The Bells of England
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THE BELLS OF ENGLAND BY J. J. RAVEN File 05 – Chapters XIII, XIV, XV, XVI Pages 193 to 261 This document is provided for you by The Whiting Society of Ringers visit www.whitingsociety.org.uk for the full range of publications and articles about bells and change ringing CHAPTER XIII THE TUDOR PERIOD IF judgment is to be formed from some of our histories, the Reformation epoch would indeed have been, not only a blank in the production of bells, but a day of extinction for those existing, " Bells, rich in silver, still hung silent in remote church towers, or were buried in for the vaults. Some few peals of bells were spared a time, but only under conditions of silence," says Mr. Froude.* I suspect that there is nearly as slender a basis for the silence as for the silver. Somebody else tells us that only one bell was left in each tower. This I have just tested for Norfolk and Suffolk, with the result that at the present day in the former county there are seventy-eight churches, and in the latter eighty-one, in which hang more than one pre- Reformation bell. In two little Suffolk churches, Athelington and South Elmham St. Peter, hang the very three bells which are named in the returns of 1553. Dr. A. D. Tyssen makes a like remark about Sussex. Nevertheless, there were some bad cases in East Anglian parishes,! as elsewhere. Monastery bells, of course, generally disappeared. They were useful for casting cannon, and from the county of * History of England, v. 459. t Church Bells of Suffolk, p. 91. o 193 194 THE BELLS OF ENGLAND Lincoln alone the value of metal handed over to Mr. Charles Morris for this purpose amounted tO;^832. Much important detail on this subject is given in Gasquct's Henry VIII. and the English Monasteiies* In a few cases the monastery- bells were bought by parishioners of adjoining villages for their churches. The amount of bell metal brought into the market had its natural effect on price, so that it is no matter of surprise that Richard Bellasis wrote to Thomas Cromwell that he could only get fifteen shillings a hundred- weight for those at Jervaulx Abbey. The Commissioners of 1553 did not ask for returns, but summoned the church- wardens before them. The original summons remains in the church chest of Bedingfield, Suffolk, requiring these officers to " appere before the Kyng's ma'''*'* sayde Comyssyoners at Ypswych the Secounde day of Maya next ensuenge before ix of the clocke. And that ye brynge before them (All excuses sett ap'te) All and everye suche p'cell of plate Jewells metall or other ornamente (whatsoever they be) belongyng to yo'' churche chapell Guylde Brotherhude ffraternytyes or copanyes as doe Remayne in yo custodye or of eny other psonne or psonnes to y'' knowledge the uses aforesayd as yow wyll answere upon othe. The grete Belles and Saunce Belles in the Steples only excepte." Herein the procedure differed from that in 1547, when returns sufficed. Unfortunately, most of these earlier cer- tificates have perished, only 179 from Essex and Suffolk remaining out of a thousand and more in the "Miscel- laneous Books " of the Augmentation Office.f The Com- missioners' Book for 1553 gives 1669 great bells, and 85 " Sancts " bells for Suffolk, without Ipswich and Thetford * Pages 273, 420-422, t No. 510. THE TUDOR PERIOD 195 St. Mary's, the grand total being 1812 against 1864 a few years ago. A similar result will be found in Norfolk, the gain in larger rings in towns more than counterbalancing the loss in cutting down the pretty little threes in villages. Whatever might be the intentions of such Edwardian authorities as Somerset and Northumberland, the depreda- tions show the action of local churchwardens rather than of the bureaucracy. The general stagnation of enterprise in the cataclysm which lasted from the breach between Henry VIII. and the Papacy till the accession of Elizabeth shows itself in the blank in Stahlschmidt's list between William Culverden, ob. 1522, and Robert Mot, of Whitechapel, whose earliest date is 1570. Norwich work collapsed between the death of the last of the Brasyers in 15 13, and the enfranchisement of William Barker in 1530. He died in 1538, and after three years came a four years' flicker under Thomas Laurence. Then all subsides till the enfranchisement of John Brend, first of that family, in 1573. At Bury St. Edmund's there is a similar break between Roger Reve and Stephen Tonni. The skilful Sir William Corvehill of Wenlock, who, among other arts, was a good bell founder and maker of frames,* lived on to 1546, with a possibly dull time of it in his later years. We get glimpses of Cuffe of Ilchester, c. 1540, from Bishop Hobhouse's Somerset Church Wardens Accounts,] of Robert Cocke, or Coke, ten years later, from those of P>am- lingham, of two Londoners—John Owen, of Houndsditch, and Thomas Taxstede, from Mr. J, R. D. Tyssen's Surrey Inventories. But these exceptions and the like only sub- stantiate the general result, that little or nothing was stirring till Elizabeth's time—indeed, till she had reigned some seven or eight years. The remembrance of the writ de Jiczretico * Willis's Cun-cnt Notes, 1856, p. 39, t iv. 204. 