The words that the church bells are saying
One of the bells cast in 1702 for the church of St Mary at Walsgrave on Sowe, Warwickshire, bears the inscription: “Harken do you heare our clappers want beere.” It is a sentiment, notes the editor of Exploring England’s Belfries, that would not have been expressed on a bell before the Reformation or indeed since the church revival of the 19th century (even if bell-ringers might have felt it).
We’re very lucky that church bells were never the object of fierce iconoclastic reformers. Inscriptions on bells in England go back 700 years, yet we unringing landlubbers seldom see them, though we hear their chimes. A good selection appears in this new pictorial essay by the photographer and bell expert Christopher Dalton, with helpful notes by Richard Jones.
“Ile crack no more. Now ring your fill. Merry George I was and will be still,” says a bell from 1671 defiantly, at Brailes in Warwickshire. Round the shoulder of a bell from 1626 at Loders, Dorset, capital letters declare: “Ay may I sounde Glory to God on hie. Thanks to my frends in swetest harmonie.”
In earlier centuries bells were usually pious. “Ave Maria” say the letters on a 14th-century bell at Edmondsham, Dorset. This is not in a church. It was discovered by Dalton on the roof of a private property. “The bell is a beautifully smooth, clean casting,” he noted. “The tone and tuning do not disappoint: the carefully designed shape of the bell has ensured that it has almost exact trueharmonic tuning.”
Richard Jones explains in five or six pages what tuning and tone entail in a bell. Bells have a strike-note, the primary pitch, known as the “nominal”. After the initial sound of the strike, a more persistent “hum” note is heard, about an octave lower. There is also a minor third above the strike note, known as a “tierce”. Two more sounds can be made out by careful listeners: the “fundamental” or “prime”, which may be flat from the strike note by a semitone or more, and the “quint”, a fifth above this fundamental.
All these produce a tone, and the most noticeable is whether the strike and the hum are exactly an octave apart. Often in old bells they are not, and some think of this as “old-style tuning” even if it was not intended.
A bell could be tuned after it was cast by chipping or scratching away metal inside the open end – the sound bow. (Parts of bells have names, of course, and a labelled photograph in the book shows the canons at the top, the shoulder, the waist and the moulding wires above and below the lower sound bow.)
There is also an account of how bells are cast. It is astonishing that the precise shape and strength of large bells was mastered in the Middle Ages. A mould was made out of a loam mixture of sand and clay, held together with dung, hair or hay. A “false bell” made of wax was modelled over an inner mould and covered with an outer mould before the wax was melted and lost. The loam mould was fired hard before molten metal was run into the space where the wax had been.
At Hanford, Dorset, Dalton found an 11thcentury bell with imprints of barley straw at the canons, the arched fittings from which the bell is hung. The straw had perhaps been used as a wick to melt the wax of the false bell.
It was in Dorset that Dalton made his name through a three-volume study of its bells. His photographs are black and white and his admiration for Edwin Smith (1912-71), the photographer who excelled in tranquil church interiors, is clear in this new collection. Dalton died in 2008, aged 66, and this beautifully produced book serves as a kind of memorial to his patient work.