Wiltshire, Trowbridge St James Bell Book 1797-1855

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You will find information including -

• You will find information including -
• First name
• Last name
• Death date
• Event date
• Remarks/bell charges
• Location

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The custom of tolling a bell as a person was dying so that the hearers could pray for his soul is known from the Middle Ages. After the Reformation the custom continued and was incorporated in the 1603 Canons of the Church of England. Canon No. 67, Ministers to visit the sick, includes:

And when any is passing out of this life, a bell shall be tolled, and the Minister shall not then slack to do his last duty. And after the party's death, if it so fall out, there shall be rung no more than one short peal, and one other after the burial.

According to Julian Litten's The English Way of Death most churches had abandoned the custom by the mid 18th century, thought it persisted in some rural areas until 1939, when bells were silenced for the duration of the Second World War. A usual, though not universal, custom was to toll in the following way:

• 3X3 strokes for a man, followed by a stroke for every year of his age.
• 3X2 strokes for a woman, then the same.
• 3X1 strokes for a child (under 7), then the same.

Hearing the passing bell in a small community must have led to general enquiry about which neighbour had died or lost a child. This gave rise to John Donne's exhortation: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

The same picture of the agitation caused by the sound of the passing bell comes from Trowbridge's own poet-rector, George Crabbe, in The Parish Register. Having gone through the life histories of some lately buried parishioners, the rector goes on:

My record ends:- But hark! ev'n now I hear, The Bell of Death and know not whose to fear: Our Farmers all and all our Hinds were well; In no Man's Cottage, danger seem'd to dwell:- Yet Death of Man proclaim these heavy Chimes, For thrice they sound, with pausing space, three times. "Go; of my Sexton seek, Whose days are sped? "What! He, himself! — and is old Dibble dead?"

The number for whom the fee of 1s (5p) was paid, was far exceeded by paupers (identified in the book by ‘parish’), for whom no fee was charged. Among these are two suicides (Rudman, 1844, Gregory 1853) and children of traveller and gypsy families (Maden,1849 and Smith 1854) which add a further level of interest to the record.<./p>

There are a very few instances of tolling for Trowbridge people buried outside the town, and one national figure, Sir Robert Peel, who had no obvious connection with the town, but whose celebrity accounted for this honour. The vast majority are for burials within the town. A comparison with the burial register for 1844, 1849 and 1855, however, reveals several discrepancies, most notably with un-baptised children. In most of these cases the bell was tolled but the burial was not recorded in the register. This seems to be evidence of the lingering power of the belief that the un-baptised should not be buried in consecrated ground, something which was unavoidable in populous urban parishes with large numbers of infant deaths and no public cemeteries, but which might be hidden by being unrecorded in the parish register.

The records were kept because it was the sexton's duty to account for the payments to the parish, as we can tell from a sexton's account book covering the years 1820 onwards. In this Nightingale entered an abbreviated account which only included the events for which actual payments were taken, and which gives less detail than the bell books themselves. Each year the sum received was totalled up and then subtracted from what the parish owed Nightingale for his salaries and his disbursements.

The 18th-century overseers' accounts for the parish record regular payments for burials which included a coffin, a shroud, and the bell. The accounts of Nightingale's time (kept by himself) do not give these details, but is seems likely that the paupers still had the bell for which no payment was levied.

William Nightingale was baptized at Trowbridge on 10th February 1765 , son of Henry and Ann. Henry, described as a clothworker in 1781 , was sexton of the church in 1789 . His son succeeded him in 1794, and took over the post of parish clerk as well in 1799 . His monument in the church says that he was also vestry clerk and paymaster of the poor for 36 years. The overseers' accounts are first in his handwriting in 1790 and continue to be so until they end in 1835 . They and the accompanying rate books are immaculately kept.

A cocky young diarist gives an account of going to see Nightingale to arrange his marriage in 1835:

"Waited on old Billy Nightingale on a very delicate subject. His daughter, of that class of old maids justly styled old and tough, would not take her ugly mug out of the room, but gaped at me like a badger, and her dad, stupid as an owl and deaf as a post, kept asking, ‘What's the woman's name?’ Nor would he be satisfied till I repeated it in a voice of thunder."

Nightingale died on 10th March 1844 aged 79. This was the age of old Dibble the parish clerk in Crabbe's poem quoted above. It would be pleasant to think that Crabbe had Nightingale in mind when he wrote, but, alas, the poem was written years before he ever came to Trowbridge.

With thanks to the Wiltshire Family History Society.