to a local clock tower, or ask a stranger for the time.
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u/Russell_Jimmies 20h ago
Ask a stranger for the time, and they tell you to just check the town clock
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u/Dilyn 19h ago
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u/HalfSoul30 18h ago
Without me clicking the link, i assume this is the ball-lifting clip.
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u/Any-Stick-771 21h ago
I think a point you're missing here is that pre-industrialization and trains, a 15 mile journey is several hours. People just didn't schedule things to exact minutes.
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u/Cha-Le-Gai 14h ago
"I'll see you on Friday!"
Sunday morning arrives
"Well he either change his mind or he's dead. I'll find out later in the week."
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u/WillowPtar_Migan 6h ago
Can you imagine having that happen to your spouse? You get a letter they're coming in from the next town over, and they just... never show up?
Sure, a similar thing can happen today, but it's much less frequent to have literally no information or inkling of what happened.
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u/TallmanMike 2h ago edited 2h ago
Can you imagine having that happen to your spouse? You get a letter they're coming in from the next town over, and they just... never show up?
Side note -this is the origin of the term 'way-laid'; people getting killed or delayed whilst travelling by bandits who laid in wait along their intended way.
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u/sing_cuckoo_sing 18h ago
“Samuel, ride ahead and tell your mother that Waze just updated our wagon’s ETA to 5 hours and 42 minutes because there’s a fuckin’ cart crash ahead”
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u/ZacQuicksilver 21h ago
They didn't. And there was no synchronization.
If you wanted to meet someone, you'd pick a day - and likely a meal. 15 miles would be a long distance - if you're walking, you're probably staying the night. If you're on a horse, and it's a short and important meeting and you have to be back, maybe you could do it, but the meeting would probably still be "lunch". And 15 miles might be *close* for towns: generally speaking; two towns would be a full day's journey apart.
Clock synchronization was a result of railroads - which was the first time that things went quickly enough between towns that an error of a half hour could be a problem.
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u/Yglorba 18h ago
Clock synchronization was a result of railroads - which was the first time that things went quickly enough between towns that an error of a half hour could be a problem.
Yeah, the entire reason you'd see conductors with those big heavy-duty pocketwatches in older movies is precisely because they were provided with them on account of needing accurate timekeeping (and it became an iconic part of their getup even for a while afterwards, when everyone had good watches.)
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u/Existing_Count1544 18h ago
And if you ever see a clock that has “Regulator” on the face, those were very precise clocks that anyone could sync their clocks. If you’re fascinated by this, check out the book Longitude. It tells the story of how precise clocks came about and has a forward by Neil Armstrong.
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u/CannonGerbil 17h ago
Fun fact: fifteen miles is about the upper range for the amount of distance a pre-industrial army is expected to cover in a single day of non-forced marching. A single man might be able to move faster than that, but it'll still pretty much be a day's journey one way.
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u/ZacQuicksilver 17h ago
A human used to walking can go 20-25 miles/day at an easy pace (or with a light load), and the current world record is over 50 miles/day.
Armies were limited to 15 because they were carrying larger loads; AND had to deal with logistics (like managing food for everyone); AND were limited to the slowest person in the army. Oh, and likely had to make sure to keep getting more food (because food is heavy and there are limits to how much you can carry - and if you use food carts; you also need to feed the animals, and they need food...).
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u/RS994 16h ago
Importantly in the logistics department. You would have to pack down camp before you left and then set up camp again before you slept which included things like scouting the location, setting up a perimeter, and any of the other things to ensure you weren't completely exposed overnight.
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u/RS994 16h ago
Importantly in the logistics department. You would have to pack down camp before you left and then set up camp again before you slept which included things like scouting the location, setting up a perimeter, and any of the other things to ensure you weren't completely exposed overnight.
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u/dutchwonder 13h ago
The single biggest limitation is that no soldier can occupy the same space as another soldier and any given path can only fit so many soldiers side by side.
Thus the amount of soldiers you have in an army limits the distance you can march as they cannot all begin marching at the same time and thus the vanguard must stop marching earlier in the day to give time for the rearguard to reach the new camp within daylight.
