A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. WORKS BY THE REV. GEO. S. TYACK, B.A. The Cross in Ritual, Architecture, and Art. "This book is reverent, learned, and interesting, and will be read with a great deal of profit by anyone who wishes to study the history of the sign of our Redemption." Church Times. " It is copiously and well illustrated, lucidly ordered and written, and deserves to be widely known." Yorkshire Post. "The volume teems with facts, and it is evident that Mr. Tyack has made his study a labour of love, and spared no research in order, within the prescribed limits, to make his work complete. He has given us a valuable work of reference, and a very instructive and entertaining volume." Birmingham Daily Gazette. " An engrossing and instructive narrative." Dundee A dvertiser. "As a popular account of the Cross in history, we do not know that a better book can be named." Glasgow Herald. Historic Dress of the Clergy. "We do not hesitate to recommend this volume as the most reliable and the most comprehensive illustrated guide to the history and origin of the canonical vestments and other dress worn by the clergy, whether ecclesiastical, academical, or general, while the excellent work in typography and binding make it a beautiful gift-book " Church Bells. "A very painstaking and very valuable volume on a subject which is just now attracting much attention. Mr. Tyack has collected a large amount of information from sources not avail- able to the unlearned, and has put together his materials in an attractive way. The book deserves and is sure to meet with a wide circulation." Daily Chronicle. "The book can be recommended to the undoubtedly large class of persons who are seeking information on this and kindred subjects." The Times. "This book is written with great care, and with an evident knowledge of history. It is well worth the study of all who wish to be better informed upon a subject which the author states in his preface gives evident signs of a lively and growing interest." Manchester Courier. BELL OF ST. MURA. H Booh Hbout Bells BY THE REV. GEO. S. TYACK, B.A., Author of " The Cross in Ritual, Architecture, and Art, " Historic Dress of the Clergy," etc. - NiV. LONDON : WILLIAM ANDREWS & CO., 5, FARRINGDON AVENUE, (preface. BELLS are of interest to almost every one. Their voices to some tell only of daily duty, of trains to catch, of the return of the hours of toil, of the ceaseless flight of inexorable time ; to others they speak of devotion, and are as the voice of a mother calling us to her knee for prayer; to others again the bells are means of healthful exercise and instruments of heart-stirring music. There is, however, an increasing number of people, who over and above the feeling of one or more of these interests in the voices of the bells, take an interest also in the bells them- selves. To these the belfry has a story to tell, now full of the resources of art, now of the glamour of romance, now of the struggles of the Faith. Recent years have seen the publication of not a few books upon the subject, some dealing exhaustively with certain districts, others touching lightly a wider field. In the following pages the author has endeavoured to cover the whole of a subject admittedly large and varied, and to illustrate by the choice of the most striking examples all the many uses of the bells. How far he has succeeded in doing this in a popular way, others must, of course, determine; but the kindly manner in which the public has accepted at his hands some previous attempts of a somewhat similar kind, leads him to hope that this may prove not less worthy of a generous reception. It remains to be stated that Mr. William Andrews, of Hull, 281648 iv PREFACE. placed at the author's disposal his collection of books, notes, etc., relating to this subject ; that Mr. J. Potter Briscoe, author of "Curiosities of the Belfry," kindly lent a number of illustrations which appear in this volume, and Mr. Robert Head, historian of Congleton, the one of " Ringing the Chains." GEO. S, TYACK. CROWLE, DONCASTER, I4th February, 1898. Contents. PAGE CHAPTER I. INVENTION OF BELLS. Early instruments of percussion Early allusions to bells Classical names for bells Introduction of large bells Church bells Allusions in modern poetry. 1 CHAPTER II. BELL FOUNDING AND BELL FOUNDERS. Primi- tive bells not cast Monastic founders Mediaeval lay founders Founders at York Gloucester London Loughborough Itinerant founders Bell-founder's window, York Foundries in churchyards Foreign bells in England Foreign foundries Scottish bells and founders Irish founders Various other founders Bell metal Alleged silver in bells Bells made from cannon Shape of bells Tubular bells Process of casting The "Poor Sinner's Bell" Tuning Hanging of a Russian bell Mode of hanging a bell Chiming and ringing The bell of S. Proculus 12 CHAPTER III. DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. Ancient bells still in use Claughton bell Cold Ash by bell Old Lincolnshire bells York bells Monastic bells still in use Seventeenth century examples Old Scottish bells Names of bells Crowland Abbey bells Principal of selection of names Examples of names Bells still known by name Inscription of name upon the bell Dedication of bells The Roman rite Modern English rite 45 CHAPTER IV. THE DECORATION OF BELLS. Artistic mould- ings on bells Initial crosses and stops Makers' marks Figures of saints Royal heads Heraldic decoration Inscriptions Invocations of saints Jesus and Trinity bells Prayers for donors, parishioners, and others Languages used for inscriptions English inscriptions Insertion of dates and makers' names Commemorations of donors Makers' rhymed inscriptions -Boastful bells Inscriptions allusive to change-ringing Allusions to uses of bells Records of parish authorities Loyal inscriptions Commemoration of public events Of local events Use of Scriptural quotations A long inscription Alphabetic inscriptions Leonine verses Doggerel verses Curious errors Bell-frame inscriptions. ... 63 vi CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. Large bells A Burmese bell Russian bells Chinese bells Japanese bells Cologne Olmutz Erfurt Bruges French bells English bells Great Paul Other London bells S. Dunstan, Canterbury Peter of York Other York bells Mighty Tom, Oxford Other Oxford bells Great Tom, Lincoln Great Peter and Grandison, Exeter Gloucester Noteworthy secular bells Big Ben, West- minster Town Hall bells at Manchester Leeds and elsewhere Bow bells Dorchester tenor bell S. Andrew's, Plymouth Wrexham Scottish bells Legend of Limerick bells Shandon bells Dublin bells American bells The peal at Zanzibar Colonial bells. 97 CHAPTER VI. THE Loss OF OLD BELLS. Comparative scarcity of old bells Loss by natural causes - Delicacy bells Careless usage of bells King Henry VIII. and church bells Robbery of bells Spoliation of Scottish belfries Mutilated bells Losses by fire Change- ringing and the consequent re-casting of bells ... ... 122 CHAPTER VII. TOWERS AND CAMPANILES. Introduction of belfries Bells in trees Detached towers in England Central towers Scottish belfries Town steeples Berwick bells Effect of change ringing on towers Sanctus-bell gable 131 CHAPTER VIII. BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. Cleri- cal ringers The " Scholars of Cheapside" The "College Youths " " Royal Cumberland Youths " " Stedman's Principle " Change-ringing Ill-repute of ringers in the past Ringers' jugs Belfry rules Examples in prose and verse Ringers' epitaphs Female ringers Picture of ringers at Ecton Modern ringers Distin- guished men as ringers Bequests to ringers. ... ... 137 CHAPTER IX. THE CHURCH-GOING BELL. The sacred trumpets of the Jews Buddhist horns in Thibet Summoning the faithful in primitive times Greek sub- stitutes for bells Early monastic use of bells Early use of hand bells S. Francis Xavier Canon law and bells Sermon Bell Early Sunday morning bells Priest's Bell Special ringing for the Eucharist Survivals of ancient services Instances in Scotland Ringing out from church The Catechism Institution bell The Moslem Muezzin. ... .. ... ... ... 159 CHAPTER X. BELLS AT CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS AND FASTS. Advent ringing S. Thomas' Day Christmas peals Childermas The Circumcision, or New Year's Day Epiphany peals Candlemas Shrove Tuesday and the " Pancake" Bell Lenten usages Disuse of the bells in Holy Week Easter Ascensiontide, Whitsuntide, and CONTENTS. vii Trinity S. Andrew's Day Festivals of the Blessed Virgin S. George's Day S. James' Day and the Armada S. Hugh's Day and Queen Elizabeth's accession Hallow-mass ringing All Souls ... ... ... ... 170 CHAPTER XI. THE EPOCHS OF MAN'S LIFE MARKED BY THE BELLS. Curious Spanish custom Birthday peals Baptism - Confirmation Apprentice peals Bannspeals Wedding bells The morning after, and the Sunday after, marriage Passing, or Soul Bell Death Bell "Tellers" Invitation peal, or Company Bell Funeral bells Muffled peals Month's mind and year's mind peals Hand-bells rung for deaths and funerals- Execution Bell. 184 CHAPTER XII. THE BLESSINGS AND CURSINGS OF THE BELLS. Belief in the power of bells against demons Bells and the dying Bells in storms In pestilence S. Anthony's emblem Cursing by bell, book, and candle Rise and character of the rite A Cheshire instance Quarterly general excommunication of sinners. ... ... ... 210 CHAPTER XIII. BELLS AS TIME-MARKERS. The canonical hours Invention of clocks Strasburg clock "Jacks o' the Clockhouse "Curfew Angelus King's Cliff and its bells Washerwoman's bell, Nottingham Seed- sowing and harvest bells Gleaning " Gatherums " at Louth 'Prentice bells of Bow Time at sea 220 CHAPTER XIV. SECULAR USES OF CHURCH AND OTHER BELLS. Harvest Home The bells' greeting to dis- tinguished people Coronation peals Royal Oak Day Gowrie Conspiracy Gunpowder Plot Celebration of great victories Plough Monday May Day Cock- fighting and horse races Bells and politics The Com- mon bell Stamford bull-running Vestry bell Some local secular usages Market and fair bells Market peals Fire, and other alarm, peals Lighthouse and buoy bells Special usages at Stainton Dale and at Rosy th Castle Ships' bells La Lutine 239 CHAPTER XV. SMALL BELLS, SECULAR AND SACRED. Form of early small bells The Jewish high-priest's bells Bells on Christian vestments Bells on lay garments Jesters' bells Morris dancers' bells Bells on warlike arms and armour The Greek sentry's bell Bells on harness Cattle bells Bells as prizes for horse- racesCommon uses of hand-bells The domestic bell Small bells in public worship The Egyptian kemkem Buddhist bells The sanctus and consecration bells Hand-bells in processions " St. Peter's Chains" at Congleton Burmese pagoda bells Japanese temple bells Moslem "Bells of Paradise." . M ._ ., 256 viii CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVI. CARILLONS. Derivation of the term Belgian carillons Mechanism of the carillon the carillon a Clavier Carillon recital by M. Denyn English chimes and carillons Hand- bell peals Bells in military bands .. 272 CHAPTER XVII. BELFRY RHYMES AND LEGENDS. Satirical verses Bell "sayings" "Ghost" peals Demons, fairies, and the bells Miraculous bells Stealing the sanctus bell The Sicilian Vespers S. Bartholomew's Day, 1572 The bell at Grosslaswitz Conclusion. ... 278 H Book about Bells. CHAPTER I. of THERE can be little question that the earliest musical instruments were those of percussion. It is true that Holy Scripture, in naming Jubal as the "father" of those who play on such instruments, makes mention only of "the harp and the organ," or the music of strings and wind. Yet legend reports that Jubal caught the first suggestion of his art from the ring of his brother Tubal Cain's hammer on his anvil ; and one cannot but realize the natural probability that such was indeed the case, when one considers how much more frequently the primitive man would hear a musical note struck out by a blow on some sonorous substance than in any other way The tones produced by Nature, or in the processes of the mechanical arts, are seldom definite and clear, except when caused by percussion. The second mention of music in those records, which claim our attention not only from their sanctity but from their antiquity, is the saying of Laban to Jacob (Genesis xxxi, 27): "I might have sent thee away with mirth, and with songs, with tabret, and with harp." Here the music of the strings is mingled with that produced by striking the tightened skin of the tabret, or tabor. 1 :<2\ : : . fa 4; BOOK ABOUT BELLS. The song of praise with which Miriam and her maidens celebrated the triumphant exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, was accompanied exclusively by timbrels, instruments probably closely resembling the modern tambourine, in which the drum-like sound produced by the taps upon the skin is mingled with the jingling of small metal plates striking together, as the timbrel is swung or shaken in the air. More striking illustrations of this fact are found if we turn to those oriental nations, which, with the conservatism apparently almost inseparable from the east, have retained through many ages the style of music and the musical instruments evolved in an early age of civilization. One of the most elaborate instruments known to the Chinese is the king, invented by one of their emperors more than two thousand years before Christ. It consists of sixteen flat stones suspended in two ranks within a frame, and so regulated in size as to give forth, when struck with a wooden mallet, a scale of notes. Besides this they use drums of every kind and size, rows of copper plates, clappers of wood, wooden tubs struck with a hammer, and cymbals. A picture of a Japanese native orchestra, drawn from life, and engraved in Siebold's work on Japan, shows us seven performers, who play respectively on a flute, a large drum shaped liked an hour-glass, two small drums, two bell- rattles, and a set of wooden clappers. Here out of the seven instruments all but one are those of percussion. The other oriental nations exhibit usually a similar fondness for music of this kind, although wind and stringed instruments take a larger share in it. This primitive and wide-spread discovery of 'the tones THE INVENTION OF BELLS. 3 producible by blows on resonant substances being then granted, we readily see that something more or less resembling the modern bell in shape would almost certainly be a very early invention. We are not therefore surprised to find that almost all ancient authors have one or more allusions to the use of bells. Some of the passages are briefly referred to here as illustrating their early and almost universal employment, the special object of which in the several cases will be more fully considered in later chapters. The book of Exodus gives us probably the earliest mention of bells, in its allusion to those golden ones which tinkled round the vestments of the Levitical high-priest. In the sacred volume we have also another reference to them in the words of the prophet Zechariah, who speaks of the harness of horses as adorned with them. Turning to profane literature we find small bells, for similar purposes to these, spoken of by Euripides in his Rhesus, by Aristophanes in his Frogs, and in the fables of Phsedrus. Plutarch alludes to them in his life of Brutus, and probably in the Georgics Virgil refers to them in speaking of the worship of Cybele. Ovid, too, and Tibullus, Martiall, Statius, Manilius, and Strabo, all have their witness to give on the matter. The researches of antiquaries, also, have brought to light facts, which indisputably prove the early use of bells. Bronze hand-bells were found by Layard in his excavations at Nimroud, and very ancient examples have been met with in various places in the far east ; while, turning to the far west, we have instances of copper bells found in ancient Peruvian tombs. In fact almost the only land which, in spite of acquiring in early times an advanced civilization, 4 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. made no use of bells, was Egypt ; and even the Egyptians were accustomed to the not dissimilar tinklings of the kemkem, or sistrum, which, in its use, was peculiarly characteristic of the land of the Nile. All the instances above quoted are those of small bells, but the various names given to them in antiquity prove that, if there were then no really large examples, they nevertheless differed in size and in shape. The following classical and sub-classical terms are used for bells. Tintinnabulum is to some extent a general term, but its sound, so suggestive of the tinkling of a little bell, shows us its proper meaning, and in that sense it is used by Plautus and by Suetonius. The corresponding Greek name was Kodon, which is found in the dramatists above alluded to, in Thucydides, and other writers. Petasus originally meant a hat such as the Romans wore when travelling, having a broad brim to protect the face from the sun ; amongst the Greeks it was largely used by hunters and shepherds, especially in Thessaly. From its resemblance to this hat in shape a gong-like bell was so called. The district of Campania in Italy has given two names to bells. Campana is applied to a bell sufficiently large for hanging in a turret, and Nola, from the town of that name in the same province, is a name given to little bells. Lebetes were properly pots or cauldrons of copper, and the word is used in Homer of hand-basins and of ornamental bowls given as prizes in athletic contests. The word is also applied, however, to bells or gongs by Heroditus, in describing the funeral solemnities of the Spartans, and to certain kettles of brass at the temple of Jupiter at Dodona THE INVENTION OF BELLS. 5 in Epirus, from the clashing and ring of which oracles were given by the priests. Yet another term for a small bell was Squilla, which occurs in Italian writings. Krotalon or Crotulum strictly means a castanet or rattle, rather than a bell. Signum, which is equivalent to the word sign or token, and by classical usage is employed for a military standard, a watch- word, and in more general senses, is used in late writers of bells, as in the Excerptions of S. Egbert, 750 A.D. The Portuguese still call a bell Sino. The word " Campana," spoken of above, is still the usual Italian word for a bell. The French and the Germans call it respectively Cloche and Clocke, words derived from a Teutonic root, which has also, as some suppose, given us "cloak," so called from the bell-like shape of the garment. The connection of these words with " clock " must be left to a subsequent occasion. Our English word comes to us from an Aryan root Bhal, through the Old English " bellan," to roar or bellow, or its cognate form " bella," signifying that which roars. " Bellow " and " bull " are both from the same source. From this it will be obvious that just as the first idea of the Romans on the subject was of a little instrument which tinkled (tintinnabulum), so the earliest knowledge which our forefathers had of it was of a swaying mass of metal that boomed and roared. Thus we see that in far-off times bells of some sort, but mostly of a small size, and none very large, were known and used for various purposes all over the world. The metallic sound rang from Italy to China ; in busy cities and on lonely sheep-tracks, and in many quaint and curious ways and places which we hope hereafter to consider. To name the 6 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. inventor of the bell is impossible ; perhaps there was no inventor, but it grew into being and use from the combined ideas of many. Almost certainly there was no single inventor ; the construction of something of the kind would occur so naturally to many a man who simply struck his staff by accident against a metal pan or bowl, that in almost every land the bell must have sprung independently into existence. There is no trustworthy evidence of the use of really large bells before the dawn of Christianity, and they owe their existence to Christian influences. This being the case, we must not look for any traces of them in the first centuries of our era, during which time the faithful met frequently by stealth in groves and deserts, " in dens and caves of the earth," for fear of their persecutors. The credit of the invention has been given to Paulinus, bishop of that Nola, in Campania, which is previously mentioned. Paulinus flourished about 400 A.D., just after the public recognition of the Christian faith by the Emperor Constantine, and was a great patron of the arts. But his claim to this distinction is rendered very doubtful by the fact that, although in a letter to Severus the bishop describes very fully the decoration of his church, he makes no mention whatever of bells. A better title is made out for Pope Sabinianus, who succeeded S. Gregory in the papal chair in 604 ; in any case, from about that date notices of the use of bells which must have been more or less of the kind and size now seen in turrets, if not in towers, become increasingly frequent. The Venerable Bede tells us of one brought from Italy, about 680, by S. Benedict Biscop, and placed in his newly-built abbey at Wearmouth ; and the same historian speaks of the THE INVENTION OF BELLS. 7 sound of a bell as being well known at Whitby Abbey at the time of the death of S. Hilda, which was also in 680. By the year 750 church bells had become sufficiently common for Egbert, Archbishop of York (732-766), to order, in his Excerptions, that all priests should toll them at the appointed hours ; and if this was possible in the north, we may feel certain that it was even more so in the south, which, from its nearness to the Continent, was even from Caesar's time more familiar with the products of European civilization than more remote districts of the island. Ingulphus, the chronicler of Croyland Abbey, mentions a peal of bells there about the year 960, and by his statement that England had then no peal to match it in tone, he distinctly implies that even by that time many churches had something more than a single bell. For fully a thousand years, therefore, we may feel certain that Christendom, and England as part of it, has heard the far-reaching tones of the bells ring out, now gladly, now sadly, across broad acres of field and woodland, and over the busy hum of the bustling town. And in all that time there has been scarce an event of interest in the life of nations or of districts, not many even in the lives of private individuals, in which the tones of the bells have not mingled with the emotions that were aroused thereby. Nothing, perhaps, illustrates in a more striking way the place which bells have for ages filled in the lives of men, than the recollection of the position which they have assumed in literature, and especially in poetry. The true poet must surely be to a great extent the mouthpiece of his age ; he is the expression of those sentiments which fill the men of his time, and vainly strive for utterance 8 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. in the hearts of uninspired mortals. And it is the poets above all to whom the bells tell the story of man's joys and sorrows, of his ambitions and disappointments. To quote only a few of the most obvious instances, the following, taken at random, will suffice. The use of bells as tellers of the passing time finds especially frequent mention by the poets. Thus in a well-known passage in his " Night Thoughts," Young exclaims "The bell strikes one. We take no note of time But from its loss. " In the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," Sir Walter Scott tell us " When the convent met at the noontide bell The monk of S. Mary's Aisle was dead." Campbell, alluding to the invention of the clock by the Germans, whom he addresses in one of his odes, expresses this wish on their behalf " . . . The clock ye framed to tell, By its sound, the march of time, Let it clang oppression's knell O'er your clime !" The sound of the Curfew, booming out from the gray church tower as the evening shadows are falling over the land, could not fail to wake an echo in the poet's breast. The Puritan Milton makes it an element in the calm surroundings of his " II Penseroso " " Oft on a plat of rising ground, I hear the far-off Curfew sound, Over some wide-watered shore, Swinging slow with sullen roar." And the American Longfellow, amid the glare of Trans- atlantic newness, across which the mellowing shadows of THE INVENTION OF BELLS. 9 antiquity have not yet fallen, loves nevertheless to picture an old-world eventide : " Solemnly, mournfully, Dealing its dole, The Curfew bell Is beginning to toll." And yet again, the clang of the " Village Blacksmith's " hammer speaks to him, as it has been suggested those of Tubal Cain did to Jubal, of bell-music, and sounds " Like the sexton ringing the village bell, When the evening sun is low." Gray's opening line in the " Elegy " " The curfew tolls the knell of parting day " is almost too well-known to quote ; as also is the song of Tom Moore's Canadian voyageurs, when they tell us " Faintly as tolls the evening chime, Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time ; " and the same poet's apostrophe to " those evening bells." Shakespere, who speaks of everything that men love or fear, speaks of course of bells. In one place it is the " remembered knolling a departed friend ; " in another the little hand-bell of Lady Macbeth is to Duncan " the knell to summon him to heaven or to hell ; " and later in the same tragedy, Macbeth, driven at last to bay, cries " Ring the alarum bell ! Blow, wind ! come, wrack ! At least we'll die with harness on our back." It is Shakespere, too, who gives us the tenderest figure for the mind deranged, as " Sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh," who speaks of the time-honoured association " of bell arid burial," and quotes the phrase, which to English ears ever represents the village chimes, " Hark ! now I hear them, ding, dong, bell." io A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. To the gentle Cowper, and the thoughtful Wordsworth, the calm of a rural English Sunday, with the bells ringing out across the fields, appeals with special force, and the echoes of those chimes, meet us in their verse. Thus Cowper in " The Task " : ' ' How sweet the music of those village bells, Falling at intervals upon the ear, In cadence sweet, now dying all away, Now pealing loud again, and louder still, Clear and sonorous as the gale comes on." In a similar spirit he represents Alexander Selkirk on his desert island, as feeling his absolute loneliness to be emphasized by the fact that " The sound of the church -going bell These valleys and rocks never heard, Never sighed at the sound of a knell, Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared." Wordsworth, in his " White Doe of Rylstone," tells of the time " When the bells of Rylstone played Their Sabbath music God us ayde (That was the sound they seemed to speak) Inscriptive legend, which, I ween, May on those holy bells be seen. " To Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" the bell speaks, too, of worship, when he exclaims : " Hark the little vesper bell, Which biddeth me to prayer." Edgar Allan Poe has left us, among the best of his poems, one specially devoted to "The Bells," in which we hear them tinkle, or peal, boom, or clang according to their weight and purpose : and Schiller has told us in stirring lines the story of " The Founding of the Bell." Throughout the master- THE INVENTION OF BELLS. n piece of Tennyson, the " In Memoriam," throb the chimes of Christmastide, " The merry, merry bells of Yule," and the bells' glad greeting of each New Year. There is perhaps no finer lyric in the language, and certainly no fitter conclusion for this brief selection from the bell-music of the poets, than that section of the poem, which begins : " Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light ; The year is dying in the night ; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow : The year is going, let him go ; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out old shapes of foul disease ; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be." CHAPTER II. THE earliest bells were probably not cast, but made of metal plates rivetted together. One, said to have belonged to S. Gall (A.D. 650), and still called by his name, is preserved at S. Gall in Switzerland ; and another, traditionally associated with S. Patrick (about 465), is shown at Belfast. These are made of iron, and are only about six inches high. Another, which was in the possession of Mr. Llewellynn Jewitt, measures ten and a half inches in height, and other examples are preserved, both in England and Ireland. The bells of this kind are not round, but wedge- shaped, broad and square at the mouth, and rising to a ridge at the top. A very splendid specimen of the bells of this shape is that named after S. Mura, in the Londesborough collection. It is some twelve inches high, and made of bronze, to which plates of silver beautifully embossed have been attached. By an accident it was discovered that the bell itself, beneath this casing, is adorned with tracery of Runic scrolls in brass and gold. A large crystal is set in the centre of the outer case, and jewels were at one time placed at other points of it, all but one of which have now disappeared. This fine piece of work is ascribed to the seventh century. The names of no very early bell-founders have come down to us, partly from the fact that it is a comparatively BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 13 late custom for the makers to place their names upon their works. Probably the bell-founder's art, like others which were exercised chiefly for the furnishing or the adornment of the church, was originally practised almost exclusively by the ecclesiastics themselves. S. Dunstan, as famous for his labours in the advancement of ecclesiastical art as for his devotion and his fearless denunciation of sin in high places, was instrumental in hanging bells in several churches ; with regard to the cathedral at Canterbury, over which see and province he ruled from 954 to 968, it is recorded that he gave it not only bells, but also a series of rules for their correct use. Previously to this the saint had been Abbot of Glastonbury, and Bishop of Worcester and of London, all places which would provide ample scope for his artistic skill and energy in this, as well as in other directions ; and being the practised artificer that he was, it is highly probable that the founding of their bells would be at least superintended by him in person. A disciple of S. Dunstan's, S. Ethelwold, Abbot of Abingdon, and afterwards, from 963 to 964, Bishop of Winchester, followed his master in his love for the mechanical arts, and under his supervision bells were cast and hung in the restored abbey church at Abingdon. Another even more famous abbot was Thurkytul, or Turketul, of Croyland, who, about the year 930, cast the great bell of his abbey and named it after the patron saint, S. Guthlac ; and subsequently Egelric, a later abbot, added others, whose combined music was "the most exquisite 'harmony," according to the chronicler, Ingulphus. As churches and monastic houses increased in number, naturally the art of bell-founding drifted into the hands of a professional class, and scattered records of some of its 14 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. members have come down to our time. In 1299, there was at Lynn, in Norfolk, one Master John the Founder, and we find records of two others of the same trade at this place during the following century, namely Thomas Belleyetere (or Bellfounder) in 1333, and Edmund Belleyetere twenty years later. The chief centres of this art in England in mediaeval days were York, Gloucester, London and Notting- ham ; and some of these places maintained their reputation for a very long period. John of York was a great bell- founder of about the middle of the fourteenth century, whose works are to be found in several places in the midland counties, as for example at Sproxton, in Leicester- shire, where is a bell inscribed, "JHOHANNES DE YORKE ME FECIT IN HONORE BEATA MARIE." The Fabric Rolls of York Minster mention a bell-founder of the name of John Hoton, in the year 1473. I n tne belfry of Christ Church, King's Court, York, is a bell dated 1659, which was cast by William Cureton, of Toft Green. At the same place Samuel Smith, the father and the son, carried on the business of bell-founding for many years. The father died in 1709; and the son, who was Sheriff in 1723-4, followed him in 1731 ; both being buried at Holy Trinity Church, Mickle- gate, York, where one of their bells hangs. Other examples of their work are found at S. Martin's, S. Margaret's, S. Crux, S. Cuthbert's, and S. Mary's, in the city of York, and at numerous other places, as at Filey, where three bells bear their mark, "S. S. Ebor," together with the dates 1675, 1682, and 1700. Another father and son who were alike in name and business were the two bell-founders named Edward Seller, whose place of business was in Jubbergate. They cast a bell for the church of S. Denis in 1718, the BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 15 whole peal of eight for S. Martin-le-Grand in 1729, and a single one for S. Saviour's in 1730. Instances of their work, also, are found beyond the bounds of the city. The son, who was Sheriff in 1731-2, died in 1764. Curious to relate yet a third case meets us in York of this industry passing from father to son in the case of George and Robert Dalton. The foundry of this firm was in Stonegate, and bells there- from are still hung in the steeples of S. Margaret's (one bell dated 1788), and of S. Olave's (six bells dated 1789). With the death of the younger Dalton, within the present century, the pursuit of the bell founder's art in the city of York ceased. The originator of the industry at Gloucester seems to have been a man named Alexander, or Sandre, early in the fourteenth century, who combined with bell-founding the craft of potter. In 1346, mention is made in the Fabric Roll of Ely Cathedral of bells made by John of Gloucester, who probably succeeded Sandre in his business. The best known of the Gloucester founders, however, is Abraham Rudhall, who was established there in 1684. His des- cendants continued to follow the same art, and their works are found in many places, a fine peal of ten at Wrexham, for example, coming from their foundry in 1726. Half-a century later they issued a statement showing that, down to Lady Day, 1774, the Rudhall family had turned out 3,594 bells, including those at S. Dunstan's-in-the-East, S. Bride's, and S. Martin's-in-the-Fields, in London. This foundry afterwards passed into the hands of Messrs. Mears, who also carry on the work in London. Of the founders in the Metropolis, one of the most conspicuous names is that of William Mot, who established 1 6 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in the sixteenth century. This passed at a later date into the hands of Messrs. Lester and Pack, who cast among other bells the great bell at Canterbury in 1762. The moulding in this case was entrusted to William Chapman, a nephew of the senior partner in the firm, which shortly after included him, and became Pack and Chapman. Under this name the White- chapel Foundry turned out the six bells of S. Mary's, Bishophill Senior, at York, in 1770. Amongst those who witnessed the casting of the great bell at Canterbury, was a young man, who evinced so strong an interest in the work, that Chapman took notice of him, and offered to make a bell-founder of him if he would go to London. This was William Mears, and from this incident it came to pass that subsequently the foundry became the property of the Mears family. By them a fine ring of ten bells was hung in the great parish church at Yarmouth in 1807, and the "Beck- with Peal" in 1844, followed by "Great Peter," in 1845, m the minster at York. The style of the firm now is Mears and Stainbank. Other firms which flourished, or still flourish, in the Metropolis, include Christopher Hodson, the best known of whose works is " Great Tom " of Oxford, cast in 1681. Richard Phelps, who, in 1716, cast the pre- decessor of the modern great bell of St. Paul's, and Messrs. John Warner and Sons, who, to instance an example of their work, supplied two memorial bells to St. Maurice's, York, in 1883. We touch, however, matters of a rather invidious nature in speaking of bell-founders of modern days, yet the fame of Great Paul of London, excuses our naming its makers, the firm of John Taylor and Company of Loughborough. John of BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 17 York, mentioned in an earlier page, is supposed to have introduced the industry into Leicestershire, and to have been eventually succeeded in business by the Newcombes, one of whose bells hung in the parish church of Lough- borough until the whole peal was recast by a later successor, Thomas Eayres, of Kettering and St. Neots. The next to take up the work was Edward Arnold, who cast a peal for Quorndon, in 1773, and for Rothley in 1784; the bells of the former each bearing the legend, "Edward Arnold, of St. Neots, Huntingdonshire, cast us all six." One of Arnold's apprentices was Robert Taylor, the grandfather of the founder of " Great Paul." An offshoot from this firm was established by John Briant, another of Arnold's apprentices, at Hertford ; and there bells were made for Prestwold, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and other places, in the first quarter of this century ; but the foundry did not survive its originator. The Taylors worked also at one time at Oxford, but on the death of William, one of the two brothers then composing the firm, in 1854, John, the other, closed the Oxford foundry, and gave his whole attention to the one at Loughborough, which had been established in 1840. Perhaps the special attention they have paid to the setting of carillons will also warrant the mention of the Messrs. Gillet and Bland, of Croydon. It is probable that many of the earlier bell-founders had no fixed place for working, but travelled the country, rearing temporary foundries at various convenient centres, and casting there such bells as might be wanted throughout the neighbouring districts. Robert Merston and Symon de Hazfelde, whose bells are found in sundry places in south and mid Lincolnshire, may have been men of this class. 