One day all the sunken church bells will surface and speak to us, sternly

Hans Faber
Jun 2
29 min read

Updated: 4 hours ago

Imagine a time unlike ours. When there were no engines, amplifiers, and speakers, and the sounds you heard were made by the actions of men, beasts, or the elements of nature. Be quiet and listen. Can you hear the chatter of children and vendors, and the hooves of horses on the streets? Can you hear the loose sails of docked ships flapping, drying in the wind? A time when communities, villages, and towns were of manageable size. This soundscape was a world where both the sounds of the bells could still carry far, and that was not until even so very long ago. It travelled over fields and water, through alleys and over tiled rooftops. For centuries, yes, even for millennia, bells and the messages they communicated were deeply embedded in the social and spiritual life of the community worldwide—also along the southern shores of the North Sea. But today, the bells are being pushed to the margins. Therefore, in this blog post, we toll the bells and tell their ancient story.

The bells in Europe have not fallen silent, yet—nor have the diverse meanings and interpretations we continue to find in their sound. Two recent examples can illustrate this. Examples that 'coincidentally' are connected to environmental threats; deadly pandemics and global warming.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in the early spring of 2020, with the first lockdown and hence a time of great uncertainty and fear about what the coming months would bring, the different church communities in the Netherlands initiated Klokken van hoop en troost (‘bells of hope and solace’). Every Wednesday from 19:00 until 19:15, the chime of church bells filled the air all over country, filled the empty and dead-quiet streets. It was an expression of solidarity, encouragement, and connectedness—of community and overcoming isolation. Churches wanted everyone to know that they were there for the people and they were all in this together, whether you were Catholic or not (Stegeman 2022).

The second example is of a very different nature. In 2018, sculptor and musician Marcus Vergette started the Time and Tide Bell project—listen to the bell. Vergette developed a new bell shape that can produce different tones at the same time and that is clear and rich in harmonics. Currently, bells are placed at thirteen locations along the shores of Britain. The idea is “to celebrate and reinforce connections in local communities, between the land and the sea, between ourselves and our environment.” Moreover, the bell sculptures are placed in the context of sea level rising and will ring with each tide or storm. For the bell community to reflect on the relationship with the sea and listen to the message of the bells. Just so you know—hint hint—the project is still looking for new coastal communities who want to place a bell at their shoreline.

In other words, bells have a voice and speak. They send messages. And these could be of all sorts. A well-known medieval engraving written on, among others, the thirteenth-century bell of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi reads (Arnold & Goodson 2012):

Sabbatha pango, funerea plango, fulgura frango. Excito lentos, domo cruentos, dissipo ventos.

I determine the Sabbath, I lament funerals, I break lightning. I rouse the lazy, I tame the cruel, I disperse the winds.

Yet other common medieval engravings on European church bells read: Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango ('I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the lightning'), Mortem clamo, Deum fortem populum voco. Festaque sanctorum orno, vim fugo daemoniorum ('I proclaim death, the mighty God; I call the people together, glorify the Saviour’s feasts, and drive away the power of evil spirits'), and Daemones angо ('I torment demons'). When reading these lines, you can hear the bells tolling in the night when a hurricane from the sea makes landfall; rousing the people and trying to drive away the storm and danger. But there are countless more similar inscriptions. Further below, we will give some more inscriptions betraying that bells are regarded almost as living entities.

That bells communicate to us is not an abnormality of Europeans alone. Actually, it is universal. Bells fulfil an important function in the rituals of great religions worldwide. Not only in Christianity but also in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shintoism. Islam is not mentioned because bells have no function in this also great religion. Even more, bells are considered instruments of the devil by Islam. And not only are bells relevant in an ecclesiastical context, but in many more domains as well, not least in sagas, legends, and folklore, often with a normative connotation. And again, worldwide. Just to name a few random sagas from the four corners and winds of the world: The Dambeck Bells in Röbel, The Talking Bells of the Yoruba People, The Sacred Bells of the Congo Basin, Zulu War Bells, The Whispering Bell of Bukhara, The Bell of the Tien Shan Mountains, The Buried Bell of Samarkand, The Lost Bell of Nalanda, The Ghost Bell of the Thar Desert, The Sacred Bell of Mahadeo Hills, The Eternal Bell of Swayambhunath, The Haunted Bell of Gorkha Durbar, The Sunken City of Valverde in Galicia, etc, etc.

