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Order and Disorder in the Eighteenth Century

Many of the performances are not recorded elsewhere, and we learn personal details that are otherwise unavailable. For this reason, for many years historians of ringing have searched local newspapers in their area. Early pioneers include J. Armiger Trollope, of Norwich and London, and Samuel Slater, of Glemsford. In the 1950s David Cubitt began his researches in the West Yorkshire papers, and continued when he moved to Norwich. From the 1960s onwards Cyril Wratten began his work in collecting together all the newspaper reports he could locate, both from other collections, such as the Slater Collection, and reports published in Bell News and the Ringing World, and then by primary research, particularly in the 1970s. At that period research was much more difficult than now, with hard copies of newspapers often still in the office of the publisher, making the identification and access much more difficult. The work reached its peak in the 1970s, and Cyril was helped in this work by a number of other historians who searched local newspapers. For obvious reasons Cyril did not need to list those who helped, but after his death, when preparing his collection for publication, I have identified the following contributors to the eighteenth century part of the collection.

A number of other contributors are acknowledged directly in the text, and David Cubitt helped by proof-reading the Norwich reports, cross-checking with his own collection. Here it should pointed out that some of these have been transcribed successively more than once, and errors of transcription can be introduced at every stage. This sort of help was kindly given by Alan Glover, by checking the Shrewsbury reports against his own personal collection.

Shortly after this collection was published in 2011, I was given access to a digitised collection of eighteenth-century newspapers, which I was able to search electronically, a much quicker process than by searching hard copy, but not infallible. The main thrust of Cyril’s collection is reports from local newspapers, and the Burney Collection was mainly of London newspapers, so this has filled a gap, and has supplied much extra information on ringing in London in the eighteenth century.

I have also subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive, a website the content of which is based on digitised runs of nineteenth-century newspapers, but with both earlier and later newspapers. The content is gradually being added to, and as new material has been added, this has been searched for reports of interest. This new material has been published as appendices in the subsequent volumes in the Order and Disorder series. In addition, newspaper reports have been sent directly to me by Chris Pickford, Chris Ridley, David Cubitt, Gareth Davies, and others, and these are acknowledged in the text. All this extra material has been integrated into combined files for the eighteenth century. Of course, further material will continue to be found, but it is expected that the bulk has already been found.

The main thrust of the collection is in telling the story of the development of change ringing, although there are many extracts relating to bellfounders and their work, and the publicity surrounding this. There are also public notices about bankruptcies, which help to tell something of the uncertain background to the bellfounding business, and these were published in the London Gazette, but repeated in the country papers. Those extracts used are mostly those that I abstracted from the Hereford Journal, although they could be replicated from most of the newspapers in the country, but for the same of completeness I did a search of the on-line London Gazette, which added more background – and a couple of bellfounders’ names. However, these may not be founders of church bells. At that period church bells were a well-recognised part of the fabric of society, and were rung for many occasions. As a result, most newspapers have many news reports about bells being rung for celebration etc., and only a few such reports are included in this collection as a sample of what can be found. However, it is from newspaper reports that the development of change ringing in the century can be traced, ringers being keen to publicise what they had achieved, often through a paid advertisement.

Those who do such research in newspapers will be aware of how easy it is to overlook items of interest, and while the main extracts have been identified, it is always worth looking out for others, just in case!