Ralph Kettell epitomized the unique characters that Oxford is famous for nurturing. Born in Hertfordshire in 1563, he embarked on his academic journey at the tender age of 15, securing a scholarship to Trinity College. Like many who tread its historic halls, Oxford became his lifelong home. As the years passed and his once-dark goatee turned silver, Kettell rose through the ranks to become a don, a clergyman, and ultimately the head of his college.

Kettell’s eccentricities would likely raise eyebrows in today’s university settings. He was known for carrying a pair of scissors tucked into his ruff, which he wielded to enforce impromptu haircuts on long-haired students during meals. In the modern lecture hall, filled with the clicks of laptops and the swipes on smartphones, Kettell might have found himself out of place.

Nonetheless, Kettell wielded his own ‘technology’ at the podium—an hourglass. If he deemed his students lackadaisical, he would threaten to introduce a two-hour glass, effectively elongating their lessons. This simple device allowed him to manipulate time to his advantage, much to the chagrin of his students, one might imagine.

Timekeeping devices have long been tools of control, dictating daily routines, calling individuals to work or prayer, and assessing productivity. The stopwatch-wielding supervisor is a symbol that has persisted throughout the era of industrial capitalism.

The tale of Europe’s embrace of the mechanical clock is a complex one. By the Middle Ages, many towns boasted public clocks, with at least 25 English towns featuring them by 1400. By 1577, William Harrison, a social observer, noted that the English day was “constantly marked by clocks, dials, and astronomical instruments.” In rural areas, by 1700, about half of parish churches were equipped with clocks.

During this period, England began to surpass the Dutch, who had previously been leaders in clock design. Clocks played a critical role in the advancement of natural sciences in the late 17th century. So pervasive were they that to elucidate Isaac Newton’s cosmology, people often employed the metaphor of a divine watchmaker—a deity setting the universe’s gears in motion. Accurate time measurement instilled confidence and fueled the expansion of European empires. Clocks enabled navigators to determine latitude and eventually longitude, strengthening the power of imperial navies. Mastery over time translated into mastery over the world.

Across the street from Kettell’s Trinity College is a neat, classical building, standing grandly above the busy hustle of students, tourists and working people. It dates to the heady years of what is still sometimes called the “scientific revolution”, and it has lost none of its grandeur.

Built in the 1680s, its original purpose was to house the collection of curiosities gathered by another Oxford eccentric, the astrologer Elias Ashmole. The original contents have been moved to a much more ostentatious building nearby. But the “Old Ashmolean” remains, adjacent to Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre, and now houses the university’s History of Science Museum. Said to be the world’s oldest purpose-built museum, it remains open to the public, free of charge.

The museum boasts a fine collection of clocks, many of which are to be found in a dark room downstairs from the main entrance. Here there are table clocks from 16th-century France, lantern clocks, watches and grand pieces constructed in 17th-century Oxford and London. It is an impressive, slightly enigmatic array: something that captures the imagination and evokes an age of mystery.

French table clock, c.1600

A Japanese lantern clock, also known as a wadokei

Back up the stairs in the brighter lobby area there is perhaps the most significant piece of all: a slim standup clock, less than 6ft high and a few inches wide, yet somehow still as delicate as a sapling. The wood is a deep ebony, the face elegant brass. It dates to the 1660s and was built by a Norwich-born clockmaker of Flemish background, Ahasuerus Fromanteel. It is one of the earliest English pendulum clocks, from a maker whose work had impressed Oliver Cromwell, Republican leader and victor in the English civil wars.

In the 1660s such a piece was still a luxury, but a century later, more sophisticated mechanical clocks and watches were much more commonplace. Historians have used “probate inventories” — lists of goods held by testators at death — to show that clock ownership was remarkably widespread by the Georgian era.

One study, by the historian Lorna Weatherill, looked at about 3,000 inventories and found a remarkable growth in clock and watch ownership between 1660 and 1740. By the 1720s a third of those inventories had clocks, more than possessed pictures or even curtains. Remarkably, in some cases even the very poorest might also have clocks or watches. Another study, of paupers in rural Essex, found one in five possessed a clock or watch in the 18th century. Time was everywhere now.

