Jacquemart (bellstriker)

A jacquemart (sometimes jaquemart and also called a quarter-jack) is an automaton, an animated, mechanised figure of a person, usually made from wood or metal, which strikes the hours on a bell with a hammer. Jacquemarts are usually part of clocks or clocktowers, and are often near or at the top of the construction. The figurine is also known as Jack of the Clock or Jack o'Clock.

Jacquemart the collegial Saint-Pierre de Leuven
The Benfeld, France, jacquemart

One of the oldest and best-known jacquemarts is found on the south tower of the cathedral church of Notre Dame at Dijon: it was installed by Philippe II of Burgundy in 1383. Other well-known historic jacquemarts are found on top of the Zytglogge[1] tower in Bern, Switzerland and the Moors on the Torre dell'Orlogio di San Marco in Venice. Italy.

The word is originally French but is sometimes used in English as well. The origin of the word is disputed, but one theory relates it to a tool called a 'jacke', used by the craftsmen building church towers, the steeplejacks.

Notable jaquemart figures
gollark: PotatOS *used* to have a feature where you could run a command to display output from Dwarf Fortress via it_was_inevitable but it used too much RAM on the osmarks.tk server cluster™.
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See also

References
  1. Marti, Markus (2005). 600 Jahre Zytglogge Bern - Eine kleine Chronik der Zeitmessung. Bern: Staempfli. p. 48. 3-7272-1180-6.
  2. Historic England. "Thornton's Arcade (1255837)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 28 February 2019.
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