The Saga of the Banished Bell of Uglich — On 15 May 1591, in the town of Uglich in Russia, people found the body of the son of Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1547-1584). Supposedly, the ten-year-old boy was killed during an accident while playing with a knife when he had an epileptic seizure. When the town bell announced the death of Ivan’s last son, the people of Uglich rose up because they suspected a murder orchestrated by regent Boris Godunov. The government of Godunov cracked down on the rebellion, and the people of Uglich were punished severely. Also, the bell was held responsible. Like a criminal, it was publicly flogged with fifty lashes, its tongue or clapper removed so it could not chime anymore, and banished to Siberia. According to the witnesses, the bell wept when its tongue was removed. It is also claimed that you can still hear its sound in Siberia as an echo of protest against tyranny and injustice.

The Russian writer and activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), who was banished as political prisoner to Siberia, used this saga as a metaphor for the unbreakable human spirit and the power of truth against tyranny (Kramer 2015).

The bell seems to be part of our social memory. Once we hear its chime, it makes an appeal to us. Either the high tone of a small iron-cast bell or the deep tone of a bronze-cast church bell weighing a few thousand kilos, its sound alert us. Just like the crow of rooster does too. From jingle bells announcing joy to storm bells warning of danger. In other words, a bell is a Signalgeber, meaning 'signal giver' in the German language, and it does something to our brains. Just try to audiolize the sound for a moment, which is, by the way, a more difficult mental exercise than visualizing something.

It is therefore not surprising that the bell appears in cultural expressions, like books, movies, and music. Think of the famous novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, written by Ernest Hemingway (1940), the bell symbolizing inevitable fate, death, and sacrifice. That death comes to us all. But also think of the pivotal scene in the movie Once Upon a Time in the West, directed by Sergio Leone (1968), when the older brother of Harmonica, played by Charles Bronson, is hanged on a rope hanging from an arch with a bell attached to it. The chime of the bell marks the moment when Harmonica could not support his brother any longer; he fell to the ground, and his brother was strangled by the rope, mortuos plango. Just before the murderer of Harmonica’s brother, the villain Frank played by Henry Fonda, is revenged by Harmonica you hear the bell tolling again; the moment and sound of judgement.

The same chime of a church bell can be heard in the dramatic scene when Louisa McKenna, played by actress Brenda de Banzie, jumps off the tower in the kasbah of the city of Marrakesh in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Much directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1956).

Some facts from the history of bells

The origin of the bell itself is China and lies at least 5,000 years behind us, dating back to the Yangshao culture in the northeast of the country. During this period, the first bronze clapper bells were cast. A clapper bell is a type of bell that produces sound when a clapper, namely a metal tongue or striker suspended inside the bell, strikes the inner surface of the bell as it swings.

With the emergence of Confucianism in the sixth century BC, the pursuit of harmony became central in Chinese philosophy. Harmony in society, but also harmony between nature and art. To achieve harmony, music played an important role. After all, it is about combining different sounds and tones into a pleasing whole. And in that music, the bell as instrument played a central role in ancient China. In Chinese mythology Yellow Emperor Huangdi, who is said to have lived 4,500 years ago, invented music at his court. He had ordered to make music instruments, including the casting of twelve bells. These bells reproduced the sound of a phoenix pair, a mythological bird representing harmony. (Kramer 2015).

An extraordinary archaeological find in China is the bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng, dating to the year 433 BC. In 1978, the tomb of Yi was excavated, and inside were 65 bells that were part of one big musical instrument, a kind of carillon. The bells are of the strung bell type, or bianzhong. This means you hit the bell on the outside with a mallet or hammer. The bianzhong of Yi is cast in bronze and is diamond-shaped, hence not round-shaped. They can produce two notes, depending on where on the surface you strike them.

Bells in Christendom

From ancient China and Confucianism, we make our way west to the early beginnings of Christendom, and skip all the rich history of bells in Asia, Scythia, and Central Asia, of the great religions Buddhism and Hinduism. Slowly moving in the direction of the southern shores of the North Sea. It is through the Christian faith, namely, that the bell got its central social function within Western society in the course of the Middle Ages. When exactly bells as such existed in Europe is uncertain, but they were already around when Christianity started to spread from the Eastern Mediterranean into Europe 2,000 years ago. We do know, for example, that the Celtic peoples on the British Isles and in Brittany used metal clapper bells made of sheet iron by then, bronze-gilded or not. Celts mastered the production and forging of iron well.

The introduction of the religious meaning of bells in the Christian faith probably started with the Coptic monastic life in Egypt and Sudan in the fourth century. Here, the first monasteries were founded, and also here the concept of the wandering or peregrine monk comes from. Coptic monks lived an ascetic life of isolation, fasting, and austerity. They used bells to ward off evil. Think of Saint Anthony the Great, born in Egypt around AD 300, who lived as a hermit in the desert. Saint Anthony is often depicted with a bell. Next, Coptic monasticism was adopted by the Irish monasteries in the fifth century, and it was the Irish monks who stood at the base of monasticism in Western Europe (Kramer 2015).

