Time

The first computer to be so called was a calculator for reckoning time, devised in the early eighth century by the Venerable Bede at the Northumbrian monastic outposts of Jarrow and Wearmouth where he spent his entire life. The computus was a system for determining the date of Easter, crucial in every sense of the word. Bede’s calculations were based on the tables produced in the third century by Dionysius Exiguus, Bishop of Alexandria (and later Pope), and he recorded his method first in a short work, Liber de temporibus, written in 703, and then in a longer version called De Temporum ratione (‘On the reckoning of time’) in 725. It was the second of these that was widely influential, and over a hundred copies of Bede’s work have been located at libraries throughout Europe. ¹ At the start of the early modern period the Dionysius/Bede system was standard, but in time all things must pass, including the method of its own computation, and by the late sixteenth century it became clear that the old calendar was out by 11 days. In 1582 Pope Gregory initiated a new calendar, a move that brought much popular consternation, since those days were suddenly ‘lost’ as the date jumped forward in order to realign it with the solar year. The new calendar was resisted by Protestant countries and the European year remained unsynchronised until the eighteenth century. When England finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 it was greeted with perhaps even greater popular protest than it had been elsewhere in Europe nearly two centuries before, since the spread of basic literacy and numeracy meant that ordinary people were now more attuned to the demarcations of calendar time.