Timekeeping  /  Six candles a day
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Six candles a day

Asser records Alfred’s six marked candles, each burning four hours inside a lantern of horn.

One of the six candles, marked at every inch, inside its lantern of horn: each candle burned for four hours.Drawing: Watch Historian
The need
King Alfred had vowed to give half his time to God, and, his biographer Asser says, could not tell the hours by night or in cloudy weather.
How it worked
Wax weighing seventy-two pennies was made into six equal candles, each twelve inches long and marked along its length. Burned one after another they lasted twenty-four hours, four hours each. Draughts made them burn unevenly, so the king had a lantern made of wood and thin white ox-horn with a door of horn.
What it changed
A self-contained measure of elapsed time that worked indoors and at night, with no sun and no water. Burning candles and incense remained everyday timers for centuries.
Where it is now
Nothing survives. The account is in Asser’s Life of King Alfred, chapter 104, written in 893.

SourcesAsser, Life of King Alfred, ed. Stevenson (Clarendon 1904), ch. 104

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