51/93

This bell belonged to the Minett family of Elmstone Hardwick in Gloucestershire and was used to call the cows in from the pasture at milking time. Elmstone Hardwicke was a village community with open fields and co-operative husbandry until 1914, so this bell may have been used to bring the villagers' cows and sheep home from common pasture in the evening. It may well have been an ecclesiastical bell originally, i.e. a sanctus hand bell. The bell has been repaired, and now gives out a cracked, hollow note. It is made from a straight piece of metal, folded over and riveted at the sides, and folded like an envelope on the shoulders. The top, at the point where the clapper is fixed, is reinforced by a strip of metal, partly riveted and partly bolted to the original.

1 bell: metal

Citation in publication [H. J. Massingham, 'Country Relics' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939)] – 'The giant cowbell, 9 in. long vertically and 4 in. horizontally at the mouth, might have been used by Mary on the sands of Dee. It belonged to the parents and ancestors of the Minett family of Elmstone Hardwick, Gloucestershire, and called the cows in from the pasture at milking time, for years so many that it appears to have lost its voice. That voice is now hoarse and mirthless, sepulchral and toneless, a cough rather than a tinntinnabulation. It may originally have been an ecclesiastical hand-bell. Elmstone Hardwick was a village community with open fields and co-operative husbandry before 1914, so that this cow-bell may have been used by the pinder for bringing the villagers' cattle and sheep home of an evening from the common waste or meadows or stubble in the arable strips.' (p.125), MERL list / description [Massingham Collection, October 1989] – 'ACC. NO.: 51/93 // NAME: COW BELL // NEG NO.: 35/80 // STORAGE: ', Email, John Blair to Ollie Douglas, 23 January 2013 - 'Although we do not know that the bell kept at Elmstone Hardwicke was necessarily dug up there, the location could be of interest in pointing to an early medieval ecclesiastical context. In 889, Bishop Waerferth of Worcester acquired for himself a lease of Elmstone Hardwicke, reserving ecclesiastical dues to the old minster of Bishops Cleeve which by that point belonged to the cathedral community. Cleeve was the kind of important and old-established church that could well have had an elaborate liturgy. Although tenuous, this could be a thread tying the group of large iron hand-bells to an ecclesiastical rather than agricultural context...' [n.b. John Blair, Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology, University of Oxford]