An astronomical table clock

One of the first English pendulum clocks, dating to the 1660s

Just outside Oxford, on a hilltop overlooking the valleys of the Thames and the Thame, is Garsington church, exposed and on bright days bathed in light. Its medieval limestone tower likely once boasted a sundial. In the early 17th century Ralph Kettell preached there as parish minister. It was his second job, a break from the life of a don. We don’t know if he brought one of his hourglasses to sermons. Maybe he kept his audience longer if he felt they weren’t paying attention.

The church itself later invested in a fine clock, replacing an earlier dial. Parishioners at the end of the 18th century paid good money (£172 and four shillings — approximately £27,000 today) to adorn the tower with a new mechanical clock, manufactured by a Clerkenwell clockmaker. The natural sciences had no monopoly on time. Even at the end of the 18th century it was upon the parish church that you were most likely to see a public clock. The rhythm of the day was still rung out by the sound of bells.

The route from Oxford to Garsington has changed beyond recognition since then. Now, rather than rutted country tracks, you pass right through the Cowley car plant, a vast factory operated by BMW where the Mini is assembled. Like many factories, Cowley once had its grand clock tower, which presided over the workforce until its demolition in 2002. Places of work were now keeping time, just as places of worship once did.

The meaning of time had changed too. It was to be spent producing, making, working. Time, now, was money.

Factory workers were expected to “clock in”, and for this daily routine they might use another gadget: a Gledhill-Brook Time Recorder. These blocky contraptions were produced by a Halifax company that had made its name assembling cash registers. At the top was a clock with a face and a pendulum, at the bottom a slot and a box where workers inserted their card to be punched, recording the time when they arrived and left work. With one of these, your boss could assess your punctuality and attendance. An old recorder from the Oxford Cowley Plant was sold at auction house Bonhams a few years ago for £100, though it was lacking the original glass panel. One in better condition might sell for much more.

The Time Recorder represents a world where work is time- not task-determined. This was one of the insights of the historian EP Thompson: clock time, for him, was a handmaid of capitalism, it brought a new discipline to workers. We are expected to be in work at particular hours, and during those hours our labour belongs to someone else. Much of our lives is spent on company time.

Of course, the desire to regulate workers was not new. In 1620, officials in Godalming, Surrey, believed that the town clock would help middle-class inhabitants with “the keeping of fit hours for their apprentices, servants and workmen”. What the modern clock brought was not the urge but the means. Now, with reliable clocks everywhere, there could be no escape from time itself. Not that everyone welcomed the change: in about 1700, in Ambrose Crowley’s ironworks in County Durham, the imperious owner had to decree that only the official clock be used to check working hours, and that it be locked up so that no disgruntled employee could tamper with it.

The ticking clock thus became the rhythm that accompanied modern capitalism. But we no longer need top-hatted factory owners to keep watch. These days, we do it ourselves. That modern-day curse, the productivity app, allows us to track what we are doing, to make sure we use our hours and minutes efficiently. One of these calls itself, with an almost audible air of menace, TickTick.

Our forebears knew the passage of time as a potential adversary, and images abound from the 16th and 17th centuries of Old Father Time with his hourglass and scythe. Now we tend to live longer, but we worry that the extra time we have won’t have been used “productively”. Precise measurement has its downsides. I’m not sure I’d want to go back to an age where lecturers can bend time for their students. But a world in which clocks were things of wonder and beauty, inspiring awe rather than anxiety might have something to recommend it. “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,” as Doctor Faustus has it in Marlowe’s play. How we listen to that time, let alone how we use it, is up to us.

Ralph Kettell lived just long enough to see his own world implode. He was alive in 1642, when the English civil war broke out. Suddenly Oxford was awash with troops, braying courtiers and the wives of royalist officers.

According to one of his students, the witty John Aubrey, the conflict hastened Kettell’s death, for it was all simply too much. Of all the miseries heaped upon the old don, none was more upsetting than when an infantryman came into the schools while he was lecturing, evidently got bored and smashed his precious hourglass. Within a year of the war starting, Kettell was dead, in 1643, at the venerable age of 80. Old Father Time, with his own hourglass, had come for him too.

Jonathan Healey is the author of ‘The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642’