Monastic Hours

I was aware that some monasteries would combine some of the hours of prayer to make life easier - less getting up in the middle of the night and then going back to sleep for a bit before getting up again.

But Lyndal Roper's biography of Luther says that this sometimes happened on a greater scale. At one stage Luther was apparently saving up all the monastic hours 'till Saturday, which actually proved rather punishing but allowed him more uniterupted time for writing. Just before he finally dropped the observance of the hours he had apparently saved up a whole quarter's worth of praying.