Jacquemart (bellstriker)
animated, mechanised figure of a person, usually made from wood or metal, which strikes the hours on a bell with a hammer
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.
One of the oldest and best-known jacquemarts is found on the south tower of the cathedral Church of Notre Dame of Dijon: it was installed by Philippe II of Burgundy in 1383. Other well-known historic jacquemarts are found on top of the Zytglogge 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.
In the South-West, the only existing one is that of Lavaur, located at the top of the bell tower of the Saint-Alain cathedral. Legend has it that during the wars of religion a Protestant prisoner was locked up in the bell tower and had to ring the bells every hour. He built a mechanism to do it for him.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jacquemart (bellstriker)” as animated, mechanised figure of a person, usually made from wood or metal, which strikes the hours on a bell with a hammer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1416494. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1383.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacquemart (bellstriker)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.