What you describe is very much a hodgepodge. Everyone doing their own, kinda maybe acurate thing. There were tales from this time of towns being off by 30 minutes here and there that were nearby each other. You could leave a town on a horse at noon and arrive in a town 3 miles away also at noon.
And the immediate precursor to this was the stage coach system, which had to generally approximate when a stage should show up to have fresh horses ready, and know of something had gone wrong to go look for them. That was less about minutes and more about halves or quarter of an hour.
Prior to that, the hours were rung by churches to call people to prayer, based on sundials and guesses during overcast days. The 24 hour day wasnt actually standardized into all 24 hours being the same length for centuries, because it was all solar days observation.
Where we agree is that very few people really cared about time down to the minute unless you needed to. Crops, livestock, and rains are things that are on the order of days. Even in cities, dawn, dusk, noon, were good enough for most people for centuries.
What you describe is very much a hodgepodge. Everyone doing their own, kinda maybe acurate thing. There were tales from this time of towns being off by 30 minutes here and there that were nearby each other. You could leave a town on a horse at noon and arrive in a town 3 miles away also at noon.
And the immediate precursor to this was the stage coach system, which had to generally approximate when a stage should show up to have fresh horses ready, and know of something had gone wrong to go look for them. That was less about minutes and more about halves or quarter of an hour.
Prior to that, the hours were rung by churches to call people to prayer, based on sundials and guesses during overcast days. The 24 hour day wasnt actually standardized into all 24 hours being the same length for centuries, because it was all solar days observation.
Where we agree is that very few people really cared about time down to the minute unless you needed to. Crops, livestock, and rains are things that are on the order of days. Even in cities, dawn, dusk, noon, were good enough for most people for centuries.