Between the years 1527-9, the parishioners of Great Dunmow collected £7 0s 7d for their new great bell to be cast in a bell foundry in London. (Great Dunmow is a town located approx 30 miles from London in North Essex on the Cambridge/Suffolk borders.) This was a highly organised collection instigated by the parish’s godly vicar and the local elite. The 153 names of parishioners, the location of their household within the town, and the amount each contributed was written in a most amazing primary source from this period – Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts. (This exquisite leather bound and tooled volume is now in the care of Essex Record Office.) In total, 7 parish collections were made between 1525 and 1538 for other religious artefacts needed in the church (including smaller collections for the Great Bell’s clapper and other, presumably, smaller, bells). Bells, at that time in pre-Reformation England, were significant religious objects. Cross referencing the lists of names for each collection with the returns from the 1520s Lay Subsidy Rolls (a tax enforced by Henry VIII) proves that contributions for the new bell were made by nearly every household within the parish – including the parish’s clergy and paupers. Paupers, exempt from Henry VIII’s Lay Subsidy tax, paid the unofficial church levy for the parish’s new bell. Many parishioners contributed the equivalent of a day’s pay.

The casting of a new church bell was a significant event in the life of this Tudor parish. Events leading to the collection are also evident within the churchwarden accounts. All the bells, and their clappers and ropes, consistently broke, as testified by regular payments for their repairs. After the 1527-9 collection, the accounts record a great flurry of activity. The churchwardens and local elite went back and forth to the bell-foundry in London to inspect the casting of their new bell. This incurred some expense as these men charged back to the parish church their expenses for food & lodgings for these many trips. Finally the bell was ready to be taken back to the parish church. Whilst the accounts’ purpose was only to list the expenditure and receipts received/made by the parish church, they manage to convey the sense of triumph the entire parish must have felt when the elite were finally able to go to London to ‘fett home the bells’. For which they paid a staggering £10 to the bellfounder. A further £6 13s 4d was paid out by the parish church ‘for makynge a new flower [floor] in the stepell & a new belframe & new wheles & stoke all owre bells redy to go’. The accounts are silent as to whether or not there was a grand opening ceremony for the new bell – but I rather suspect that there was. (The serious shortfall between the amount collected for the bell and the amount eventually paid out was not commented upon in the accounts!).

It was this same church-bell, cast in the London bell foundry, which rang out the joy of Queen Elizabeth’s summer progress through the parish over thirty years later on 25th August 1561. The pageantry and ceremony of her magnificent progress when her entire royal household moved from Lord Rich’s home in nearby Leez Priory to Lord Moreley’s estate in the Hertfordshire village of Great Hallingbury can only be vaguely determined from the single entry in Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts: ‘payd to the good wyfe barker for ale for those yet dyd rynge when ye Quenes grace cam thorow ye parysshe’. The ringing of the church bells would have been heard by all in the parish and surrounding villages.

Was this London bell foundry of the 1520s the predecessor to the 1570s bell foundry in your article? It probably was. Your blog alludes to the fact that the current master bellfounder is from an unbroken line that goes back to the 1420s. Gentle Author, if you could time-travel, I wonder how you would have described the 1520s Master bellfounder and his busy foundry; and the extensive negotiations between him and his demanding client for Great Dunmow’s new Great Bell?

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