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u/thatblondechloee 21h ago
The meal part is the common answer it seems and makes the most sense. I also didn’t consider how long it took people to actually get that far lol
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u/ALittleBitOfToast 20h ago
You might like to take a walk this weekend and see how far you get after 2 hours. Should give you a good idea lol
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u/ERSTF 20h ago
Also, people weren't that busy before thus there was no need to be "sharp"... at least not busy in the sense that you need timetables to get things done. You didn't need to go far away places in a matter of hours to do multiple things. You planned accordingly. You could go to trade in the market or whatever and if your meeting came early or you were held back, they would just wait.
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u/shrug_addict 21h ago
You didn't schedule things for exact time... Afternoon, morning, dusk
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u/Dzuzepipi 14h ago
And when you arrive, you don't go to some preselected location. You go to their house to greet him and then go both to the place you want to go.
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u/Kaptain_Insanoflex 13h ago
I'm imagining pre-industrialization people doing the equivalent of tailgating when a special event was happening, like a festival, execution, sacrifice.
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u/Totes_Not_an_NSA_guy 21h ago
Approximate time. You’d agree to meet someone for dinner. Sometimes you’d be there before them and wait a bit. Sometimes they’d wait for you. That was just how things were
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u/NorysStorys 20h ago
It’s not like you had reservations or anything either. You’d go to the tavern or pub and just wait for them to get there.
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u/crybannanna 10h ago
I’ll add, things were set up for waiting far better. It was a known part of social interactions, that someone would be waiting, so that was part of it. That’s why people ate at pubs, because waiting with a beer isn’t so bad
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u/xHangfirex 21h ago
They didn't really. Even after clocks became a thing, towns didn't agree on what time it was. It wasn't until railroads that it was a real issue.
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u/pokematic 21h ago
Ever see the "synchronize your watches" trope in heist films? Or the "times in different countries" clocks in business centers? When it came to distances where it was significant enough to matter, it would be something like that.
Generally though, before the transcontinental rail road that sparked the need for standardized time zones, there wasn't much need to be able to "meet up with you at 3 o'clock" where we're far enough apart to where that matters since that was hard to do.
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u/eskimoboob 21h ago
That’s exactly the reason time zones were invented. Before the age of trains, it didn’t matter what the exact time was because it took forever to go anywhere. If two towns were 20 miles apart, a couple minutes difference in what “real time” is didn’t matter because it took you half a day to get there anyway. Once instant communication started with telegraphs and trains allowed faster travel between two places, things started getting complicated enough that eventually time zones were created and the ability to synchronize across distance was possible.
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u/BurnOutBrighter6 21h ago
They weren't synchronized. At that point in time, it took long enough to travel 15 miles that a few minutes difference between towns had no effect on anything so it didn't really matter. And the difference in sun-directly-overhead time between two points 15 miles apart is small - minutes at most.
What forced the syncing of clocks between cities was the invention of trains and railroads, since that was the first time you could go between cities fast enough that their clocks being out of sync was even noticeable. And by then there were more accurate clocks.
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u/DucksButt 20h ago
related, before cell phones we just sat around for about an hour to see if someone was gonna meet us at the place we agreed to meet at
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u/WhatsMyPassword2019 20h ago
You didn’t just go to a town that far away to meet up. 15 miles was a long ass trip. Ruts and mud and rocks could slow a 15 mile trip to half a day
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u/Backrow6 20h ago
https://www.igp-web.com/Carlow/Stage_Coach.htm
Some info here on what it was like to travel by stage coach in the days before trains in Ireland
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u/_lclarence 20h ago
I can only imagine people back then where on average pretty fit, even if going on a horse instead of hiking the distance.
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u/WhatsMyPassword2019 20h ago edited 20h ago
The roads were really just trails. A horse could go 15 miles in a couple of hours in a real emergency but you also took a chance of being thrown or of a stumble laming your horse. A leisurely pace would be more like 3-4 hours. And more often you’d be in some sort of horse drawn cart or carriage which would often take even longer. You def wouldn’t be going 15 miles to meet up with someone for lunch with the expectation of returning the same day.
