We attempt the difficult, but there is no virtue in what is easy.

From Akenfield by Ronald Blythe

Ardua molimur: sed nulla nisi ardua virtus
We attempt the difficult, but there is no virtue in what is easy.

Written in the Ipswich Senior Society’s records after it had attempted a peal of 6144 Treble Bob Major at Woodbridge Church, March 1851.

Robert Palgrave · aged fifty-five · bellringer, tower captain

Handel called the bell the English national instrument and still, in a great loud web of percussion, there are the hundreds of bellringing societies, guilds and associations which unite town with village from one end of the country to the other. The societies are ancient but those belonging to them are invariably called “youths,” and there is something in the tensely permutating atmosphere of the ringing chamber, the dozen or so reaching out figures, the leaping ropes and the blindingly passionate clamour above, which suggests the climatic ascension of young blood. The ringers are utterly absorbed. Such a total absorption takes over their mortgaged, class-bound, year-measured lives that these conditions of existence are temporarily cancelled and the Self revels in noise, logic, arithmetic and a kind of intoxicating joy which accompanies the striking of one’s own particular bell in the deafening harmony.

The ringing men must reach stages of exultation which are on a par with those of cannabis, but if this is so there is no outward evidence to prove it. The less extreme degrees of pleasure derived from the art of campanology are similar to those derived from chess. Yet, perhaps because all bells are feminine and are “raised” or “turned over” by the neat strength of the bellmen to “speak” their Pleasures, Tittums, Superlatives and Surprises, something less entirely cerebral than chess causes the contentment. The towers literally rock and the peals can be so overwhelming for those living near the church that the belfry windows are louvred so that the sound can be cast out at the highest level.

Ringing is an addiction from which few escape once they have ventured into the small fortress-like room beneath the bells, and the sally—the soft tufted grip at the end of the rope—leaps to life against the palm of the hand like an animal. There then begins a lifetime of concentration, of perfect striking and a co-ordination of body and mind so destructive to anxieties and worries of all kinds that one wonders why campanology isn’t high on the therapy list.

The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with the names of saints, princes, squires, parsons and merchants, as well as rhymes and prayers, engraved on their sides. The ringing men know them both by parish and individually, and will travel from tower to tower across the county in pursuit of a particular sound. The world to them is a vision of belfries. Some part of the general fretfulness of humanity seems to be soothed by this vision. Theology is put to the count. Lost in an art-pastime-worship based on blocks of circulating figures which look like one of those numismatic keys to the Great Pyramid’s secret, the ringing men are out on their own in a crashing sphere of golden decibels. The great changes are mesmeric and at half-way through the “attempt” the ringers are drugged by sound and arithmetic. Their shirt-sleeved arms fly with the ropes and, because their whole personality bends to the careening mass of metal above, they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them. They are famous for avoiding church services. They keep in touch by means of a weekly magazine called The Ringing World which, to the outsider, presents a scene of extraordinary fantasy. The ringing men are indifferent to all the usual “craft” or ancient art talk and are a different race altogether to Morris Dancers, say. They just walk or drive to a given tower—the fact that the building is a church is always a secondary consideration—and ring. The curious thing is that the sweet uproar of change-ringing is so integral a part of the village sound that it is often not consciously heard. When listened to by the non-ringer, the general effect is soothing, bland, a restoration of God to his heaven and rightness to the world. The reality of what is occurring is known only to another ringer.

Bellringing is one of the most claiming activities imaginable. The magnificent noise and belfry drill took John Bunyan over completely and his description of his efforts to abandon the obsession has the desperation of a man longing for drink or sex.