Abbots Clee has two clocks: the church clock, which the sexton Abel Pruett corrects every noon by the sundial on the porch, and the walnut clock in the passage of the Crown, made in Fleet Street and kept by the innkeeper's widow, Hester Dimmock, from a printed table she has never had reason to question. When an attorney with a new watch walks into church in the middle of the second lesson, the town splits into the Church party and the Crown party, and the gap between the clocks keeps widening. Alexander Pope Simulacrum tells the quarrel as a mock-heroic history in prose. Its dry remarks set out at the foot of each section what the townspeople do not know.
by Alexander Pope, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A History of Abbots Clee, with Remarks
Abbots Clee had two clocks, and for nine years that was why it had never quarrelled about the time. The church clock was heard and the Crown's clock was seen. Nobody in the town had ever done both at once.
The church clock stood in the tower of St Michael's, a thing of iron bars and a stone weight the size of a calf. It had been given a minute hand in the late Queen's time, and had kept it since with the air of an old man wearing a young man's coat. Every noon that the sun allowed, Abel Pruett the sexton went out to the dial on the south porch, waited with his hat in his hand until the shadow of the gnomon lay on the line of twelve, and then climbed the eighty-one steps and set the minute hand two minutes past the hour, which was what the climb took him. He had done this for twenty-two years. He had missed eleven days in that time, and he could name them, and the reason for each.
The Crown's clock stood in the passage between the tap-room and the yard, where a man waiting for the London coach could not help but look at it. It was eight feet of walnut, with a brass face and a seconds dial, and the name of Mr Graham of Fleet Street engraved under the twelve. Thomas Dimmock had brought it home in a wagon packed with straw, the year before he died. He meant it to tell his passengers that the coach would go when the Crown said, and not when the coachman finished his ale. Since his death his widow Hester had kept it. She wound it every Saturday night with a crank, as he had shown her. On each quarter-day she opened the trunk door and read a figure from a printed paper pasted inside it, against the date. Then she went out to the porch dial with her own watch, and set the clock so many minutes before or behind the shadow, as the figure told her. She had never asked why the figure changed, any more than she asked why Easter did.
So the bell told the town when to pray, and the brass face told travellers when to leave. The sexton never waited for a coach, and the widow heard the bell through two walls and a yard full of ostlers. Two kingdoms lay side by side, and neither had read the other's laws.
‡ The Commentator notes that the printed paper in the trunk door was headed A Table of the Equation of Natural Days, was in plain English, and had been swinging past the pendulum for nine years.
‡ The dial on the porch bore the motto Pereunt et imputantur: they perish, and are reckoned to our account. Nobody in Abbots Clee had read it as a remark about clocks.
The war began at Michaelmas, at the second lesson.
Mr Simeon Tapsell, attorney, had that week bought a watch. He was a man who acquired an instrument first and the habit of it afterwards, and he set his watch at the Crown, which was nearer his office than the church and better lit. On the Sunday he gave himself, by his new watch, a comfortable five minutes. He brought Mrs Tapsell, the two Miss Tapsells and his clerk, and he came up the nave of St Michael's just as Mr Gedge the rector was halfway through the second lesson.
Mr Gedge stopped. He was a slow reader and a fast resenter, and the pause he left was large enough to hold all five Tapsells as they went the length of the aisle. The clerk dropped a prayer book. One of the Miss Tapsells looked at the reading-desk, then at her father, then at the floor, all in the space of a single step.
In the pew behind the Tapsells sat Mrs Dimmock. She leaned forward and said, in a voice meant for Mrs Tapsell and reaching the font, "It wants a minute of the hour by ours."
That was the whole offence. One family came late to church and one widow told the time. A scholar of the ancient wars will know that the greater number of them began with less.
By Monday the town had two parties. The Church party held that time came down from the sun to the dial and from the dial to the tower, and that a clock which disagreed with the tower disagreed with Heaven. The Crown party held that a London clock, made by the first maker in the kingdom and costing more than the sexton earned in four years, was not to be corrected by a man with a hat in his hand and a squint. Each party had its dignities. Each, by Tuesday, had its jokes.
‡ The difference that Sunday was thirteen minutes, the church ahead. Mr Tapsell's comfortable five were therefore eight minutes late. He did not do the sum; he was not asked to.