196 THE BELLS OF ENGLAND coniburendo in action, the wild talk of those who would abolish all things which tended, according to their ideas, to " noryshe any kinde of superstition," the general unsettle- ment of the realm, took some time to work off. Then about 1570 came a revival, and from that date till the Parliamentary war foundries had a busy time. Then John Wallis, of Salisbury, put his familiar initials on many a cheerful bell now sounding over the downs or in the vales of Wessex. Then a like work was done for East Anglia by John Brend, of Norwich, and Stephen Tonni, of Bury St. Edmund's. At Nottingham Robert Ouerneby and Henry Ovlfeld joined their forces, casting, with many others, the tenor of the eight which now hang in the west tower of Lincoln Cathedral.* The foundry at Whitechapel had a struggle at first. In 1578 Robert Mot twice petitioned the Lord Treasurer for the payment of a debt of £\o \Qs. due to him for eight years past from Henry Howard, Esq., alleging that " your said poor orator is greatly impoverished and come into decay, and is likely every day to be arrested for such debts as he oweth." t He died in 1608, and divers of his bells remain in Surrey, the second at Fetcham being remarkable for bearing the Norwich sprigged shield used by the Brasyers, which we shall also find in evidence at Leicester. Here the foundry seems to have suffered less than most others from the Tudor troubles. Passing after the death of William Millers, of whom mention has been made, to Thomas Newcombe, who married the widow and died in 1520, it fell into the hands of the widow's third husband, Thomas Bett, a wealthy man, * The Querneby family wants looking up. V, Thoroton's Nottinghamshire^ P- 235- t State ijapers in tlie Record Office, quoted byTyssen, Church Bells of Sussex, p. 21. — — THE TUDOR PERIOD 197 who left his foundry to his son-in-law, Robert Newcombe. Three sons of this Robert were connected with their father's business, and they appear to have done remarkably well. Simultaneously with the later Newcombes were the three Wattses, Hugh I., Francis, and Hugh II., of whom the two latter used the Norwich sprigged shield. When North was writing his Leicestershire book he obtained a rubbing from South Luffenham, Rutlandshire, which turned out to read HEW WATTS MADE ME 1563. In the following year Francis Watts bought the bell wheels from St. Peter's, Leicester, then being taken down. There must have been some connection with Norwich, the Brasyer lettering also appearing on some of these midland bells, A favourite inscription of the second Hugh was -i-JHS : NAZARENVS : REX : IVDEORVM : FILI : DEI : MISERERE : MEL North says that there are still nearly ninety examples of this inscription remaining in Leicestershire, and that they were called " Watts's Nazarenes." The latest date for the New- combes on a bell is 1617, so that their business was in some way absorbed by the house of Watts. We shall find the last of them engaged in making Old Tom o' Lincoln quite at the end of his career. The village of Datchworth, near Welwyn, in Hertford- shire, had its foundry in the days of Queen Mary, when an inquiry was made in 1557 about the weight of the fourth bell at Graveley, which formerly belonged to the Priory of Wymondley. It was estimated at " xviij hundryth wcyght and tht is with the most," by '* a bell founder woos name is Clarke dwellyng at Thestwurth." The family seems to iqS THE BELLS OF ENGLAND have been dispersed, and John Clarke, whose bells are found, c. 1600, from Wrentham in Suffolk to Eastry in Kent, a son or grandson of the Datchworth man, as it would seem, is Fig. 45. clearly itinerant. So is also the contemporaneous John Dier, ranging over Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Essex. With Bury it is otherwise ; and under Stephen Tonni the THE TUDOR PERIOD 199 old burgh of St. Edmund resumes the status which it pos- sessed in the later Plantagenet period. The spelling of the surname in the previous generation had been Tonne.