2 i8 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Miles Graye, who made two bells for Baldock church, Hertfordshire, in 1650 and 1655, carried on his work in this fashion, and in 1732, Henry Bayley advertised his readiness "to cast any ring or rings of bells in the town they belong." Daniel Hedderley, of Bawtry, also set up a foundry of this temporary sort at Winterton, in Lincoln- shire. A passing mention may also be given to William Oldfield, of Doncaster, who cast the " great bell " at Snaith, for "twenty nobles and twenty marks," in 1624, of Henry Knight of Reading, who recast six bells at Newbury, Berk- shire, in 1680, making them a peal of eight, at the cost of ^"67. There was also a well-known foundry at Albourne in Wiltshire ; the owner of which in the beginning of the eighteenth century was Robert Corr, and in the end of it James Wells. In many cases it is certain that the bell-founder did not devote himself exclusively to that work, but combined with it some other more or less analogous trade. Ropeforde cast bells for Exeter Cathedral in 1284, and was also entrusted with the repairing of the organ and the horologe there; similarly Thomas Chyche, in 1500, supplied King's College, Cambridge, both with bells for its chapel and cooking-pots for its kitchen. Richard de Wimbish was a potter of London, who also cast bells, in the early fourteenth century, and the same trades were combined, as we have already seen, by Sandre of Gloucester. Sometimes, how- ever, the second trade taken up was strangely incongruous with the other. For example we find one Roger Reve, who made both clothes and bells in the sixteenth century ; and in the fourteenth century Daniel Founder, of London, BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 19 not only cast bells, but also sold wine. The surname of the last-named artificer is an illustration of the growth of these distinctive titles from the trades of our forefathers. We meet with another artist in bell-metal called William Founder, and others named Potter and Brazier, suggesting the handicraft which usually employed them. In the sixteenth century we find a notice of a priest, who, like S. Dunstan and others before him, combined with an earnest attention to his spiritual duties, a devotion to the mechanical arts. This was William Corvehill, called, according to the custom of the time in speaking of the clergy, Sir William. The following record of him is preserved in the register of the parish of Wenlock in Shrop- shire, kept by Thomas Botelar, the Vicar: " 1546, May 26, buried out of tow tenements in Marfold Street, next S. Owen's Well, Sir William Corvehill, priest of the Service of our Lady in this church, &c. He was well skilled in geometry, not by speculation, but by experience : could make organs, clocks, and chimes ; in kerving in masonry, and silk weaving and painting, and could make all instru- ments of music, and was a very patient and gud man, borne in this borowe, and sometime monk in the monastery . . . All this country had a great loss of Sir William, for he was a good bell-founder and maker of frames." Before leaving the bell-founders, reference may appropri- ately be made to two interesting relics, which exist at York. The first is a memorial to some unknown master of the art, who was probably buried at the Church of S. Denis. It is an ancient cross, originally in that church but now in the Hospitium, on the one side of which is a brazier, and on the other an antique bell. The other takes the more elaborate 20 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. form of a stained window in the nave of the Minster, known as the " Bell-Founders' Window." Several of the processes of casting are represented ; among others the forming of the mould, the heating of the furnace, and the filling of the mould with molten metal, while bells are introduced in various places in the borders. This window was either given by Richard Tunnoc, or put up in memory of him. Tunnoc, who was bailiff of the city in 1320, and its repre- sentative in Parliament in 1327, is introduced in several places in the window, a scroll with the name inscribed being inserted for the purpose of identifying him. A legend now only partly decipherable, but commencing " Richard Tunnoc me fist " (fecit), runs along the bottom. There is ample evidence that the migratory bell-founders, to whom allusion has already been made, not infrequently set up their temporary foundries in the garths of those churches for which they worked. Doubtless the conditions of the pathways, and even the highways, of the country in early times, made the transport of heavy masses of metal a matter of no little difficulty ; and the founders were there- fore glad, not only to visit the places which might require new bells, but even there to work as near as possible to the towers, to which the bells were to be raised. The bells at Peering in Essex are said to have been cast by Miles Graye in a field adjoining the churchyard. During some excavations made in the churchyard at Scalford, in Leicestershire, traces of a furnace, together with a mass of bell-metal, were discovered, and similar remains were unearthed at Empingham, in Rutland, in 1876. In 1762 the great bell at Canterbury Cathedral was taken down and recast, when to avoid the expense of carriage the work was BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 21 done in the Cathedral yard, as had also been the case at the recasting of Great Tom of Lincoln in 1610. The bells of Meaux Abbey were cast within the precincts. Occasionally a portion even of the church itself was made into a tempor- ary foundry. Early in the fourteenth century the great bell of S. Alban's Abbey, called Amphibalus, was recast in the hall of the sacristy; and at Kirkby Malzeard, and at Haddenham, bells were cast within the sacred buildings. In 1483 the importation of foreign bells into England was made illegal, a fact which would seem to imply that they were at that time being brought into the country in sufficient numbers to affect the home industry. Not many products of foreign foundries are, however, known in England at present. One is found at S. Crux, York, inscribed " Ic Ben Ghegoten Int Jaer Oons Heeren Mcccccxxiij " (I was cast in the year of our Lord, 1523), the date of which is noteworthy as being only forty years after the issue of the prohibition. This bell is supposed to be the work of Van den Gheyn, one of the best-known of the old founders in the Low Countries. This family had works at Louvain, at Mechlin, and at Antwerp, at different periods, and a few other examples of their bells are to be found in England. The hall-bell at Peterhouse, Cambridge, a fine hand-bell belonging to the Corporation of Rye, and probably one at S. Giles's Hospital, Norwich, are specimens of the handicraft of Peter Van den Gheyn. At Culsalmond, in Scotland, is another bell by the same maker; and at Inverarity and Crail are two, both dated 1614, by a descendant of the same name. The representative of the firm in the eighteenth century was Matthias Van den Gheyn, whose daughter married Van Aerschodt : and two 22 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. of her sons, Andre Louis J. Van Aerschodt and Severin Van Aerschodt, afterwards succeeded to the business at Louvain. A ring of bells made by them was hung only a few years since in the church at Lower Beeding, Sussex. A famous foreign bell-foundry of bygone times was that of the Waghevens at Louvain. For far over a century this family maintained a high reputation ; Henri, one of the greatest of them dying in 1483, and Jacop being still at work in 1590. Bromeswell, Suffolk, has a bell by Cornelis Wagheven, dated 1530; and two or three other English bells are ascribed to the same family. Deventer was another centre of this art, Gerrit Schimmel of that town being the maker of a bell now at Frindsbury, Kent, which is dated 1670. At the same place also about the same time wrought Henrick Ter Horst. The foundry at Middelburg, conducted by Jan Burgerhuys in the early seventeenth century, and after him by his descendants Michael and Jan the younger, appears to have no representative among English bells. And the same is true of the foundries at Rotterdam, of which there were several, such as those of Cornelis Ouderogge, Peter Ostens, Claudius Fremy, and Gerhard Koster, all working in the seventeenth century. Further north in Europe we find in the same century Gert Meyer casting bells at Stockholm, and also Gerhard Horner, a specimen of whose work is at Lavenheath, in Suffolk. Foreign bells were more frequently imported into Scotland than into the southern Kingdom. Examples of the bells of most, if not all, of the makers just named still exist, or were at one time found, in that country, and also others by such Low Country founders as Peter Jansen, Andreas Ehem, Adam Danckwart and Jacop Ser. But Scotland was not BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 23 without bell-founders of her own, Patrick Kilgour, of Old Aberdeen, laboured at this craft in the seventeenth century, and on his admission to the Burgess Roll of the city was specially restricted "only ... to make or mend watches or cast bells as he may have occasion." His successors were Albert Gely, who probably died or retired about 1713, and John Mowat, who became a Burgess of the Gild of Hammermen in 1719, and died in 1771. Andrew Lawson, at one time an apprentice of Mowat's, carried on the business until 1783; and nothing is at present known of this foundry after that date. John Blaickie and Sons, however, cast bells at Aberdeen early in the present century, and still do so. A foundry at Montrose, originally belong- ing to David Barclay, and afterwards to J. Dickson, is about contemporaneous with the last named in birth, but it no longer exists. The older Scottish bells of native workman- ship, are usually cast according to the model most popular in the Netherlands, one point of which is their thinness, in proportion to their size, as compared with English bells.* Ireland has also had her masters in the art of bell- founding, of whom it must suffice to name Tobias Covey as one of the ancients, Thomas Hodges and James Sheridan, in the middle of this century, and John Murphy of the moderns. The above paragraphs, do not by any means pretend to give an exhaustive list even of those bell-founders, ancient and modern, whose works are to be found in British belfries; * For his information concerning Scottish bells, and for many interesting notes on oreign bells, the author is indebted to a recent contribution to bell-lore, namely " The Church and other Bells of Kincardineshire," by F. C. Eeles, (London : Elliott Stock, 1897.) This is, he believes, the first attempt to do for a Scottish county what has been so well done for English ones, and as such, as well as for its intrinsic excellence, it will be welcomed by all lovers of such literature. 24 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. such a catalogue, if accompanied with details of their work, would form a large and interesting volume by itself. No reference has been made to John* of Stafford, in all probability mayor of Leicester in 1366 and in 1370, who cast bells for various places in Leicestershire ; to the Norrises, who throughout the whole of the seventeenth century carried on the work of bell-founding at Stamford ; nor to the Bilbies, who from 1700 to 1815 had a foundry at Chewstoke, in Somersetshire. The names most prominent in connection with the art in England have, however, had a place ; and others will be noticed incidentally in later pages. It is time to turn from men to methods, and to speak of the processes followed in the founding of a bell. And first we must give our attention to the materials employed, and to the shape and proportions most approved among experienced bell-founders. Old French bells were often made of iron, while brass was more commonly employed in Italy and in England, the latter country probably obtaining her earliest examples, and her first lessons in the art of making them, from the former. The bells found by Layard at Nineveh were of bronze, and hand-bells are still made of every kind of sonorous metal, including gold and silver, according to the fancy of the maker or the buyer. Glass has also been employed for bells of a fair size, and one such still hangs at Borrowdale Grange ; the tones of such bells are sweet but not far-reaching, and the brittleness of the material is greatly against its use. A foundry at Bochum, in Westphalia, has recently turned out bells of steel, but the experiment can only be called fairly successful at best. Lawrence Kirk, Scotland, has a bell of this metal, cast in 1895 by Vickers of Sheffield, who has BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 25 cast steel peals for S. Clement's, Hastings, and other places. Wood does not strike one as a hopeful material for the manufacture of bells ; yet in a chest at S. Mary Magdalen, Ripon, and also at the parish church of Lenton, wooden bells may be seen. It has been suggested that these may have been imitation bells only, meant to serve as guides to the maker of the bell-frame, or for some such purpose ; they may however have been actually used during Holy week, according to a custom of which we must speak hereafter. Bell metal, as now understood, consists of a compound of copper and tin. The proportions vary to some extent, but a common standard is three parts copper to one tin in small bells, and four parts copper to one tin in large ones. If the amount of tin be increased the bell becomes more brittle ; , while if the copper be in excess the brilliancy of its tone is damaged. Occasionally small quantities of other metals are also added ; thus the proportions recommended in Paris for clock bells are copper 71 parts, tin 26, zinc 2, and iron i. A document, still extant, which records the receipts and disbursements in connection with the casting of a new bell for Bridgewater in the thirteenth century, illustrates the composition of the metal used at that time. We learn that there were bought 896 pounds of copper, 40 pounds of brass, and 320 pounds of tin; moreover gifts of "pots, platters, basons, lavers, kettles, brass mortars, and mill pots " amounted altogether to 180 pounds, apparently of brass ; and the old bell, which was melted down, weighed 425 pounds. If we take the brass, amounting in all to 220 pounds, as being composed of 9 parts copper to 4 parts zinc, according to the usual average, and also leave out of the account the old bell, as probably consisting of much the 26 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. same compound of metals as the new one was intended to do, we get these quantities : 1049 pounds of copper, 320 pounds of tin, and 68 pounds of zinc, which is singularly near the proportions of the French bell-metal quoted above, except for the absence of iron. It is a popular superstition throughout the length and breadth of the country, that a bell of specially sweet tone owes its excellence to the presence of a quantity of silver in its composition. Of the Lavenham bells, for instance, concerning which the " Magna Britannia " reports that " the tenor hath such an admirable note, as England has none to compare to it," a local tradition tells that at the casting some rich wool-staplers and others gave great quantities of silver, and even some gold, to throw into the furnace. A similar story is told of Great Tom of Lincoln, at the casting of which, in 1610, silver tankards, spoons, and other like articles, are said to have been devoted to the melting-pot. When this bell was re-cast, however, in 1831, the following was found to be the composition of the metal : 700 pounds of copper, 299 pounds of tin, and one pound only of silver. Other assays of old bell-metal yield similar results, and conclusively prove that silver, if used at all, was in almost inappreciable quantities. It is, in fact, alleged by experts that the employment of that metal would have precisely the contrary effect upon the tone of the bell to that which tradition assigns to it, silver being in its nature too closely allied to lead to permit of its use in this case. It has been suggested that the legend arose from a practice among the workmen engaged in the casting, of asking the bystanders for silver coins to throw into the molten metal, on the plea that thus the composition would be improved ; such coins being, as a matter of fact, put to a use more BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 27 calculated to loosen the workmen's tongues, than to mellow the tone of the bell. How far this is a libel on bell-founders, ancient and modern, the present writer does not pretend to determine. The almost contradictory qualities needed in an ideal composition of bell-metal are thus summed up by Mr. Benjamin Lomax in his little work on "Bells and Bell- ringers " : " The typical bell should be flexible enough to bend, elastic enough to resume its original shape after the strongest vibration, tough enough to stand heavy blows without splitting, and hard enough to retain a form once taken." Experiments have been made in many directions ; for instance, the alloy known as German silver, which consists of 100 parts of copper to 60 of zinc, and 40 of nickel, has been used for the casting of a large bell in Cathay ; but practical experience has proved the superiority for this purpose of the compound above described. Bell-metal is very similar to what was known as gun-metal before the invention of ordnance first of cast iron, and then, as we have it to-day, of steel ; and we have several instances of the metal being cast first in the one form and then in the other. Peter, the great Tsar, is said to have converted church bells into cannon, and the great bell of Rouen was put to a similar purpose in 1793. Several instances can be quoted on the other side. The bells of Liversedge, in Yorkshire, were made from guns captured by Lord William Bentinck at Genoa in 1814 ; in 1893, six bells, cast from copper cannon captured by the Russian forces in their last campaign in the Caucasus, were sent to Petrovsk to be hung in the churches of the Orthodox Faith in Daghestan ; and in 1887 a great bell named Gloriosa, formed from the metal of no less than 28 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. twenty-two French guns taken in the Franco-German War, was raised with much ceremony to its place in Cologne Cathedral. Care is taken by the best modern founders to procure the purest possible metals for the construction of bells, experience having proved that, cumbersome as they may appear to the uninitiated, their tone requires as delicate consideration as that of a violin. Rougher methods at one time, however, prevailed. A writer in Knight's " Penny Magazine," for March, 1842, describing the method of casting bells, says, " The tin is usually brought to the foundry in blocks from the mining districts, and the copper is old ship-sheathing and other fragments." Not less important to the voice of the bell than its material is its shape. Mediaeval bells were, for the most part, longer and narrower than those of more modern make. At Mitford, in Northumberland, is preserved a bell of great, but unknown age, whose height is equal to the width, and whose sides, instead of forming the graceful curves now usually seen, are very nearly in straight lines, giving to the bell almost the shape of a cone with a rounded apex. An inscription on a plate affixed to the stock informs us that this quaint old bell hung in the belfry until 1862, when two new ones were given to the church by Admiral Robert Mitford, of Mitford. Chinese bells are frequently even greater in height than width. On the other hand a much flatter form, approaching the gong in outline, is very common in hand-bells, and has been used for those of larger proportions. In practise it is found that if the bell be too flat the vibrations expel the air from within with an almost explosive force, and the sound is loud and harsh. BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 29 If, however, the opposite error be committed, and the height be too great in proportion to the diameter, the air reverberates too much within the bell itself, and the sound does not travel satisfactorily. Some of the famous bells of Russia depart a good deal from the laws of proportion which are commonly observed in England. The well-known " Great Bell of Moscow " is practically as high as it is broad, measuring twenty feet in height, and only a quarter of a foot more in diameter ; and a second monster bell in the same city stands twenty-one feet high and is eighteen in diameter. One of the most celebrated of European bells is the one at Erfurt, which is eight and a half feet in diameter, but ten and a quarter in height. All these will be referred to again more particularly when we come to speak of noted bells. A curious variation from the usually accepted form of the bell once existed in the church of S. Andrea, Mantua. Guido Ganzaga, who was abbot there in 1431, and became provost of the Cathedral in 1444, used the metal of an ancient bell, presented to the church in the year 1000, to make a newer and larger one. The peculiarity in the construction of this was that the design was a skeleton bell, eight long openings, like lancet windows, being left in its sides. It was adorned with much moulding in bands above and below the windows ; and a number of full length figures and medallions enriched the spaces between them, the subjects selected including persons rather incongruously associated, such as Atlas, Hercules, Pallas, and Adam. On being rung the bell unfortunately cracked ; and having been taken down from the tower, it was preserved in the church or its precincts until 1812, when after some repairs it was swung up into its old place once more, and rung in honour 3 o A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. of Napoleon's birthday. The tone did not, however, prove satisfactory, and the bell was again taken down, and a few years later was sold and broken up. Another bell with windows, and dated 1593, is in the chapel of Our Lady " del Canossa " at Mantua. In deciding the just proportions for a large bell, it is usual to take the thickness of the metal at the sound bow, that is the part where the clapper strikes, as the unit. This is sometimes called the brim, and the measurements are reckoned in brims. The commonly accepted proportions are as follows : the diameter of the bell at the mouth should be from thirteen to fifteen of these units ; the height, measured externally from the lip to the shoulder, twelve ; and the diameter at the shoulder rather more than half that at the mouth. In thickness also the different portions of a bell vary ; the sides at the top being two-thirds of the unit, or thickness at the bottom. These dimensions, from which bells of different sizes and from different foundries vary in small details, have been arrived at, not so much by scientific theorizing, as by long experience. Curious shapes are sometimes seen in single bells that have been more or less roughly cast. In Scotland, for example, we find at Fettercairn, a bell cast by Dickson, of Montrose, in 1821, the crown of which is hemispherical; this, combined with its unusually short waist, reduces it almost to the shape of a basin. In the town steeple at Drumlithe is another with a projecting lip and no structural sound-bow ; it is quite a modern bell in its present form, having been recast in 1868. Mention ought, perhaps, also to be made of the modern invention known as the tubular bells. These are the TUBULAR BELLS. BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 31 work of Messrs. Harrington, Latham, and Company, of Coventry, and have been inserted in the belfries of several churches. Their tone is said to be sweet, though naturally not as powerful as that of an ordinary peal. But since these tubes, in spite of their name, are rather substitutes for bells, than actual bells in the accepted sense of the word, they call for no more than passing notice here. Let us in imagination follow the process adopted in the casting of a church bell. In this the first important work is the construction of the core, by which term is meant a hollow cone of brick constructed on a cast-iron plate as a foundation, and in diameter somewhat smaller than the interior of the bell. Over this is plastered a specially- prepared mixture of clay, intended to bring up the core to the exact size and shape of this interior. The old method of gaining this end was by the use of a wooden " crook ; " this was something like a huge pair of compasses standing open, and balanced on the top of a long stake running through the centre of the core, the two legs of the compasses being shaped to the exact curves of the inside and the outside of the bell respectively. The more workmanlike instrument now usually employed consists of a light iron frame, into which can be fixed metal templates, called the " sweep," cut to the precise form of each bell. The action in each case, however, is practically the same. While the clay on the core is still soft, the crook or sweep revolves upon its pivot in the middle of it, and by shaving and smoothing the clay, moulds it according to the model decided upon for the interior of the bell. This clay mould is then baked dry and hard by means of a fire lighted within the brick core. The old bell-founders then proceeded to build up upon this the 32 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. " thickness," by which name they called a second layer of clay of exactly the thickness, shape, and size of the proposed bell. The core was first dusted over with dry tan, to prevent the two layers of clay adhering ; and then this thickness was built up of a friable composition, which was shaped, just as the core had previously been, by the use of the second arm of the crook, into the correct figure of the outside of the bell. The thickness was then also dusted over with tan, and upon this was constructed the " cope," an outer casing of clay several inches thick. The whole having been thoroughly dried by means of fire, the cope was carefully raised by the help of a crane, and the thick- ness was all destroyed j the cope was then lowered into its former position, every care being taken to make it con- centric with the core ; and the mould was ready. When means had been taken to prevent either core or cope from being moved even a hair's breadth by the influx of the molten metal, preparations were made for filling the space between the two from the glowing furnace hard by. Much time and trouble are saved by the more modern plan of abolishing the " thickness " altogether, for which purpose a cast-iron cope-case is used. This is placed mouth upwards and lined with clay, which is shaped exactly to the external form and dimensions of the bell by means of the outside template of the sweep. When this has been thoroughly dried it is lowered over the core. Whichever method is used one or two details have to be attended to before the baking of the cope. The first and most important is the moulding of the "canons," or hooks, for fastening the bell to the wooden stock, which forms the axis on which it revolves in the belfry. A clapper BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 33 ring, or loop from which to suspend the clapper, has also to be moulded. In many modern bells, however, the canons are dispensed with, and the bell is bolted directly on to its stock, and the clapper ring is also made separately and bolted in. One great advantage of this plan is, that when the repeated blows of the clapper have worn the sound-bow at one spot, the bell can be turned round and bolted in a new position, and the clapper suitably adjusted, so that the blows may fall upon a fresh place. The perpetual beating of the clapper on one point of the sound-bow during many years, has been known to form a furrow in the metal which has eventually resulted in cracking the bell. The clapper, which is technically divided into the "ball " or hammer, and the " flight," or shaft, is fastened into the crown of the bell by an iron staple; anciently, however, thongs of white leather, made from horse-hide, were used. These were known as bawdrills or bawtries, and since the frequent swinging of the clapper comparatively soon wore them through, the purchase of new ones is an item not seldom found in churchwardens' accounts. The following entries occur in the accounts of S. Michael's Church, Spurriergate, York : s. d. " 1520. Item paid for a Baldrege to the second bell vj 1540. Item paid ffore helpyng of ij bawtrys off the bells ..... vij ." These thongs are also mentioned, under the name of "baudricks," in the accounts of the churchwardens of Newbury, Berkshire. Most ancient bells bore some motto, and many some 3 34 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. sacred emblem or device, to which modern makers add the date, and the trade mark or name of the firm. There must, therefore, be impressed upon the cope any such lettering or device. When all these details have been arranged, and the cope has been placed over the core with the greatest precision possible, to prevent one side of the bell being thicker than the other, the actual casting is begun. To facilitate this the invariable plan at one time was to erect the core in a pit, below the level of the furnace mouth, from which channels were cut to convey the metal ; and this method is still common. Sometimes, however, where cope cases are employed, the course followed in ordinary castings is employed, the metal being brought to the mould (which in this case is not sunk) in a ladel by a travelling crane. In ancient days, while the art of bell-casting was still retained in the hands of ecclesiastics, the blessing of heaven was invoked at the very outset of the work. " The brethren of the monastery," so Southey tells us in "The Doctor," " stood round the furnace, ranged in processional order, sang the i5oth Psalm, and then, after certain prayers, blessed the molten metal, and called upon the Lord to infuse into it His grace, and overshadow it with His power, for the honour of the saint to whom the bell was to be dedicated, and whose name it was to bear." In putting the metal into the furnace a very ample quantity is always provided, and as tin is more quickly melted and more volatile than copper, it