‘The bell, like a speedy messenger, runs from house to house, and ear to ear’

Playing earwitness to the power of a bell’s potential reach, Protestant Bishop Hugh Latimer in 1552 concluded that ‘if all the bells in England should be rung together at a certain hour, I think there would be almost no place, but some bells might be heard there …’ ² So what then did these bells have to say? Impossible to contain, a peal of bells or a tolling bell was readily understood by those within earshot, for it was the auditory hallmark of a civil society. Bells offered sounds of hope and warning, life and death, religious conformity, diversity and dissent as well as national mourning, commemoration and celebration. Bells were a performative representation of the politics of everyday life making audible the mechanisms of gender and status divisions, as well as religious diversity and political continuity, change and for some a form of sonic static.