Work and Leisure

History of work 23task-orientation typical of traditional and agricultural societies to an increasingawareness of clock-time. Lewis Mumford, in chronicling the role of themachine in the development of civilisation, noted that it was the medievalmonasteries and their strict daily regime of prayer and work, which gave riseto the need for clocks:one is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries – atone time there were 40,000 under Benedictine rule – helped to givehuman enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine;for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but ofsynchronizing the actions of man . . . by the thirteenth century there aredefinite records of mechanical clocks, and by 1370 a well-designed ‘modern’clock had been built by Heinrich von Wyck at Paris . . . The instrumentpresently spread outside the monastery; and the regular striking ofthe bells brought a new regularity into the life of the workman andmerchant. The bells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence.Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting andtime-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serveas the measure and focus of human activities . . . The clock, not thesteam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.(Mumford 1934: 13–14)He goes on to note that ‘A generalised time-consciousness accompanied thewider use of clocks . . . dissociating time from organic sequences’ (Mumford1934: 17). Thus a changing sense of time was underway in Europe, at least inurban areas, from the fourteenth century. However, as Thompson and otherhistorians record, at the time of the beginning of the industrial revolution atthe end of the eighteenth century, the transformation from a task-orientatedsense of time to a clock-time orientation was far from complete among urbanworkers and was still quite alien to the thousands, and eventually millions,who flocked from the countryside to the towns as industrialisation andurbanisation unfolded. Steam-driven factory machinery tended by largelabour forces raised the demand for clock-based discipline to a new level: allhands needed to be in place when the machines started and they could notstop until the machines did so; and every minute the machines were idlemeant lost output and lower profits. Despite the fact that, as Bailey (1978: 13)points out, factories were also subject to irregularities, caused by breakdownsor fluctuations in business conditions, the unrelenting demands of machinesin factories and their owners’ determination to maximise profits, called for anincreasingly ‘disciplined’ labour force.O’Malley (1992), however, cautions against an oversimplistic acceptance ofthis thesis. He argues that a life without clocks was not necessarily a leisurelyor disordered life. In particular, in medieval Europe, in ‘everyday affairsand for all practical purposes time’s authority . . . came from the Church’