The curfew bell was a bell rung in the evening in Medieval England as a curfew signal. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
The curfew bell was a bell rung in the evening in Medieval England as a curfew signal. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
The custom of ringing the curfew bell continued in many British towns and cities, especially in the north of England, well into the 19th century, although by then it had ceased to have any legal status. [12] The tradition is still practiced in the town of Sandwich, Kent, where a curfew bell known as the "Pig Bell" at St Peter's Church is rung at 8 pm every evening for ten minutes. [13] At Ruthin in Denbighshire, the custom lapsed in the 1970s but was revived in 2020 after the bells of St Peter's Church were restored. [14]
At Penrith, Cumbria in the 19th century, the curfew was known as the "Taggy Bell", thought to be derived from the Old Norse tœkke, "to cover". [12]
The tyranny of William I is described by the poet Francis Thompson,
The shiv'ring wretches, at the curfew sound,
Dejected sunk into their sordid beds,
And, through the mournful gloom of ancient times,
Mus'd sad, or dreamt of better.
Chaucer writes on the curfew bell as just as a time, not a law:
The dede slepe, for every besinesse,
Fell on this carpenter, right as I gesse,
About curfew time, or litel more.
Shakespeare had unusual times for the curfew bell. In Romeo and Juliet, iv 4, he has Lord Capulet saying:
Come, stir, stir, stir, the second coch hath crow'd,
The curfew bell hath rung, tis three o'clock.
In Tempest, v. 1, Prospero says:
You, whose pastime'
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew.
This is the foul fiend, Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew
and walks to the first clock.
In the sixteenth century Bishop Joseph Hall's "Fourth Satire" it reads:
Who ever gives a paire of velvet shooes
To th' Holy Rood, or liberally allowes,
But a new rope to ring the couvre-few bell,
But he desires that his great deed may dwell,
Or graven in the chancel window glasse,
Or in his lasting tombe of plated brasse.
In the play The Merry Devil of Edmonton (published 1608), the curfew was at nine o'clock in the evening:
Well, 'tis nine a clocke, 'tis time to ring curfew
John Milton's put in his allegorical Il Penseroso's mouth the words:
Oft on a plat of rising ground,
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-water'd shore,
Swinging slow, with sullen roar...
In Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato these words are accompanied by a pizzicato bass-line, representing a distant bell sound.
The most famous mention of the curfew in English poetry is in Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750), whose opening lines are:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me
T. S. Eliot Gus the theater cat ("Old possum's book of practical cats")
When the curfew was rung, then I swung on the bell!
Eleanor Farjeon and Herbert Farjeon, William I – 1066 in Kings and Queens (1932). These poems were used to teach history to generations of British schoolchildren:
So William decided these rebels to quell
By ringing a curfew – a sort of a bell
And if any Saxon was found out of bed
After eight o'clock sharp it was "Off with his head!"
Change ringing is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a tightly controlled manner to produce precise variations in their successive striking sequences, known as "changes". This can be by method ringing in which the ringers commit to memory the rules for generating each change, or by call changes, where the ringers are instructed how to generate each change by instructions from a conductor. This creates a form of bell music which cannot be discerned as a conventional melody, but is a series of mathematical sequences.
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry was a business in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. At the time of the closure of its Whitechapel premises, it was the oldest manufacturing company in Great Britain. The bell foundry primarily made church bells and their fittings and accessories, although it also provided single tolling bells, carillon bells and handbells. The foundry was notable for being the original manufacturer of the Liberty Bell, a famous symbol of American independence, and for re-casting Big Ben, which rings from the north clock tower at the Houses of Parliament in London.
Campanology is the scientific and musical study of bells. It encompasses the technology of bells – how they are founded, tuned and rung – as well as the history, methods, and traditions of bellringing as an art.
A curfew is a government order specifying a time during which certain regulations apply. Typically, curfews order all people affected by them to not be in public places or on roads within a certain time frame, typically in the evening and nighttime hours. Such an order may be issued by public authorities but also by the owner of a house to those living in the household. For instance, an au pair was typically given a curfew, which regulates when they must return to the host family's home in the evening.
A bell tower is a tower that contains one or more bells, or that is designed to hold bells even if it has none. Such a tower commonly serves as part of a Christian church, and will contain church bells, but there are also many secular bell towers, often part of a municipal building, an educational establishment, or a tower built specifically to house a carillon. Church bell towers often incorporate clocks, and secular towers usually do, as a public service.
A bell is a directly struck idiophone percussion instrument. Most bells have the shape of a hollow cup that when struck vibrates in a single strong strike tone, with its sides forming an efficient resonator. The strike may be made by an internal "clapper" or "uvula", an external hammer, or—in small bells—by a small loose sphere enclosed within the body of the bell.
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A church bell in Christian architecture is a bell which is rung in a church for a variety of religious purposes, and can be heard outside the building. Traditionally they are used to call worshippers to the church for a communal service, and to announce the fixed times of daily Christian prayer, called the canonical hours, which number seven and are contained in breviaries. They are also rung on special occasions such as a wedding, or a funeral service. In some religious traditions they are used within the liturgy of the church service to signify to people that a particular part of the service has been reached. The ringing of church bells, in the Christian tradition, is also believed to drive out demons.
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Il Penseroso is a poem by John Milton, first found in the 1645/1646 quarto of verses The Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, published by Humphrey Moseley. It was presented as a companion piece to L'Allegro, a vision of poetic mirth. The speaker of this reflective ode dispels "vain deluding Joys" from his mind in a ten-line prelude, before invoking "divinest Melancholy" to inspire his future verses. The melancholic mood is idealised by the speaker as a means by which to "attain / To something like prophetic strain," and for the central action of Il Penseroso – which, like L'Allegro, proceeds in couplets of iambic tetrameter – the speaker speculates about the poetic inspiration that would transpire if the imagined goddess of Melancholy he invokes were his Muse. The highly digressive style Milton employs in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso dually precludes any summary of the poems' dramatic action as it renders them interpretively ambiguous to critics. However, it can surely be said that the vision of poetic inspiration offered by the speaker of Il Penseroso is an allegorical exploration of a contemplative paradigm of poetic genre.
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Thirteenth stroke of the clock or "thirteen strikes of the clock" is a phrase, saying, and proverb to indicate that the previous events or "strokes to the clock" must be called into question. This is illustrated in the fictional case of "Rex vs Haddock" in which a remark by one of the parties is compared to the thirteenth stroke of a clock: not only is this thirteenth strike itself discredited, but it casts a shade of doubt over all previous assertions. This proverb puts forth the notion that if just one of someone's proclamations is wrong, or something of a process is wrong, then the correctness and accuracy of all the previous items are called into question. In a legal case it brings forth the notion that perhaps none of the party's claims are valid, given that one of them is obviously wrong.
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