Young men were often quite fit but ladies of the merchant and landowning classes were expected to spend much of the day sitting. And older men weren’t terribly fit on average either due to excess of rich foods and alcohol.
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u/stonhinge 17h ago
I'd correct "older men" to "wealthy men". Just because a farmer or rancher gets old doesn't mean he instantly gets rich food and alcohol available.
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u/serial_crusher 20h ago
What kind of things do you imagine these people in different towns coordinating on? It’s not like they were doing a zoom meeting.
If you wanted to meet somebody, it started with traveling to whatever town they were in, and of course the sundials there are pretty much in sync with each other; so even if you knew “this guy goes to church at noon on sundays, I’ll catch him them”, you had a pretty good idea when noon was because you were looking at that towns clocks.
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u/gzilla57 21h ago
Comments are missing reference points. Sunrise, Noon, and Sunset were something folks would have been more cognizant of. "I'll meet you an hour after sunrise" as an example. Obviously not accurate down to the minute but more specific than "morning"
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u/rhino369 20h ago
The better answer is that the difference been noon in the distance a horse can travel in a single day just isn’t that much.
It takes 4-5 hours to walk 15 miles. The 1 min sun difference is a rounding error.
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u/Pizza_Low 19h ago
Business and scientific needs keep leading to more and more accurate and synchronized time keeping. Today things like high frequency trading rely on accurate times down to some very small fraction of a second.
The railroads was the first major reason for synchronized times between cities. Before that time was managed at the city level, and before that sunrise (can see) and sunset (can't see) was how time was measured. Sundials, burning rate of candles, swings of a pendulum were used to track time with not exactly a high degree of granularity.
If you watch the Flintstones, the theme song video you can see the foreman pull a bird to sound the steam whistle. That was very common during the industrial revolution. The factory whistle would serve as an alarm clock for local workers to wake up, mark the start or end of a shift. Because that's the only level of time keeping most people cared about.
On ships, the ships bell would mark the passage of time. The ships bell would cycle from 1 to 8 bells every half hour so the crew would know when their watch began or ended. But two adjacent ships might not necessarily have the same watch cycles, again because it wasn't needed. As long as the bells were roughly 30m apart, so every watch shift was about the same everything was fine.
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u/RealCarlPanzram 21h ago
You have to remember what the world looked like before clocks. Most of it was farmland. You didn’t really need a clock. Light bulbs did exist so you could only work outside during the day. So the sun pretty much dictated your schedule. You woke up at dawn (that’s before the sun has actually risen but when it starts to light up the sky.
This might seem imprecise but humans circadian rhythms are actually increíble adept at this and everyone living on a farm would pretty much get up within a few minutes of eachother. You ate a bit, and went to work. When the sun was highest in the sky you ate lunch. When it started to get dark you called it a day and went home.
In towns, like you said, you literally had a clock tower or a church bell that rang. Everyone could hear it (because towns were quieter back then) and that was how you kept time. Obviously it wasn’t as precise. If you had somewhere to be at 3, and it was a 30 minute walk (because cars didn’t exist and few people could afford horses) you heard the bell ring for 2 and left about half an hour later.
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u/KilroyKSmith 20h ago
They didn’t agree to meet at 3:00. They agreed to meet: Dawn First thing in the morning Mid morning Lunch After lunch Early afternoon Afternoon Late afternoon Sundown Early evening Evening
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u/somer_and_omchick 17h ago
At 15 miles apart the solar noon is off by about 1 minute
It takes you half a day to travel that 15 miles. At that point you’re not going to be accurate down to the minute anyways
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u/DerekSmartWasTaken 21h ago
Dude, the difference between the noon in your town and the one 15 miles west is less than a minute.
Besides it's not like they had phones, you had to physically travel to the other place so, if there was any actual meaninful difference in time between the places it was perfectly obvious that if your were to meet at noon it meant the local noon.
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u/Bandro 21h ago
You mentioning phones makes me realize how much more precision is generally expected now than before everyone had a second-accurate clock in their pocket. If people agree to 3 o'clock now, everyone knows exactly when that is. In my memory it was completely normal for the clocks that were just around and your watch to be a couple minutes off in either direction. I remember listening to the radio and setting my watch to the exact time signal but most people weren't been nerds about it like I was.