Consider the sexton on a Wednesday at a quarter before twelve. He takes down his hat from the peg and brushes it with his sleeve. He takes the oil-can from the window-ledge, the long key from his belt, a rag from his pocket and his spectacles from their case. He looks once at the sky, as a general looks at the ground. He goes out to the porch, and if the sun is out he waits for the shadow, and if it is not he waits for the sun, standing, because to sit would be to admit that the sun might fail him. And when the shadow touches the line, he climbs.
Consider the widow on a Saturday night. The tap-room is shut and the girl sent to bed. She sets the candle on the settle, fits the crank to the left-hand square and turns it, counting under her breath. Then she fits it to the right, and the weights rise in the dark of the trunk like two buckets in a well. She does not open the trunk door. It is not the quarter-day. She shuts the hood, puts the crank in her apron, and stands a moment listening to the beat, which is as even as a sleeper's breath and more reliable.
Abbots Clee arranged itself between them. The baker drew his loaves by the tower, because his ovens had always done so. The schoolmaster rang his bell by the Crown, because he had a quarrel with the rector about a hedge. The market bell, the carrier's cart, the cock-fight behind the Bull, the reading of wills, the turning of the spit at the Hall and the hour at which a servant girl might be courted at the stile: each was ruled by one clock or the other, and none was ruled by both. The Tapsells went over to the Crown in a body. Mrs Gedge's cook went with them, privately, because the Crown's time gave her thirteen minutes more in the morning.
The difference grew. In the second week of October it was fifteen minutes, by St Luke's day sixteen, and at sixteen it stood through All Hallows. Each side knew the other had done it. Pruett swore on the dial that he set the tower by the sun and nothing else, and it was true. Mrs Dimmock swore that she had not touched the minute hand since the quarter-day, and that was true as well. Each of them, being honest, could account for the other's increasing wrong only by supposing a dishonesty, and did. The rector preached on the third chapter of Ecclesiastes: a time to every purpose under the heaven. The Crown party heard the text as aimed at them, and they were right. The rector heard the Crown party's coughing as aimed at him, and he was right too.
Mrs Dimmock put a card in the Crown's window: TIME KEPT HERE BY MR GRAHAM OF FLEET STREET. The next Thursday the vestry minutes recorded, under the cost of a new bell-rope, a resolution that the time in the parish was kept by the Sun, and the clerk had copied it out fair for the church door. It was the first time the Sun had been entered in the minutes of Abbots Clee. It went in below the bell-rope and above fourpence for a polecat's head.
‡ On the cook: the Commentator has found her at the root of more schisms than she is credited with, and in the index of none.
‡ Both oaths were true. The Commentator records this not as a curiosity but as the only fact in the history that would have settled it.
In the middle of November a gentleman stayed one night at the Crown on his way west. He had a brass case of instruments and a Fleet Street manner, and the town decided before supper that he should judge between them.
They brought the question to him in the morning, in the tap-room, while he breakfasted: Mr Tapsell for the Crown and the curate for the Church, with Pruett standing by the door in his hat because he would not sit in that house. The gentleman listened. Then he opened his waistcoat and drew out his own watch, which had been set at a regulator in London four days before. He held it up beside the Graham clock in the passage, and then, by the window, against the sound of the tower striking nine.
His watch agreed with neither.
There was a silence in the tap-room of the kind that follows an ally's change of sides. The gentleman looked at his watch, at the clock, at the window, and began to smile, because he had seen something. He said, "Ah, but you see, the sun is not —"
Out in the yard the guard blew his horn. It was the London coach, going east, and the Crown's clock showed the hour exactly. The gentleman had not been going east, but his trunk had been put on the wrong roof by an ostler of the Church party. He ran after it with his brass case in his hand and his explanation in his mouth, and the town never heard either again.
What he had seen, both parties agreed, was that he was a fool. That was the only point on which they agreed between Michaelmas and Advent, and they agreed on it hotly.
‡ London lies east of Abbots Clee by about two and a quarter degrees, and the gentleman's watch was therefore nine minutes ahead of the Crown, which kept the town's own meridian, and some minutes behind the tower. He had seen this. He had also seen the other thing, which was larger and on the printed paper in the trunk.
‡ The ostler was dismissed, and taken on at the Bull, which kept no clock at all and was the only house in the town where nobody fought.
Then the difference began to close.
