Instruments · Sundial
Sundial from near Oswestry
- Maker / attribution
- R R Caton (Maker)
- Date
- 1578 16th century
- Historical period
- Renaissance Horology (1400 – 1600)
- Country of origin
- England
- Place
- England Europe Oswestry Shropshire United Kingdom
- Object type
- Sundial
- Holding institution
- Archaeology Data Service
- Accession / object no.
- society_albums_utensils_and_furniture_uf91_6
- Credit line
- Archaeology Data Service
- Catalogue title (original)
- Sundial from near Oswestry (English)
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Record summary
Held and catalogued by Archaeology Data Service (object number society_albums_utensils_and_furniture_uf91_6), this is a sundial by R R Caton, made in England Europe Oswestry Shropshire United Kingdom, dated 1578 16th century. The Atlas places it in the Renaissance Horology period (1400 – 1600) of its Instruments collection. The record is illustrated with 1 photograph.
Assembled from the source record's structured fields. Dates and attributions are given as the source states them; where a field is missing the Atlas leaves it blank rather than estimating.
Catalogue description
Catalogue description from Archaeology Data Service
The item is a proof or cutting from Archaeological Journal (see Bibliography).The wodcut shows a sundial dated 1578, built into the terrace wall at Park Hall, near Oswestry.
Historical context
Renaissance Horology (1400 – 1600)
Spring power makes clocks portable; Nuremberg and Augsburg produce the first watches; the Prague Orloj is built.
Instrument-making flourished in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Louvain and London: ivory diptych dials, astronomical compendia, astrolabes and nocturnals for wealthy patrons, navigators and scholars.
Read the period in the timelineMore instruments from this periodEarlier: Medieval Period
Atlas type guide
Sundials and solar time-finders
A sundial tells time from the position of a shadow cast by a gnomon or style. Because the sun's apparent motion depends on latitude, every fixed dial is laid out for a particular latitude, and portable dials either carry a latitude scale or are made for one region. Sundials show local apparent solar time, which drifts against mean (clock) time by up to about sixteen minutes over the year — the equation of time.
Portable dials were the pocket instruments of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Nuremberg and Augsburg workshops produced folding ivory diptych dials with inset compasses; English and French makers sold brass horizontal dials, ring dials and the Butterfield type; Japanese and Chinese makers had their own traditions of compass dials. After mechanical watches became reliable, dials remained in use for setting them, and nineteenth-century heliochronometers were built to correct directly for the equation of time.
What to look for
- The latitude engraved on the dial plate or a latitude arc on the gnomon — it shows where the dial was meant to be used.
- The type of hour lines: equal (equinoctial) hours, Italian or Babylonian hours counted from sunset or sunrise, or unequal temporal hours on early and Islamic instruments.
- An inset magnetic compass and whether a magnetic-declination mark is drawn on its card — a useful dating clue because declination changes over time.
- Maker's signatures and town marks: Nuremberg compass-makers (Kompassmacher) often struck a personal mark and the town's punch.
- Additional scales such as lunar volvelles, wind roses, perpetual calendars or lists of cities with their latitudes.
Dating clues
- Ivory diptych dials are characteristic of Nuremberg between about 1500 and 1700.
- Butterfield-type dials with a bird-shaped adjustable gnomon point to Paris workshops from the late seventeenth century onward.
- Equation-of-time tables engraved on the plate became common after the mid-seventeenth century, once pendulum clocks made the difference between solar and mean time obvious.
General guidance written by the Atlas editors about this kind of object. It is not a statement about this particular piece; for that, rely on the source record above and on physical examination.
Read next:The history timeline
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