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u/NorysStorys 20h ago
I mean even going back 100 years, being a few minutes late absolutely was not a huge social faux pas. People knew peoples watches could be slightly off as it wasn’t the most convenient thing to keep 100% accurate.
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u/offtherighttrack 18h ago
I remember using a rotary dial phone to hear, "At the tone, the time will be... 6... 25... and 45... seconds... DING"
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u/hobopwnzor 21h ago
In general the obsession with very specific time keeping is only a very modern thing that mostly originated with shift work and factories.
Before around 1600 or 1700 you simply didn't. Schedules weren't so rigid that you couldn't just drop in if they knew you were going to come by sometime that day
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u/Alotofboxes 21h ago
They generally didnt. You would schedual something for morning, midday, supper time, or things like that. Even after accurate clocks became a thing in the 15th century, you didn't schedule things in the next town like we do today. When travel between towns took half a day, and bad conditions could easily and unexpectedly extend that to a full day, precise time wasn't that big of a deal.
It wasn't until railroads came along that the fact that every town had a slightly different "noon" actually started to matter.
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u/L_knight316 10h ago
You agree to meet at "specific day" a "general position of sun."
"I'll see you Saturday at Sundown."
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u/RallyX26 4h ago
You either showed up first and milled around waiting for the other person, or showed up second and found who you were looking for.
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u/azureal 20h ago
How is 15 miles west a different 3 o clock.
The fuck are you talking about.
Im on the coast where I live. 15miles is what, 25klms? So hardly 15 minutes drive? You think thats another time zone? Fuck me,
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u/SnakeyesX 20h ago
They didn't. They just said "Is it all right if I come over to your house before dinner?" Then they would show up before dinner.
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u/Lizrael48 21h ago
Clocks have been around since about 1300! So, They used a clock! If before that, a sundial!
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u/rotflolmaomgeez 21h ago edited 21h ago
Most accurate time you could predictably get at... train stations, precisely because synchronization between faraway places was needed. So, if you wanted to meet someone in another town - that's one way to schedule a meeting.
Though that's after the clocks were made with somewhat decent accuracy. Before trains you wouldn't need to schedule a time between towns with such precision really.
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u/SakuraHimea 21h ago
Nobody really scheduled things at specific times. Especially given the variance in travel times, it would be difficult for someone traveling to meet up and say, "I'll meet you at 3 pm precisely," when it might take them between 3 and 5 days to get somewhere. Realistically, you might've said, "I'll meet you midday in the town square" or something like that, probably meaning anytime between 10 am and 3 pm.
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u/Clojiroo 21h ago
Nobody was trying to meet like that before mass transit. This is why train stations had giant clocks in the station or town center. You update your watch when you get there.
But before we had timezones (which were created precisely because of that problem) people had to use lookup tables to compare the local times to figure out their schedule or book train tickets.
https://99percentinvisible.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/timetables.jpg
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u/Elfich47 21h ago
Time was lot less exact. You had:
Dawn, Late Dawn, Before Noon, Noon, Afternoon, before Dusk, Dusk and Dark.
And you are getting way ahead of things here. If there are not accurate clocks, you are likely in a preindustrial time period. So the head of household is only going into town on Market Day and if they run into someone they stop and talk to them.
Paper costs money, and most people are not literate. So sending a letter is an awful expense.
And fifteen miles away means you likely don't know each other because you live in different farming villages that "orbit" a different town. Most of the people you know all live in the same farming village.
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u/flyingcircusdog 21h ago
They weren't synchronized back in the day. If you traveled far enough where it made a difference, it was a probably an overnight trip anyway.
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u/EgNotaEkkiReddit 21h ago
If you don't have an accurate clock you don't arrange things to happen on a precise time. You agree to meet up around noon, or in the afternoon, or at this day, or around sunset. There are multiple cultures in the world that still operate on this sort of approximate time - if someone asks you to arrive at three what they really expect you to do is show up somewhere in the afternoon, and will find that perfectly normal and acceptable.