is not thrown in until the latter is in a molten state. For filling the mould of Great Paul, which weighs something under seventeen tons, twenty tons of metal were allowed. A certain amount BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 35 of waste must be reckoned upon, and moreover it is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate beforehand to a nicety the weight of a really large bell. In order to resist the pressure of such a flood of molten metal, it will be evident that the cope-case must be of great strength. The one made for the bell just referred to was capable of bearing a pressure of two hundred tons. When the casting takes place in a pit this strength is gained by filling up the pit with loam, so that the mould is embedded in solid earth. A pathetic story, connected with the casting of a bell, is told concerning the "Poor Sinner's Bell" at Breslau. Some five hundred years ago a founder was employed in constructing a bell to hang in the south tower of the church of S. Mary Magdalene in that town. The mould had been duly made and the metal was nearly ready for tapping, when the master was called away for a short time ; and, in leaving a boy in charge, gave him strict injunctions not to interfere with the furnace. Scarcely had he turned his back, however, when the lad, boy-like, began to finger the catch which kept the metal in, and presently to his horror the youngster saw the crimson stream of glowing metal come leaping from the furnace, and flowing in full tide to the pit where lay the mould. In terror at what he had done, he rushed from the foundry shouting wildly for his master ; and the latter on entering, seeing, as he thought, his labour all thrown away, and his work absolutely ruined, struck the lad a blow, which passion rendered so severe that he fell lifeless at his feet. In due time the metal cooled, the cope was drawn off, and the bell was lifted from the core ; when the amazed artificer beheld it smooth and perfect in finish, and found it, on testing, clear and sweet in tone. Overcome with remorse 36 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. for the fatal consequence of his momentary rage, the master gave himself up to the authorities, accusing himself of the murder of his servant. The law took its course, and its full penalty was exacted ; and the first man on whose behalf the bell rung out, calling the faithful to pray for his parting soul, was the skilful maker of the bell itself. S. Mary's bell was the name given to it at its dedication, but from that day forward even to our own times the Breslau folk have called it the bell of the " Poor Sinner." Formerly the furnace was heated entirely with wood fires, the form employed being that known as a reverberatory furnace, in which the flame and heat are made to pass over the metal, instead of being applied beneath. It is maintained by some that fires of this kind ensure greater purity in the metal than can be gained by the more modern use of coal. Slowly the monster mass flows from this furnace into the mould. In casting the great bell of Montreal Cathedral, at Messrs. Mears' Foundry in London, in 1847, tne mould w ^s twelve minutes in filling ; the tons of metal required for the casting of Great Paul of London were over eight hours in melting, but were not as many minutes in running into the gigantic cope. Then follows a time of keen anxiety for the founder, especially if the work be one of unusual size and importance. In the case of the last-named bell six days were allowed to elapse before the metal was supposed to have set sufficiently solidly to allow of its being touched. At last, however, it is dug out from the pit, or the metal cope is raised from it, and the master is able to judge of the success of at least the outside of his work. But the bell has still to be hoisted up from the core, and when swung upon BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 37 a temporary frame, to undergo the ordeal of testing its tone. Next to the making of the bell itself, the size and weight of its clapper, or tongue, call for consideration! Too heavy a clapper will destroy the fineness of the tone, and perhaps even crack the bell ; while one that is too light fails to bring out the fulness and richness of the voice with which the bell should be endowed. Both bell and clapper having been duly cast, and the latter secured in its place within the former, preparations are made for putting its sound to the proof; and, if the bell is to form one of a ring, it must be tuned so as to accord with the others. It but seldom happens that a bell, and still less frequently a ring of bells, is cast exactly true in pitch. If such be the case, the ring has the high dis- tinction of being a "virgin peal." If the note struck out be too flat, a portion of the edge of the bell is cut away, thus reducing the diameter ; if it be too sharp, the thickness of the sound-bow is reduced. The former process is far more liable to damage a bell than the latter, and therefore in tuning a peal it is customary to take the bell which gives the flattest note as a basis, and to tune to that. The old method of reducing the thickness was exceedingly rough ; " the reduction is made," so says the article quoted above from the " Penny Magazine," " by chipping away the metal with a sharp-pointed hammer." A chisel of hard steel was an instrument the use of which was less dangerous to the bell, but both these are now superseded in good foundries by the employment of a specially-constructed machine, consisting of a kind of lathe. The bell is securely fastened to the face-plate, and the 38 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. requisite amount of metal can be cut away from any portion of the interior, without dangerous violence, and with the greatest accuracy. The tuning of bells is not, however, so simple a matter as the above paragraph might at first sight seem to imply. If a bell struck out one note simply, it would not be difficult to correct and alter it to the pitch required ; but such is not the case. A bell in perfect tune sounds a perfect chord. There is the note struck out directly by the clapper from the sound bow ; this booms out most prominently, and if the pitch of the bell be spoken of, it is this tone to which reference is made. But as the vibrations of the stroke set the whole mass of metal throbbing, the following notes are also sounded; at one eighth of the height of the bell from the brim a third above the fundamental note is given ; at three-quarters of the height, a fifth; and at the shoulder the chord is completed by the octave. Besides these there is also developed from them a "hum note," as it is called, consisting of the octave below the fundamental, An absolutely perfect bell would have all these five notes absolutely in tune with each other ; but probably no such bell exists. The tenor at Lavenham, already spoken of, which has been called " the matchless tenor," has the fundamental and the octave above in perfect tune. The fundamental has absorbed almost the exclusive interest of tuners in England in most cases ; but its prominence in peal and change-ringing, although it renders it the most important note, does not justify the ignoring of the others. The bell having been tested and tuned, nothing remains but to convey it to its destination, and to place it within the BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 39 belfry ; and this is often accompanied with no little rejoicing and some formality. The solemn reception and hanging of a new church bell is accompanied in Russia with a good deal of religious ceremony. The following account is given by an eye- witness : * " In the body of the church before the royal gates (answering to the western chancel screen), stood a low naloy (movable prayer-desk), on which were two candle- sticks with burning tapers, and a large pewter sort of tureen containing holy water, or rather water that was destined to be blessed. There was a good deal of going backwards and forwards among the readers and sextons, and evident preparation. At last the High Priest who, in by no means so handsome canonicals as I had expected on this occasion, issued from the royal gates, followed by three other priests and a deacon, and placing himself before the naloy, with his back to the greater part of the congregation, and his face towards the gates began a moleben, and blessed the water by plunging the cross in it three times, each time holding the same, on taking it out of the water, over another smaller vessel, which the deacon held, and allowing the drops to fall from the cross into it : with these drops the bell was afterwards sprinkled. The congregation now approached the naloy, and each, as he kissed the cross, which the High Priest held, was sprinkled by him with water from the first vessel. ... A procession was immediately afterwards formed, consisting of the clergy and readers, churchwardens and sextons, each with something * " Sketches of the Rites and Customs of the Greco-Russian Church," by II. C. Romanoff. Rivingstons, 1868. 40 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. in his hand. Two readers went before with the church banners ; two sextons followed with horrid, dull, wax- dropped lanterns containing tapers, as candles in the usual tall candlesticks would be liable to be blown out. . . . At the foot (of the church steps), with a quantity of linen wound round it to prevent its rubbing when it entered the belfry, lay the bell, a mystery of cordage and pulleys twisted about it ; and when I looked at the immense mass, I felt nervously doubtful as to whether the means prepared were strong enough to raise it. My companions experienced the same dread, and we moved to the left, lest the 10,950 Ibs. should fall on our heads. The High Priest read a few prayers on reaching the bell, not a word of which was audible, and then proceeded to sprinkle it in the manner I have described, walking round it as he did so. The choir, with the remaining priests, sang psalms and irmos, but the sound was completely drowned by the hum of voices and the shouts of the workmen to each other, as they arranged the cordage ; a dozen or so of men were in the belfry, and five hundred in the street below, ready to pull at the cords ; and when the service, which did not occupy more than five minutes, and which was by no means striking in any respect, was concluded, a great noise ensued, which ended in the signal to begin pulling being given, and in a few seconds the huge mass began to move. . . . When it began to ascend the shouts ceased, and the crowd made the sign of the cross devoutly, while the melodious singing of the choir, now agreeably audible, accompanied the bell on its rapid progress to its place of final destination." The bell here spoken of was one made for the church at Votkinsk by the bell-foundry at Slobodsky. BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 41 The ceremony observed in the west for the dedication and naming of a bell will be described in the next chapter, when the use of names for bells comes under consideration. Even those, to whom an elaborate ceremonial makes the least appeal, must admit that this solemn way of placing within the church so important an article of its furniture, is to be preferred to the scenes of revelry, sometimes degenerating even into debauchery, which at one time frequently marked the occasion in England. White, in his "Antiquities of Selborne," tells us how the new bells were inaugurated there in 1735. "The old bells, three in number, loud and out of tune," were recast into a ring of four, to which Sir Simon (or Simeon) Stuart, a Hampshire baronet, added a fifth, in memory of his daughter Mary. " The day of the arrival of the tuneable peal was observed," says the chronicler, "as an high festival by the village, and rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble bell should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with punch, of which all present were permitted to partake." This is by no means a solitary instance of such a usage, and it needs little imagination to judge how such a practice, however well intended by the jovial but irreverent donor, would usually end. A more pleasant picture of the reception of a new peal of bells in an English rural parish is supplied by a record preserved by a late vicar of Blyth, near Retford. In 1842 the belfry of the splendid old monastic church in this Nottinghamshire village had a new and melodious ring cast for it, in place of the somewhat tuneless bells which had long served the church's needs. The whole village turned out to meet them with every sign of welcome ; a brass band proceeded 42 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. the waggon, in which were the bells garlanded with flowers and evergreens ; and an ornamental arch was erected over the gateway leading into the churchyard. Before leaving the question of the making of church bells, it will be convenient to speak of the manner of hanging them, and of fitting them for their work. The bell, once safely landed in the bell-chamber of the tower, is securely fastened to its stock, a solid wooden block, in length about equal to the diameter of the bell. From the lower ends of the stock project metal " gudgeons, " or pivots, which, when the bell is raised into its place, fall into " brasses," or iron sockets in the massive wooden frame within which the whole ring of bells is suspended. Fastened to one end of the stock is a wooden wheel, in radius equal, more or less, to the diameter of the bell, the spokes of which are at one point doubled. At this point the rope is firmly secured, a deep groove in the rim of the wheel keeping it in its proper place. At the opposite end of the stock is the stay, a bar of stout, sound wood projecting upwards almost as far as the bell hangs below. When a bell is chimed, it is gently swung to and fro, so that the side strikes regularly against the clapper, which hangs almost motionless within it. When, however, the bell is rung, it is made to revolve upon its gudgeons until it lies mouth upwards ; in which position the stay, now at the bottom, catches against the slide, a wooden bar fastened below the bell at one side of the frame, thus preventing the bell from actually turning over. The next- pull of the rope, sends the whole mass spinning back again, until the stay strikes the slide again, the stopping of the bell on each side sending the clapper BELL FOUNDERS AND BELL FOUNDING. 43 on to the sound bow with a clang, while the position of the bell allows the full power of the sound to float away from the belfry through the louvres. The slide is so fixed as to turn on a pivot at one end, while the other moves a few inches forward and backward when struck by the stay ; in this way the bell performs something more than complete revolution at every stroke. The task of hauling such weighty matters as church bells up to their lofty situation is not, as may be supposed, without its anxiety to all concerned. A belfry story from Italy illustrates the danger involved in undertaking such a work incautiously. A volume published in 1691, called " Observations on a Journey to Naples," tells how a new bell was made for the Benedictine Monastery at Bemonia, and in due time was blessed and dedicated in the name of S. Proculus. The sexton, who also bore that saint's name, was unfortunately standing immediately beneath his sonorous namesake, as it was being slowly swung to its place. Suddenly, without warning, some part of the tackling gave way, and Proculus the bell fell to earth once more, cracking itself and killing Proculus the sexton. The brothers of the community showed a some- what disgraceful levity on the occasion, for the following epigram was passed from one to the other in the monastery : " Si procul a Proculo Proculi campana fuisset, Jam procul a Proculo Proculus ipse fuisset." To translate this literally so as to preserve the pun and the epigram is, of course, impossible ; the following will convey to those " not learned in the Latin tongue " some idea of the point : 44 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. v ' If from father Proculus Our father's bell had farther been, Now farther from our father's breast Were father Proculus, I ween." The sexton, probably some lay brother of the community, has no right, it must be admitted, to the honorary title of " father," but even if the exigencies of the translation of a pun count for nothing, we may surely pay a little extra posthumous respect to one whose tragic death was treated so flippantly. CHAPTER III. ate* anb QUme0 of S5eff0. IT is impossible to say which bell in Europe, or even in England, can claim the distinction of having been in use for the greatest number of years, the custom of marking upon them the date of their founding not having become general until about the fifteenth century. It is certain, however, that in many cases where the bell bears a com- paratively modern date, the metal of which it is composed represents one of much greater antiquity, many ancient bells having, for one reason or another, been recast in later times. A bell at Fontenville, near Bayeux, in France, was reputed to be the oldest dated bell in Europe. It bears the date 1202, and was in use until the year 1858, when it fell and was cracked. Thus it swung in its steeple for over six-and- a-half centuries. At Freiborg, in the Black Forest, is a veteran which, although a little younger than the French bell, can boast that it is still serviceable. It is dated 1258. The village of Claughton, in Lancashire, has the distinction of possessing the oldest dated bell known to exist in England. In a double bell-cot over the west end of the church hang two bells, one quite modern, and its fellow just over six hundred years old. On the shoulder of the latter is an inscription, forming a circle round it, which runs as follows: ANNO. DNI. M. CC. NONOG. AI that is, " In the year of the Lord 1296." Two peculiarities 46 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. will be noted in the expression of the date ; one is the curious fact that Roman numerals are mixed up with an abbreviation of the word nonaginta (ninety), and the other is the inversion of the v in the sign for six. The latter eccentricity is far from unique among the inscriptions on bells, as we may have further occasion to note hereafter. The Claughton bell measures slightly over sixteen inches in height, and twenty-one in diameter at the mouth, and sounds the note E flat. Only a little later in date is the tenor bell, there being three in all, at Cold Ashby, in Northamptonshire. It bears the inscription MARIA. VOCOR. ANO. DNI. M. CCC. XVII. preceding which is an initial cross, and following it the impressions of a seal, of a silver penny of the reign of King Edward I., and the maker's mark. The last consists of the figure of a bell with a fleur-de-lys on each side, an inscription surrounding it setting forth that it is the seal of William de Flint. Lincolnshire provides us with eleven fifteenth century bells, which have been described by a competent authority* as "the most interesting group yet recorded in England." They consist of the second and third bells at South Somer- cotes, the first and third at Somerby, by Brigg, the second at Toynton S. Peter, a bell at Hainton, two at Somersby, and others at Hammeringham, Beesby, and Gunby S. Peter. The " family likeness " which connects all these together is the use of finely designed Gothic lettering in the inscriptions, together with initial crosses and ornamental stops of * " English Bells and Bell Lore," by the late Thomas North, F.S.A., edited by the Rev. William Beresford. Leek, 1888. o U u p O o DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 47 exceptional beauty. The letters are elaborated, like the initials in an illuminated manuscript, by interweaving with them all manner of figures and foliage : thus the "I" contains the effigy of S. George in the act of piercing the dragon, " O " surrounds the head of a bishop vested in an antique mitre, and lions, trefoils, conventional foliage, and other devices adorn the other letters. The South Somercotes bells are the most complete of the series in their decoration ; the letters are all of this splendid type, the stops are large and graceful, the trade mark of the maker is scratched on each, and each bears a date, namely, 1423. The bells at Toynton S. Peter, at Hainton, and at Somersby have most of the same characteristics, but are undated. Those at Somerby were cast in 1431. They bear a double inscription ; the first setting forth that each was made at the order of Thomas Cumberworth, the second that the one bell is dedicated in honour of S. Mary, and the other of the Blessed Trinity. The stops of these inscriptions are smaller than those found at South Somercotes, and the inscriptions, perhaps in consequence of their length, are in smaller and simpler characters, the initial letters only being of the type above noticed. The bells at the remaining places, Hammer- ingham, Beesby, and Gunby S. Peter, are probably somewhat later in date. The smaller letters alone are here employed, fragments of the larger ones, which must have been broken up during the interval, appearing as stops between the words. The tenor bell at Westminster Abbey was originally cast in 1430; but, as is duly set forth upon it, it has been twice since then recast. Its legend runs, " Remember John Whitmell, Isabel his wife, and William Rus, who first gave this bell, 1430. New cast in July, 1599, and in April, 1738. 48 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Richard Phelps, T. Lester, fecit." It would go hardly with Masters Phelps and Lester were their bell-founding no better than their Latinity. Of the seven bells, including a small Sanctus bell, hanging in the steeple of S. John's, York, one at least is an early fifteenth century example. Its inscription is much worn, but the date 1408, in Roman numerals, is legible. Other bells in this belfry are apparently ancient, but their dates do not appear upon them. Three of them came from the church of S. Nicholas, without Walmgate Bar, which was destroyed by fire during the seige of the city by the Parliamentarian army under Lord Fairfax in 1644. That commander is said to have shown a solicitude, unusual among his comrades, for the preservation of public buildings in the places which he was called upon to attack ; a fact to which the citizens of York have to be thankful that the damage done by the cannonade and the soldiery was not greater. Other bells there are throughout the country, whose age, though not proclaimed upon their sides, can be approximately decided by circumstantial evidence. At Goring, Oxfordshire ; Berechurch, Essex ; Burham, Kent ; Great Bradley, Suffolk and Slapton, Northampton- shire, are bells cast by a maker named in the preceding chapter, Richard de Wimbish. This founder, whose name also appears as Wimbis and " VV ambis," is, with every show of reason, identified with a man of that name who cast bells for Holy Trinity Church, Aldgate, in 1312. At S. Mary, Bishophill Junior, York, is a small bell with an inscription in Lombardic characters, which is supposed to have been cast by some local founder between 1390 and 1410. In DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 49 the same church is another, the sixth, which is ascribed to John Hoton, who was a bell-founder of York in the end of the fifteenth century. From the similarity of the letters and stamps used, it has been suggested that bells at S. Nicholas' Cathedral, Newcastle, and at Heighington, in Durham, are from the same source. The bells of John of Stafford, and of John of York also, though undated, are ascribed by antiquaries to the latter half of the fourteenth century, or the early years of the fifteenth. The Reformation found the church in England rich in bells, as in every other requisite for divine worship. The inventories of church goods compiled during the reign of Edward VI., prove that three bells at the least were the rule even in small parish churches. Two are sometimes found, but scarcely anywhere was there one only. On the other hand, few parishes, except those of more than ordinary importance, had more than four bells. Many of these have disappeared from causes which will hereafter be considered, and many more have been recast in subsequent times. The bells of the monastic houses, which probably possessed larger and heavier peals in most instances than the simple parish churches, were, no doubt, in many cases, seized upon by the laymen, to whom the abbey lands were assigned ; in some instances, however, they were sold or given to a neighbouring church. The tenor bell at Ormskirk is alleged to have been the third bell of Burscough Priory ; tradition indeed has it that the whole peal was originally removed from the priory to that church, but that all except this tenor were afterwards again transferred to Croston. However that may be, all have been recast since then. The 4 50 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Ormskirk bell bears the inscription, " I. S. DE BURSCOUGH, ARMIG ET E UXOR ME FECERUNT IN HONOREM TRINITATIS. R.B. 1576." I. S. is probably for James Scarisbrick, and R.B. is intended to identify the founder. The same initials are found on a bell at Warburton, in Cheshire, the metal of which may possibly have come from the Praemonstratensian Priory of S. Werburgh there ; the inscription, which is only partly legible, runs, "R.B. . . . ANO DNI. MDLXXV." When we come down to the seventeenth century, examples of dated bells are not so rare, though even at that period they are not so common as to lack interest. Two bells, now used for secular purposes, and dating from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the following one, are noteworthy chiefly on account of their history. One hangs in the gateway tower of Lincoln's Inn. This was part of the plunder of the city of S. Sebastian, near Cadiz, which was stormed by the English under Essex in June, 1596. That date, which marks its capture, not its casting, is now seen upon the bell. The other bell, so tradition asserts, once hung in a Continental convent, but passed by purchase into the possession of Messrs. Dickens, at Tonge, in Lancashire, and was placed in their factory. It bears the legend, "MA. RO. MDCXIV. RA." The little bell, known as the priest's bell, at Newbury, Berkshire, was recast at a time when probably such an event was exceedingly rare in England, namely, in 1652. It would be interesting to know if any other church was able to provide itself with a new bell in those dark times of Puritan ascendancy. The good folk of Newbury, however, were enthusiastic in defence of their ancient parish church ; it was only six years before, in 1646, that they redeemed their DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 51 bells from the hands of the Parliamentary soldiery, together with the lead from the church roof, and the weathercock from the tower. Among eighteenth century bells, mention may be made of one in Westminster Abbey, cast by Rudhall in 1 743 ; of a peal of eight with a priest's bell at S. Mary's, Leigh, Lancashire, dated variously from 1740 to 1775 ; of ten out of the thirteen in Halifax parish church, which were cast in 1787, the remaining three dating only from 1814; but further it is needless to particularize, bells of that century being common enough in all parts of the kingdom. Some of our finest churches and cathedrals have quite modern peals ; the cathedral at Worcester, for instance, includes its bells among the details of its recent restoration, and the bells of S. Paul's were only dedicated on All Saints' Day, 1878. The sister kingdom of Scotland has suffered far more severely than England in the matter of bells. The Reformation in that country being a thorough religious revolution, resulted in a more widespread destruction of church property than even the Church in England suffered ; and consequently really ancient bells are rare. In the county of Kincardine, for instance the only Scottish county whose bells have yet been systematically catalogued there are but seventy-five public bells, sacred and secular, known; and of these one only is in any sense ancient. The contrast between the condition of things north and south of the Border, is, perhaps, even more strikingly illustrated by the absolute absence of rings of bells through- out that entire county. S. James' Episcopal Church, at Stonehaven, and the Town Steeple there, have each two 52 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. bells ; while at S. Cyrus there are, besides one bell in use, two clock bells that are not used at all. The other bells of the county are all found separately. The one representative of mediaeval workmanship among the Kincardineshire bells is not earlier in date than the end of the fifteenth, or the commencement of the sixteenth century. It is now preserved at the Sessions House, at Strachan, but formerly hung in a small belfry at the west end of S. Mary's Church. It has no inscription. Turning to other parts of the country, mention should be made of the " Minister's bell " at S. Giles', Elgin, the work of Thomas of Dunbar in 1402. The cathedral at Kirkwall had several ancient bells ; one, the first, still exists, the others, which dated originally from 1528, have been recast. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, however, Scotland began to some small extent to arouse herself from that absolute deadness to all ecclesiastical art into which the Reformation had thrown her. Bells were again imported from the Low Countries, and a few native artificers are heard of. Robert Hog, of Stirling, cast bells for Glencairn in 1611, and foundries were at work soon after at Edinburgh and Aberdeen. A carillon of twenty-three bells was hung at S. Giles', Edinburgh, in 1698. Within quite recent years many fine rings of bells have been cast, chiefly by English foundries, for Scottish churches, especially for the Episcopal Church of Scotland. S. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, has a peal of ten bells, and octaves are by no means rare in large and important churches. It has already been remarked that mediaeval bells were DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 53 seldom impressed with the dates of their casting, or with the names of their makers. Yet the names of the bells themselves were usually inscribed upon them ; in these names they were dedicated, and by them they were commonly called. In the accounts of the churchwardens for the parish of North Walsham, for the year 1583, a charge is entered for " new casting the Gabrell," that is, S. Gabriel's bell. The Cathedral Rolls at Norwich, under the date 1403, speak of new clappers provided for "Lakenham " and for " Stokton." A somewhat later phrase in notices of bells is illustrated by the name of the Bell Harry Tower, at Canterbury, so called from a bell which swung within it. A similar expression occurs in the churchwardens' accounts at S. Margaret's, Lynn, for 1673, where "Bell Margaret" and " Bell Thomas " are referred to. The earliest ring of bells, of which we know anything, in England, was hung in Crowland Abbey, and each of the seven composing it had its name. Pega, Bega, Tatwin, Turketyl, Betelin, Bartholomew, and Guthlac, their several titles, were chosen for various local reasons ; thus, S. Guthlac was the hermit whose residence within the isle of Crowland had first sanctified the spot ; S. Bartholomew was a saint for whom S. Guthlac ever evinced a special devotion, and it was on his festival that the hermit first entered upon the isle ; S. Pega was the sister of S. Guthlac, and lived a life of prayer and self-discipline in Northamptonshire ; and Tatwin was the guide who brought the saint through the fens to the spot which he chose for his hermitage ; while Turketyl was Abbot of Crowland about 930, and, as remarked in a former chapter, cast some of the earlier bells there. The dedication in the names of S. Bega, or S. Bees, and Betelin is not so 54 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. readily explained. A fire at the abbey, then only a wooden structure, destroyed these bells in the year 1091. The above instance illustrates the usual principle on which the names of bells were selected. The tenor bell, the heaviest of the peal, bore the name of the patron saint .of the church, or the religious foundation ; the dedications of chapels within the building, or of gilds connected with it, suggested the titles for the others. Some benefactor of the church is sometimes also commemorated in this way, as in the case of Abbot Turketyl quoted above, and in that of Bishop Grandison, of Exeter (1327-1369), the ancient bells of that cathedral being named respectively Walter, Bockerel, Chauncel, Germacyn, Jesus, Mary, Peter, Trinity, and Grandison. The cathedral is dedicated in honour of S. Peter. At Oseney was a peal of bells, in the thirteenth century, whose names in two cases were apparently meant to be merely descriptive of their tones ; they were called Haute- clare, Doucement, Austyn, Marie, Gabriel, and John. Two names which frequently occur are those of the Blessed Virgin and S. Gabriel the Archangel. The first will strike everyone as being quite natural ; it would be strange if, in selecting a number of saints' names to confer upon a similar number of bells, the first of saints was forgotten. With equal appropriateness the name of the Angel of the Annunciation was generally given to the bell which was rung at the Angelus. Occasionally bells, like some churches, had a double dedication ; an inscription on the fourth bell at Killingholm, in Lincolnshire, proclaims it " the bell of the Holy Trinity and of All Saints." Five bells at Pisa, dated 1664, named from mysteries of the faith instead of after persons, are called L'Assompta, DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 55 De Crucefisso, La Giustizia, La Pasquarreccia, and Del Pozzo. With taste which is more than questionable, but is none the less characteristic of its age, the eight bells at Ashover, in Derbyshire, cast in 1714, bear the names of the Queen and of the leading military triumphs and heroes of her reign ; they are Blenheim, Barcelona, Ramilies, Menin, Turin, Eugene, Marlborough, and Queen Anne. Equally secular, but under the circumstances more reasonable, is the name of the large bell of S. Nicholas' Cathedral, Newcastle, which was given in 1833 by Major Anderson, and from that fact is popularly known as the " Major." A ring of bells sometimes received one common name, possibly in addition to the special title of each member of it. The well-known story of King Henry VIII. wagering a peal of bells against ;ioo at a game of dice with Sir Miles Partridge, is told by Stow in connection with four bells, which bore the name of "Jesus' bells," and which hung in a cloister in the ward of Farrington Without. The same name was given to a ring of bells at old S. Paul's, from the fact that it was used especially in connection with the services in the Jesus' Chapel; Lincoln had its "Lady Bells," which hung in Our Lady's Tower. In these instances, and in several others which might be quoted, the churches in question possessed two rings of bells, which were dis- tinguished by the use of these general names. Most of these names are entirely forgotten in England now, or have, at any rate, dropped out of use. In some few cases a name is still employed, usually in a somewhat familiar way ; which probably is not so much a sign of irreverence, as of the traditional affection of the citizens for the bell whose tones have been familiar to them daily from 56 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. the time of their earliest recollections. Thus we have still "Great Tom" of Lincoln, and in the same city, "Old Kate," of St. Mark's Church ; " Mighty Tom " of Oxford, and " Black Tom of Sothill," at Dewsbury. Similarly the tenor at S. Nicholas, Aberdeen, was familiarly called " Old Lawrie," from its dedication in the name of S. Lawrence. The remembrance of this is still kept alive by a bell at Cults, in Kincardineshire, which was cast by Blaikie & Sons, Aberdeen, from a piece of the old bell, in 1883; it is inscribed, " I am a chip of Old Lawrie." One of the most famous of Continental bells is Carolus, at Antwerp Cathedral, called after its donor, Charles V. ; the good folk of that city hold the bell in such estimation that it is only sounded two or three times a year. The ancient alarm bell, or tocsin, of Antwerp, cast so long ago as 1316, bears the suggestive name of Horrida. In the fifteenth century the great bell of Paris was named Jacqueline, and that at Rouen, in the sixteenth, was Amboise, or more properly George d'Amboise, so called after its maker, who died of joy, tradition says, on first hearing its tone. The famous Russian bells are distinguished by titles suggestive of their size ; the broken monster at Moscow being called the Tsar Kolokol, or King of Bells, and its almost equally gigantic neighbour, Bolshoi, or the Big. The name of a bell was generally impressed upon it formerly. Sometimes the name only, or the name coupled with some title of the saint referred to, occurs ; as in three bells dedicated to the Blessed Virgin at Brattleby, Lincoln- shire, and at Farrington Gurney, and Holcombe, Somerset- shire, which are inscribed respectively, "Maria," "Virgo Maria" and "Stella Maria Maris." A somewhat fuller DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 57 form is a brief declaration, such as that on a bell at South Somercotes, Lincolnshire, "Vocor Maria;" or one at Northborough, Northamptonshire, u lsta Campana Facta est in Honore Sta. Andree." Of this kind was the legend on Mighty Tom of Oxford, before its recasting in 1612 : " IN THOMAE LAUDE RESONO BIM BOM SINE FRAUDE," which one may perhaps venture to translate "For Thomas' sake, I cry Birn Bom, and no mistake." A very similar inscription, though hardly so quaint, is on a bell of the same dedication at Marston S. Lawrence, Northamptonshire : "PRO THOME LAUDE RESONABO MODO SINE FRAUDE." At Market Stainton, Lincolnshire, is a bell dedicated in the name of S. Mary, which simply has the initial M repeated seven times. The tenor bell at Fawsley, Northampton- shire, named after S. John Baptist, has the apt quotation : "JOHANNES EST NOMEN Ejus." Brief forms of invocation are also frequently found. On bells dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, the " Ave Maria," or some part of it, is common. At Willington, in Bedford- shire, is a bell called after S. Christopher, with the inscription : "O MARTIR XROFORE PRO NOBIS SEMPER ORATE." Many other instances might be given of the use of the formula, "ora pro nobis," or its equivalent. 