From the end of the sixth century, the Irish monks played a dominant role in the Christianization of the continent. Monks, armed with only a crozier (a staff annex shepherd's hook), Bible, and bell, wandered through Europe, defying the seas and mountains between Iceland and Italy, living as hermits and spreading the gospel, while also promoting monastic life and founding monasteries. It is also called the peregrinatio dei, which translates to 'wander for God'. When the Norwegians colonized Iceland in the late ninth century, they found croziers, books, and bells that must have belonged to Irish monks, which they called papar ('father/priest'). An Irish monk who speaks to the imagination is Saint Brendan of Clonfert, who travelled the seas in the first half of the sixth century. The lighthouse visible in the featured image of this blog post stands on the Wadden Sea island of Terschelling in the province of Friesland and is named after Saint Brendan, namely Brandaris. It was built in 1594.

It is not clear when exactly bells fulfilled a prominent role in monastic life and, subsequently, in Christendom in general because the old Latin texts merely refer to signum/signa (‘signal/signals’) to call for prayer, also as signum dare (‘signal given’) or signum ecclesiae (‘signal of the church’). Hence, most old texts are not conclusive about when these signals to summon for prayer and structure the day were produced with bells and when not, and thus with other means. Therefore, until the seventh and eighth centuries, there is only sporadic evidence of the use of bells in monasteries. In the first quarter of the ninth century, the existence of bell towers in Gaul is attested in the old texts (Arnold & Goodson 2012).

At the same time, the cast bronze bells with their well-tuned sound most probably were a development in Western Europe. The typical flared, wavy shape of the cast bell, like an inverted tulip, evolved throughout the Middle Ages and reached its definitive form in the late fifteenth century. The introduction of new materials, i.e., bronze, and new techniques, allowed large resonant bells to be cast. It had reached its optimum shape to produce the most pure, rich, and melodious tone (Blaauw 2021, McEachern website). The bell with the name Pretiosa, meaning ‘precious’, in the Cologne Cathedral, cast by bell founders Christian Cloit and Heinrich Brodermann in the year 1448, is regarded as one of the most beautifully sounding bells to this day. A bell that continues to resonate due to its immense mass, more than 10,000 kilograms. Another bell famous for its sound is also called Pretiosa and hangs in Saint Martin’s Cathedral in the town of Utrecht. It was cast in 1505 by bell founder Gerard van Wou and weighs almost 5,000 kilograms.

But handbells were part of the standard missionary gear of wandering monks in an earlier stage. They were probably used for the rhythm of the day, when to work and when to pray, but also during funerals and to warn of danger (Ó Floinn 2018). A famous and very old handbell is that of the missionary monk Saint Patrick from the British Isles, the Apostle of Ireland. He lived in the fifth century, but when exactly is debated. The bell that is attributed to Saint Patrick, called Clog Phádraig (‘bell of Patrick’) in the Irish language, has been preserved. It is a classic rectangular handbell made of sheet iron. Together with its richly decorated shrine, it is kept in the National Museum of Ireland. It is considered one of the most precious relics of the Roman Catholic Church. If one were to ring it, you would hear the same sound as 1,600 years ago. Preservation of sound above vision.

image of Saint Columbanus and the handbell with shrine of Saint Patrick

One of the Irish monks who majorly contributed to the conversion of parts of the continent is Saint Columbanus (543-615). With crozier, Bible, and handbell, he travelled with a party of twelve monks through Europe, walking from the island of Iona in the west of Scotland to the town of Bobbio in the north of Italy (Kramer 2025). Picture Columbanus' bell together with the ones of the other monks echoing through the wheat fields and rural villages of post-Roman Gaul while he was passing by. Like a flock of sheep being herded. In 1950, French statesman Robert Schuman dubbed Columbanus the father of Europe, who brought spiritual unity and “le patron de tous ceux qui cherchent à construire une Europe unie" ('the patron saint of all who strive for a united Europe'). One of the monasteries he founded is Luxeuil Abbey in the north of France. This monastery would become one of the most influential in Europe. The bell of Saint Columbanus must have been a rectangular handbell made of sheet iron.

See also note for suggestions for hiking the route of Saint Columbanus.

Monk Adalbert — Following the path of the Irish monks, Anglo-Saxon monks educated in the Irish monastic tradition also started evangelizing on the continent. Especially the monastery Rath Melsingi in northern Ireland played a central role in preparing and sending off monks to the mainland. One of them was the Anglo-Saxon monk Adalbert, who joined Saint Willibrord to help convert still heathen Frisia at the end of the seventh century. Adalbert would eventually become the patron saint of the Egmond Abbey in the current province of Noord Holland. The abbey was of great significance for the rise of the counts of West Frisia and the emergence of the County of West Frisia, which later, from around 1100, became the County of Holland. For more about Saint Adalbert and his life in West Frisia, read our blog post The Abbey of Egmond and the Rise of the Gerulfing Dynasty.