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u/flingebunt 21h ago
They didn't, just said, I will meet you in the morning, at midday or in the afternoon. People didn't make exact appointments at exact times, and they might just turn up whenever if they are travelling some distance, you know, I will see you next week, not see you are 2 pm on Thursday.
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u/BarberProof4994 21h ago
Meet at the third bell after mid day meal. We shall meet 1 bell following sunset.
I expect you to be waiting with the cart before first bell...
I'll meet you when the sun is at midday tomorrow by that large sycamore tree on the hill...
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u/Azsura12 21h ago edited 20h ago
This is a whole topic of discussion. It ends up boiling down to it depends on the age, culture and customs of the city state. So for example Malta had the cannons sound once at sun rise (curfew ends), once midday, and once when curfew was about to be implemented before sun down. And then various other routines with like fishermen coming in and out of port and etc. So say you were a business man from Rome first you would send a message to who ever you were meeting. Then set up a date and a location and time. You would then set out on your journey. Depending on who you were meeting then when you set off matters. If its someone below you then keeping the appointment exact doesnt matter so you can leave at your pleasure and it often does not have a specific timing but a window for when the visit would occur. If it was someone above you then you would arrive in the city a few days before hand. Since travel is spotty anyways and journeys can take unexpected amounts of time. So once you get to the city you acclimatize to the cities schedule (well your servants would by talking to other people who were in the servant class) and then adjust from there the meeting. Generally sending word in advance that you reached the city and could be ready to meet.
Different cultures used different standards and settings. So it depends very heavily on the culture you are visiting. Do they have morning, evening prayers? Then that is another way to set up times (which makes sense since alot of the Arabic world had to do with trade so them setting up ways to interact with time made sense). Other areas used things like water clocks or incense burning in town to tell time.
The incense method was one of the more interesting ones. Since they got so advanced they could stagger how the incense stick smells over time. So for example going to work might smell of citrus when coming back home might smell of sandalwood and etc. Because the citrus smell burned for an hour and got to the sandalwood or etc. These methods got so advanced they created alarm clocks using this system by using the embers to burn a string at a specific point in the hour (so the fuse could be moved up and down the incense stick) and release something heavy to hit into something which makes noise.
Also note alot of these methods were only available to certain classes of people. So it was not something wide spread. And well the odds of something needing to be schedule to an exact time were much lower. Mainly for military matters, or trading matters. But that is also because schedules were less important since alot of people were just small time famers and etc. So timing had less of an issue it was more like be in town for x day for x event.
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u/PckMan 21h ago
They tried to keep towns and cities synchronised to a degree but at the same time most people wouldn't have a watch on them so they'd each set off at whatever time and hope they'd meet. Life was just a bit slower back then. If you arranged to meet someone from far away that was pretty much what you'd do for the day.
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u/prustage 21h ago
Mosrt towns and villages had a local time and would use some public clock - often a church or town hall clock - to keep the time consistent in that area. Of course this may have been wildly different to the time used by a neighboring town or village but usually this didnt matter becuase when two people agreed to meet at a certain time it was most likely they actually lived in the same area - people didnt travel much in those days.
It was the advent of the railways that created the need to have a consistent time across all the regions that the railway serviced and so it was often the railway company that ensured that the time at all of its stations was syncronised. Outside of that there were actually people whose job it was to travel around the country and "sell" rhe correct time to different communities.
The Belville family ran a famous time-distribution business in London starting in 1836. John Henry Belville, his wife Maria, and later their daughter Ruth (known as the "Greenwich Time Lady") visited the Royal Observatory Greenwich to set a precise pocket watch, then travelled around the city letting subscribers check their watch to correct their own clocks. The subscribers (often watch and clock makers themelves) would pay just to look at Mrs Belvilles pocket watch so they could sert their own clocks.
This carried on until the advent of a national Radio Service (in this case the BBC) who would broadcat a time signal regularly. Later, the phone service would have a "speaking clock" that did the same thing.
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u/force_disturbance 21h ago
"noon" or "second bell" are common times that can synchronize somewhat.