58 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. The treatment of the names of bells would be incomplete were there no mention of the ceremony by which from very ancient times the name of each has been conferred upon it, and which has for that reason often been styled the baptism of the bell. As under the Jewish ritual everything dedicated to the service of God was solemnly set aside for its holy purpose, so in the Christian church, from the earliest ages, every piece of church furniture was specially blessed before being used. That such was the case with bells is evident from the fact that forms for the benediction of them are to be seen in the Gregorian Sacramentary (about 590). One of the Capitulars of Charlemagne, issued in 789, declares that " bells are not to be baptized ; " but this has been supposed to refer either to bells other than those of the church, which were perhaps blessed with a view to making superstitious use of them ; or to some details in the ceremonial as then employed, which seemed to resemble an actual baptism rather than a solemn benediction. In 961, we find a record of the consecration of the great bell of the Lateran Church at Rome by Pope John XIII., and the conferring on it of the name John. This is said to have been at that time the largest bell cast in Christendom. Southey mentions the blessing in his own time of a peal of bells in France, by the Bishop of Chalons, and speaks of the sermon preached by that prelate on the occasion. Chauncy, writing in 1700 of the parish church of Baldock, mentions the fact that its six bells (there are now eight) had been duly blessed with the full pre-Reformation ceremony, which he goes on to describe, as follows : DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 59 "The bell itself was placed at the lower end of the church hanging upon two gudgeons covered with rich velvet of a violet colour. . . . The pillars and walls of the church were curiously adorned with sheets of silk and pictures ; an altar was erected near the bell very neatly set forth ; a white satin robe was laid upon it, in order to cover the bell so soon as it was baptized ; and a great fair garland of choice flowers stood by it to be placed on it. There was also a Roman ritual, a censer, and a vessel of holy water. . . ." The bishop " sang the first psalm, which was continued by the music, and when all the psalms were ended, he blessed the holy water, that it might afterwards sanctify the bell. This benediction was very long, but when it was finished the bishop and priests dipped sponges in it, with which they rubbed the bell within and without, from the crown to the skirts thereof, repeating in the meanwhile divers prayers full of heavenly blessings, to purify, sanctify, and consecrate the bell . . . The bell being thus washed, they dried it with clean napkins, and the bishop taking the vial of holy oil, he anointed the cross of metal fixed on the crown of the bell, in order to make the devil flee at the sound of it ... Then he made seven other crosses with the oil on the out- side, and four more on the inside of the bell." The next portion of the ceremony is one over which writers on bells have more than once endeavoured to make merry, namely, the questioning of the " sponsers " for the bell ; but it is obvious that those who thus ridicule the custom have not informed themselves of the nature of the interrogatories, which our author shows to be of an exceed- ingly practical kind. He continues as follows: "he (the 60 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. bishop) then proceeded and asked whether the founder was paid and satisfied for the metal and workmanship of the bell ? They answered, Yes. Then he demanded whether they believed all that the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church believes concerning the holiness and virtues of bells. The answer was, Yes. Lastly, he demanded of them what name they desired should be put upon the bell." Were the ceremony of dedicating a bell intended actually to copy the sacrament of Holy Baptism, it is at this point that the parallel would be most obvious, but the details as set forth in the account which we are following are far otherwise. The name having been communicated to the bishop, we are told, " then the bishop took two great silk ribbons, which had been fastened to the gudgeons, and gave each of them one in their hands, and pronounced, with a loud intelligible voice, the words of consecration . . ' Let this sign be consecrated and sanctified in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen ! ' Then turning himself to the people he said) 'The name of this bell is Mary.' After that he took the censer and censed it round about on the outside, then put the censer under the bell, full of sacred fumes, repeating all the time prayers and invocations." During the ceremony many psalms were sung, and finally a Gospel was read, the passage appointed being the story of SS. Mary and Martha of Bethany (S. Luke x. 38), wherein we are reminded that the voice of Christ calls us at times to forsake earthly cares in order to sit at His feet and learn of higher things. Such is the ceremony observed two hundred years ago, and in its leading features still used in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a solemn and stately act of benediction, DATES AND NAMES OF BELLS. 61 which could hardly fail to impress anyone who realized the intimate part which the bells must hereafter take in the joys and sorrows, the work and worship, the life and death, of those who hear them. Of course there are many to whom the details of the rite, the use of consecrated oil and water and incense, is offensive ; but even these must admit that there is no such attempt here to parody the sacrament of regeneration as is used, generally without protest, in the naming of a new-built ship. A simpler ceremonial obtains in the English Church, and one which probably varies considerably in different dioceses. The following brief account of the dedication of the new bells of S. Paul's Cathedral in November, 1878, will sufficiently indicate its general character. At the conclusion of Evensong a procession was formed, consisting of the choir, the cathedral clergy, and the bishop, which made its way by means of the Geometrical Staircase into the ringing chamber. Here several psalms were sung, commencing with Deprolundis and concluding with Laudate Dominum (Ps. cl.), after which followed a number of versicles and responses. The bishop then said several special collects ; the first prayed that the bells might be " blessed to the spiritual well-being " of the people ; the next, recalling the silver trumpets made by divine command for summoning the assemblies of the Israelites, asked that those who heard the bells might "joyfully obey the call to meet together in God's Holy Church ; " other collects were supplications on behalf of those who might hear, but through sickness or other cause be unable to obey, this call, and for the ringers that they might be " filled with reverence and godly fear." After the singing of an appro- 62 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. priate hymn, the collect for S. Paul's Day was said, and the blessing given by the bishop, who, after a short pause, gave the word to the ringers to sound the bells. The ringing of a short peal completed the simple, but impressive ceremony. CHAPTER IV. ecotafton of (geffe. SEVERAL allusions have already been made incidentally to the marks and inscriptions found decorating the exterior of most bells ; the subject is, however, of sufficient interest to call for a chapter to itself. In decoration, properly so called, ancient bells were as a rule much richer than modern ones, at any rate in England. It is no uncommon thing to find bands of gracefully designed moulding running round the shoulder, waist, or sound-bow of a bell. Sometimes they consist of conventional foliage or rows of fleur-de-lys ; grotesques, or figures borrowed from classical mythology, meet us in other cases ; while yet others have simple scrolls. In many instances the founder had his favourite and characteristic form of moulding, by which his bells could be identified. At Kinneff, in Kincardineshire, is a bell by Peter Ostens, of Rotterdam, dated 1679 ; it has a moulded band above and below the inscription, the first being a series of Cupids or cherubs with bells, seated amid the convolutions of a scroll, and the second a band of ivy, or other leaves of a similar character. A bell by the same maker was cast in 1664, for Banchory Ternan, in the same county ; in this case the lower moulding is again seen, but the upper one is simpler and narrower, consisting only of foliage. These two again are met with on a bell at Skene, in Aberdeenshire ; but in this case they are divided by a 64 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. narrow plain moulding only, the inscription being above them both, and a line of fleur-de-lys forming a new upper band. Oldfield, who was casting bells in the seventeenth century, used a simple but elegant border of foliage ; and Purdue, of Bristol, employed one that was somewhat similar, but fuller, suggesting a conventional vine with bunches of grapes. One of the most curious forms of ornament found on bells is on the fourth bell at S. Mary's, Oxford. This was cast by Newcombe, of Leicester, in 1612, and has two lines of music around it, the ancient square-headed notes being used. At the commencement of the melody are the words, " Keepe tyme in anye case," and at its end, " Then let us singe it againe." Closely related to these ornamental borders is the use of characteristic initial crosses and stops. As a rule each inscription on a bell begins with the sacred sign, and some kind of ornament is inserted after every word. Some of these crosses are very beautiful. Thomas Newcombe, who was named above, used an elaborate cross, entwined with foliage. The earlier and more splendid members of that family of eleven remarkable Lincolnshire bells, to which reference was made in the last chapter, bear a very fine initial cross ; on the later ones we find a smaller and simpler example. John of York used a cross that is noteworthy for its dignity, rather than its elaboration. The curious cross known as the fylfot is found on a good many bells, as, for instance, within the initial G of the word " Gloria," on a bell at Bonsall, in Derbyshire, and in connection with the initials of R. Heathcote, a bell-founder. The ornamental stops are full of variety. These some- BELLFOUNDERS MARKS. THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 65 times take the form of small crosses, sometimes of fleur-de-lys ; and not seldom small sections of the ornamental band are used. On the Kinneff bell, above spoken of, a couchant ox and several heraldic roses are employed as stops. These last are characteristic marks of the Dutch maker of that bell, and are found on others of his works in Scotland. Floral designs are of frequent occurrence, as on the bells of John of York. It has been already remarked that the names of the makers are not often to be seen upon ancient bells ; in many cases, however, the stamp, or trade mark, of the founder was placed upon them. This often consists of a shield or a circle, charged with some device and the owner's initials. Heathcote's mark, a shield with straight sides bearing the letters R.H. above a fylfot, has already been referred to. The same initials are also found, as at Baslow, in Derbyshire, surmounted by a royal crown. John Draper, who cast bells at Thetford, Norfolk, from 1601 to 1646, used a die in shape like an inverted shield, on which was a bell between the letters J.D. Ellis Knight, of Reading, used a hand holding a halbert between three bells, and the initials E.K. Occasionally the full name of the founder appears in his mark. A copy of the seal of Sandre, of Gloucester, was found in the Thames ; it is a vesica with the name round the edge, and in the centre a small bell, and a vessel something like a modern coffee-pot. The first bell at Cold Ashby, one of the oldest dated bells in England, as we have seen, has a circular stamp, in the middle of which is a bell between two fleur-de-lys, while around it runs the name of William of Flint. Robert Merston also put his full name on his stamp, around the figure of an 5 66 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. embattled castle surmounted by a crescent ; an emblem which suggests Crusading associations. The stamp of William Founder, as seen on the seventh bell of Magdalen College, Oxford, and elsewhere, is a circle within which his name circumscribes the figures of a couple of birds perched upon a branch. Thomas Bartlet, whose mark is on the first bell of S. Nicholas, Rochester, used three bells surmounted by a crown, his name surrounding the whole. Sometimes, on the contrary, neither name nor initials appear. Thus William and Robert Corr used merely a shield charged with a chevron between three bells. Others marked their work with quaintly conceived monograms, or merely scratched upon it a simple private mark. In not a few instances the owners of the initials found on bell-marks are not now known. Other ornamental stamps are also occasionally found on bells. The effigy, as well as the name, of the saint, after whom the bell is called, is sometimes placed upon it. This is more frequently the case with examples in use abroad, than with those now existing in England, yet we are not without instances of the custom. On the second bell of S. Andrew's Church, Welham, Leicestershire, is a boldly conceived figure of the patron saint bound upon a cross of the type traditionally assigned to him. At Stanion, North- amptonshire, Thurcaston, Leicestershire, and elsewhere the effigies of the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Child are found; and at Bapchild, Kent, the bells bear the figures of our Blessed Lord and S. John Baptist. Angels are seen in several instances, probably on bells originally intended for ringing the Angelus, though dedications to Archangels other than S. Gabriel are not uncommon ; there is a S. Michael's THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 67 bell at Cossington, Leicestershire, and another at Tadding- ton, Derbyshire, and a S. Raphael's bell at Wymington, Bedfordshire. The apocalyptic symbols for the four Evangelists appear on a bell at Impington, Cambridgeshire. The stop in the inscription of a bell at Shipton, Hampshire, which is dedicated in the name of S. John, consists of a full-faced bust, intended probably for that of our Lord, round which are the three traditional names of the Magi, Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior. On the waist of the sixth bell at S. Martin's, Salisbury (dated 1628), is the figure of a bishop, mitred, holding in the left hand his crozier, while the right is raised in the act of blessing. This is probably intended for the patron saint of the church. In S. Magnus Cathedral, Orkney, are three bells, each of which has on a medallion a figure bearing a sword, with beneath it the name " Sanctus Magnus." Another order of marks found on old bells consists of Royal Heads. These are assigned to a few royal personages only, all of whom lived between the end of the thirteenth century, and the early years of the fifteenth. The following are supposed to be represented in various instances, Edward I. and his consort Queen Eleanor, Edward III. and his Queen Philippa, Henry VI., Margaret of Anjou, and their unfortunate son, Prince Edward. Loyal emblems are more frequently seen on bells. In many cases in all parts of the country are the royal arms, as used in England from the time of Henry IV. to that of Elizabeth, or more strictly from about 1405 to 1603. This was quarterly modern France (three fleur-de-lys) and England (three lions passant gardant). The shield is sometimes, but not always, crowned. The four bells of S. Botolph's, Cambridge, have 68 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. this stamp. The tenor bell at Ormskirk has, as stops, the royal badges of the rose, the portcullis, and the fleur-de-lys, alternately. North Newton, Wiltshire, has a bell dated 1606, and Steeple Ashton, in the same county, one of 1607, each of which has the rose and crown, and the initials J. R. (Jacobus Rex). The shields of the donors of bells, of the corporate body in whose church they hang, or of the great landed proprietor on whose estate the church is situated, are also sometimes employed as decorations. At Headington, Oxfordshire, the fourth bell (dated 1624) bears the name and arms of Thomas Whorwood, Esq., lord of the manor, by whom probably it was given. The tenor bell at Heytesbury, Wiltshire, has two shields, that of the family of Knollys, and that (probably) of Powells. The bells at Orkney Cathedral, in addition to the figure of the patron saint, have the arms of Bishop Maxwell, who ruled that ancient See from 1525 to 1541. An inscrip- tion informs us that they were " made by Master Robbert Maxvell, Bis-chop of Orkney, the yeer of God MDXXVIII, the year of the reign of King James the V." A bell at S. Ternan's, Arbuthnott, Kincardineshire, has the arms ,of the Arbuthnott family. The present bell was recast in 1890, but the decoration and inscriptions of an ancient predecessor were reproduced upon it. " Great Paul " of London, has the arms of the chapter of S. Paul's Cathedral. Probably the most popularly interesting form of bell- decoration is supplied by the inscriptions, the number and variety of which are almost endless. The earliest of these were declarations of the name in which the bell was dedicated, and what a wealth of ingenuity is displayed in varying this is well illustrated by a single set of such THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 69 inscriptions, collected in a recent book on the subject* In a list there given of inscriptions on bells named in honour of the Blessed Virgin, we have no less than seventy different forms, all found in England, though the catalogue makes no pretension to be exhaustive. Amongst the simplest is the seven-fold repetition of the initial M, on the first bell at Market Stainton, Lincolnshire, and cases, such as were quoted in the last chapter, where the name " Maria," or the brief invocation " Ave Maria," forms the whole of the legend, One of the longest formulae is at Conington, Cambridge- shire ; " Assumpta : est : Maria : in : Celvm : Gavdent : Angeli : Lavdantes : Benedicvnt : Dominum." A complete litany of the Virgin could be compiled from these old bells. She is hailed as "Virgo virginum " (Somerleyton, Norfolk) ; " Mater Dei " (Milton Clevedon, Somerset) ; " Celi Regina " (VVeasenham S. Peter, Norfolk) ; " Concipiens Christum Virgo" (Sedbergh, Yorkshire); "Virgo Pia" (Kempsey, Gloucester); "Stella Maria Maris" (Billesdon, Leicester); "Virgo Coronata" (Theddlethorpe S. Helen, Lincolnshire); and under yet other titles. Naturally such a profusion of titles is not found in the case of other saints. The usual form is either the simple name, as "Sancta Catherina " (Bristol Cathedral), and " Sc'e Michael" (Stowe, Lincoln- shire) ; or a mere declaratory phrase, as " Campana Sancti Johannis Baptiste" (Priddy, Somerset), and "Hujus campanae nomen est Jesu speciale ." (Swyncombe, near Henley) ; or again, that briefest of invocations involved in a vocative only, as " O Sancta Ihoannes " (Downton, Wilt- shire), and " O Sancta Andrea" (Colne, Wiltshire); or, finally * North's "English Bells and Bell Lore." edited by Rev. Win. Beresford, already referred to. 70 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. and most commonly, the "ora pro nobis." Connected with this invocation we meet the names of an immense number of saints ; as for instance, S. Anne (S. Edward's, Cambridge), S. Andrew, and S. Margaret (S. Botolph's, Cambridge), S. Gabriel (Upminster, Essex), S. Peter (Aveley, Essex), S. George (Sudeley Castle, Gloucester), S. Nicholas (Shipton, Hampshire), S. Lawrence, (Week, Hampshire), S. Oswald (Luddington, Lincolnshire), S. John (Aston Rowant, Oxfordshire), S. Dunstan (Bury, Sussex), S. Thomas (Norton Bavant, Wiltshire), S. Michael (Holt, Wiltshire), S. Osmund (Great Cheverell, Wiltshire), S. Luke (Wink- field, Wiltshire) ; and many more, for the catalogue might be almost indefinitely extended. Next to the Blessed Virgin, the favourite saints in England, in the dedication of bells, seem to have been S. Peter, S. Margaret, and S. Catherine. It may be interesting briefly to note the names of some other saints found in English bell inscriptions. Among worthies whose works are recorded in the New Testament, we have, in addition to those above given, Saints Matthew, Thaddeus, Paul, Clement, Cornelius, and the Holy Innocents. Of English saints, again excluding those already named, we find Saints Cuthbert, Edward, Edmund, Petroc, Richard, Wilfred, and Etheldreda. Others are Saints Agatha, Ambrose, Anthony, Appolonia, Barbara, Benedict, Christopher, Denis, Faith, Giles, Gregory, Helen, Leo, Nicholas, Vincent, Augustine, and All Saints. Many bells have inscriptions proving their dedication in the Holy Name. At several places in Devonshire are found the words " Est Michi Collatum, I.H.S. istud Nomen Amatum;" such are Sidmouth, Teignmouth, Churston THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 71 Ferrers, Clyst S. George, and Whetstone. At Leighton Bromswold, Huntingdonshire, and at Dunton and Froles- worth, in Leicestershire, is the prayer, "I.H.S. Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum Fili Dei Miserere Mei." Frequently the superscription of the Cross is alone used, as on the Bishop's Bell of Salisbury Cathedral, where it stands in full, " Jesus Nazarenus Rex ludeorum." Invocations of the Holy Spirit are not so common, but there are not wanting instances. " Great Tom," of Lincoln, recast in 1835, has an inscription beginning " Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio Procedens Suaviter Sonans ad Salutem." Dedicatory inscriptions to the Holy Trinity are found in many places. The fifth bell of a former peal at Bakewell, Derbyshire, was inscribed, " Trinitate sacra fiat haec campana beata ; " and the same occurs on the tenth at Christ Church, Oxford (dated 1589). At Ogbourne S. George, Wiltshire, is a bell with the legend, " Trinitatem adoremus." The inscriptions which take the form of invocations are sometimes petitions of a more definite character than any given above. The safety of the bell itself is occasionally a matter of solicitude. *' Augustine tuam Campanam protege sanam," is the prayer of the fifth bell at Trent, Somerset- shire; "Serva Campanam Sancta Maria Sanam," that of one at Dyrham, Gloucestershire ; while the second at Winthorpe, Lincolnshire, has " Antonius Monet vt Campana Bene Sonet," which, though scarcely a prayer, may fairly be classed with the former ones. To the same effect, but in more general terms, is the petition of the two bells at Oxford and at Bakewell, quoted in the last paragraph. Supplication is sometimes offered through the inscriptions for the donors of the bells. A rather full form of this meets 72 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. us at Albourne, Wiltshire, the eighth bell bearing the words, " Intonat : de : celis : vox : campana : Michaelis : Deus : propicius : esto ; a'i'abus (animabus) : Ricardi : Godard : quondam : de : Upham: Elizabeth : et : Elizabeth : uxorum : eius : ac : a'i'abus : o'i'm (omnorum) : liberorum : et : parentum : suorum : qui : hanc : campanam : fieri : fecerunt : anno : Dni : MCCCCCXVI." At Bolton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, are two bells inscribed, the first, " Sc'e loh'is ora pro a'i'abus loh'is Pudsey Militis et Marie consorte sue" (Sancte Johannis ora pro animabus Johannis Pudsey militis, et Mariae, consortae suae) ; and the second, " S'ce Paule ora pro a'i'abus Henrici Pudsey et Margarete consorte sue." Again the bells sometimes pray for those who hear their voices, as at Griitleton, Wiltshire, where the fifth bell is inscribed, " Protege pura via quos convoco virgo Maria." The inscriptions on old bells are usually in Latin. One or two in Dutch have already been quoted ; and one with a legend in Norman French hangs in Bitterley Church, Shropshire ; it offers a prayer for the soul of Alice Turye. A few only of our ancient examples have English words. Two with inscriptions of the kind that we have been con- sidering are at Alderford, Norfolk, and Gunby S. Nicholas, Lincolnshire, respectively. The former bears the words, " I am mad in name of Sen Ion Baptist " ; and the latter, kl In ye nam of ye Trynyte Nicholas Bel men cal me." Towards the end of the sixteenth century English inscrip- tions become more common, though Latin is by no means abandoned, and their sentiments are of a more general character, and take the form of admonitions rather than of prayers. We find a bell at Winterbourne Dantsey, in Wiltshire, THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 73 inscribed "God be our guyd. I. W. 1583." The initials probably stand for John Wallis, a founder at Salisbury. The same words occur also in connection with the date 1600, and the initials R. B. (perhaps Richard Bowler), at Shipton, Hampshire. Other examples that may be quoted are " Praise God. 1595," at Fotheringhay, Northamptonshire; "Geve God the glory," found, with the date 1600, at Kimpton, Hampshire, and, with the date 1606, at S. John's, Winchester; u Praysed be thy name O Lord, 1580," at S. Peter the Less, Chichester ; " Cum, cum and Prey Anno Domini 1599," at Bowden Magna, Leicestershire; and "Jhesus be our speed 1589," at Wakerley, Northamptonshire. Of Latin inscriptions of the time, Thornton Curtis, Lincoln- shire, gives us a good instance, " O Deus absque pare fac nos Tibi dulce Sonare, 1592." At this period names of makers and donors, and the dates of making, are of common occurrence ; and often the religious aspiration disappears entirely, to make way for a bald statement concerning the bell itself. The second bell at S. Benet's, Cambridge, has simply the figures "1588"; and scarcely less terse is the announcement on a bell at Benniworth, Lincolnshire, "Anno Domini 1577." S. Peter's bell, at Cambridge, tells us a little more in the sentence, " Ricardus Bowler me fecit, 1602"; which S. Sepulchre's, in the same town, matches with " Robard Gurney made me, 1663." An earlier instance is supplied by Findon, Sussex, where, however, at any rate, the sacred monogram reminds one that the bell is still a part of the furniture of the church; its first bell has the words, "I Col Belfunder mad me, 1576, I. H. S." The commemoration of benefactors on the bells of this 74 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. and subsequent centuries is often very curious. The reverend and humble spirit in which the faithful of old time gave their offerings to God's Church is well illustrated by an old bell at Botolphs, Sussex, whose legend runs, " Of your charitie prai for the soulles of John Slutter, John Hunt, and William Slutter." An inoffensive formula is the one which merely records without comment the donor's name. At Dalby-on-the- Wolds, Leicestershire, is a case in point, where the inscription on the third bell reads " Andrew Nouel, Esquier Ano. D. 1584." A bell, about contemporaneous with the last named, and hanging in the chapel of Sudeley Castle, has, in addition to an invocation of S. George, the statement, " The Ladie Doratie Chandos, Widdowe, made this." At Stapleton, and at Westerleigh, are bells inscribed respectively, "The gift of John Bubb. A. Rudhall, 1694," and "The gift of John Astry, Esq., 1702." Several bells are not, however, content to honour their donors in this modest fashion, but enter into vulgar details concerning the exact amount of the monetary offering made. In Hampshire, are two instances of this. At Bentley the first bell announces that "John Eyer gave twenty pound To meek mee a losty sound. 