By the twelfth century, bells fulfilled a central role in Christendom. And although the exact nature and extent of the use of bells in the Early Middle Ages cannot be reconstructed, there is ample support that bells already played an important role in Christian identity and culture before the High Middle Ages. We know that Saint Patrick distributed fifty handbells over churches in Ireland (Ó Floinn 2018). Furthermore, in the mid-eighth century, in Al-Andalus, i.e., Islamic Spain, there were conflicts between Christian and Muslim communities over the use of bells and the muezzins calling the adhan, the call to prayer. In the tenth century, the Umayyads considered bells as trophies upon defeating the Christians. Much later, in the thirteenth century, during the Reconquista, Zayyan ibn Mardanish, the last Muslim ruler of Valencia, warned the Hafsid rulers in Tunis that the adhan might soon be replaced by the chime of bells (Arnold & Goodson 2012).

coexistence or rivalry between adhan and bell—town of Chania on Crete, Greece

By now, in the twelfth century, different terms for bells, namely campanum, signum ‘signal’, tintinnabulum ‘small bell’, vas ‘vessel’, and clocca or glocca, stemming from the Old Irish word clocc or Welsh cloch. Compare also clock, cloche, klok, and Glocke in English, French, Mid Frisian, and German, respectively. A remnant of those wandering Irish monks with their bells, perhaps?—bringing to mind merry Santa Claus with a hat full of little jingling bells. The term campanum is still used. Today, campanology is the study of bells. Think this is exotic? Know you can do a Master’s in Fairy Tale Studies at the University of Utrecht for real. It is often said the name campanum for bell derives from the region of Campania in Italy, but whether that is true we do not dare to say. However, the claim of the Campanians that their region is also the origin of bells, is too heavily imbued with bias anyway.

Tolling tower bells

So, from the beginning of Late Antiquity, the sonorous toll of the bells increasingly became an important part of the overall rituals and symbols of the Christian faith in Europe. From the sheet-iron bells of wandering monks to bells being used in monasteries to structure the day—when to wake up, when to work, and, of course, when to pray: ora et labora. Bit like the opening and closing of the New York Stock Exchange, which is signaled with a bell too: labora, and less ora. In the High Middle Ages, bells undisputedly gained a prominent role in the Christian secular community, thus extra claustra monasterii, outside the walls of the monasteries as well. From the ninth century onward, during the Romanesque Period, the building of bell towers really took off, and in the following centuries was succeeded by full-swing, sky-scraping church towers with heavy bronze-cast bells, summoning the village, town, and wider surrounding area to come to church to pray.

For the sake of completeness, it is good to mention that the interaction between the development of towers as part of monasteries and churches on one hand, and that of bells on the other hand, is still not clear to historians (Blaauw 2021). One aspect is that originally, bell towers were built separately from the church; only later were tower and church integrated. Many examples of high-medieval free-standing belfries can still be found in the region of Ostfriesland and, to a lesser extent, in the province of Groningen.

Around the year 1200, church bell towers reached their final stage of development and have, at their core, remained largely unchanged to this day. It was then, thus, when the bell towers had become an inseparable part of the Christian community, that bells communicated an array of messages. No longer did the voice of the bell only summon the people for prayer, but it also announced celebrations, weddings, births, dangers, and death, or more generally, marked important events in the community and called for collecta, assembly. Different messages were, and are, communicated through distinctive ways of tolling the bells, varying in pattern, length, and, if available, choice and sequence of various bells, each with a distinctive tone. But also the manner in which the bell was rung. When a clapper bell was struck with a hammer, it meant there was a fire (Van der Ven 1970). Of course, with the introduction of mechanical clocks in the High Middle Ages, church towers began striking the hours of the day, too.

belfries of Midlum in region Ostfriesland and of Zeerijp in province Groningen

And parallel with the ever-rising Babel-like towers of medieval churches and cathedrals, the bells got bigger and bigger—heavier, purer in tone, and their mighty peal resounded across ever-wider distances in Western Europe. Above we already mentioned the bell Pretiosa in the Cologne Cathedral weighing over 10,000 kilograms. The other bell of the Cologne Cathedral, called the Petersglocke or Dikker Pitter ‘fat Peter’, with a diameter of more than 3 meters, weighs even twice as much, namely 24,000 kilograms.

