The passing bell owes its origin to an idea of sanctity attached to bells by the early Catholics, who believed that the sound of these holy instruments of percussion actually drove the devil away from the soul of the departing Christian. Bells were moreover regarded formerly as dispelling storms, and appeasing the imagined wrath of heaven, as the following lines from Barnaby Googe will show:—
If that the thunder chaunce to rore and stormie tempest shake,
A woonder is it for to see the wretches howe they quake,
Howe that no fayth at all they have, nor trust in any thing,
The clarke doth all the belles forthwith at once in steeple ring:
With wondrous sound and deeper farre than he was woont before,
Till in the loftie heavens darke, the thunder bray no more.
For in these christned belles they thinke, doth lie such powre and might
As able is the tempest great, and storme to vanquish quight.
I saw myself at Numburg once, a towne in Toring coast,
A bell that with this title bolde hirself did prowdly boast:
By name I Mary called am, with sound I put to flight
The thunder crackes, and hurtfull stormes, and every wicked spright.
Such things when as these belles can do, no wonder certainlie
It is, if that the papistes to their tolling always flie,
When haile, or any raging storme, or tempest comes in sight,
Or thunder boltes, or lightning fierce, that every place doth smight.
Naogeorgus.
We find from Brand, that “an old bell at Canterbury required twenty-four men, and another thirty-two men, ad sonandum. The noblest peal of ten bells, without exception, in England, whether tone or tune be considered, is said to be in St. Margaret’s church, Leicester. When a full peal was rung, the ringers were said ‘pulsare classicum.’”
Bells were a great object of superstition among our ancestors. Each of them was represented to have its peculiar name and virtues, and many are said to have retained great affection for the churches to which they belonged, and where they were consecrated. When a bell was removed from its original and favourite situation, it was sometimes supposed to take a nightly trip to its old place of residence, unless exercised in the evening, and secured with a chain or rope. Mr Warner, in his “Hampshire,” enumerates the virtues of a bell, by translating two lines from the “Helpe to Discourse.”
Men’s deaths I tell by doleful knell.
Lightning and thunder I break asunder.
On sabbath all to church I call.
The sleepy head I raise from bed.
The winds so fierce I doe disperse.
Men’s cruel rage I do asswage.
There is an old Wiltshire legend of a tenor bell having been conjured into the river; with lines by the ringer, who lost it through his pertinacious garrulity, and which say:
In spite of all the devils in hell
Here comes our old Bell.[42]
Baron Holberg says he was in a company of men of letters, where several conjectures were offered concerning the origin of the word campana; a klocke, (i. e. bell) in the northern tongues. On his return home, he consulted several writers. Some, he says, think the word klocke to be of the northern etymology; these words, Ut cloca habeatur in ecclesia, occurring in the most ancient histories of the north. It appears from hence, that in the infancy of Christianity, the word cloca was used in the north instead of campana. Certain french writers derive the word cloca from cloche, and this again from clocher, i. e. to limp; for, say they, as a person who limps, falls from one side to the other, so do klocks (bells) when rung. Some have recourse to the latin word clangor, others recur to the greek καλεω, I call; some even deduce it from the word cochlea, a snail, from the resemblance of its shell to a bell. As to the latin word campana, it was first used in Italy, at Nola in Campania; and it appears that the greater bells only were called campana, and the lesser nola. The invention of them is generally attributed to bishop Paulinus; but this certainly must be understood only of the religious use of them; it being plain, from Roman writers, that they had the like machines called tintinnabula.