I can understand “ we ride at dawn” but what did people call 3:17am and how was something like that calculated before we have a near universal standard?
I can understand “ we ride at dawn” but what did people call 3:17am and how was something like that calculated before we have a near universal standard?
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They didn’t. It would be “middle of the afternoon” or “when the sun is in x position” if they needed more accuracy. But the sun would only work at certain parts of the year, so that would have limited usefulness too.
Try askhistorians rather than here.
But as the other poster said, they didn’t articulate “3:17 AM.” In the Middle Ages the day was divided into 24 “hours,” 12 of daylight and 12 of dark. But they were calculated by the movement of the sun in the seasons, so an hour in winter was shorter than an hour in summer. Dawn was the first hour. The third hour was the midpoint between dawn and noon (9:00). The sixth hour was noon, and so on. Matins was sung roughly between midnight and dawn; if something happened at 3:17 AM, you would say it happened “just past Matins,” although of course how accurate this would be to 3:17 am as measured by a clock would vary by the season.
This is why we say “three o’clock;” it literally means “of the clock,” and denotes the difference between time as measured by the movement of the sun and time as measured by the clock.