Newly hung bells in a church tower were, before they were sounded, consecrated by a priest, a practice that continues to this day within the Roman Catholic Church and is known as Benedictio Campanae (‘blessing of the bells’). The ritual consists of sprinkling with holy water, anointing with sacred oils, incensing with the thurible, and, of course, prayer and psalms. Often, bells are inscribed or dedicated to a saint or angel as well. The consecration underlines the sacral nature of these bronze-cast bells. With this ritual, magical powers were attributed to ward off evil spirits, storms, lightning, etc. All this underlines that bells are seen as intermediaries between heaven and earth, too (Blaauw 2021).

That the blessing of church bells was no unnecessary luxury is proven by the legends from the village of Ankum in the state of Lower Saxony and from the village of Bergkirchen in the region of Westphalia. In both places, the inhabitants had forgotten to bless the bells. The bells of Ankum flew out of the tower’s belfry the very first time they were rung. They vanished into the earth, and to this day, their sound can still be heard. The bells of Bergkirchen likewise flew out of the tower and landed in the pond Glockenteich, where they are said to remain to this day ( Kuhn & Schwarz 2018). This also applied to the bells of the Saint Odulf monastery in the town of Stavoren. Because the abbot had forgotten to consecrate the bells, the devil was able to take them out of the tower and started playing with them in the sky. Where the bells fell to the ground, the lakes Fluessen and Morra were created.

Not only ecclesiastic authorities communicated through bells with the community, the secular authorities started to the same. Town and city halls got their own towers and bells, communicating celebration and danger as well, but also the ratification of verdicts, confirmation of council decisions, confirmation of property transfers, the closing of the city gates, etc (Blaauw 2021). Together with the church bells, they strike the hour of the day as well.

Estimations are that in the High Middle Ages, the city of Rome counted about two hundred church towers, with ever more bigger and louder bronze bells. Audiolize—as sketched at the beginning of this blog post—in a world without engines, amplifiers, and speakers the cacophony of bells during major religious or secular events. Already when the towers struck twelve o'clock the racket must have been tremendous. If you were in a serious conversation or trying to concentrate on reading a book, forget it. Too much noise and distraction. Whether this eruption of sound can still be regarded as harmony, we are not sure. Going back to the social relevance of bells in medieval society, we like to quote the Groningen historian Johan Huizinga (1919);

Er was één geluid, dat al het gedruisch van het drukke leven steeds weer overstemde, en dat, hoe bont dooreenklinkend, toch nooit verward, alles tijdelijk ophief in een sfeer van orde: de klokken. De klokken waren in het dagelijksch leven als waarschuwende goede geesten, die met bekende stem dan rouw, dan blijdschap, dan rust, dan onrust kondigden, dan opriepen, dan vermaanden.

There was one sound that continually rose above the bustle of busy life—a sound that, no matter how richly overlapping, was never confused, and momentarily lifted everything into an atmosphere of order: the bells. The bells were like watchful good spirits in daily life, who, with familiar voices, announced now sorrow, now joy, now peace, now unrest—at times calling, at times warning.

A church that has been making some noise in Rome and the Vatican, too, since the mid-twelfth century is the Santi Michele e Magno, better known as the Friezenkerk or Church of the Frisians. The church tower of the Friezenkerk happens to be the oldest Romanesque tower in Rome. For decennia, its bells were silent, though. That is not a good thing because silent bells are associated with death. The reason was a much-needed restoration of the wooden bell frame. In 2019, the two bronze bells of the Friezenkerk, which were cast in 1757 and 1768 by the bell founders of the Vatican Angelo en Felice Casini, were hung back and from then on joined the Roman cacophony again. The bells are named (Archangel) Michael and (Saint) Magnus, the patrons of the church (Friezenkerk Rome 2019). For more about the history of the Friezenkerk, read our blog post Magnus’ Choice. The Origins of the Frisian Freedom.

Mythologization of church bells

With the virtually central position that church bells held within the community from most of the Middle Ages onward, their role as intermediaries between the heavenly and the earthly, their ritual blessing, and the great amount of money and effort invested in them, it is only natural, or even inevitable, that many sagas and legends grew up around them. This happened not only in Western Europe but worldwide, as we have seen earlier in this blog post.

Bells are more or less regarded as living beings, with their own voice and temperament. They are believed to possess mythical powers, such as protecting against danger and driving away evil spirits. As agents of both sound and sanctity, they are often given names or nicknames, and many bear inscriptions that describe their specific character or purpose. We already mentioned the bells Pretiosa and Dikker Pitter. In Museum Vleeshuis ('meat market hall') in the city of Antwerp in Flanders you can gaze at an old storm bell with the Latin inscription that reads orida vocor which translates to 'I am named horrible'. The bell, known as Orida, was cast in the year 1316 and was part of the Church of Our Lady until it was torn down in 1930. In the great tower of the Saint Martin's in Groningen one of the bells is called Salvator meaning 'saviour'. And so we could fill an entire evening program with bell names.