1703." Binstead was not so fortunate ; it can only record that " Doctor Nicholas gave five pound To help cast this peal tuneable and sound." The tenth bell at Bath Abbey thus declares its origin, " All you of Bathe that hear me sound Thank Lady Hopton's hundred pound." There are cases where no one donor could be* lauded in this way, yet the numerous helpers are not forgotten. The THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 75 treble of a peal cast for Milton Lislebourne, Wiltshire, by Robert Wells, of Aldbourne, in 1789, has this inscription " My chearfull note aloft shall raise, To sound my benefactors praise." Bugbrooke, Northamptonshire, varies this " Kind benefactors unto me My note shall sound your piety." And yet another version is seen at Buxted " At proper times my voice I'll raise, And sound to my subscribers' praise." The inscription on a bell at S. Giles's Northampton, sounds rather like an after-dinner toast, "Long life and prosperity to our worthy subscribers." If these excellent benefactors must needs be alluded to, the manner displayed by a bell at Leominster is in far better taste " Kind heaven increase their bounteous store, And bless their souls for evermore." Dollington, too, while mentioning the source whence the needful funds were drawn, puts the subscribers into their right place in its declaration "I, by subscription that was raised, Re-casted was to celebrate God's praise." Calne, on the other hand, while depriving the subscribers of their praise, gives it not to God, but to him who collected their donations, ' ' Robert Forman collected the money for castinge this bell Of well-disposed people as I doe you tell." Many of these doggerel rhymes commemorate the makers of the bells. One at Eydon, Northamptonshire, on a bell dated 1603, informs us " Be yt knowne to all that doth me see That Newcombe of Leicester made me." 76 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Thomas Hedderley, a relative probably of Daniel Hedderley, who was casting bells at Bawtry about 1720, is mentioned on a bell of 1752, at Westborough, Lincolnshire, in the words " Tho. Hedderley made us all, Good luck attend us all." A founder named Henry Pleasant, who wrought early in the eighteenth century, is punningly alluded to in a bell inscription at Towcester " When four this steeple long did hold They were the emblems of a scold, No music ; But we shall see What Pleasant music six will be." On one of Rudhall's bells the founder is not happy in merely praising himself, he takes the opportunity of disparaging a predecessor in the art at the same time ; this is at Badgworth, in Gloucestershire, where a bell is inscribed : " Badgworth ringers they were mad Because Rigbie made me bad ; But Abel Rudhall you may see Hath made me better than Rigbie." The church bells, thus taught to praise their subscribers and their founders, rather than God, His angels and His saints, only follow the natural course of earthly depravity in praising themselves. The treble bell is found to be specially self-assertive. At All Saints', Northampton, it declares " I mean it to be understood That though I'm little yet I'm good. A bell at Coventry, dated 1774, has this inscription " Though I am but light and small I will be heard above you all." Varieties of this couplet are found at South Witham, Lincolnshire, and at Broadchalk, Wiltshire. "When we doe ring I sweetly sing," THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 77 is the legend on a bell of 1723 at Brington, Northampton- shire. The second bell at Broadchalk, not to be silenced by the self-satisfied motto of the treble, avows " I in this place am second bell, He shurly doe my parte as well." At several places, among others at Grantham (on a bell of 1775), an d at Knaresborough (on one of 1777), we find the words " If you have a judicious ear You'll own my voice is sweet and clear." The usual Latin formula used for a bell motto of this boastful kind is " Me melior vere non est campana sub ere." Better than I, there is no bell beneath the sky. This is on a bell at Portlemouth, Devonshire, at Vale Church, Guernsey, and at East Dean, near Eastbourne. At another Guernsey church, namely, S. Pierre du Bois it appears as " Me melior vere non est campana q'm me." Not often do the bells depreciate their own importance, yet one or two instances exist. At Bakevvell is a bell dated 1798 which bears the moral dictum, " Mankind, like us, too oft are found Possessed of nought but empty sound ; " and this appears, with slight variation, at Kirton-in-Holland, Lincolnshire. Another set of inscriptions came in apparently with the introduction of change ringing, and alludes to the order of the bells in the peal. The ring of six bells at S. Mary's, Ticehurst, furnishes a good illustration of this ; the legends running as follows : 78 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. FIRST, or " I am she that leads the van, TREBLE BELL. Then follow me now if you can." SECOND " Then I speak next, I can you tell, BELL. So give me rope and ring me well." THIRD " Now I am third, as I suppose, BELL. Mark well now time and fourth close." FOURTH "As I am fourth, I will explain, BELL. If you'll keep time you'll credit gain." FIFTH " Now I am fifth, as I suppose, BELL. Then ring me well, and tenor close." SIXTH, or " This is to show for ages yet to come, TENOR BELL That by subscription we were cast and hung, And Edward Lulham is his name, That was the actor of the same. " The church of S. Mary the Virgin, Thame, Oxfordshire, provides us with a briefer set TREBLE." I as treble begin. 1 " 2. " I as second ring." 3- "I as third will ring." 4. " I as fourth in my places." 5." I as fift will sound." TENOR. " Richard Keene cast me, 1664." Bakewell possesses a ring of eight bells, some of which have inscriptions of this nature ; those only are here quoted : TREBLE. "When I begin our merry din This band I lead, from discord free, And for the fame of human name May every leader copy me." 5. "Through grandsires and triples with pleasure men range, Till death calls the Bob, and brings on the last change." 7. " Would men like me join and agree, They'd live in tuneful harmony." 8. " Possessed of deep and sonorous tone This belfry king sits on his throne ; And when the merry bells go round, Adds to, and mellows every sound. THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 79 So in a just and well -poised state Where all degrees possess just weight, One greater power, one greater tone, Is ceded to improve our own." One wide-spread result of the introduction of change- ringing into England was the multiplication of the bells ; and in order to do this in many cases the three or four heavy bells of ancient make were melted down, and recast into a larger number of smaller ones. To this subject we shall have occasion to return hereafter ; it is mentioned here because not a few epigraphs on bells refer to it. At Laneast, Cornwall, a bell of 1742 tells us : " F. V. Goodall all we did contrive to cast three in five." At Bentley, Hampshire, we find: " Thomas Eyer and John Winslade did contrive To cast from four bells this peal of five," and at Northfield, Worcester, again : " Thomas Kettle and William Jarvis did contrive To make us six that was but five." The number of bells in the peal was commemorated at S. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, where one of them, before the hanging of the new peal, was inscribed " Henry Paris made me with good sound To be fift in eight when all ringe round." A very natural subject for bell-legends is the reason of their ringing, and to this many of them allude. Most of the ancient instances of this are included in the following Monkish rhyme : " En ego campana, nunquam denuncio vana, Lando Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum, Demnctos plango, vivos voco, fulmina frango, Vox mea, vox vitae, voco vos ad sacra venite. 8o A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Sanctos collaudo, tonitrua fugo, funera claudo, Funera plango, fulgura frango, Sabbatha pango, Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos." The last two of these lines have been thus translated : " Men's death I tell By doleful knell." " Lightning and thunder I break asunder." "On Sabbath all To church I call." " The sleepy head I raise from bed." " The winds so fierce I doe disperse." " Men's cruel rage I doe asswage." Fragments of these lines, variously arranged, are found all over Europe. The Minster bell at Schaffhausen has the inscription " Defunctos plango, vivos voco, fulmina frango," which we may translate " For the dead I moan make, The living I call, the lightning's power break." At Geneva was formerly a bell inscribed with a variant of two of the above lines " Laudo Deum verum, defunctos ploro, congrego clerum, Vox mea cunctorum fit terror Daemonorum. " " The true God I adore, the clergy I summon, the dead I deplore ; My voice is a terror to spirits of error." The tenor bell at Wilsford, Wiltshire, has " Sabbata pango, Funera plango." " Sabbath's coming I tell, and toll the death knell." At Darley Dale, in Derbyshire, another fragment appears, namely, THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 81 " Sacra Clango, Gaudia Plango, Funera Plango." The old " Mittags " of Strasbourg Cathedral bore the legend " Vox ego sum vitae Voco vos, orate, venite." " The voice of Life am I, I call, pray ye, draw nigh." Many will remember, in this connection, the prologue of Longfellow's " Golden Legend." The scene is the summit of the tower of Strasbourg Cathedral, round which in storm and thunder wheels a host of evil spirits, vainly endeavouring to drag the great cross from its lofty seat ; and the hoarse shouts of the demons mingle with the chant rising from the choir below, and with the voices of the pealing bells, which boom forth words taken from this antique series of belfry epigraphs ; which run as follows, a rough translation being here added : Laudo Deum verum, I laud the true God, Plebem voco, I summon the people, Congrego clerum ; The clergy I gather ; Defunctos ploro, The dead I deplore, Pestem fugo, The plague put to flight, Festa decoro ; The festivals honour ; Funera plango, For fun'rals I toll, Fulgora frango, The lightning I shatter, Sabbata pango ; And mark Sabbath's coming ; Excito lentos, The sleeping I rouse, Dissipo ventos, The hurricanes scatter, Paco cruentos. And tame evil passions. The inscriptions upon several English bells seem to be intended as free translations, or imitations, of these Latin lines. The tenor bell at S. Peter's, Nottingham, for example, has this verse, " I toll the funeral knell, I hail the festal day, 6 82 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. The fleeting hour I tell, I summon all to pray." The sixth bell at Colne, recast in 1848, is inscribed " I call the living, mourn the dead, I tell when days and years are fled, For grief and joy, for prayer and praise, To heaven my tuneful voice I raise." In other cases the employment of the bells to summon the people for certain specific services, or to mark some special occurrence, has suggested the motto for them to bear. Among these particular uses, to all of which full notice will be given hereafter, the passing bell, and that so nearly related to it, the funeral bell, are perhaps the most impressive, and consequently receive most frequent mention. The simple warning, "Remember death," is found on several Lincolnshire bells, as at Cleethorpes (1701), Candlesby (1704), Wadingham (1713), and Addlethorpe (1770); while Croft, in the same county, has one (dated 1716) equally brief and expressive, "Prepare to Die." Again, Fotherby (1608) Lincolnshire, and Whissendine (1609), in Rutland, have the quaint rhyme " My roaring sound doth warning give That men cannot heare allwaies live." An old bell at Bakewell had the words " All men who hear my mournful sound Repent before you lye in ground." An almost grotesque variant of this is found on some seventeenth century bells, among others on one of 1658, at Addington " When you hear this mournful sound Prepare yourselves for underground." THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 83 The following lines are met with in a great many places in different counties : " I to the church the living call And to the grave do summon all." They are on the fifth bell at Foulden, Norfolk, and on the tenors at Bremhill, Heddington, Rowde, and Edington, Wiltshire, at Quedgeley, Gloucestershire, at Cotterstock and other places in Northamptonshire, and at numerous other churches. A more striking form of it is employed at Bentley, in Hampshire, 11 Unto the Church I do you call, Death to the grave will summons all ;" while at Chilton Foliot, Wiltshire, the following two lines are added : " Attend the instruction which I give, That so you may for ever live." The merry wedding bells have also their word to say. At Hogsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and elsewhere we meet with the following sententious couplet : " When Female Virtue weds with manly worth We catch the rapture, and we spread it forth." At S. Michael's, Coventry, and at Boston we have a fuller form " In wedlock's bands all y^ who join With hands your hearts unite, So shall our tuneful tongues combine To laud the nuptial rite." An inscription at Bakewell emphasizes the extremes of joy and sorrow which the bells are called upon to mark : " When men in Hymen's bands unite, Our merry peals produce delight j 84 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. But when death goes his dreary rounds, We send forth sad and solemn sounds." The ordinary services of the church find frequent mention in general terms, such as " When I do call come serve God all," at Frome ; or the distinctly prosaic dictum of a bell at Thorp S. Peter, Lincolnshire, " When I call come to church." At Wainfleet S. Mary is the couplet : " Come to God's house to praise his holy name, Those that forsake it 'tis a sin and a shame." The sermon bell has also its appropriate legend : " I ring to sermon with a lusty borne, That all may come, and none may stay at home." This is found at Banbury, and at Kingsthorpe and other places in Northamptonshire. Certain useful secular purposes for which the church bells are sometimes rung are alluded to in the following three or four quotations. " When backwards rung we tell of fire, Think how the world shall thus expire ; " this is from a bell at S. Ives ; the Abbey Church at Sherborne has an allusion to the same use, in the form of a prayer to God and an exhortation to men, " Lord, quench this furious flame : Arise, run, help, put out the same." The bells of Flanders in several instances have an in- scription referring to their employment as alarums, the common formula being, " Mynem naem is Roelant, Als ich clippe dan is brandt, Als ich myde dan is storm in Vlienderland," which we may interpret, THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 85 'My name is Roland, When I toll there is fire, When I swing there is tempest in Flanders-land." Longfellow evidently had this, or some similar bell-legend in his mind, when, in his poem on the " Belfry of Bruges," he fancies " the bell of Ghent" crying aloud, " O'er lagoon and dike of sand, ' I am Roland, I am Roland i there is victory in the land ! ' " Another secular use of the bells gave rise to the epigraph, " I ring at six to let men know, When too and from thair worke to goe ; " which is on the fourth bell at S. John's, Coventry ; and to the terser form to be seen at S. Ives, " Arise and go about your business." There are still other classes of inscriptions which deserve notice. In many cases we find on the bells a record of the ecclesiastical rulers of the parish at the time of their casting. This usage is very obvious on bells of the seventeenth century, the churchwardens usually endeavouring thus to immortalize themselves, though the vicar's name is some- times, and especially towards the end of the century, joined with theirs. At Cannings Bishops, Wiltshire, we find bells of 1602, one of which bears the name of the vicar, George Ferebe, and another that of one churchwarden, Thomas Sloper. In later times a perfect catalogue of names was sometimes placed upon the bell ; as on one cast in 1831 for Peterborough Cathedral, which bears the names of the Bishop (Dr. Marsh), the Dean (Dr. Turton), the Archdeacon of Northampton (Dr. Strong), and of sijf prebendaries; and another cast in 1841 for S. Saviour's, Leeds, has the names of Dr. Hook, the vicar of Leeds, 86 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. of four assistant priests, and of Thomas Mears, the founder. The ringers of the bells are not entirely forgotten, although the inscription takes the form of a warning rather than a record of their " name and fame." At Uppingham, Rutland, and elsewhere, we find " Ye ringers all who prize Your health and happiness Be sober merry wise And you'll the same possess." Many bells have inscriptions expressive of the loyalty of the makers, or bearing reference to public events. A general sentiment, given in the words of holy Scripture (i S. Peter, ii. 17), "Fear God, Honour the King," is found in many places, as on one of 1665 at Chilton, Berkshire, at Goxhill, Lincolnshire (1666), and at S. Peter's, Northamp- ton (1734); and a doggerel rhyme founded on those words occurs at Knaresborough and several other places, " Our voices shall in concert ring : In honour both to God and King." Church and state are linked together in the mottos in some cases, as at Ramsbury, Wiltshire, where a bell, of 1708, has, " Prosperity to the Church and Queen," and at Chippenham, where the treble bell (1734) has, " Let us ring for the Church and King. The sovereign and his people are remembered at Devizes, where a bell of 1677 bears the words, "Vivat Rex et floreat grex." The successive monarchs from the days of Elizabeth are most of them person- ally commemorated. At East Farndon, Northamptonshire, we meet with, "God bless our Queene Elizabeth 1587," and at Bugbrook, in the same county, "God save our Queene and her preasearve 1599." At Hemel Hempsted, THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 87 Hertfordshire, and at Wappenham, Northamptonshire, we find, " God save King James," with the dates 1604 and 1610 respectively. Charles I. does not seem to be alluded to by name, but at Norton, near Daventry, is a bell dating from 1640, in his reign, inscribed, "God save the King," and others similarly marked hang in the steeples of various churches, and bear dates of that period. At Banbury, the fourth bell, now recast, used to have the words, " Diu et feliciter vivat Carolus secundus Rex sic precor et opto 1664" (Long and happily live King Charles II., so I pray and hope). James II., who both was unpopular, and also reigned for little over three years, does not seem to be commemorated in this way, and the present writer knows of no allusion to the dual occupancy of the throne by William and Mary. The words, " God save the King," are found however on bells ot this latter reign, as at Hanley Castle, Worcestershire, on an example dated 1699. Queen Anne is mentioned by name at Bromham, and Melksham, in Wilt- shire, and at Bottesford, Lincolnshire, and is referred to by her title only at Magdalen College, Oxford. The earlier Georges are alluded to only in the same way, by the inscrip- tion "God save the King;" a bell so marked of George II. 's time, dating from 1747, is at Kenton, Devonshire. At Foulden, Norfolk, we find, " Long live King George the Third. 1802;" and at S. John Baptist's, Peterborough, the same words with the date 1808. A similar prayer on behalf of George IV., and dated 1821, occurs at Poole, Dorsetshire. William IV. is another King who does not appear to have been immortalised by the bells, and our present sovereign is probably not mentioned by name, although on her behalf a modern bell at Piddington, Northamptonshire, offers the 88 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. petition, "God save our Queen and preserve our peace." Four new bells at Cottingham show by their inscriptions that they were added in 1897 in memory of the sexagenary of the Queen. This event has also been commemorated at Upottery, Devonshire, by the hanging of a new bell in the church steeple ; it is inscribed : " To-day for sixty years we've been, The subjects of one gracious Queen, So as those days are ended now, With thanks to God this bell we vow June 22nd, 1897 '." It will be interesting to refer to some other public events which obtain commemoration by means of these inscrip- tions. At Damerham, Wiltshire, the fifth bell announces, " I was cast in the yeere of Plague, Warre, and Fire. 1666." The long period of warfare which closed the last, and opened the present century, has left its mark upon the bells in many places. One at Kirton-in- Holland, Lincolnshire, dated 1807, has the somewhat grandiloquent legend. " Should Battle rage, and sanguine foes contend We hail the Victor, when he's Britain's friend." Another cast in the same year, and for the same place, prays, " May peace return to bless Britannia's shore And faction fall to raise her head no more." The conclusion of the peace is celebrated at S. Giles's, Northampton, in distinctly indifferent grammar : " With joys of peace our infant voice proclaim With Holland, France, America, and Spain." The illness and recovery of George III. are alluded to in the epigraphs of two bells, dated 1789, at Eye, in Suffolk. The seventh has the words, "O God continue thy mercies to the King;" and the tenor, "Let us rejoice our King's THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 89 restor'd." The first abdication of Napoleon Buonaparte, and the too enthusiastic joy of the ringers at Ashover, Derbyshire, are kept in mind by an inscription placed on a bell recast for that church, "This old bell rung the downfall of Buonaparte and broke, April, 1814." An earlier bell seems to record the finally undisputed settlement on the throne of William and Mary. It is at Stapleton, Gloucestershire, and bears the words, " Free from Rebellion. God save the King. 1694." Owmby Church, Lincolnshire, has a bell recalling the Gunpowder Plot, of November 5th, 1605. Interesting facts in local history are occasionally recalled by the inscriptions on the bells. One at S. Peter's, at S. Albans, informs us that the tower was rebuilt in 1805 ; and another at Holyrood, Southampton, quaintly suggests the efforts required to raise the needful funds for its casting, by the words, "Long lookt for is come at last. 1742." The complete story of a parochial agitation on the question of the church bells is told by the peal at Northfield, Worcester- shire, in these terms : TREBLE. "Though once but five, we now are six, 2. And 'gainst our casting some did strive, 3. But when a day of meeting there was fixed, 4. Appeared nine 'gainst twenty-six." The fifth and the tenor give the names of the churchwardens and the founders, Kettle and Jarvis. Local patriotism finds expression in scores of instances. "Prosperity to this town," says a bell at Launceston, which has its parallel in " Prosperity to this parish," at S. Peter's, Northampton, at S. Lawrence's, Reading, and in other cases. A more explicit wish is " Prosperity to the town of Poole," 9 o A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. found upon the sixth bell there; "Prosperity to New College," at that College in Oxford ; and " Prosperity to this parish of S. Mary," at S. Mary's, Reading. A wider sympathy is shown in the expression of the hope of " Pros- perity to the Church of England," as found at Launceston, and the corresponding prayer, " God prosper the Church of England," as at Cumnor, Berkshire, both of which are very common elsewhere; as also is the yet more general aspiration, "God save his Church," which occurs, to give one illustration out of many, at Normanton-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire. A few inscriptions, not included under any of the above divisions, have points of interest which we may remark. Scriptural quotations are riot common on the oldest bells, the inscriptions on which were usually much more brief than is the case with modern ones. The Angelic Salutation is found, especially on Angelus bells, and the Holy Name is often expanded into the Superscription of the Cross. At Corby, Lincolnshire, we meet with a contracted Latin version of the words, " At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth." " Love horteth not," from Cranmer's rendering of Romans xiii. 10, occurs at Hannington, Northampton- shire ; and S. Gabriel's declaration, " With God nothing shall be impossible " is paraphrased at Crofton, near Wakefield, in the words, " In God is al quod Gabriel." Towards the end of the seventeenth century these quotations become more frequent and more varied, among the most popular being the opening words of the several Canticles of the Church. "Gloria in excelsis," " Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini," and " Magnificat anima mea Dominum ait THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 91 Maria," form the legends of the first three bells at S. Giles's, Oxford, but these are all of modern date. Passages from the Psalms, such as " Praise ye the Lord," and other expressions of thanksgiving are very common in every county, both Latin and English being freely employed. At Floore, Northampton, we have " Cantate Domino cantum novum. 1679," and at Peterborough Cathedral, " Magnificate Dominum mecum. 1709." " Dominus providebit Anno Domini 1665," is an inscription at Chichester Cathedral, and " Laudate Domin.," at Hemel Hempsted, Hertfordshire, On the other hand, " Glory be to God on high," at Marston- on-Dove (1654), and "Sing ye merrily unto God," at Coleby, in the same county, are but a few examples where as many scores might easily be given. Some Scriptural passages are very aptly chosen. " Holiness to the Lord," found at Orlingbury (1843), is an application to church bells of a sacred motto, said by the prophet Zachariah (xiv. 20) to be in the day which he foretells upon " the bells of the horses." There is a manifest endeavour to plead a quasi-authority from Scripture for the use of bells in the inscription, "In timphanis laudate Dominum. 1669," found at S. Edward's, Cambridge ; and in a similar spirit the ceremonial use of trumpets among the Jews is quoted as having some analogy to the modern employment of bells, in a line on a bell of 1586 at S. Alkmond's, Derby, "Ut tuba sic resono ad templa venite pii," " I ring out like a trumpet, come ye faithful to the temple." The diverse occasions on which the bells are rung, are aptly recalled by the words, adapted from those of S. Paul in the epistle to the Romans (xii. 15), and found at Cannings Bishops, " Gaudemus gaudentibus, Dolemus dolentibus." A passage 92 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. from the prophet Joel (ii. 15-16) sums up briefly the chief uses of church bells in the phrase, " Call a soleme assemblie, gather the people." Thus it appears at S. Martin's, Salisbury, with the date 1628. But perhaps the most striking application of a passage of Scripture to this purpose, is given us by Hemony, the Belgian bell-founder of the sixteenth century, upon some of whose bells is placed the motto, "Non sunt loquellae neque sermones, audiuntur voces eorum," or as the Prayer Book version runs, " There is neither speech nor language, but their voices are heard." (Ps. xix. 3). The record for length in inscriptions must surely be held by a Scottish example on the great bell of Glasgow Cathedral. It is as follows : " In the year of grace 1583, Marcus Knox, a merchant of Glasgow, zealous for the interest of the Re- formed Religion, caused me to be fabricated in Holland for the use of his fellow-citizens of Glasgow, and placed me with solemnity in the Tower of their Cathedral. My function was announced by the impress on my bosom : * Me audito venias doctrinam sanctam ut discas,' and I was taught to proclaim the hours of unheeded time. 195 years had sounded these awful warnings when I was broken by the hands of inconsiderate and unskilful men. In the year 1790, I was cast into the furnace, refounded at London, and returned to my sacred vocation. Reader ! Thou also shalt know a resurrection ; may it be to eternal life. Thomas Mears fecit, London, 1790." In marked contrast to this is the series of short, pithy exhortations on the bells at Burbage, Wiltshire. The treble and the tenor are alike inscribed, "Hope well"; while the remaining three bear the words, " Love God," " Feare God," " Prayse God." THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 93 In some instances the motto seems to have been regarded as a necessary formality only, and consequently so long as something was inscribed on the bell, it did not matter what it might be. Only on such a supposition can one explain the fact that in several cases the letters of the alphabet serve the purpose of an epigraph. At Leighton Bromswold, Huntingdonshire, are bells dated 1641, with the alphabet from A to G ; one at Hoby, Leicestershire, has the series as far as I ; Bemerton, Wiltshire, and Elford, Staffordshire, also have from A to G; and a bell at Charwelton, Northamptonshire, has a number of meaningless letters only. Many of these inscriptions exhibit much questionable taste, and sometimes an almost complete forgetfulness of the high and sacred purposes to which the bells are to be dedicated. One at Towcester is well nigh profane ; it runs, " Pull on brave boys, I'm metal to the back, But will be hanged before I crack." The date of the bell bearing this elegant effusion is 1725. In style it will have been observed that these inscriptions are, when not portions of litanies or passages from Holy Scripture, usually Leonine verses in Latin, or couplets in English. As further illustrations of the first of these two classes, the following are given : from North Burlingham, Norfolk, " A tempestate protegas nos Petre beate," and again from the same county, at Aldburgh, " Dona repende pia rogo Magdalena Maria." There are not wanting, however, instances of Latin verse of a more classical type. At Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, 94 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. are eight bells cast by Rudhall in 1713, most of which have a Latin verse as a motto : for example, the fourth has " Ad templum populus per me properare monetur," and the tenor, " Me resonare jubent hominum mors conscio funus." The English inscriptions occasionally expand into quatrains, or even longer stanzas ; not infrequently also one set of rhymes is divided among the whole ling. One example of this has already been given, taken from the bells of Northfield. Another instance occurs at All Saints', Oxford, and is as follows, Treble. " Think no cost to much 2. That you bestow of all 3. To bring to pass so good a thing 4. That five bells may together ring." The fifth bell has a Latin inscription ; the date on each is 1622. It cannot fail to be a matter of wonder that the clergy permitted to appear such miserable doggerel as we find on church bells all over the country. The taste, or tastelessness, of the bell-founder, and the poetic skill of the parish clerk, or some other local rhyme-monger, were allowed to "run and have free course and be glorified." The only spot where the fearful poetic creations of the belfry can in any way be matched, is in the churchyard. Many of the epitaphs of the last century are at least equally horrible. Here are two more specimens of belfry doggerel, the latter one quite a modern one. At S. Benet's, Cambridge, we find a rhyme that has at least the merit of being daring : " John Draper made me in 1618, as plainly doth appeare, This bell was broake and cast againe, wich tyme Churchwardens were, THE DECORATION OF BELLS. 95 Edward Dixon, for the one whoe stode close to his tacklin, And he that was his partner then was Alexander Jacklyn." The other example may be seen at Picton, in Devonshire, and runs thus : " Recast by John Taylor and Son, Who the best prize for Church-bells won At the Great Ex hi bi ti on In London I. 8. 5. and I." We doubt not that Messrs. Taylor would not dream of perpetrating such an abomination in the way of an inscription at the present time ; and it is at least satisfactory to know that their bells were better than their poetry. At Little S. Mary's, Cambridge, we meet with a rare instance of an inscription of an argumentative character, " Non sono animabus mortuorum sed auribus viventium :" The translation of this occurs at Hambleton : " I sound not for the Souls of the dead, but for the Ears of the living." Whether the bell-founders of old were dealing in the ecclesiastical Latin or in their mother tongue, they seem to have been equally uncertain in the matter of grammar and spelling. Numerous examples given above exhibit eccentricities in these respects ; one or two of special originality may be added. At S. Martin's, Salisbury, we find, " Be mec and loly to heare the word of God. 1582." At Upton Lovell, Wiltshire, is this original way of spelling Hallelujah : " Halalugeva Anno Domini, 1619." At Clyst S. George, Devonshire, is the exhortation, " Embrace trew museek," 96 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Another matter in which founders were careless at times was the arrangement of the letters. We find, for instance, inscriptions entirely reversed, as at All Cannings, Wiltshire, where Anno Domini, 1626, appears as " 6261 : in : im : od : on : na." The name Sancta Helena is given on a bell at Dunsforth, Yorkshire, as " AN EL EHAT CNAS." A bell at Holton-le-Clay, Lincolnshire, has the letters mingled according to no rule, so that what was meant for Sancti Petri, appears as " SANG IRT EP IT." At Clapham, Bedfordshire, one word of the inscription is upside down, thus : " God save the ipjnq;} " In several places the bell-frame has its maker's name cut upon it, occasionally with the addition of those of the churchwardens. In one case, however, at least this also has its couplet. It is at Slapton, Northamptonshire, and is thus curiously expressed, " Be-it-Kno-wen-un-to-all-th-at-see-th-is-same. Th-at-Thomas-Cowper-of-Wood-end-made-this-frame 1634." GREAT BELL AT MINGOON, BURMA. CHAPTER V. QXofetvor^g Q0effe. '"IT* HE popular estimate of bells seems to be .based JL entirely on their weight and size ; and the most famous bells are consequently the largest. Without by any means conceding that this is a just, or even a reasonable, method of reckoning the relative importance of instruments of music, it will perhaps be useful to bow to public opinion so far as to begin this chapter by an account of such bells as are noteworthy by reason of their size. It is a disputed point which country can truly claim the distinction of possessing the largest bell in the world. In Europe the record is unquestionably held by Russia ; but it is stated that China can produce yet more gigantic examples ; and it has recently been stated that the palm for actual supremacy must be given to Burmah. If this be indeed the case, it will no doubt gratify some people to feel that if the champion monster neither hang in an English belfry, nor is of English manufacture, it is nevertheless found in a British dependency. It is at the huge padoga at Mingoon, that the bell, on whose behalf this claim is made, may be seen. It is in the open air, suspended by immense canons from several strong beams of wood, and its proportions more nearly resemble those usually adopted in the West, than those of the East, and especially in China. What its weight may be the 7 98 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. present writer knows not, and he therefore quotes with all due reserve the words of a recent traveller in Burmah, that this bell "is the largest in the world (not excepting the well-known Russian bell at Moscow), and can easily hold within it a picnic party of fifty people."