The Upside Down: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Twenty-eight years ago, not long after I’d moved to Great Tew, I became a bell-ringer. 

Part of this was motivated by the desire to throw myself into as much of rural life as I could – I returned to church and joined the village flower show committee too – but there was also a fascination with the idea of making public music, of learning to perform a ritual the rules and meanings of which had been handed down across three centuries. 

Change-ringing, to give it its full name, is a peculiarly British invention. 

There are more than 5,000 church towers in Britain (most of them in England) that carry bells mounted on large wheels in frames so the timing of their ring (or ‘strike’) can be controlled by the ringer, and only 300 in the rest of the world. Nobody knows why exactly.  

Bell founding began in China in 1,200 BC and spread through Asia and into Europe.

By 400 CE, Paulinus, the Roman senator-turned-Christian bishop, was recommending that bells be incorporated into religious worship. There might have been an element of regional marketing in this – he was from Campania, famed for its bronze and iron work, so much so that the Latin for bell is campana (from which we get the word ‘campanology’ for the art of bell-ringing).

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The first bells in Britain were probably the small handbells used by the early Christian missionaries to call people to prayer. Bell towers holding larger, louder bells started to be built across the country in the 6th Century – perhaps to warn of invasion or call local populations to arms – and had reached a sufficient critical mass by 750 for Egbert, the Archbishop of York, to recommend the ringing of church bells at certain times of day.  

Also in Anglo-Saxon England, in order to call yourself a ‘thane’ – their version of aristocrat – you had to own 500 acres of land complete with a church and tower. Which might explain why there are so many.

Medieval English bell-ringing resembled that of the rest of Europe, a process called chiming in which bells mounted on a simple pulley and frame were agitated in no particular order.

It wasn’t until after the Reformation that the technological breakthrough of the large wheel, with a stay and slider to prevent the bell over-tipping its 360° circle, meant that real control could be exerted. Setting a bell takes practice but it means you can pause its ringing, and speed up or slow down its strike. By the late 17th Century, this new flexibility meant that church bells could be ‘played’ and a new pastime was born.

Change-ringing was built on a series of ‘methods’ and the principles remain the same to this day. 

The aim is to ring for as long as possible without repeating a sequence, bearing in mind that each bell can only swap places with the bell either in front or behind it. On six bells, the maximum number of simple permutations is 720 (mathematicians would call this 6 factorial or 6!) which takes about half an hour to ring. To get to that maximum, ringers had to ‘dodge’ – i.e. move in front of or behind other bells. 

Calling these ‘bobs’ and ‘singles’ is the job of the conductor and they generated thousands of different methods that can be played on a ‘ring’ of bells, from three to 12. 

To ring all the permutations on seven bells requires 5,040 permutations or ‘changes’ which would take about three hours to ring and is known as a ‘peal’, the ringers’ gold standard. 

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The methods themselves are often named after the place they were first performed (such as Carlisle Surprise or the Reverse Canterbury Pleasure). All have to be approved by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers and are recorded in various publications as both strings of numbers (each row showing the order of the bells – somewhat like genetic code) and a blue line showing the path of a bell as it moves through the method. This line helps the individual ringer memorise the work they will need to perform.

If that sounds challenging, believe me it is. I haven’t rung for a few years now – I could handle a bell well enough but found the maths too challenging. Bell ringing is a great leveller.

Six of the eight bells at Great Tew were hung in 1709 by Abraham Rudhall of Gloucester, the greatest bell founder of his time, who perfected a way of tuning the bells with a lathe rather than a chisel. Our tenor bell, tuned to D, weighs more than a ton and is inscribed ‘God Save the Queen’ (Queen Anne was monarch).  

Listening to the complex harmonics it produces – especially when the clapper is muffled for a funeral – is to hear a genuinely 18th Century sound and to be reminded that, one day, it really will toll for me.