Some (more) examples of inscriptions on bells that reveal the almost human nature of bells are: Laudo Deum Verum, plebum voco, congrego clerum, defunctos ploro, pestum fugo, festa decoro, vox mea terror est daemonorium ('I praise the true God, I call the people, I gather the clergy, I mourn the dead, I drive away pestilence, I adorn the feasts, my voice is a terror to demons'), “Meinen Namen habe ich aber nicht eingeschrieben, da ihn der Heilige Geist bereits in dein Herz geschrieben hat,” ('but I did not write down my name, because the Holy Spirit has already written it in your heart'), “Wenn mein Ruf erschallt, eile zu Hilfe, Maria” ('when my call sounds, hurry to help, Mary'), "Sancta Katerina bin ick gheheten, de van Ulrum leten mi geten" ('Saint Catherine is my name and the people of Ulrum had me cast'), Maria ick heite, de van Eppinghehusen leten mi gheten" ('I am called Mary; the people of Eppenhuizen had me made'). Also, the aforementioned inscription orida vocor shows the living nature of bells. And, again, these are just a few examples to illustrate.

Saint Thomas ringing — A tradition that caused some stir in the province of Friesland over the years is the tradition of Sint Thomas ringing. Tradition was that between the feast day of Saint Thomas on 21 December and New year’s Eve the church bells would chime uninterrupted, day and night. Origin was to purify the world from evil before a new year would start. This was in the nineteenth century still a vivid tradition among youngsters in the southeast of the province of Friesland. A time when there were no fireworks.

belfries of Goingarijp, Sonnega, and Oldeouwer in province Friesland, and on Mandø Island in region Jutland

In 1841, Saint Thomas ringing gave some unrest in the town of Drachten. That year the ringing was forbidden by the grietman, the local magistrate, under—probably—the pretext that it all cost too much money. The belfry frame, or klokstoel in the Mid Frisian language, was, after all, too old and would need to be repaired. At first, the youngster accepted the decision, but once it was Christmas and they heard the chime of bells everywhere in the area, they started tolling their own bell. Fifty-eight soldiers from the town of Leeuwarden had to restore order (Lanterfanten website).

In 1892, again the tradition Saint Thomas ringing caused commotion. It even provoked an uproar. In the village of Oudehorne it caused too much disturbance and in 1892 the mayor had the belfry frame or klokstoel relocated to the village of Brongerga. In the end, the mayor had the belfry returned to Oudehorne.

For a long time, young people remained very eager to ring the church bells on New Year’s Eve. The father of one of the Frisian bastards, who originated from a farm close to the village of Langezwaag in the southeast of the province of Friesland, climbed, when he was a teenager, together with a friend the church tower on New Year’s Eve in the early ’60s and started tolling the bell. They had climbed up the outside of the tower, along the copper lightning rod, and crawled inside through the belfry openings. It alarmed, of course, the pastor. When soon after the constable arrived, too, the pastor said to the constable: “Ga van mijn erf!” (‘get off my property’), hence protecting the boys.

To this day, although adjusted and less invasive, the tradition of Saint Thomas ringing still exists.

Finally, let's zoom in on the church bell sagas and legends along the southern shores of the North Sea, more specifically the Wadden Sea coast, which was part of medieval Frisia, because they are legion. In a note at the end of this blog post, we have made a short but very incomplete overview of the Frisian, Groningen, and Dithmarschen church bell sagas we came across. Recurring themes, occasionally combined, of these sagas and legends are the following:

Church bells being stolen by neighbouring villagers, either out of having no means to finance a bell themselves, either out of envy or jealousy because of its enchanting sound;
Church bells that refuse to ring or, on the contrary, bells that ring by themselves. The latter often in relation to the arrival of the pope, a saint, or relics, or to warn the community of upcoming danger. But also because they need to tell the truth;
Church bells that have not been blessed, allowing the devil to take hold of them;
Church bells that, for various reasons, disappear into the ground or vanish into the water—with variations depending on whether it is a swamp, a lake, or, the sea. These are so-called sunken bell sagas. Especially Frisian sagas often have the sunken-in-sea variant;
Rich villages, towns, or cities whose inhabitants grow arrogant, idle, and commit blasphemy. As a punishment from God, the settlement, together with its bells, disappears beneath the sea, or sometimes into a lake, swamp, etc. The church bells can still be heard, tolling from beneath the water as reminder and warning.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

Book of Ecclesiastes

Sagas and legends telling about sunken bells and submerged settlements, often as a punishment for being too proud and idle, and not being humble, are not specifically Frisian. Just think of the Chinese saga about the Leifeng Pagoda and the sunken bell, the Dutch saga about the Slobbetjes Tower of the sunken town of Zevenbergen, the Slovenian saga about the sunken bell in Lake Bled, the Breton saga of the sunken cathedral of the city of Ys, and, lastly, the English saga about the town of Dunwich swallowed by the sea. The theme of being swallowed by water is above all a Christian one and aligns with the idea that, in the Old Testament, water washes away sin and sinners; Book of Genesis for example. In this way, sinners are punished by God. This is also the reason why, until the mid-twentieth century, storm surges always received the name of the Catholic saint of the day. They were considered a divine punishment and ordeal.

