Book Description

Excerpt from The Church Bells of Suffolk: A Chronicle in Nine Chapters, With a List of the Inscriptions on the Bells, and Historical Notes As this, the latest contribution to English Campanology, is in one sense the earliest, a few words seem necessary to explain the history of a book which has been forty-two years in hand, and to account for its imperfections. In the days of my boyhood at Mildenhall, where my father was curate, I took great delight in the sound of the bells, and raised a five-pound note for the repair of the gear of the fine old tenor. The bell-hanger, one Flanders Green, an enthusiastic ringer, asked me to read for him two of the inscriptions, of which I made a transcript in a copy-book on August 28th, 1848, and proceeded to the investigation of other bells in the neighbourhood. In the course of two years I had made a considerable collection from Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and South Lincolnshire. