Ben Jonson called it “the poetry of steeples”. In his Bedfordshire youth, John Bunyan was seduced by, if not addicted to, its pleasures. So ubiquitous was bell ringing to England in the 17th century that at least two sources from the 1650s – a religious tract and a poem – attest to the country’s nickname, ‘the ringing island’.
Bells had long been part of the English aural landscape. Bede in the eighth century writes of a bell sounding a call to prayer at the monastic house at Hackness, near Scarborough. A bell-ringer can be seen at work in a carving in the Norman chancel at Stoke Dry in Rutland. By the mid-16th century Hugh Latimer could tell a Lincolnshire audience that “if all the bells in England should be rung together… there would be almost no place, but some bells might be heard”.
The sermon bell summoned people to church. The sacrament bell marked the end of the litany, the sacring bell the elevation of the host. Three strikes on another marked the saying of the sanctus. Bells rang for the reading of marriage banns and to celebrate the wedding, at baptism and confirmation. A morning bell rang at dawn; bells rang the eight o’clock curfew. Bells sounded the canonical hours.
The passing bell rang when death approached. The death knell – sometimes known as the soul bell – when it came. Practices were familiar and local, an aural fingerprint. In Lincolnshire alone, according to one Victorian historian, there were over 70 different rituals for ringing the passing bell. At one Northamptonshire church a bell rang while the body was wound in its shroud.
Bells rang to mark great occasions: Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto; the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. “It is natural to the mind of man to be ravished with great joy by the notes and harmony of music (which thing bells well rung commonly effect in men’s hearts),” said the divine Thomas Holland in 1599, defending the annual ringing of bells to celebrate Elizabeth I’s accession.
Bells also marked the presence of the great and the good. At the end of the 14th century, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, processing past London’s churches “did not only look and wait for the ringing of bells… but took great snuff [that] so many… did not receive his coming with the noise of bells”. So offended was Arundel, in fact, that he interdicted them. “They certainly knew of our coming,” he complained.
Bells were familiar sounds – but familiar in other ways too. Many church bells were dedicated to the Virgin Mary, or to other saints. Many carried inscriptions: “When struck, I am called Catherine the rose of the world.” Most such inscriptions are in Latin, but a few are in English. “Mary of Hawardby. Of us have mercy,” said a bell at Laceby in Lincolnshire. “Love hurteth not,” said another at Hannington in Northamptonshire; “When you die I cry,” said another at Owmby. Some had names that were yet more familiar still: Old Kate, Bell Harry, Black Tom of Sothill.
By the end of 16th century, driven partly by protestant distaste for religious usage and partly by technological development in the bell wheel, bell ringing had become a secular pastime and pleasure. A German traveller in 1602 noted that: “On arriving in London we heard a great ringing of bells in almost all the churches, going on very late in the evening. We were informed that the young people do that for the sake of exercise and amusements and sometimes they pay considerable sums as a wager, who will pull a bell the longest, and ring it in the most approved fashion.”
It is out of this milieu that change-ringing developed. Primitive five-bell-changes have been found scratched on an early 17th-century belfry doorjamb at Buxhall in Suffolk; others are marked in a charity accounts book, also in Suffolk, sometime in the 1610s. But it is the foundation of the first-known secular bell-ringing society, the Schollers of Cheapeside on 2 February 1603 – 1604 by the modern calendar – that is the best evidence for the development. The society lasted until 1662, electing new officers each year, although it had a brief interregnum of its own in 1640-1, followed by three years with the same officers “in regard of the troubles” of that decade.
Fabian Stedman, the society’s last treasurer in 1662, would go on to publish Richard Duckworth’s Tintinnalogia in 1668, the first book on the art of change ringing. Stedman himself wrote the second, Campanalogia in 1677, which, among much advice and many examples, fantasises about the more than 479 million changes it is possible to ring with twelve bells, which Stedman calculates would take 75 years, 12 lunar months, one week and three days of non-stop bell ringing at a rate of 720 changes an hour.
Certainly not everyone shared this kind of zeal for the art. In 1628, the parishioners of Ashby-de-la-Zouch felt compelled to crack down. “None shall be allowed to ring for pleasure above twice in the week,” they decreed, “and that above the space for an hour at a time.”
No doubt they felt, to use a ringing term, over-belled.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the February 2023 issue of History Today. In the original version I unaccountably wrote Francis Stedman for Fabian.
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Mathew Lyons 