Albeit not exclusively Frisian, the Frisian saga corpus has more than quite a few that recount sunken bells. That their numbers are large has to do with the fact that Frisians, a people living on the sharp edge of sea and unprotected land, dwelled in a natural environment where they were confronted with great floods, loss of life, livestock, and property, and the loss of monasteries and villages to the sea. What the Bible described was not an abstract and distant world preached by a priest from behind the pulpit, but a very recognizable and often harsh reality, certainly during the High Middle Ages, when the coastal regions of the southern North Sea were ravaged by many devastating storm surges. For more on how the sea plagued the Frisian lands, read our blog post Half a million deaths. A forgotten North Sea disaster…

Bells are the Omega

The Alpha of this blog post is the title saying that one day all the sunken bells will surface again and speak to us sternly. Over time, the bells have been pushed to the margins of society and lost much of their once central role in the community. Many people are not aware of its existence and role anymore, especially in the bigger towns and cities. Reasons for this include, as said, the increased motorized noise or noise pollution, endless new ways of wireless communication, the process of secularization, and the eroding sense of community in general.

A town without a bell is like a man without a soul.

‘A Bell for Adano’ by John Hersey (1944)

But if we take all the bell sagas in the world and all the bells that have been submerged or buried in seas, lakes, ponds, swamps, and earth over the past centuries, the number of bells must be truly gigantic. When, on the day they surface, all the bells ring together, it is going to be a deafening spectacle, surpassing even the cacophony of high-medieval Rome. To know what the message or judgment of the resurrected bells will be, we recount a saga from the village of Bergum in the heart of the province of Friesland:

According to legend, there used to be a village where Lake Bergum now lies, in the center of the province. This village had a church with beautiful bronze bells. However, the villagers had become idle and godless. They mocked faith and tradition and no longer observed the Sunday rest. One day, God decided that it was enough and that the villagers were to be punished. The earth opened up, and the entire village sank into the depths, including the church and its bells. To this day, at midnight or on New Year’s Eve, you can hear the bells ringing from the depths of Lake Bergum. This is said to be a warning.

Besides the bells ringing as a warning, it is also said that when the bells rise above the water and ring clearly again, humanity will have been restored from its sins and wrongdoings, and a time of peace and prosperity will begin.

A time humanity gets a second chance. Listen to the bells and grab it!

Note 1 — Small inventory of bell sagas and legends along the Wadden Sea coast, in other words the regions of Nordfriesland (Nordfr.), Dithmarschen (Dithm.), Butjadingen (Butj.), and Ostfriesland (Ostfr.), and the provinces of Groningen (Gron.) and Friesland (Frl.), including some key words.