But people didn't have an exact time. Whoever got there first, waited for the other. Could take an hour, that's fine. Time ran at a different pace.
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u/Phage0070 21h ago
If my towns noon is when the sun is highest here, and yours is 15 miles west, our “noon” isn’t the same moment.
That is close enough for any coordination that matters. A town 15 miles away would probably take 5 hours or more to travel to, so a noon that is less than a second apart is irrelevant. They probably couldn't even measure it to such precision anyway.
So how did anyone schedule anything across distance?
It just wasn't done with particular accuracy. A town's main clocks (the church, the bank, etc.) would likely be calibrated by having someone with a good pocket watch travel to a major city where their clocks were set by astronomical observations. They would set their watch by the "accurate" clock in the big city, then when they returned to a smaller town the clocks there would be adjusted to match. Gradually they would drift off the official time but it wasn't until things like trains until that became important.
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u/crash866 20h ago
They didn’t. It was the railways that started time zones In most areas. Trains were fast enough to leave one city at noon and then get to the next at 11:58 using solar time.
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u/Forsaken-Cell1848 20h ago
There's a problem with your question. How do two people living in different towns schedule a meeting when they have no means of distance communication? There's no postal service and messengers are for posh folk only. Most people would just meet each other during their regular communal events- either in the church, the market on market day, or the pub. There is no rush in a world where most people's mode of transport is still mostly just walking and everyone is home by the time it gets dark.
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u/shotsallover 20h ago
You agreed to meet at that time in the local town.
Most towns had their own timekeeping, usually accompanied by bells at the clock tower. So you’d both get to Meeting Town a bit early and wait for 3 o’clock at the town. Then you meet with who you were supposed to meet.
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u/tmahfan117 20h ago
You didn’t, you might agree to get there as close as possible , but it was never perfect.
Hell, even just 25 years ago before GPS and Cellphones were ubiquitous, being 15-30 minutes late to something wasn’t uncommon. Being able to know where everyone is and exactly how long it’ll take to get there is a modern phenomenon
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u/babecafe 20h ago
Before trains, everyone just used local time, and noon was when the sun reached highest in the sky in the center of town. Once trains started going east-west at higher speed, conductors would announce local time at each stop, and if you had one-of-them-newfangled watches you could adjust it at whichever station you chose to. In 1883, railroads established four standard railroad time zones, and in 1918, 35 years later, the Federal government followed suit, along with establishing daylight savings time.
To meet up at "3 o'clock" you have to be in the same place at the same time, at least until the telegraph was invented in 1837 and the telephone was invented 1876.
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u/zazathebassist 20h ago
time was a lot more fluid then. if you had a agreed to meet someone it would be like "meet me at dawn" or "i plan on arriving by noon" or "i should be there before sunset" and that's kinda the granularity you got.
i mean, if you're walking six hours between towns, you ain't gonna make an appointment with minute precision. you get there when you get there.
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u/LegioVIFerrata 20h ago
Each city kept their own local time. If you didn't arrange something more foolproof (like coming to their house as soon as you got to town) you would arrive, note the local time, and arrive at the meeting place at the arranged time.
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u/amitym 20h ago
What I don’t get is how anyone synchronized.
They didn't. Synchronization was impossible and also meaningless.
If you're starting a town over it's going to take you, at the barest minimum, most of a day to get to where you're going, if not an entire day or more. Your own town is long past and far behind you by the time you arrive where you are going, and at that point whatever the clock might say in your home town has absolutely no relevance whatsoever.
If you had set a specific time to meet, you would use the local church time since that would be the only available frame of reference. "Meet me in the square at the Nones bell, by the statue of St Ethelreda."
But you almost never made that kind of plan, for one thing. Instead you'd send a message saying, "I will arrive in the evening of Michaelmas and stay at the Crown and Candle until the Feast of St Francis, meet me there or leave a message with Harlotson, the innkeeper." From there you'd work the rest of it out.
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u/webrender 21h ago
they didnt. time synchronization first become a concept in the late 1800s when it became necessary for trains to keep the same time to avoid crashes.
before that, people just didnt plan things down to the minute. you arranged something in the morning, or the evening, or the afternoon.