The only other “Sunday use” to which I have to draw attention is the ringing of a bell after services. This is, or was, sometimes done with the object of notifying a service in the afternoon; but it is known in some places, as at Mistley, in Essex, as the “Pudding Bell,” it being supposed that it was intended to warn housewives to get ready the Sunday dinner! Some writers have thought that this midday bell is really a survival of the midday Angelus, or Ave bell; but it is more likely to date from the bad times of non-residence and irregular services.
The ringing of bells on festivals is more particularly associated with Christmas and the New Year, though the latter is a secular rather than a religious occasion. The Christmas bells have been a favourite theme with poets, great and small, and the best-known lines on the subject are in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, said to have been composed by him on hearing the bells of Waltham Abbey, in Essex (Plate [33]).
“The time draws near the birth of Christ;
The moon is hid; the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.”
And again:
“The time draws near the birth of Christ;
The moon is hid, the night is still;
A single church below the hill
Is pealing, folded in the mist.”
The more famous stanzas, beginning:
“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow;
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true,”
refer rather to New Year’s Eve.
On New Year’s Eve the old year is rung out and the new year in, in many parishes. Sometimes one bell only is tolled until the clock strikes twelve, in other cases the bells are rung muffled, i.e., with the clappers wrapped round to deaden the sound, these being uncovered at midnight, when a merry “open” peal bursts forth. Either practice is to be preferred to that of ringing consecutively before and after the hour, which obscures the significance of the performance.