The English are practical people and their church buildings have traditionally served secular ends as well as spiritual needs. Weather and time, for example, are age–old human preoccupations. Long before the advent of television and radio, townspeople and country folk felt a need to keep a close eye on both, and, in the days before weathermen and wristwatches were invented, they looked towards church towers for answers.
Church towers have been decorated with wind vanes and timepieces since the Dark Ages. In the 11th century, churches were required by papal edict to display images of roosters on their towers or roof peaks. The purpose of this was to remind the people that St. Peter denied Christ thrice before the cock crowed twice.
The idea quickly spread to England, where it was adopted with enthusiasm, not for love of the papacy but because they discovered that a rooster fashioned out of wood or iron made an excellent wind vane. This is why the English call a wind vane “a weather cock” and their understandable obsession with the weather explains why England’s ancient parish churches are decorated with a rooster wind vane rather than a cross.
Frankly, I think they would have done a lot better to have chosen an eagle to top their churches. A rooster, after all, is simply a jumped up chicken—and where’s the dignity in that, I ask you?
But maybe it was entirely for the best that folks chose chickens to tell the direction of the wind. It is, after all, hard to shorten the word “weathercock.” However you can bet your life that weather eagles would soon be called “weagles”—and that’s too close to “weasel” for comfort.
Church towers were also decorated with sundials à la St. Stephen’s. Often they were elaborate affairs, embellished not only with gilded scrollwork, but also with proverbs and religious texts. Parish clocks, sad to say, have increasingly displaced the sun dial.
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