The Easter Bells of Neukirchen (Nordfr.): theft, ringing beneath water
The Lost Bell of Fohr Island (Nordfr.): doom, ringing beneath water
The Bell of the Saint Nicholas Church on Sylt Island (Nordf.): theft, doom
The Ghost of Bell on Amrum Island (Nordfr.): doom, ringing by itself
The Bells of Keitum (Nordfr.): theft, blessed, enchanting sound
The Bells of Rungholt (Nordfr.): pride, richness, sunken town, ringing beneath water
Brunsbüttel and the Bells in Balje (Dithm.): theft, enchanting sound, water, pride, no sound
The Krempen Bell (Dithm.): doom, enchanting sound, lamenting sound
The Luther Bell of Hemmingstedt (Dithm.): doom, hope
The Flounder Catch on Sunday (Butj.): devil, warning
The Handprint on Rodenkirchen's Bell (Butj.): explanatory
The First Bell (Ostfr.): theft, ringing beneath water
The Ayenwold Bell in Sand Lake (Ostfr.): theft, ringing beneath water
The Bells from Riepe in Uphuser Lake (Ostfr.): theft, water
The Bell Sound Openings of the Neermoor Tower (Ostfr.): theft, enchanting sound
The Pewsum Bell ‘Oll Eej’ (Ostfr.): theft, water
The Geese from Uttum (Ostfr.): theft
The Bells of Torum (Ostfr.): sunken town, ringing beneath water
The Bell Pond (Ostfr.): theft, water
The Thunum Bell in Esens (Ostfr.): theft, enchanting sound
The Eggelingen Bells in Tettens (Ostfr.): theft
The Funnix Bell in the Harle River (Ostfr.): theft, ringing beneath water
The People of Carolinensiel Steal the Bell from Esens (Ostfr.): theft, water, enchanting sound
The Bell in Lake Raudermeer (Ostfr.): theft, ringing beneath water
The Robbery of the Bells of Rhede (Ostfr.): theft, ringing beneath water
The Sunken Bells (Ostfr.): theft, water
Kirchdorf (Ostfr.): pride, richness
The Bell Maria (Ostfr.): water, richness, sunken town, cracked bell
Peter Klockgeter and the Wester Bell of Norden (Ostfr.): enchanting sound, doom, cracked bell
The Master of Wybelsum Sits in the Bell (Ostfr.): richness, sunken town
The Bell Casting at Völlen (Ostfr.): richness
The Bells of Lahe (Ostfr.): pride, water
The Bells of Rommelskerken (Gron.): theft, unblessed, ringing beneath water
The Bells of Boertange (Gron.): doom, lamenting sound
The Bells of the Sunken Villages of Oerd and Blieke (Gron.): ringing beneath water
The Bells of Saint Odulf (Frl.): sunken cloister, ringing beneath water
The Monastery Bell of Stavoren (Frl.): doom, unblessed, horrible sound, devils, lake
The Little Bell of Mariëngaard (Frl.): enchanting sound, ringing beneath soil
The Saga of the Bell of Oldeouwer (Frl.): sunken village, ringing beneath swamp
The Little Bell on Ameland Island (Frl.): doom, summoning the death
The Little Mass Bell of Littens (Frl.): ringing by itself, enchanting sound
The Bell of Lake Bergum (Frl.); enchanting sound, pride, ringing beneath water
The Sunken Bell of Hantumhuizen (Frl.): enchanting sound, pride, ringing beneath soil
The Bells of Goingarijp (Frl.): theft, ringing beneath water
The Bells of Ureterp (Frl.): theft, ringing beneath water

Note 2 — When someone is speaking gibberish, there exists the Dutch expression praten als het Dokkumer klokkenspel, which literally translates to ‘talking like the Dokkum carillon’. Dokkum is a small town in the north of the province of Friesland, and to the people of Dokkum, the carillon only produced meaningless and incomprehensible melodies.

Note 3 — "Durch Feir und Hiz bin ich geflosen. Leonard Rosenlecher hat mich zu der Ehr Gottes gegossen in Constanz" ('through fire and heat I was cast. Leonard Rosenlecher cast me to the honour of God in Konstanz') as an inscription on a bell reads in southern Germany. In this blog post we did not explain how bronze bells were and are founded, but they are born in earthen pits with fire, heat, and much force. How beautifully these elements fit with the divine judgements of sagas and legends of an earth that opens up to swallow villages and church bells, or how bells again rise from the earth again. Here a short movie of a bell founder in Spain.

Internationally renowned bell founder Rincker in the municipality of Sinn in the state of Hessen in Germany is a family business that has existed for an amazing 450 years. An also internationally well-known bell founder is Royal Eijsbouts in the town of Asten in the province of Noord Brabant in the Netherlands, although it has existed for 'only' 150 years.

Note 4 — When one of the Frisian bastards moved to a new house in The Hague twenty-five years ago, he found an edition of the newspaper Haagsche Courant, dated 4 April 1940, one month before the Nazis would invade the Netherlands. In the newspaper, the article Het conflict over de luchtbescherming (‘the conflict over air defence’—the Netherlands was one month before the war started still discussing how the air defence had to be organized…) mentions that the bell of the tower of the Basilica of Saint Servatius in the town of Maastricht in the province of Limburg had been taken down to bring it to safety because of the international tensions. The bell, weighing 6,350 kilograms and cast in the year 1515, is named Grameer, which means ‘grandmother’. The bell has been spared by the war, and although it has been replaced, it is still on display.

Anyway, two lessons to take home from this anecdote: the Dutch have the tendency not to think the threat of war is urgent, and once they do start taking down old church bells, better be prepared for turbulent times.

Suggested hiking

If you want to follow the track of one of the great Irish peregrine monks, Saint Columbanus (543-615), then walk the Via Columbani, the Columban Way. Some say it is the oldest pilgrim route in Europe. Saint Columbanus hiked about 5,000 kilometers from Ireland to Italy and crossed through many countries of Europe. Check the website www.thecolumbanway.org/en/home for some godly inspiration.