* The claim of Russia to rank at least second in the possession of big bells is apparently a sound one. The land of the Tsar is, in fact, beyond dispute the country of great bells ; for whereas single specimens notable for their size are to seen elsewhere, in Russia even small towns frequently possess bells surpassing in dimensions these locally famous examples. In a former chapter a descrip- tion was given of the hauling of a bell into its place in the belfry of the Russian church of Votkinsk, which is a manufacturing town of no special mark ; the bell in this instance weighed nearly five tons, a weight exceeded in only four or five instances in England. The cities of Moscow and S. Petersburgh supply us, however, with examples compared with which all these are but toys. The Great Bell of Moscow, popularly called the Tsar Kolokol, or " King of Bells," but more correctly Ivan Kiliki or Big John, weighs nearly two hundred tons. This monster was cast in 1734, and its dimensions are as follows: the height is a little over nineteen feet, and the diameter twenty-two-and-a-half feet ; the thickness is twenty-three inches. The tongue is fourteen feet long, and six feet in circumference at the thickest part. Huge as it is, it was nevertheless suspended on a frame of immense beams near the spot where it now is, but a fire in 1737 destroyed these supports, and it fell, breaking from its side a fragment seven * Dr. Chill, in "Travel," for October, 1896 ; p. 283. SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 99 feet high. Since then no attempt has been made to put the bell to its proper use. It lay just as it had fallen, partially sunk in the earth, until 1837, when it was raised once more to a perpendicular position, and was made the dome of a small chapel, which was formed by excavating beneath it. The piece broken from its side and the tongue lie near. The bell is adorned with several effigies in relief. On the one side is the Empress Anne in her coronation robes, with above her the figure of our Lord between those of S, Peter and S. Anne ; on the other is the Tsar Alexei Michaelowitz, surmounted also by the Saviour between the Blessed Virgin and S. John Baptist. An inscription tells us of a predecessor. It informs us that this Tsar Kolokol was made from the metal of a bell cast in 1654, rung for the first time in 1658, and seriously damaged by fire in 1701. We learn also that this earlier bell weighed 288,000 pounds (nearly 130 tons), but that the Empress Anne added to this 72,000 pounds for the new bell. This would make a total of 360,000 pounds only, whereas Russian authorities usually give the weight of this broken giant at 432,000 pounds. The balance is largely, if not wholly, accounted for by the fact that metal was brought from all directions during the casting by the people, who were evidently stirred by a great enthusiasm for the work, the nobles especially vying with one another in the value of their gifts. The " King of Bells " having been disabled by his fall, a successor was, after an interval, cast to take his place ; and this still hangs in the church of S. John at Moscow, its weight being over ninety-six tons. Another great bell in the same city was the Bolshoi (Big), cast in 1710, at a weight of slightly over fifty-five tons. It was hung with thirty-two ioo A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. smaller ones in the belfry of S. John's, and remained there till the great fire, which formed so dramatic an episode of the French invasion in 1812, destroyed the tower, and ruined the peal. In 1817 the Bolshoi was broken up, metal being added to raise the weight of a new bell to be cast from it to about sixty-four tons ; and on the yth March in that year this new bell was made by a Russian founder of the name of Bogdanof. It was not until February, 1819, that the bell was removed to the cathedral, a wooden sledge dragged by a vast multitude of people being the means of transport. Part of the cathedral wall was taken down to admit of its entrance, and it was finally swung into its place amid the enthusiastic transports of the populace. It bears the figures of our Blessed Lord, His Virgin Mother, and of S. John the Baptist ; also of the Tsar Alexander and his Empress, the Tsar Nicholas, and other members of the imperial family. Less than these gigantic creations of the bell-founder, yet still vast in size when compared with other western bells, are the bells of Novgorod, famous for its fairs, and of the capital, S. Petersburg. The great bell of the former weighs some thirty-one tons, and that of the latter over twenty- three-and-a-half tons. The last-named bell hangs in the magnificent cathedral of S. Isaac, and is, like the more celebrated Moscow bell, ornamented with imperial portraits ; effigies of Peter the Great, Catherine II., Paul I., Alexander I., and Nicholas I., the sovereigns under whom the cathedral was built, being upon its sides. Among the Russians them- selves the bells of Valdai, a town near the capital, are famous for the richness and beauty of their tone. Returning once more to Asia, we find immense bells at SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. IOT Pekin and Nankin. Le Comte, at the end of the seven- teenth century, describes a bell which he found lying on the ground at the latter place amid the ruins of its fallen belfry. It was eleven feet nine inches high, and seven-and-a-half feet in diameter ; its weight being computed at twenty-two-and- a-quarter tons. Three lesser bells lay beside it. The Emperor Yong-lo, on transferring the seat of government from Nankin to Pekin, in 1403, cast nine huge bells to commemorate the event ; and in the middle of the seven- teenth century Father Verbiest saw seven of them lying in the same forlorn condition as their brethren at the old capital. He measured one of them ; the result in English terms being a height of fourteen feet five inches, with canons standing another three feet high, a diameter of nearly thirteen feet, and a thickness of thirteen inches. The weight was alleged to be about fifty-three tons. These great bells, which are in some cases of iron, were struck by a wooden clapper, and consequently had not so powerful a sound as similar ones would have, if used after the European manner. The casting of such giants apparently went out of fashion with the overthrow of the native Chinese dynasty in 1644. Japan possesses some splendid bells of great size. Like the Chinese examples, however, they can hardly be compared with those of Europe without injustice to the latter, since they are not intended to be chimed, much less rung, in the proper sense of those terms, but are merely struck on the outside with wooden instruments. The late Lady Brassey mentions one of these bells, in describing (in the "Voyage of the Sunbeam") a visit to the Japanese Temple of Gion Chiosiu. " We strolled about the temple 102 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. grounds," she says, "and ascended the hill to see the famous bell, which is the second biggest in Japan. The immense beam which strikes it was unlashed from the platform for our edification, and the bell sent forth a magnificent sound, pealing over the city and through the woods." When we come to consider the chief bells in the European states other than Russia, we at once note a considerable falling off in the matter of size. It is, however, scarcely fair to contrast Russian bells with those used further west ; for this reason, that the bells of that country also are not intended to be swung, they are merely struck. Korb, in his " Diarium Itineris in Muscovia," published in 1698, describes the method of sounding the first Tsar Kolokol at Moscow. He tells us that forty or fifty men were employed, who stood half on each side of the bell, and by means of ropes pulled the clapper to and fro. And this is the usual Russian plan to the present day ; the bells are fixed immoveably, and the clappers only swing. To a certain extent, therefore, Russian and other bells can scarcely be called examples of the same kind of instrument, their use being so entirely different; and to compare them is almost as unreasonable as it would be to compare a harp with a pianoforte. Nevertheless, one or two of the largest of the European bells do not fall much below some of the smaller examples quoted above. The great bell of Cologne Cathedral weighs twenty-five tons, and replaces one cast in 1448, at a weight of eleven tons. There is one at Olmutz of eighteen tons, and another at Vienna which weighs seventeen tons fourteen cwt., and was cast in 1711. The famous bell at Erfurt, dating from the fifteenth century, and long reputed SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 103 to be the largest in Europe, weighs thirteen and three- quarter tons ; it is ten and a quarter feet in height and eight and a half feet in diameter. The Low Countries are represented by the great bell of Bruges, dating from 1680, which, however, only weighs ten and a quarter tons. France has several examples of noteworthy proportions. The old ''Jacqueline" of Paris, cast in 1400, attained only the modest weight of six tons, but the modern great bell of Notre Dame in that city weighs seventeen tons. Rouen had one, the George d'Amboise, of sixteen tons, dating from 1501. At Toulouse the bell of Cardaillac is of a great size, as also is the largest of the ring at Lyons. Of Italian bells one at Florence holds the premier place; it weighs about seven and a half tons, and has been swung up into the tower of the Palazzio Veccio, 275 feet from the ground. We turn now to English bells, first among which in the matter of size is " Great Paul," of London, said to be the largest bell in the world which is actually rung, in the technical sense of being revolved in the usual manner of English bells. One or two facts in connection with the casting of this splendid bell have been already given in illustration of the methods employed in modern bell-foundries; but a brief account of the making and hanging of it should be given. On the 23rd November, 1881, the foundry of Messrs. Taylor & Co., Loughborough, witnessed the casting of the largest bell ever made in England. Over eight hours were occupied in melting the twenty tons of metal in the three furnaces devoted to the work, and it was past ten o'clock on the night named, when the molten streams ran into the gigantic io 4 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. cast iron mould, and in about four minutes filled it with the glowing metal. Six days were allowed for the thorough cooling of the mass, and it was not until November 29th, that eager eyes and ears could satisfy the many anxious minds of the beauty and the soundness of the work. The dimensions of the bell are : height, eight feet ten inches, diameter, nine feet six-and-three-quarter inches, and thick- ness at the sound-bow, eight-and-three-quarter inches ; and the actual weight is sixteen tons, fourteen cwt, two quarters, nineteen Ibs. The tongue is seven feet nine inches long and weighs nearly four-and-a-quarter cwt. The inscriptions and ornaments upon the bell are simple but appropriate; consisting of the name of the founders and the date, " John Taylor & Co., founders, Loughborough, MDCCCLXXXI," of the arms of the Dean and Chapter of S. Paul's Cathedral, and the motto, 'Vae. Mihi. Si. Non. Evangelisavero." (i. Corinthians ix. 16). " Great Paul" from first to last cost about ^"3,000. The note given out by it is E flat, " the upper partials B flat, E flat, and G being just audible, with the sonorous ground-tone." So wrote Dr. Stainer, and speaking of the intention of using the bell for the first time on the following Easter Day, he added, " I shall be surprised if Londoners do not realize the fact that * Great Paul ' is worthy alike of their ancient city and splendid cathedral." The public interest shown in the conveyance of the monster to its home in the metropolis was very great ; church bells rang out to greet it, and in some cases the Volunteers turned out to escort it. A carriage of massive timber was specially constructed for it, the weight of the car being five tons, and this was drawn by a traction engine; SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 105 a second being in attendance to assist if needful on bad roads and in hilly districts. Many difficulties had to be faced during the journey ; bridges had to be inspected before the engines with their load of twenty-two tons could be suffered to venture on them ; in one place a piece of soft road had to be covered with boiler-plates, two inches in thickness, to allow of the passage of the car ; and as London was approached the ever-increasing stream of traffic compelled those in charge to travel chiefly by night. The final stage of the journey, from Highgate to S. Paul's, was made between midnight and eight o'clock in the morning of May 22nd, 1882, and preparations for getting the bell into the cathedral were at once commenced. The chains which had secured it to its carriage were removed, and some of the stonework having been taken out so as to enlarge the doorway, " Great Paul " was at last successfully swung up by means of pulleys into its place in one of the western towers. S. Paul's Cathedral possesses, in addition to this English " King of Bells," a fine ring of twelve, the tenor of which weighs three tons two hundred weight. Their dedication in the year 1878 was described in an earlier chapter. Up to that date S. Paul's, alone among the cathedrals of England, and probably of Europe, possessed no peal of bells. The twelve were cast by the same firm which afterwards was entrusted with " Great Paul," and they were given for the most part by the various city companies, the total cost being about ^5,000. The treble and the second bell were given by the Drapers' Company ; the next four by the Turners and the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who is a member of that company ; the seventh bell by the 106 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Salters, the eighth by the Merchant Taylors, the ninth by the Fishmongers, the tenth by the Clothworkers, the eleventh by the Grocers, and the tenor by the City Corporation. Each bell of the ring, which weighs in the aggregate about eleven tons, bears the armorial shield of the Dean and Chapter, and also that of the company presenting it, with the motto of the latter. The old " great bell " of S. Paul's was cast in the reign of Edward I., and hung in Westminster Hall Gate, where it was used for sounding the hours for the information of the judges. In those days it was popularly named first " Edward of Westminster," and later " Westminster Tom." William III. presented it to the cathedral, and thither it was conveyed on New Year's Day, 1699; but at Temple Bar, the boundary of the city, " Tom " rolled off his car and cracked himself. It was recast in 1708, by Philip Wightman, and again in 1716 by Richard Phelps. It is the hour-bell, and otherwise was formerly used, and only used, to toll for the death of a member of the Royal Family, of the Bishop, the Dean, or of the Lord Mayor. Having given precedence to London's great bell, it is but right that the next place, at any rate, should be given to those of Canterbury and York, each of which, and especially the latter, is of no mean reputation. The largest bell at Canterbury is "S. Dunstan," the casting of which in the Cathedral yard, in 1762, has already been referred to. The present "S. Dunstan" is the successor of a more ancient one, and not improbably the name dates back almost to the days of the great artist and archbishop from whom it is borrowed. The dimensions of this bell are : diameter five feet eight-and-a-half inches, and thickness at SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 107 the sound-bow five-and-a-half inches ; its inscription merely records the names of the dean, Dr. William Friend, of the founders, Messrs. Lester and Pack, and of William Chapman, who superintended the work ; together with the date, 1762. Among the records preserved by the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln is an account of the expenditure in the casting of this bell. Several of the items will be of interest, as illus- trating the price of labour and of materials in the middle of the eighteenth century. The account runs as follows : 5)C. The Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral of Canterbury. 1762, Sep. 10. s. d. To Bell Metal, lo-cwt. o-qrs. o-lbs. at I4d. per Ibs. 65 6 8 200 Windsor Bricks at ^4 per 1,000 0160 250 Large Bricks Compos ... ... ... ... o 10 o For Tackle Ropes and Collar Ropes, 7-cwt. 2-qrs. i6-lbs. @ 3d 10 14 o 4 Hogsheads ... ... ... .. ... ... 140 2 Casks o 10 o Cartage ... ... ... ... .. ... ... o 12 o Wharfage and Porterage ... ... ... ... 080 I Clapper 85^ Ibs. lod 3 II 3 Tackle ropes which remain, 20 @ 6d. Ibs o 10 o I Brass Roller, 30^ @ 1 2d I 10 6 To recasting one large Bell ... .. ... ... IOO O o Coachhire for Win. Chapman ... 300 Freight and Land Carriage ... ... ... ... 57 2 Over paid ... ... ... ... ... 004 19 II On the other side we find : 1762. The Dean and Chapter CCS. , s. d. By deducted for a brass Rowler 104 Do. for old Clapper, i-cwt. l-qr. $y z Ibs. @ 2d. ... 143 Do. for waste of metal ... ... ... ... 4 13 4 Dec. 10, by cash in full 187 2 o 19 io8 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. "S. Dunstan" is the clock-bell of the Cathedral. The bell of state and ceremony, whose voice warns the citizens of the death of the Sovereign or of the Archbishop, and which is rung on other occasions of special solemnity, is " Harry " or the " Bell Harry," hanging in the central tower to which it has given its name. This is also Canterbury's Curfew-bell. The Northern Metropolis can boast a much heavier bell than any in the possession of her Southern sister, " Peter of York " ranking third in size of the bells of the kingdom, the heavier ones being both in London, "Great Paul" and " Big Ben." " Peter " is reputed to weigh twelve tons, ten cwt, and was cast by Messrs. Mears of Whitechapel on January i8th, 1845. Its diameter is eight feet four inches, its height, seven feet two inches, and its thickness at the sound-bow, seven inches. Its note is F, or as some say F sharp. The cost was about ^2,000. On the 2ist, August, 1845, it was rung by sixteen men, but it is now never sounded in the regular way. Every day at noon, Sundays excepted, it is struck twelve times by means of a hammer worked by a manual lever, after the clock has sounded the hour upon the tenor bell of the ring ; and once a year, on the 3151 December, it tolls midnight in the same way. Otherwise it is only used occasionally as a passing, or a funeral bell. The ring of bells at York is known as the " Beckwith Peal," having been purchased from a bequest left for the purpose by Dr. Beckwith, of York, in 1843. They were cast in the following year by Messrs. Mears, and were placed in the south tower. The bells are twelve in number, ranging from a treble weighing about seven and half cwts, SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 109 to the tenor of two tons, thirteen cwts, three quarters. The diameter of this latter bell is five feet five inches, and its note is C. The bells of the parish churches in the city of York are none of them remarkable in the matter of size, although several of them are interesting in other ways, especially as illustrations of the once famous local industry of bell- founding. The church of S. Maurice has a couple of memorial bells, which may be noted in passing. They were given to the church in memory of John Henry Cattley, a chorister, who was accidentally drowned on November 2nd, 1882, and bear the apt quotations : " Misit de summo et accepit me," "Sumpsit me de aquis multis," ("He sent from on high and took me, He drew me out of many waters,") from Psalm xviii., 16. One of the most famous bells in England is " Mighty Tom" of Oxford. At the dissolution and plunder of the monastic foundations, the great bell of Oseney Abbey was taken to S. Frideswide's, at Oxford, and became the original " Mighty Tom," its inscription being one already quoted, " In Thomae Laude Resono Bim Bom Sine Fraude." Among other accounts in reference to the transference of the bell, we learn that in 1546 there was "payd to Wellbye of Ensham for caryege of the great bell to Fryswids, 26 September, xxs.," and also fourpence for "ale to theym laboreres at ye wyndyng up of the great bell into Friswides steple." In the reign of Mary it was re-dedicated in the name of the Queen, but the old name has always continued in popular use. In 1612 it was damaged by an accident, and was consequently re-cast, on which occasion Richard Corbet, subsequently Dean of Christ Church, and later no A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Bishop of Norwich, celebrated the event in some verses full of rather ponderous humour. In 1680 the bell was again re-cast, the work being entrusted to Richard Keene, of Woodstock, who was exceptionally unfortunate, or remark- ably incompetent. Anyhow it was cast three times unsuc- cessfully ; twice there was not enough metal allowed, so that the moulds for the cannons were not rilled, and the third time the mould burst, and the molten metal ran into the ground. The College authorities took pity on the poor bell-founder, and "made him amends;" but they transferred the work to Christopher Hodson, of London, who carried it through satisfactorily. Soon after Sir Christopher Wren had completed the Gatehouse, this bell was removed to the tower there. The diameter of " Mighty Tom " is 7 feet 2 inches, the height 6 feet 9 inches, and the thickness 6 inches. The clapper weighs 342 pounds and the bell 7 tons, ii cwts, 3 qrs, 4 Ibs. Its inscription sets forth that "Magnus Thomas" was re-cast on April 8, 1680, in the reign of Charles II., and gives the names of the College authorities, and of the founder. It was first rung on the 2 gth May, 1684, and its voice has ever since been familiar to each successive generation of undergraduates, since it is the signal that all must at once betake themselves to their respective colleges. For this purpose it rings at five minutes past nine o'clock at night one hundred-and-one strokes, whereby it also commemorates the original number of the scholars on the foundation. It has been pointed outf that the various bells of the city of Oxford form, by a curious accident, a complete chromatic t By the Rev. Wm. C. Lukis in "An Account of Church Bells." Parker, London and Oxford, 1857. SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. in scale. Christchurch peal is said to have as its key-note the "vocal D," and S. Mary's the D of the concert pitch. Merton and New College have E flat, Magdalen E natural, Carfax and S. Mary Magdalen F, S. Michael's and S. Giles's F sharp, All Saints G, S. Aldate's A flat, S. Peter-in-the- East A natural, and Holywell B flat. The scale, is not, however, accurately in tune throughout. Of the origin of "Great Tom" of Lincoln there are several legends, most of which are not over-creditable to the ecclesiastics of the day. One story has it that it was stolen from Beauchief Abbey, Derbyshire, another that it was " conveyed " in a similar way from the Abbey of Peter- borough, and a third says that no less a personage than Bishop Longland (1521-1547) stole it from the suppressed priory of Markby, in Lincolnshire. Tradition seems to have determined that at any rate the bell was stolen, though there are that aver that the Abbot of Peterborough gave it as a present ; and as it is known that Geoffry Plantagenet gave two fine bells to Lincoln Minster in the twelfth century, it is possible that all these accounts are incorrect, and that " Tom " is a descendant from one of these. The first authentic allusion to this bell is in a document among the archives of the Dean and Chapter bearing date January 30, 1610, or, in the new style, 1611. This informs us that it was re-cast in the Minster Yard, by Oldfield, of Nottingham, and Newcombe, of Leicester, and that "upon Sunday the xxvij of this month " it was " ronge oute and all safe and well." The former bell had weighed rather more than 3 tons 18 cwt. ; the new one was slightly heavier, and measured in circumference " seven yards and a half and two inches." In 1827 Great Tom cracked, and nothing was ii2 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. done to repair the damage until 1834. In that year Mr. Thomas Hears took down and broke up not only the great bell, but also six small ones which hung in the Rood Tower, and were known as the Lady Bells ; and from the metal of them all three bells were cast, the present " Great Tom " and two quarter bells. The casting was done on November i5th, 1834, and on the sixth of the following April the bell commenced its journey to Lincoln, being taken by road on a wooden car drawn by eight horses. It reached its destination on i3th April, 1835, and was sus- pended in the Rood Tower. It is used as the clock bell, and is also tolled on special occasions. It alone rings for services on Good Friday, and it announces the death of persons of special note in the city or the country, and is employed as the " sermon bell " on great festivals. The diameter of Great Tom is 6 feet loj inches, and the weight 5 tons 8 cwt. It gives out the note A The western Cathedral of Exeter boasts two noteworthy bells, "Great Peter" and " Grandison " ; the first named from the dedication of the church, with perhaps an allusion to the original donor of the bell ; the second from John de Grandison, bishop of the see from 1327 to 1367. "Peter" is the clock bell, and also sounds daily for mattins and the curfew, being struck with a hammer. An inscription sets forth the fact that the bell was given by Bishop Peter Courtenay (who ruled the see from 1478 to 1487) in 1484, and that it was recast by Thomas Purdue in 1676 at the cost of the Dean and Chapter. It is six feet four inches in diameter, and five inches thick at the sound-bow, and weighs 5-tons 2-cwt. ; its note is A. "Grandison" is the tenor in the peal of ten. As far back as 1396 Exeter Cathedral SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 113 possessed a bell of this name, and it (or a successor) is mentioned in 1552, the weight being given as "XL C waight by estimacon." It has been twice since then recast; by Pennington in 1629, and by William Evans, of Chepstow, in 1729. It still bears a legend announcing that it is the gift of Bishop Grandison. It is six feet in diameter, and nearly five inches thick at the sound-bow, and weighs 3-tons 7-cwt. i-qr. i8-lbs., being, it is said, the heaviest bell in England that is regularly rung in a peal. Its note is B flat. The largest bell at Gloucester, although smaller than those already spoken of, is remarkable as being the only old example of a heavy bell that we now possess. It is supposed to date from about 1400. Its inscription asserts " Me fecit fieri conventus nomine Petri " (the convent had me made in the name of Peter), the arms of the abbey and the founder's trade-mark being used as stops. It is five feet eight-and-a- half inches in diameter, and weighs 2-tons i8-cwt, giving out the note C sharp. It was formerly customary for nine men to ring this bell, eight pulling the rope as they stood in the choir, while the ninth, stationed in the ringing-chamber, steadied it. Since 1827, however, "Great Peter" has not been raised, but it is still sounded by means of a hammer at nine every night. It also tolls a knell on the death of a member of the Royal Family. Before leaving the great bells of England, one or two secular examples demand notice, first among which, by right of size, situation, and fame, is " Big Ben," of Westminster. The first bell of the name was cast in 1856, by Messrs. Warner & Son, of Stockton-on-Tees, and was, according to the design of Sir E. B. Denison (now Lord Grimthorpe) to be nine feet in diameter, and fourteen tons in weight ; the 8 H4 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. hammer for striking it weighing a ton. It was brought up to London, but on trial it was found not only to have a flaw in its metal, but to be actually cracked. It was consequently broken up, and recast at Whitechapel by Messrs. Mears, in 1858. The weight was this time reduced to i3~tons lo-cwt. 3-qrs. i5-lbs., and the new hammer was only 6-cwt. This bell also cracked after a time, and for a considerable period it was not used. Subsequently it was patched up, and still serves its original purpose of an hour-bell. The Westminster quarter bells, on which are sounded the famous Westminster chimes, are of no despicable size. The first weighs four- and-a-half tons, the second two tons, the third one-and-a-half tons, and the fourth a ton ; the notes sounded being respectively B, E, F sharp, and G sharp. They all hang in the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster. The two Bens cost ^4,000. Several provincial towns have fine bells, used generally as clock bells, in their Town Halls. Manchester has one, cast in 1876, which weighs 6-tons 9-cwt. ; Preston's Town Hall bell was cast in 1878, at a weight of 4-tons 1 6-cwt. ; at Bradford is a similar one, dating from 1873, an d weighing 4-tons, 7-cwt. ; Leeds Town Hall has a bell, dated 1859, and named Victoria, which weighs 4-tons i-cwt. ; and the Halifax bell weighs just three tons. " Big Ben " is the largest of our secular bells, and second only to "Great Paul" in the list of all the English bells. A record of famous English bells would be indeed incomplete were no mention made of Bow Bells. These are celebrated, not from anything remarkable in their size or tone, but because the church of S. Mary-le-Bow has long been reckoned the very heart and centre of London, so that SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 115 it is essential to the being of a true cockney that he should have been born within the sound of Bow Bells. Alexander Pope has two allusions to them. In the Dunciad (Book HI.; line 278) he defines the limits of London, or " Lud's old walls," as being " Far as loud Bow's stupendous bells resound " ; while in the "Rape of the Lock" (Canto iv., line 118) he contrasts the mercantile city with the environs of the court, by suggesting that it is impossible that " wits take lodgings in the sound of Bow." The old story of the hopes of which Bow bells sung in the ears of young Dick Whittington, and of their strange fulfilment, need scarcely be recalled to anyone. The modern bells are not, however, precisely those to which the future Lord Mayor listened, nor even those of which the poet sung ; for of the original ten, the tenor was recast in 1738, and the rest in 1762, two more being added in 1881. The central position of Bow Church was recognised by the authorities when they ordained that from its steeple should sound the curfew for the city. Dorchester Abbey has a tenor bell which is noteworthy for its donor's sake. It was originally cast in Tournai, and presented to Dorchester Abbey by Cardinal Wolsey. It is slightly under three tons in weight, and although it has been twice recast, it still bears the legend, " By Wolsey's gift I measure time for all, To mirth, to grief, to church I serve to call." Other bells in the country claim to have been the gifts of the great Cardinal, as, for example, the third bell at Hil- marton, Wiltshire. In the parish church of Great Hampden are three bells n6 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. dated 1625, which it is suggested were probably given by John Hampden, who lived at the manor-house, and was the patron of the living. The bells of S. Andrew's, Plymouth, are said to have originally commemorated the return of Drake, after his circumnavigation of the globe, in 1594. The existing peal was cast, however, with the exception of the tenor, by Bilbie in 1749. The tenor dates only from 1840, and came from the foundry of Thomas Hears. Wales possesses several noteworthy peals of bells. Wrex- ham has a fine ring of ten, already mentioned; and Llanbadarn bells, near Aberystwith, are exceptionally sweet and mellow. The " bells of Aberdovey," so famous in song, probably owe their reputation chiefly to the fancy of the poet who sang of them ; and the same may be said of the Cornish peal, " the bells of S. Michael's Tower," whose merry music rang out so joyfully " when Richard Penlake and Rebecca his wife arrived at the church door." Of Scottish bells, one at Glasgow Cathedral, and the quaintly-inscribed ring of four at Orkney Cathedral, have already been mentioned. Of these latter, the tenor was recast in 1682, at Amsterdam, at a cost of " 1,303 merks Scots," equal to about ^72 73. gd. The weight of the bell is only i3~cwt. 2-qrs. i6-lbs. " S. Lawrence," an old bell at S. Nicholas, Aberdeen, was a fine one, but it was un- fortunately destroyed, owing to the burning of the steeple, in 1874. The Cathedral of S. Mary, Edinburgh, has a good peal. The Limerick bells are justly celebrated for the sweetness of their tone ; they are said to have been brought from Italy, and into their history is woven the following romantic SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 117 episode. A young Italian, so runs the legend, had devoted himself to the art of bell-founding, and with such success that he at last produced a peal of bells whose tones almost realized his ideal of the perfection of belfry music. This wonderful ring was sold to the abbot of a neighbouring convent; and the artist, now living in a state of modest affluence, bought a small villa in the district, where day by day the sweet voices of his own creation might sing their songs of joy and sadness, of sacred duty and heavenly hope, in his listening ears. But such a time of peace was not to last. Warfare swept across the land ; and when the tide of fire and rapine had subsided, all was changed. The young artist found himself homeless and ruined, and even his loved bells had gone, sold in a moment of necessity by the reverend abbot, and carried into far-distant Ireland. For a long time the wretched man was an outcast and a wanderer throughout Europe ; his heart was crushed within him, hope seemed to him as much devastated as was his home. At last after long and weary journeyings he found himself on board a little bark bound for the unknown Hibernian coast. Evening, clear and calm, was shining around them with a mellow light, as their keel silently cut the glistening waters of the Shannon, for the voyage's end was near. Suddenly filling and thrilling the throbbing air came a sound of heavenly music, rising and falling on the evening breeze. " Limerick bells !" cried the rough skipper, " we shall be able to drop anchor, lads, ere dark to-night." But that lonely Italian passenger, starting at the first boom of those bells, moved not, nor answered. Speedily the bark made her way homeward ; hoarsely the shout of the skipper was answered from the shore, and at last, amid the rattling n8 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. of blocks and the grinding of chains, the little vessel lay still, her voyage o'er. But still the lonely Italian stirred not, and when they went to him they realized that a strange thing had happened ; for his soul had gone out to meet the singing of his bells, and was by them upborne, as on the wings of angels, to the Paradise of God. His voyage too was o'er. Father Prout's verses have established the fame of the Shandon bells. One stanza may be quoted to illustrate both the enthusiasm of the Irishman, and the ingenuity of the poet : " I've heard bells chiming Full many a clime in, Tolling sublime in Cathedral shrine, While at a glibe rate Brass tongues would vibrate But all their music Spoke naught like thine ; For memory dwelling On each proud swelling Of the belfry knelling Its bold notes free, Made the bells of Shandon Sound far more grand on The pleasant waters Of the river Lee." Whether the bells have degenerated, or whether they were never so splendid as their bard would have us believe, it would perhaps be dangerous for an Englishman to attempt to decide. That, at any rate, opinions may differ on the subject even of the beauty of Shandon bells, is abundantly proved by comparing the foregoing stanza with the following from the pen of another Irishman, the late A. M. Sullivan, M.P. : SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 119 " I've heard bells rattle Round the necks of cattle ; The Chinese in battle Use hideous gongs ; And down in Galway The natives alway Enswarm their bees To the beat of tongs. But there's something sadder To drive one madder Than gongs or tongs Struck discordantly, 'Tis the bells of Shandon, With discord dinned on, The roaring waters Of the river Lee!" S. