The Hours of the Divine Office are very ancient. They were already ancient in the sixth century when St Benedict codified them in his Rule, a practical guide for the monastic life. They consisted of seven Day Hours together with Vigils, the Night Office (also known as Matins). Each Hour was made up of a selection of prayers, psalms, hymns and readings that changed with the seasons and together spanned the whole twenty-four hours. The exact timing of each of the Hours varied according to whether it was winter or summer and, when Benedict’s Rule was adopted by other communities of monks, also from one religious house to another. Vigils was originally said at midnight, but in the Rule of St Benedict was prescribed for ‘the eighth hour of the night’ – 2 a.m. – because ‘by sleeping until a little past the middle of the night, the brothers can arise with their food fully digested.’ Lauds might then follow Vigils immediately or be said separately, three hours later, with a period of study in between. Then came Prime, after which work began, followed three hours later by Terce. Three hours later again came Sext and the main meal of the day. Then came None (pronounced to rhyme with ‘stone’), at about 3 p.m., followed by Vespers, often celebrated with great solemnity, at about sunset, and finally Compline, celebrated at 9 p.m., after which the community retired to bed. The Hours still provide the basic structure of monastic life today.
The text of the Office (from the Latin officium, meaning ‘duty’ or ‘service’) was contained in a compendium known as the Breviary. Books of Hours were smaller portable versions of the Office for use by laypeople. They contained a simplified scheme of the eight Hours, known as the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, together with other prayers and devotions, including the Litany of the Saints, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the Office of the Dead. Books of Hours are the most numerous class of books to survive from the late Middle Ages. They are at once the most visible and the most intimate of medieval books, very widely disseminated yet used in an intensely private manner by individuals, often women, in the privacy of their own chambers. Mass-produced by workshops in France and the Low Countries, they were exported to this country in their thousands – the ‘best-sellers’ of their day. The middle classes bought them ready-made; the wealthy commissioned them splendidly embellished in gold and colours, with special prayers to their patron saints and miniature paintings by the greatest artists of the day into which their own portraits might be incorporated as bystanders — looking on at the Nativity, as it were – or their favourite castle adopted as the backdrop to some scene of rural life.