The writer is tower captain at St Cyriac & St Julitta in Swaffham Prior, and a historian specialising in change-ringing in the 18th and 19th centuries
Earlier this week, I arrived home from bellringing practice rather earlier than usual. The village pub was closed and we had to forgo the normal post-exercise refreshment. But otherwise, the evening had been a great success: for the past three months, my new recruits — who are training to ring for King Charles’s coronation on May 6 — have been learning how to control a half-ton bell swinging through a full circle. Now they were setting the church tower rocking to the sound of heavy metal.
Without those new ringers it is unlikely that our village bells would be heard for this coronation. We are not alone. There are many areas of the country where ringers are spread too thinly to meet demand. Earlier this year, the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers sounded the alarm. Its pre-coronation campaign, Ring for the King, has sought to find enough ringers so that churches throughout the land can ring both the “King’s” change and the “Queen’s” change (as some permutations of bells are known) to celebrate our new monarchs.
As new recruits quickly discover, there is more to ringing than just what meets the ear. Some simply enjoy making loud music on huge instruments; others relish the physical challenge; the mathematically-minded may be drawn to inventing new sequences and compositions. Those with a practical bent often find a role in maintaining the bells and their fittings.
Underlying all those is the sense of history. The bell ropes are telephone lines to the past. Each bell in our church was cast in 1791. They sound the same today as they did then. The music is based on the order in which the bells sound, and each different combination is a “change”. Pulling the rope with just the right amount of force and at exactly the right time to let the bell strike in its correct place is an art that has been practised for more than 400 years. We stand in the shadows of ringers long-dead, ringing the same patterns they would have done.
Continuity runs, too, through the occasions the bells mark. The genesis of change-ringing in the late 16th century coincided with the practice of using bells to celebrate the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne. Wherever she visited, bells were a required part of her welcome and a proxy reminder of her royal authority. In later centuries, bells were rung to mark a wider range of royal and civic events, such as parliamentary elections, mayoral appointments, military victories and the opening of assize courts.
For ringers, these were opportunities for lucrative reward. For a few they provided the mechanism for political protest. Opposition to George I and the Hanoverians was expressed through bells pointedly staying silent on the anniversary of his accession, while the ringing for his Stuart predecessor, Queen Anne, continued for many years after her death. Individuals would also pay to have bells rung for promotions, marriages, successful court cases, and winning racehorses. When 17 regulars at the Boot Inn won the state lottery in 1767, they paid half a guinea to have the bells in Cambridge rung for joy.
By the beginning of the 20th century, most of those entirely secular practices had been swept away. One of the few constants has been the royal connection. Bells ringing for the coronation of the third King Charles will continue a tradition that stretches back well beyond his two earlier namesakes. If the Central Council’s recruitment drive is anything to go by, enthusiasm for keeping that tradition alive is strong. Should church bells ever cease to be rung on such occasions, the Crown might infer that its days were numbered.
But there is no such risk at present. We will all be ringing changes in the belfry on May 6 and hoping that by then, the pub has reopened.
