The bells, the bells!

I've been listening to church bells ringing for the last 30 minutes or so. Although I live in a Kent village the local church is Norman and only has a single bell used for calling the congregation to service. I'm not sure where the ringing was coming from, the sound of bells can travel a long distance, but I suspect that a team of guest ringers was visiting a nearby village church. I used to do a bit of bell-ringing myself a few years back, when I lived in Hertfordshire, but not for long enough to become really proficient.

In some parts of the country the changes are made by a conductor calling out numbers but in most towers 'method ringing' or 'scientific ringing' is used based on a mathematical series. (Our Captain of bells was, in fact, a maths don at Cambridge.) I never got to grips with it and tended to ring by ear, which according to the ringers marked me out as a 'natural'. The bells constitute a single musical instrument played by up to 12 people!. Most country towers have six or eight bells and these days often have trouble finding sufficient ringers for all of them. I found this interesting piece at Answers.com.

Method ringing, or "scientific ringing", is what bell ringers usually mean by "change ringing". The theoretical goal of method ringing is to ring every possible change in sequence; this is called an "extent" (in the past this was sometimes referred to as a "full peal"). If a tower has n bells, they will have n! possible permutations, a number that becomes quite large as n grows. For example, while six bells have 720 permutations, 8 bells have 40,320; furthermore, 10! = 3,628,800, and 12! = 479,001,600. Estimating two seconds for each change (a brisk pace), we find that while an extent on 6 bells can be accomplished in half an hour, a full peal on 8 bells should take nearly twenty-two and a half hours (in 1963 ringers in Loughborough accomplished the feat in just under 18 hours), while an extent on 12 bells would take over thirty years! In practice, then, when ringing larger numbers of bells ringers have to settle for only a portion of a complete permutation-series.

Bellringers do not cycle through the various permutations in haphazard order; nor do they typically try to read off each row from a mind-numbingly repetitive list of numbers tacked up in the ringing chamber. Instead, various algorithms or methods have been developed which the bellringers can learn conceptually, so that they can deduce most rows from their predecessors without seeing them all written out; when necessary, a caller or conductor (usually one of the ringers) will call out to let the ringers know when they must make some slight variation to the pattern.

Listen to the bells of St. John the Baptist, Burford. The sound of an eight bell country church tower.

(Control or right click to download the mp3 file.)

Next Sunday morning open the windows, play it on full volume and recreate the wonderful sound of England!