Abel Pruett knew it first, because he measured it. Since Michaelmas he had been cutting a notch every Sunday in the oak beam beside the clock-face, one for each minute that the tower stood ahead of the Crown, whose face he could make out from the belfry louvre, through the passage window across the yard, with a glass he had borrowed from the curate. The notches ran along the beam in rows: thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, fifteen. Then fourteen. Then twelve. Then, on the Sunday before Advent, ten.
He looked at the row for a long time with his spectacles on. Then he took them off and folded them and went down the eighty-one steps. That evening he let it be known at the pump, without saying how he knew it, that a certain London clock was being brought, minute by minute, to its senses. He spoke in the voice of a man who would never mention it again, and he mentioned it every evening that week.
Mrs Dimmock knew it second, because the coachman told her. Kit Blewitt had driven the London road for eleven years. Like a planet he knew one thing perfectly: the time of his own going round. He observed one morning, scraping his boots, that the old tower was coming round handsome, and it must be the curate's doing, the old man being too proud. Mrs Dimmock said nothing at the time. That afternoon she gave the curate's laundress a quarter of a pound of tea, and sent with it a message that Mrs Dimmock bore no ill will to the clergy, and never had, the young ones especially.
So each of them believed the other was in retreat. Each was gracious about it in the manner of a victor, which is to say not at all to the enemy's face and continually behind his back. Neither had moved a minute hand. The Church party began to say that Mrs Dimmock was a sensible woman when she was let alone. The Crown party began to say that Pruett had a good heart, under the hat. The schoolmaster made it up with the rector about the hedge, though they did not discuss it.
The notches on the beam went on: seven at Advent, and the Sunday after, three.
‡ The Commentator notes that the notches are still to be seen, though the beam has been whitewashed twice. A visitor counting them will find a row that rises to sixteen and falls away. Without the paper in the trunk he will take it for a record of the sexton's temper.
On the thirteenth of December, St Lucy's day, the sun came out at a little before noon over Abbots Clee. It was the first time in nine days, and half the town was in the street to see it, because the rumour had gone round.
Pruett stood at the dial with his hat in his hand. Mrs Dimmock stood in the Crown's doorway with her watch, as she did on quarter-days, though it was not one. She had come out, she told the girl, for the air. Mr Tapsell had his watch open in his palm. The baker came out floury to the elbow. The curate came out with his glass, which he had got back from Pruett on the Thursday. Mrs Gedge's cook came out from both kitchens at once, or so it was said.
The shadow of the gnomon crept across the old stone, past the half-hour and the quarter, toward the line. High in the tower the bars turned over and the hammer went back. In the passage of the Crown, Mr Graham's clock gathered itself with the small dry whirr of a London clock about to speak.
The shadow touched the line, and they struck together. For the first time since Michaelmas, and for all the town knew the first time ever, Abbots Clee heard twelve strokes instead of twenty-four. The bell came down over the roofs and the brass rang up out of the passage, so close together that no ear in the street could part them.
Pruett went up the eighty-one steps all the same, from habit, with the key in his hand. When he reached the clock the hand stood where he would have set it. He stood back from it with the key raised, like a man who has drawn his sword and found the enemy kneeling.
Down in the street there was a cheer, which started among the Tapsells and was taken up by the Church. Mrs Dimmock sent a bowl of punch to the vestry, where it arrived at the moment the vestry was sending a ham to the Crown, and the two messengers met in the churchyard and exchanged burdens out of politeness. Pruett came down from the tower and was handed a cup by the widow herself at the lych-gate. He drank her health, and she drank his, and each told the other, with great kindness, that it had not been easy to come round.
The rector preached on the Sunday following, from the hundred and thirty-third Psalm, on how good and joyful a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. The whole congregation was in its seat before the bell had finished.
Inside the trunk of the Graham clock the pendulum went on swinging past the printed table, in the dark, beside the line for the thirteenth of December. Against it stood the figure 0.
‡ Further down the table, against the line for Candlemas, the figure is 14, and the sun is then behind the clock, not before it. On that morning the London coach will leave the Crown by Mr Graham's time, as it always has. The Church party will come down the hill by the tower at what they believe to be a comfortable five minutes before, and will find the yard empty.
‡ The Commentator has not the heart to tell them.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Alexandrō Pōpiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Alexander Pope, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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