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, has recently had a fine peal of ten bells presented to it by Lord Iveagh. The total weight of the metal is over nine tons, the tenor weighing 2 tons, 5 cwt., i qr., 18 Ibs. : and the founders were the firm of Taylor, Loughborough. The inscriptions are for the most part taken from the Canticles of the Church, and are as follows : " Treble. Sursum corda. 2. Venite adoremus et procidamus. 3. Te laudamus. 4. Tibi benedicimus. 5. Te adoramus. 6. Te glorificamus. 7. Per singulos dies benedicimus Te. 8. Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum. 9. Gloria in excelsis Deo. Tenor. Ad majorem Dei gloriam. This peal of ten bells was erected at the expense of Edward Cecil, Baron Iveagh, K.P., A.D. 1897. Henry Jellett, Dean." One or two more continental examples, besides those quoted above for their size and weight, deserve mention. Strasburg has a famous ring of nine bells, among which are 120 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. several devoted to special duties. The Storm-bell dates in its present form from 1774, and was rung to warn travellers^ of approaching storms, and to guide them to the city gates. The Gate-bell, dated 1618, but recast in 1651, informs the citizens of the opening and closing of the gates at morning and evening. " Mittags " sounds the hours of noon and midnight. One of the most beautiful of continental bells is " Carolus " at Antwerp. This was given to the city by the Emperor Charles V., and has ever since been held in special honour by the citizens. Amongst its belfry comrades are " Horrida," the tocsin, dated 1316, now seldom used, "S. Maria," dating from 1467, "S. Antoine," and the " Curfew," which rings thrice daily. Crossing the Atlantic, we find the city of Montreal laying- claim to the possession of the heaviest bell on the American continent. This hangs in the Roman Catholic Cathedral, and weighs 13^ tons; but the tenor bell of the chimes in Trinity Church, New York, has the reputation of being the sweetest in tone. The United States have made a point of casting large and sonorous bells for secular use, and especially as alarm-bells. The alarum of the Old City Hall, New York, weighed over 10 tons, but having been broken in removal, the metal was recast as five small bells. An example, specially interesting to American citizens, is the " Liberty Bell " in the Philadelphia State House. This was cast in 1752, in England, but having been cracked by a trial stroke, was recast at Philadelphia by Isaac Norris. It bears an in- scription taken from Leviticus xxv. 10 : "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof;" and, in 1776, as if in fulfilment of its unconscious prophecy, it rang in celebration of the Declaration of the Independence SOME NOTEWORTHY BELLS. 121 of the United States. It was again cracked in ringing a welcome to Henry Clay, and has since been preserved as an honoured relic only. An interesting peal of bells, consisting of twenty-five, hangs in the cathedral at Zanzibar, their tones forming a chromatic scale of two octaves. They were presented by various schools and colleges which support the English mission to that district, and bear appropriate names. Thus Durham gives " S. Cuthbert;" London, "S. Paul;" Canterbury, "S. Augustine;" Dublin, "S. Patrick," and so forth. They were cast by Messrs. Warner. The British Colonies have not so far provided their churches with any very noteworthy bells. South Africa, for example, has only two full peals of eight, namely, those in the cathedrals of Capetown and of Grahamstown ; and in neither instance can they be rung, one or two bells in the former case being damaged, and the bell-frame in the latter being faulty. The love of bell-music may be a mere matter of sentiment, yet sentiment is a powerful factor in human action ; and one cannot but think that the cost and trouble involved in producing in the New World the old familiar chimes of the English village church, would be amply repaid in their influence for good. CHAPTER VI. gge EOBB of &fb QSeffe. IN view of the fact that the churches of mediaeval England were so well furnished with bells, it may appear strange that so few really ancient specimens are left to us. A few words of explanation are therefore offered. The extent of the loss which has to be accounted for is illustrated by the following facts supplied by two works already quoted.* In Leicestershire, 147 bells only out of 998 are of dates earlier than the year 1600; in Northamp- tonshire there are 137 out of 1,317; in Lincolnshire, 353 out of 2,036; and in Rutland 31 out of 191. In Wiltshire, out of 698 bells recorded by the Rev. W. C. Lukis, 63 were older than the year 1500, 23 dated from that period to 1600, 273 belonged to the seventeenth century, 239 to the eighteenth, and 46 to the nineteenth; the date of the remaining 26 being doubtful. No doubt, could we obtain statistics of the whole country, the proportions of ancient and modern bells would not be found materially different from those which we obtain in these five counties. In the course of the centuries a great many bells have been destroyed through what may be called natural causes, the accidents to which all earthly things are liable ; and how simple a matter may fracture a bell is not probably realized by those unfamiliar with belfry lore. One sees a * North's " English Bells," and Lukis's " Church Bells." THE LOSS OF OLD BELLS. 123 ponderous mass of metal, weighing some hundredweights, or even tons, and measuring several inches in thickness ; and the uninitiated is apt to imagine that nothing short of very violent ill-usage could damage it ; and yet, as a matter of fact, when that sonorous metal is all throbbing beneath the stroke of its clapper, the sudden checking of its vibrations by a very little thing may cause it to crack. It has even been said that a piece of string tied tightly round the sound- bow of a large bell may be sufficent to ruin it. At Hanbury, Burton-on-Trent, a new bell was being sounded, when a workman in play sprang on to it, and clung to it by clasping his legs around it, with the result that it cracked. Many a sweet-toned bell has been destroyed by a careless sexton, in his endeavours to make the tolling of it easier. In many places instead of swinging the bell, the sexton fastens a cord to the clapper, and pulls it against the sound-bow, as he stands beside the bell. In tolling a minute-bell, or any slow strokes, this avoids the necessity of "raising" and " setting " the bell, that is, ringing it in the orthodox way, but the extra labour is only saved at the risk of cracking the bell ; for if the clapper be brought smartly against the sound- bow, and for a moment held there tightly (as in this process is very likely to be done), the vibrations may be hindered with fatal results. Neither the custom nor its consequences are of modern date, for the authorities of S. Laurence's, Reading, found it needful long since to decree that, "Whereas there was, through the slothfulness of the sextine in times past, a kind of tolling ye bell by ye clapper rope : yt was now fforbedden and taken awaye ; & that the bell should be told : as in times past : & not in anie such idle sorte." The same unfortunate effect has also been frequently i2 4 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. produced in the case of small bells by the practice of " getting the double " on them ; that is, by swinging them like factory bells, the clappers striking both sides in quick succession. Would that in all places as much thought had been given to the care of the bells as was evidently the case at Barrow- on-Humber, where, among other rules for the parish clerk's guidance "as recorded in the Town's Book, 1713," we read : " He must be Careful that no Boys or Idle persons Jangle the Bells or abuse the Church or the Windows ; he is to grease or oil the Bells, and to keep them in good order, and if they be defected in anything he shall let the Churchwardens know, that they may be mended in con- venient time." It must, however, be admitted that wilful destruction accounts for the disappearance of a great number of old bells. We have already alluded to the story of that sacrilegious monarch, King Henry VIII., staking a ring of . bells over a game of dice with Sir Miles Partridge, and losing them. It is some little satisfaction to be able to add that the knight was hanged in the following reign. But this was not a solitary act of the kind on the part of the monarch. In the little Sanctuary at Westminster hung three large bells given by Edward III. for the use of S. Stephen's Chapel, around the heaviest of which ran, so it is reported, the following legend : " King Edward made me thirtie thousand weight and three, Take mee down and wey mee and more ye shall fynd me." So notorious was the greed of the Tudor sovereign that someone scrawled beneath this "with a coale": " But Henry the Eight Will bait me of my weight." THE LOSS OF OLD BELLS. 125 Sir Henry Spelman gives us more than one instance of the sacrilegious robbery of church bells during the Reforma- tion period. Sir Hugh Paulet despoiled the Jersey churches of their bells, and sold them into France. The county of Norfolk suffered severely in this respect, but a singular fatality is alleged to have attended the godless traffic in these consecrated articles of church furniture. " In sending them over the sea, some were drowned in one haven, some in another, as at Lynn, Wells, or Yarmouth ;" fourteen of the Jersey bells sunk in the harbour of S. Malo, and at Hunstanton a bell was seen, at an exceptionally low tide, half-buried in the sands, in Spelman's days. Even the clergy were not always ashamed to seek these ill-gotten gains. The same chronicler informs us that, " in the year of our Lord 1541, Arthur Bulkley, Bishop of Bangor, sacrilegiously sold the five fair bells belonging to his cathedral, and went to the sea-side to see them shipped away ; but at that instant was stricken blind, and so con- tinued to the day of his death." In the present year (1897) an interesting discovery was made in Suffolk, which seems to point to this time of destruction. In cleaning an old pond at Rooksie Farm, Preston, in that county, it was found necessary to pump out the water and to dig out a considerable depth of mud at the bottom, in which process a bell bearing the date 1133 was laid bare, embedded in the clay which formed the subsoil. One wonders was it flung there by the despoilers, or by some friendly hands endeavouring to save it from desecra- tion, who failed afterwards to recover it. The traffic with the continent in bell-metal became sufficiently large to attract attention, and in 1547 such 126 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. export was forbidden, not from any scruple of conscience, but lest there should be a lack of material in the country for the casting of cannon ! In 1549, the rising in the West against the innovations in religion, was made the excuse for the wholesale spoliation of the belfries of Devon and Cornwall. According to Strype, " it was remembered how the bells in the churches served by ringing to summon and call in the disaffected unto their arms," and consequently Lord Russell was ordered " to take away all the bells " in those counties, " leaving only one in each steeple, the least in the ring, which was to call the people to church." When the wholesale robbery of church plate, and the sale of church lands, is remembered, it seems very questionable whether the plundering of the steeples was not part of a policy of lawless greed, the rebellion affording an excuse, rather than a reason for it. The following extract from a letter written by Richard Bellycys to Thomas Cromwell deals with this traffic in bells. The writer is superintending the demolition of certain abbeys in Yorkshire; and thus expresses himself: "as concerning the selling of the bells, I cannot sell them above fifteen shillings the hundredth, wherein I would gladly know your lordship's pleasure, whether I should sell them after that price or send them up to London ; and if they be sent up surely the carriage wolbe costly frome that place to the water, . . . And thus the Holy Ghost ever preserve your lordshipp in honour." Surely blasphemous effrontery could go no further ! In some few cases the bells carried off from the monastic houses at their suppression were given or sold to parish churches, but to what extent the spoliation was carried on is THE LOSS OF OLD BELLS. 127 illustrated by an indenture of 1540-1, by which Henry VIII. sold to John Core, a citizen and grocer of London, one hundred thousand pounds weight of bell-metal for nine hundred pounds, giving him at the same time leave to export it. This traffic in church bells was checked under Edward VI. and Elizabeth, although it is evident that it was not entirely stopped, from the fact that Thomas Egerton made the former sovereign an offer to buy "all the bell metal that his Highnesse nowe hathe in the realme at the price of xx s - euerie hunderith weighte." Among the articles stolen (by authority) from S. Mary's, Reading, and sold in this reign, were " Two belles weighing 38 cwt. 4 Ib. at 305. the cwt." Where the example is set by the great ones of the earth, there are not wanting plenty of lesser note who are ready to follow. Thus in 1552 complaint is made that the church- wardens of Devizes had in their private possession two of the church bells, which they refused to surrender: while the people of Sidmouth, Devon, gave a bell towards the cost of Ottermouth Haven ; and those of Skidbrook, Lincoln- shire, sold two bells to raise money to clear out their sand- choked haven, as well as to make some repairs in the church. In Scotland the destruction of bells was far more thorough at this period than in the southern kingdom. There it was not a matter of mere covetousness, but was a systematic attack upon what the reformers denounced as a superstitious practice. Abbot, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Scotland in 1605, and was astonished at the almost complete lack of bells : " at Dunbar, he asked how they chanced to be without such a commodity, when 128 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. the minister, a crumpt unseemly person, thinking the question as strange, replied, ' It was one of the Reformed Churches !'" Here, too, people were not wanting to argue that what was right for the state could not be very wrong in the individual, and so about 1560 we have the authority of the Baillies of Dundee invoked in two cases concerning bells ; James Young had in his house " the bell of Kyn- spindie," which he refused to part with ; and William Carmichell was ordered " to deliver to the parishioners of Lyff their bell, taken by him frae certain persons wha wrangously intromittit therewith." Spain, when under the dominion of the Moors, witnessed a curious misuse of some of her church bells. The victorious Mohammedans captured in battle the bells, evidently small ones, of S. Jago de Compostella ; and having no use for them as such, they turned them upside down, and suspended them by chains in the splendid Mosque, now the Cathedral, of Cordova, making use of them as lamps. There surely is a moral in the fact that even these " infidels," as Mediaeval Christendom always called them, in their momentary triumph over Christianity, still devoted the captured treasures of the Church to the service of religion. Several bells exist in England which have had their inscrip- tions mutilated by the hand of some fanatic of the sixteenth or of the seventeenth century. At Apethorpe, Northamp- tonshire, the name of the saint has been cut from the bell ; at South Lopham only the word " Vocor " has been left on one of the bells, and at S. Michael Coslany, Norwich, only the word " ora." No doubt if this process of chipping with hammer and chisel at the bells was general in any district, THE LOSS OF OLD BELLS. 129 some examples must have fallen victims to this display of misplaced zeal. In not a few cases church bells have been taken down and sold in order to raise funds for repairs to the fabric. This was specially characteristic of the parsimony in such matters of the last century, an age when chancels were pulled down to save the cost of repair, and towers were truncated for the same reason. In the single county of Lincoln church funds were raised by 'the sale of the bells at Cadney, Fosdyke, Fulletby, Howell, South Reston, Skegness, Strubby, Sturton Magna, Low Toynton, and elsewhere. The destruction, partial or complete, of the church, has naturally, when it has taken place, involved the bells in the general ruin. All through the Middle Ages the great enemy of the property of the church was fire. There is hardly an old cathedral in the country that has not suffered from this cause, in some cases more than once. The peal at Croyland, famous as being the first in England, was destroyed through the burning of the abbey at an early chapter in its history. The bells of old S. Paul's perished in the general conflagration of the cathedral, and other cases might be quoted. One great cause of the disappearance of old bells remains still to be mentioned. The introduction of the art and mys- tery of change-ringing is answerable probably more than any- thing else for the rarity in England of ancient examples in our belfries. We have seen that in mediaeval times, although no churches had less than two bells, few had more than three or four. Early in the seventeenth century change- ringing was introduced into the country, or more properly 9 130 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. was invented, and about the middle of that century it grew rapidly into increasing popularity. A ring of three or four bells was, however, quite useless for the practice of the new art, and thus every church in a parish of any pretensions became ambitious of possessing a larger ring of bells, six being the minimum required for the purpose. In any case where the bells already in the belfry were heavy ones, the simplest and cheapest way of meeting the difficulty was found in melting them down, and making a larger ring of smaller bells ; and unfortunately this was done all over the country in almost countless instances. The practice has received some illustration already in considering the inscriptions upon bells, some of which allude to it. One cannot but feel a certain sentimental regret at the disappearance, from one or another of these many causes, of so large a number of our ancient bells. On other grounds, however, there does not seem to be any ground for special regret. The art of bell-founding not having, like so many others in the service of the church, fallen behind its older self. There is no reason to suppose that the best founders of to-day cannot turn out as good bells as any of their predecessors. CHAPTER VII. r0 anb BEFORE leaving the questions connected with the making and hanging of the bells, a few words may appropriately be added on the provision made for their accommodation in the church and elsewhere. Belfries did not form part of the structure of churches until the seventh or eighth century, the earliest mention of them being in the latter period by the monk of S. Gall and Amalarius ; and the first of whose erection we have a record was built either by Pope Stephen III. in 770, or by his successor two years later. The precise reason for this form of addition to ecclesiastical architecture has been debated, but whatever it may have been, it may be taken as fairly certain that the introduction of large bells, and especially of complete peals, into the service of the church must sooner or later have led to some such building. By a law of Athelstan in 926, the possession of a bell- tower at the church on his estate conferred on the thane the right to sit in the town-gate, or, in modern phrase, to take his place on the grand jury. This fact, taken in connection with the gift to the abbey of Croyland of the first peal in the country by Abbot Turketyl about the middle of the tenth century, seems to point to the period at which towers began to become usual in England. Such bells, few and small, as the churches possessed before that time may have been 132 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. hung, as is still the case in many village churches, in a mere turret or bell-cote ; but in some cases they were most likely suspended in a timber frame hard by. Such was certainly the use in several instances at a much later date. At Aberdeen and at Glasgow, and at several places in Kin- cardineshire and elsewhere in Scotland, the bells were hung on trees ; and in the churchyard of S. Helens, in Brittany, may still be seen a kind of gallows within which hang the two church bells. The wit of the Irish Roman Catholics suggested a similar practice by way of evading the oppressive law which at one time forbade their erecting steeples to their churches and placing bells therein. Probably most of the earlier towers, when erected specially to contain bells, were built detached from the churches. Belfries thus situated it has become the custom to speak of in England as campaniles, though it will be obvious that the word strictly implies merely a bell-tower, no matter of what kind or in what position. We still have several of these detached towers, that of Chichester Cathedral being per- haps the best known. Worcester formerly had such a " clocherium," crowned with a wooden spire, near the north-east transept ; Little Snoring, Norfolk, has an ancient example, and others are found at East Dereham, Spalding, Torrington, Woburn, Bronellys, and other places. At the restoration of Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, the bells were removed to a wooden campanile in the churchyard, their position in the tower not being deemed safe. The country most famous for its campaniles is un- doubtedly Italy. That of S. Mark, at Venice, is of brick, and rises to a height of 350 feet without buttresses, and without pinnacles ; the splendid campanile of Florence was TOWERS AND CAMPANILES. 133 begun in 1324 by Giotto, and attains a height of 267 feet; the tallest in Italy is at Cremona, its elevation being 395 feet. Other fine examples are met with at Ravenna, Padua, Bologna, Siena, and Pisa. Spain has also a beautiful cam- panile in the work of Guever the Moor at Seville, begun in 1568, and standing 350 feet in height. A church in the Italian style of architecture was built at Wilton, near Salisbury, about half a century ago, the belfry of which is a tall campanile connected with the main building by a covered arcade. The need of some protection of this kind for the ringers as they passed between the belfry and the church, must soon have become obvious to everyone in our northern climate ; and this probably accounts for the fact that the detached tower is chiefly found in southern Europe. With us the western, or the central, tower forming an integral part of the plan of the church, was probably the most usual design almost from the first. It is alleged, however (as by Grose in his " Antiquities "), that the old central towers were at first intended merely as lanterns to give light to the body of the church, and that it is for this reason that old examples are generally raised so little above the nave roof. Where we find, as is so frequently the case, that other storeys have been added to the "squat" original tower, it tells of the time when room was required for a peal of bells. Occasionally all the bells are not hung in one tower ; at Beverley, for instance, the peal hangs in the north tower, while the southern one contains the deep-toned funeral bell. The same is true of St. Paul's, and in other instances. A small turret over the chancel-arch frequently contained the "sacring- bell," when the rest of the bells hung in a western tower. 134 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. In the sister kingdom of Scotland, towers were never the rule in the case of ordinary parish churches, but a type of bell-gable of more imposing proportions and more elaborate design than the bell-cote of the English hamlet was evolved by their builders. Several good specimens of these still exist. There are mediaeval ones at Abdie, in Fifeshire, Dyce, in Aberdeenshire, and Corsragnel, in Ayrshire ; others of a more classic design, dating from the Renaissance period, may be found at Kinneff and Garvoc in Kincardine- shire, and elsewhere. The form which these take has been called a " bird-cage belfry : " they consist of four stone pillars on an oblong ground plan, or of two side-walls pierced, surmounted with a stone roof with mouldings ; the whole generally finished off with a stone ball, or other similar finial, bearing a weather-vane. A peculiarity with respect to Scottish steeples in the towns, is that they are frequently the property, not of the church, but of the municipality; the bells in these cases belong to the civil authorities, and are used by them for civil purposes during the week, though the church has the use of them on Sundays. It seems that in past times it was not unusual for the burgh to advance money for the repair of the edifice on the security of the steeple and bells ; hence the present state of things. In 1778, the council of the Burgh of Peebles agreed that the town should bear the cost of the steeple, clock, and bells of the new church there; and in return for this should continue to hold them as its property. Aberdeen, Dundee, Forfar, Stirling, and Mont- rose, all supply instances of the same arrangement. Occasionally, however, the church owns one bell absolutely} though that one does not always hang in the church steeple TOWERS AND CAMPANILES. 135 at all, but in the tower of the Tolbooth, or some other public building. A somewhat similar case exists at the curious church in Berwick-on-Tweed. There is no belfry to this building, but only two little "ornamental" cupolas; but the Town Hall bells ring the people to church. Colonel Fenwicke, one of Cromwell's officers, and governor of Berwick during the Commonwealth, was the leading spirit in the erection of this church, and probably he shared the Puritan dislike to " steeple houses." The introduction of change-ringing has had a serious effect upon the stability of some of our old towers. An erection that was thoroughly capable of withstanding wind and weather, and of bearing the weight of its two or three bells, gently swung as they were on their half-wheels, has frequently been put to a test beyond its strength when required to endure the swaying caused by eight or ten bells revolved in rapid succession, and that occasionally for an hour or more at a time. The ancient church of S. Leonard, Middleton, Lancashire, has a tower, the upper storey of which, erected in 1709, is of wood; probably because it was feared that the foundations were unequal to the weight of a heavier superstructure, such as was required for effectively hanging the peal of bells. In arranging a ring of bells in the bell- frame, care is always taken to make them swing in different directions, so as to neutralize to some extent the force of their revolutions ; but even so a distinct oscillation is imparted to the tower. The mischief has often been increased by ignorant joiners wedging the bell-frame tightly between the walls, when disaster can scarcely ever be more than a question of time. No serious evil need result where the frame is fixed in a reasonable way, clear of all the walls, 136 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. and the peal is not too heavy for the structure in which it hangs. Many English churches anciently had a small bell-cote for one or two bells, over the gable between the nave and the chancel, in addition to their belfry. In these hung the bells rung at the Elevation in the Mass. Such bell-cotes, now without their bells, may be seen at Isham, Rothwell, and Desborough, Northamptonshire, at Bloxham, Brize- Norton, Coombe, and Swalcliffe, Oxfordshire, and at Boston, in Lincolnshire. One complete in the possession of its bell is found at Long Compton, Warwickshire. CHAPTER VIII. QBeffmnging anb QBcff HAVING devoted considerable space to the consider- ation of the bells themselves, we turn to the question of their use; and, as is natural, the human agents in such employment of them first demand some attention. There is not much of interest, however, to record con- cerning these until comparatively modern times ; for although bells, as we have seen, are very ancient, bell-ringing as it is understood in England to-day is a thing of the last three hundred years only. In the days when churches usually had two or three bells only, and these were chimed or tolled singly, the bell-ringers' art was not one to attract notice. Charle- magne ordained that the clergy themselves were to sound the bells as a summons to divine worship, and as late as the last century the custom was regularly observed in some places ; at Notre Dame, in Paris, for instance, the priests, arrayed in surplices, rang the bells, and such is still the rule among the Carthusians. The churchwardens' accounts for the parish of Ludlow in 1551 have an entry of the sum of twelvepence paid to "the dekyns for rynginge of day belle;" and a trace of the same usage is to be found at Holy Trinity, Coventry, a century earlier. At Exeter, in 1511, the chantry priests were bidden to toll the bells, first one 138 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. and then all, at the canonical hours. Among the figures carved on one of the shafts of the chancel arch at Stoke Dry Church, Rutland, and on the font at Belton, Lincolnshire, are men in albs ringing church bells. These do not, however, necessarily represent clergy, but more probably members of the separate order, as it was in some cases accounted, of bell-ringers. The Council of Cologne, held in 1310, decreed concerning these, that "those persons whose office it is to ring the church bells, shall know how to read, in order that they may be able to make the responses ; and also that they shall wear the alb during divine service." From this it would seem that they filled to some extent the place of our now almost extinct parish-clerks. It is said, however, that a gild of ringers existed at Westminster as early as the reign of S. Edward the Confessor, and that it can be traced at least as late as the time of King Henry III., from whom it received a royal patent. It may reasonably be supposed that such a society was not absolutely unique, though the absence of any records forbids our supposing that such provision for the ringing of the bells was common. By the middle of the sixteenth century, ringing had become well known in the country, although it was probably of a somewhat unscientific sort; and already the ringers had gained that evil reputation for irregularity of life which so long, and it is to be feared to some extent justly in past days, clung to them. " The people of England," says Paul Hentzner, who travelled among them about the year 1550, "are vastly fond of great noises that fill the ear, such as firing cannon, beating of drums, and the ringing of bells ; so that it is common for a number BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 139 of them that have got a glass in their heads to get up into the belfry and ring the bells for hours together for the sake of exercise." Early in the following century more system and science were introduced into the art by the foundation of societies for the special study and practice of it. The " Scholars of Cheapside" came into existence in 1603, but the fraternity was probably not long-lived. In 1637 the far more famous "Ancient Society of College Youths" was established, taking its name from S. Martin's Vintry, on College Hill, London, where the "youths" practised. Other societies with a similar object quickly came into being ; Oxford, Cambridge, Norwich, and other places had their " scholars " or "youths," all eager to learn the intricacies of change ringing, and London saw others of these companies formed. The "Union Scholars" were founded about 1715, and lasted nearly half a century, and there still survives the society of the " Royal Cumberland Youths," so called from the Duke of Cumberland, but originally named the "London Scholars." Whether the existing "College Youths " can trace their pedigree in an unbroken line from the Ancient Society of 1637, is a debated question, some authorities maintaining that the original body died out in 1788. The "College Youths" started their career under dis- tinguished auspices, Lord Brereton and Sir Cliffe Clifton being among the founders, but their special claim to recollection in the history of bell-ringing lies in the fact that to them was dedicated Stedman's " Tintinalogia," the earliest book on the principles of change-ringing, published in 1667. 