Her shirt was o the grass-green silk
Her mantle o the velvet fyne
At ilka tett of her horse's mane
Hang fifty siller bells and nine.
A little while back I was given a crotal bell. I'd never really thought about it before , but there are two basic bell plans.
The first is the flared, open-ended bell.
This
is the type seen in church towers, handbells in Victorian school
playgrounds, Liberty bells, and so on. But there's another kind, quite
familiar from jester's caps, Morris dancers' legs, and kittens' collars.
These are smaller bells, with crimped ends. Where a flared bell has a
clapper, such "crotal" bells just have a "pea", retained within the bell
but free to rattle.
Millions of these were made in medieval
Europe. At first they were cast it two parts, which were then soldered
together, with the pea inside. To make them look more fancy a variety of
simple decoration was added, which evolved over time.
As
technology advanced people saw that the bells could be cast in a single
piece, open-ended, then the pea introduced and the end crimped. However
to make them look and feel like "proper" bells the makers gave the bells
a little equatorial girdle where the soldered joint would have been in
the good old days. You can see this in the photo.
Decoration continued to change over
the centuries, until about 1800, and these crotal bells are very easy to
date from the stylistic features. Mine is from about the time of Shakespeare.
Why were so many crotal bells manufactured? Not of
course because there were millions of jesters or Morris men. It was at
least partly because where carts and horses moved about at night, in
town or county, there was no lighting on vehicle or road. Bells gave
audible warning of approach.
My
bell isn't siller, like the one on the Queen of Elfland's horse. It's
copper alloy. But it still rings with a silvery and magical sound.