140 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Fabian Stedman, of Cambridge, is looked upon as the father of all modern bell-ringers, for to him is due that complex system of changes which makes a "peal." But little had been attempted in this direction before the year 1657, which date is assigned to the invention of "Stedman's principle " by him whose name it has ever since borne. In his "Tintinalogia" he thus refers to the art of ringing as practiced up to and at that time : " for the Art of Ringing, it is admirable to conceive in how short a time it hath increased, that the very depth of its intricacy is found out ; for within these fifty or sixty years last past changes were not known, or thought possible to be rang : then were invented the sixes, being the very ground of a six-score : then the twenty, and twenty-four, with several other changes. But Cambridge forty-eight for many years was the greatest peal that was rang or invented ; but now, neither forty-eight, nor a hundred, nor seven hundred and twenty, nor any number, can confine us ; for we ring changes adinfinitum" Stedman's system, as originally devised, was intended for application to a ring of five bells only, but it was very soon adopted to rings of seven, nine, and other uneven numbers. It would be out of place to insert here anything in the way of an elaborate treatise on change ringing; some account of what is meant by the term, is, however, necessary to the completion of our subject. The number of permutations possible in any given series of things is found by a well-known rule of arithmetic, namely by multiplying the consecutive numbers together. Thus, two things can stand only in two ways ; three in thrice as many, or six ways ; four in four times as many again, or twenty-four ways, and BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 141 so forth. Briefly, then, change-ringing consists of sounding a ring of bells according to every possible combination, each of which must be used once only. It is usual to commence with a " round," or the simple sounding of the bells in regular scale from treble to tenor ; the order must then be continually changed, without repetition, until every permu- tation possible to a ring of that size has been used. This would be a perfect and complete peal, but it will be obvious that in a ring of many bells it is impossible to actually ring all the changes. A ring of twelve bells, for instance, will allow of the astonishing number of 479,001, 600 ; changes which at the average of 24 changes per minute, would take nearly 38 years in execution. In dealing with such rings, therefore, a certain section only of the possible changes is employed at one time. Five thousand changes, which it is only possible to ring with seven or more bells, is the smallest number to which the name of a peal is technically allowed, less than that number merely constitutes a " touch." From the intricacy of the work, it will at once be obvious that both deft hands and clear heads are needed for it; the former to keep the bell in such perfect control as to insure its sounding only in the right place, and the latter to determine that place amid the continually changing variations. Several different systems have been composed for arranging the possible changes in rings of various numbers ; and each ringer must know by heart the course which his own bell is to take among the others, according to the special system employed. The oldest system is that known as a " Grandsire Bob," for five bells only. " Grandsire Triples " were invented by Benjamin Anable, who died in 142 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. 1755, and further elaborated by Mr. Holt. A manufacturer of barometers in the early eighteenth century, Patrick by name, was also a composer of peals. The names by which peals of different kinds are distinguished are curious. The Plain Bob, the Treble Bob, the Alliance (a combination of the preceeding two), and the Court Bob are all systems differing chiefly in the method in which the treble bell passes through the order of the changes. Another set of terms tells the experienced ringer the number of the bells in the ring ; those consisting of the odd numbers, three, five, seven, nine, and eleven, being denominated respectively, Singles, Doubles, Triples, Caters, and Cinques ; while the even numbers, four, six, eight, ten, and twelve, are called Minimus, Minor, Major, Royal, and Maximus. A Bob Major, that is a peal consisting of every possible permutation of eight bells, consists of no less than 40,320 changes, and this is the fullest complete peal that has ever been rung. An epitaph in Leeds Churchyard, Kent, records the accomplish- ment of this extraordinary feat : " In memory of James Barham, of this parish, who departed this life Jan. 14, 1818, aged 93 years: who from the year 1744 to the year 1804 rung in Kent and elsewhere 112 peals, not less than 5,040 changes in each peal, and called Bobs, etc., for most of the peals; and April 7th and 8th, 1761, assisted in ringing 40,320 Bob Major in 27 hours." This took place in the belfry of the church of the said parish of Leeds, and was performed by thirteen men, one of whom rang for eleven hours, and another for nine, out of the twenty-seven. The average rate at which this peal was rung was, as will be seen, rather over twenty-five changes per minute. The longest peal rung by one set of men only is said to BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 143 have been a Kent Treble Bob Major, which was rung at St. Matthew's, Bethnal Green, on April 27th, 1868. It con- sisted of 15,840 changes, and was completed under the conductorship of Mr. H. Haley, in nine hours and twelve minutes. Oxford has records of notable peals rung on the bells of Christ Church, New College and Magdalen ; as, for instance, one dated March 27 (Easter Monday) 1815, when ten thousand and eight Grandsire Caters were rung at New College in six hours and forty-two minutes. It is probably well that these exhibitions of skill cannot very frequently be given : for our fallen nature cannot always endure even sweet music for a quarter of a day, or more, without rest or respite. Many old churches with fine rings of bells have some record of past exploits by their ringers, the details of the peal being not infrequently painted on a board in the belfry. Allusion has already been made to the fact that bell- ringers in the past bore anything but the best of reputations. In the general carelessness concerning the fabric and furniture of the church, the belfry almost ceased at one time to be considered part of the consecrated building; the clergy seldom entered it, and the ringers and their friends went in and out much as they pleased, and rang their touches and peals for mere amusement ; until it became almost proverbial that even after calling the parishioners to divine worship the ringers usually turned their backs upon the church and sought the neighbouring ale-house. John Bunyan, some will perhaps remember, was in his early days one of the bell-ringers at Elstow ; but an employment which in better regulated times ought, from its sturdy exercise for the body, and its summons of the soul to prayer and praise, to be a help to a man, was found in those days to be a hindrance, 144 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. and was abandoned by Bunyan as he grew more thoughtful, together with profanity and Sunday " tip-cat," dancing and evil company. A curious illustration of the customs of the belfry in bygone days is the existence in several places of "ringers' jugs," which are generally careful to tell us by means of an inscription that they were intended for something stronger than water. At Hinderclay is one inscribed as follows : " By Samuel Moss this pitcher was given to the noble society of ringers at Hinderclay, in Suffolk, viz : Tho. Sturgeon, Ed. Loch, John Haw, Ric. Ruddock, and Ralf Chapman, to which society he once belonged, and left in the year 1702. From London I was sent, As plainly doth appear ; It was with this intent, To be filled with strong beer. Pray remember the pitcher when empty." Thomas Sturgeon and his four brethren of the " noble society " must have been thirsty souls, for the pitcher will hold sixteen quarts. At Clare is a similar jug of a slightly larger size. These are still preserved in the church ; another belonging to Hadleigh is kept at the "Eight Bells" Inn. It is dated 1715, and has the following lines, in addition to the names of the eight ringers of that date, roughly engraved upon it : " If yov love me doe not lend me, Evse me often and keep me clenly, Fvll me fvll, or not at all, If it be strovng, and not with small. Hadly." George Fox, the Quaker, sent in 1650, the following letter to the ringers of S. Peter's, Derby, his reason for so doing BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 145 being no doubt the general reputation for careless lives which such men then unfortunately bore : " Friends, Take heed of pleasures and prize your time now, while you have it, and do not spend it in pleasures or earthliness. The time may come, that you will say, you had time, when it is past. Therefore, look at the love of God now, while you have time ; for it bringeth to loathe all vanities and wordly pleasures. O consider ! Time is precious. Fear God, and rejoice in Him, who hath made heaven and earth." An old proverb which declares that " Singers and Ringers Are little home-bringers," obviously alludes to the fact that they were notorious for spending their earnings too readily and too selfishly. Some attempt was early made to keep the belfry in order by means of more or less elaborate rules, a copy of which was hung therein, or painted on the wall. The two oldest examples now extant are those to be found at Scotter, Lincolnshire, and at Dunmer, Basingstoke. The former painted in black and red Gothic letters, runs as follows : " Yow ringers All who heare doe fall And doe cast over a bell doe forfeit to the Clarke theirfore A Groute I doe yow tell & if yow thinck it be to little & beare A valliant minde ymore yow give vnto him then you prove to him more kinde." 10 146 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. The rules at Basingstoke, dating from the sixteenth century, are imperfect ; they now appear in this fragmentary form : . . . Bless the King . . . To the Sexton thay belong. pay him tharefore, do him no rong. Stand from the ringers a yard at least . . . 26 years pay i do not jest if any bell you over throw it cost you p . . . you So put of your hats else pay . . ." It may not be unnecessary to explain that overturning a bell, which is punished with a fine in these and other rules hereafter to be quoted, consists in raising it with such force as to break either the slide or the stay, so that the bell instead of resting mouth upward until brought back in the reverse direction, makes a complete circle and comes down on the wrong side. It is a serious belfry offence, because it renders the correct ringing of the overturned bell impossible without the repair of the broken timber. Here is a fuller form of rules found at Hathersage, Derbyshire, and with little alteration at Chapel-en-le-Firth, and at Tideswell : " You gentlemen that here wish to ring, See that these laws you keep in everything ; Or else be sure you must without delay The penalty thereof to the ringers pay. First, when you do into the bell-house come Look if the ringers have convenient room ; For if you do be an hindrance unto them Fourpence you forfeit unto these gentlemen. Next, if you do here intend to ring, With hat or spur do not touch a string ; For if you do, your forfeit is for that Just fourpence down to pay, lose your hat. BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 147 If you a bell turn over, without delay Fourpence unto the ringers you must pay ; Or if you strike, miscall, or do abuse You must pay fourpence for the ringers' use For every oath here sworn, ere you go hence Unto the poor then you must pay twelve-pence ; And if that you "desire to be enrolled A ringer here, these words keep and hold ! But whoso doth these orders disobey Unto the stocks we will take him straitway ; There to remain until he be willing To pay his forfeit and the clerk a shilling." The parish stocks frequently stood in the churchyard, and were therefore " convenient " for the application of summary punishment on an obstinate offender. Fourpence was long the traditional fine for the violation of belfry-law. The ancient rules at Scotter demand a " groute," and so do these just quoted, whose date is about 1650, and others at Culmington, Shropshire, which have the date 1663 affixed. The following regulations were in force at Tong, in the last named county, but whether they were calculated to improve the moral tone of the ringers may be questioned. " If that to ring you doe come here You must ring well with hand and eare, Keep stroak of time and goe not out or else you forfeit out of doubt. Our law is so concluded here ; For every fault a jugg of beer. if that you ring with spur or hat a jugg of bear must pay for that. If that you take a rope in hand these forfeits you must not withstand, or if a bell you ov'rthrow, it must cost sixpence ere you goe. If in this place you sweare or curse, sixpence you pay, out with your purse : 148 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Come pay the clerk, it is his fee for one that swears shall not go free. These laws are old and are not new, therefore the clerk must have his due. GEORGE HARRISON, 1694." At S. Andrew's, Plymouth, and at Landulph, in Cornwall, we meet with verses of a more ambitious character. They are dated 1700, and headed with the words, " Nos resonare jubent Pietas, Mors atque Voluptas." (Loudly we sound at the call of Gladness, Devotion, and Death.) " Lett awfull silence first proclaimed be, And praise unto the holy Trinity, Then honour give unto our valiant King, So with a blessing raise this noble ring. Hark ! how the chirping Treble sings most clear, And covering Tom comes rowling in the rear. Now up on end at stay, come let us see What Laws are best to keep sobriety, Then all agree and make this their decree. Who swear or curses or in hasty mood Quarrell and strikes altho' they draw no blood, Who wears his halt or spurs, or turns a bell, Or by unskillful! handling marrs a peale, Lett him pay sixpence for each single crime, 'Twill make him cautious 'gainst another time. But if the Sexton's fault an hindrance be, We call from him a double penalty. If any should our Parson disrespect, Or warden's orders any time neglect, Lett him be always held in foul disgrace, And ever after banished this place. Now round let goe with pleasures to the ear, And pierce with echo through the yielding air, And when the bells are ceas'd, then let us sing God bless our holy Church, God save the King. BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 149 Other places in Cornwall adopted these rules, with certain omissions and alterations ; they are to be found at Fowey, Wendron, Lanlivery, and elsewhere. At Southill, Bedfordshire, is a set of rules, partly in rhyme, partly in prose. It is entitled " Rules to be strictly observed by everyone who enters this belfry." " We ring the Quick to Church, the Dead to grave, Good is our use, such usage let us have. He who wears Spur, or Hat, or Cap, or breaks a stay, Or from the floor does from a bell rope sway, Or leaves his rope down careless on the floor, Or nuisance makes within the Belfry Door. Shall sixpence forfeit for each single crime, 'Twill make him carefull at another time. Whoever breaks or injures any of the Handbells shall make the damage good. We Gentlemen Ringers are nobody's foes, We disturb none but those who want too much repose, Our music's so sweet, so enchanting to hear, We wish there was ringing each Day in the Year. To call the folks to church in Time we chime three seven minute peals, stop one minute between ; toll the Tenor four minutes ; ring the Ting Tang three minutes. Total ]/z an hour. When mirth and pleasure is on the wing we ring, At the departure of a Soul we Toll." One of the longest forms of these rhymed belfry rules is that found at Grantham, the date being 1764. " He that in Ringing takes delight And to this place draws near These Articles set in his sight Must keep if he Rings here. The first he must observe with care Who comes within the door Must if he chance to curse or swear Pay sixpence to the poor. 150 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. And whoso'er a noise does make Or idle story tells Must sixpence to the Ringers take For melting of the Bells. If any like to smoke or drink They must not do so here Good reason why just let them think This is God's House of Prayer. Young men that come to see and try And do not Ringing use Must Six Pence give the company And that shall them excuse. So that his hat on's head does keep Within this sacred place Must pay his Six Pence ere he sleep ; Or turn out with disgrace. If any one with spurs to's heels Ring here at any time He must for breaking articles Pay Six Pence for his crime. If any overthrow a Bell As that by chance he may Because he minds not Ringing well He must his Six Pence pay. Or if a noble minded man Come here to Ring a bell A shilling is the Sexton's fee Who keeps the church so well. If any should our Parson sneer Or wardens' rules deride It is a rule of old most clear That such sha'nt here abide. The Sabbath day we wish to keep And come to church to pray The man who breaks this ancient rule Shall never share our pay. BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 151 And when the bells are down and ceased It should be said or sung May God preserve the Church and King And guide us safely home." Some of the lines in the above sets of rules seem to have become almost traditional, and they are found combined with various other doggerel " tags " all over the country. The following, from S. Mary's, Stow, Lincolnshire, is concerned rather with the apprenticeship of the novice in the art of ringing than with offences committed in the belfry, and is in other respects different from those already given s. d. " All you who hath a mind to Larn to Ring Must to the Sexton Admission money Bring - - - 2 6 Those Articles observed strict must be Or your expelled this Society. Two nights a week, Sirs, you must meet, or pay This forfeiture to us without delay - - - - -02 Or when the Sexton for you tools a bell You must appear, or else this Forfit tell - - - -02 And when you come upon this Bellfrey If that you noise or talk, this Forfeit pay - - - o I When you Round peals can Ring, you must pay down To be a change man, Sirs, just half-a-crown - - -26 On the first change that you have Learned to Ring One shilling more must pay, Sirs, that's the thing - - I o And every Ringer must spend more or Less As he thinks meet, to wish you good Success - - -02 If you would learn to prick a peal in Score Unto those Colledge youths you must pay more When you know Bob, Hunt, Single, Dodge compleat You'll not deny our Colledge youths a Treat - On our Feast-Day, the Twenty-ninth of May, Each member must, Sirs, just one shilling pay When our accompts are passed, Sirs, for truth And you are stiled then a Colledge youth, New Stewards then are chose, and, by the by, If that you do the Stewardship deny 152 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Your fine must pay as in the margin see - - - i 6 Then from your Stewardship one year are free. Those Rules peruse well before you enter, Its a hard task on which you venture. When once a member you are freely made Those Articles must justly be obey'd. So now, my Lads, admission money bring - - - 2 6 And we will Learn you presently to ring." These articles are attested by John Marshall, Master, and William Smith, Notary, and bear date March, ist, 1770. One cannot but feel in reading them that a novice in the belfry at Stow was made the most of by his elders. In some instances no attempt was made at weaving the code of belfry laws into verse. In the church at Glee are a set of " Orders to be observed kept by y e Bell Ringers in y e town of Clee, in y e County of Lincoln, from this 27th day of Novr. 1793, with the consent of the Rev. J. Stockdale Vicar." They cover most of the offences already noticed, such as ringing in hat or spurs, breaking the stay, leaving the rope's end lying upon the floor, and so forth ; the last two orders are : "Any person or persons who shall swear, lay wagers, etc., in ye ringing room, shall forfeit for every offence 3d, to y e use of y e ringers. Any person yt shall read any of these orders with his hat upon his head shall pay 6d to ye use, etc." Several other " codes " contain this last regulation, and since in each case it stands last of the list, so that the unwary would be unlikely to see it until the offence in question had already been committed, it seems probable BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 153 that it was inserted, not out of reverence to the rules, but as a trap for obtaining sixpences from strangers.* In spite of all these rules and regulations (most of which, it must be confessed, aim rather at making the man a good ringer, than at making the ringer a good man), the art of bell-ringing was at a very low ebb in the early part of the present century. Thus despondently does the Rev. Wm. C. Lukis speaks of it in a book already quoted (published as late as 1857) : "There are sets of men who ring for what they can get, which they consume in drink ; but there is very little love for the science or its music : and, alas ! much irreve- rence and profanation of the House of God. There is no ' plucking at the bells ' for recreation and exercise. Church- ringers with us have degenerated into mercenary performers. In more than one parish where there are beautiful bells, I was told that the village youths took no interest whatever in bell-ringing, and had no desire to enter upon change- ringing." The complaint is made specially concerning Wiltshire, but it was equally applicable to many, if not most, other counties. Here, however, as everywhere else, the revived Church life of the last half century has shown its power. The belfry is no longer used as a lumber-room for the sexton, nor as a lounge for the village idlers. Almost everywhere it is as well cared for within and without, in its degree, as any part of the church; and week after week from hundreds of steeples the music of the bells is sent throbbing across town and country by bands of willing workers, who throw head and heart and hands into the work * That little collection of notes on bells, " Curiosities of the Belfry," by John Potter Briscoe, F.R.H.S. (London : Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1883), contains some two score examples of these belfry rules. The present writer is indebted to the book for several interesting facts. 154 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. for the love of God and of His Church. That there are no neglected belfries left, and no drunken ringers still to be seen, amid the thousands of the former and the myriads of the latter in England, were too bold an assertion ; but this may be said without fear of contradiction, that the ill- repute of bell-ringers as a class has gone ; it has been lived down. An epitaph, which contains a record of a famous peal, has already been quoted ; it is by no means the only instance in which reference is made upon a tombstone to the ringer's love of his art. In the chancel of the church of Wainfleet S. Mary, Lincolnshire, is a slab with these words : " Under this stone there is a vault and therein lyes the Remains of Adlard Thorpe, Gent., a Sinner and a Ringer, who departed this life on the 24th of January, 1770, aged 58 years." In the same county, at Scothorne, the old sexton, John Blackburn, is thus commemorated : "Alas poor John Is dead and gone Who often toll'd the Bell, And with a spade Dug many a grave And said Amen as well." At Pett, near Hastings, is a brass tablet immortalizing the name of George Theobald, " a lover of bells," who "gave a bell freely to grace the new steeple;" but instances are not rare of ringers giving, not only their time and talents to their art, but their means also to provide the instruments required by it. The inscription on the treble and second bells at S. Peter's, Nottingham, records that they were given by the Society of Northern Youths in 1672, and re-cast by the BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 155 Sherwood Youths in 1771. At Aldbourne, Wiltshire, is a bell with the inscription : " The gift of Jos. Pizzie & Wm. Gwynn. Music & ringing we like so well And for that reason we gave this bell. Robt. Wells, of Aldbourn, fecit. 1787." By a quaint conceit, similar to that by which all drivers of post-horses were called " boys," all ringers of bells anciently considered themselves " youths." In each case the exercise indulged in was of so health-giving a nature, that the charac- teristics of youth, if not of boyhood, might well gain from it an unusually extended life. Old James Barham, whose ringing at Leeds and elsewhere has been noticed, lived to the age of 93 years, and cases are often quoted in proof of the longevity of bell-ringers. For example, at Painswick, in Gloucestershire, on May 5th, 1817, the longest peal of caters on record, consisting of 12,312 changes, was rung by ten men in seven hours and forty-nine minutes, and of these ringers one still survived in 1883 at the age of 91 years, and the rest had died at the respective ages of 89, 87, 85, 84, 80, 78, 71, 70, and 50. A modern instance of long- continued service in the belfry is sufficiently remarkable to deserve mention. Samuel Mayers, who still survives, took part in ringing a muffled peal at Christleton Church, Cheshire, on the occasion of the death of William IV. ; he also helped to celebrate the accession of Queen Victoria, and was present at his place in the belfry when a loyal peal was rung in 1887 to commemorate her Jubilee; and at the rejoicings for the sexagenary anniversary of her accession on June 22, 1897, he assisted in ringing a set of Holt's 156 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. Grandsire Triples of 5,040 changes, which occupied nearly three hours. Even in the belfry, however, the " youths " have not been suffered to maintain an absolute monopoly, and the "gentler sex " has tried its hand here and there at tolling and chiming ; but a company of female change-ringers has apparently not yet arisen. At Spalding, at the beginning of this century, and at S. Benedict's, Lincoln, at the same period, the widows of the sextons held their late husbands' offices for some years, and regularly tolled the morning bell. At Spring- thorpe, Lincolnshire, a funeral wreath and gloves, made of white paper, hang in the chancel, commemorating the sad death of a girl who was killed in unskilfully handling a bell, allowing herself to be drawn up by it, and dashed against the floor of the bell-chamber. Such tragedies, though happily uncommon, have happened elsewhere. In June, 1778, a ringer named Lilley was killed at Doncaster in a similar way. Some unknown hand has sought to immortalize the " youths " who rang the bells at Ecton, Northampton- shire, some hundred and fifty years ago. The belfry con- tains the portraits of the six, each holding the rope of his bell : they wear knee-breeches, with stockings and buckled shoes, their shirts are open at the neck, and their coats and vests lie upon the floor. The leader is represented as dressed in a somewhat better style than his companions, from which we may judge that he occupied a social position more or less in advance of theirs. The manners and customs allowed in the belfry in those days in too many instances, are illustrated by this quaint old painting, which represents, upon a bench on one side, a jug of beer, a mug, and five tobacco-pipes. BELL-RINGING AND BELL-RINGERS. 157 During recent years the old Societies of "College youths " and others have been supplemented by the estab- lishment of county or diocesan associations, under whose auspices the art and mystery of change-ringing have become more widely popular, and the status of the ringers deservedly improved. Occasionally the use of the church bells for peal-ringing is criticized, as if it were a secularizing of sacred things ; but the complaint is surely made somewhat thoughtlessly. If abuses are removed, so that the sacred character of the belfry, as part of the church, is neither forgotten nor ignored ; if the ringers be men whose conduct in the belfry and out of it be such as to bring no scandal on the Church, whose humble ministers they are ; and if they who ring for exercise and pleasure are those who also sound the summons to worship, and obey the summons which they sound ; there can be no more objection urged against peal- ringing, at proper times and within reasonable limits, than against a "voluntary" on the organ, or, to quote a closer parallel, against a "recital" thereon. And the belfry is not devoid of its spiritual force any more than the organ-chamber : he is indeed dense of soul, or hard of heart, that can hear unmoved the mellow music of the pealing bells across the green fields of Old England as the summer sun sinks west- ward to his rest ; and who has not felt his blood tingle and his spirit stir within him, as amid the hurry and bustle of the busy, selfish town, the mad clash and clangour of the bells on Christmas Eve, echoing from a dozen quivering steeples, tell him that " Christ is born " to bring on earth goodwill and peace ? The names of several distinguished men are to be found among those who have used the exercise of bell-ringing. In 158 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. the roll of the Society of College Youths are reckoned Sir Michael Hicks (in 1699), Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (in 1717), and Lord Mayor Slingsby Bethell (in 1756). Sir Matthew Hale, the Lord Chief Justice, was a bell-ringer; and Anthony Wood, the Oxford antiquary of the seven- teenth century, tells us that he " often plucked at them (the bells of Merton) with his fellow colleagues for recreation." Perhaps the most distinguished name of all, however, so far at least as worldly position goes, is that of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievitch, known as the Terrible. It was his delight to mount the belfry of his favourite monastery at Moscow, and toll the bell for Mattins at three or four in the morning. But in his case, at least, the music that fell from the throbbing metal was powerless " to soothe the savage breast." Ivan was both a fanatic and a tyrant, and turned, as if for relaxation, from Mattins to murder, and from villany to Vespers. The Ancient Society of College Youths assumed almost the dignity of a company ; they had their own beadle, who, armed with a staff surmounted by a silver bell, preceded them as they went in procession to Bow Church once a year. Now and again a bequest proves that the sweetly modulated music of the bells has found an echo in some grateful heart. Nell Gwynne, the frail and fair, left money for a "weekly entertainment" for the ringers of S. Martin's- in-the -Fields ; and in 1603, a worthy of Harleigh, Middlesex, remembered the ringers of that parish in a way, which, if not appealing to their poetic sentiments, perhaps touched their feelings in a more tender place he provided for them an annual feast of roast pork. CHAPTER IX. IN dealing with the uses of bells it is natural to speak first of that employment of them which was the original cause of their introduction into our churches, and still remains the most familiar evidence of their presence there ; namely, the ringing of the bells as a notification to the people of the ordinary services of their parish church. Amongst the Jews, it will be remembered, although small bells were known, solemn assemblies were summoned by a blast of silver trumpets. Thus ran the divine command : " Make thee two trumpets of silver, of a whole piece shalt thou make them : that thou mayest use them for the calling of the assembly, and for the journeying of the camps." (Num. x. 2.) Trumpet music in other respects also took, among that ancient people, the place filled among us by bell-music. In a later verse of the chapter just quoted, we read, " In the day of your gladness, and in your solemn days, and in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets over your burnt offerings, and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings." The ark of God was brought up to Jerusalem amid the sound of trumpets, and in a similar way the fall of Jericho was celebrated ; in a word, in circumstances where we look for the clash of bells, the Jews were familiar with the blare of clarions. Hue, the Lazarist priest, who travelled in Mongolia in 160 A BOOK ABOUT BELLS. 1844, found the same means employed for summoning the worshippers in Thibet. Among them also bells are known and used, but the calling of an assembly is thus described : " When the hour for prayer is come, a Lama whose office it is to summon the guests of the convent, proceeds to the great gate of the Temple, and blows as loud as he can a sea-conch, successively towards the four cardinal points ; upon hearing this powerful instrument, audible for a league round, the Lamas put on the mantle and cap of ceremony and assemble in the great inner court ; when the time is come the sea-conch sounds again, the great gate is opened, and the living F6 enters the Temple." At Willoughton and at Thorney are preserved tin trumpets, which are said to have served at one time for calling the people together. In the primitive Church during the times of persecution the use of bells, or any other public announcement of divine worship, was, of course, impossible ; but in their stead trusty messengers, called " runners," passed from house to house of the faithful, briefly stating the time and place ap- pointed for their next meeting. To this custom Tertullian seems to allude in the last chapter of his " De Fuga in Persecutione," "If you cannot assemble by day," he says, " you have the night, the light of Christ luminous against its darkness ; you cannot run about among them one after another, be content with a church of threes." In the eighth century the Greeks began to employ sonorous pieces of wood, much as we now use bells ; on high festivals, at solemn litanies, and when carrying the blessed sacrament to the sick, they struck upon these " holy boards." At a later time a plate of metal came to be used in a similar way, under the name of hagio$i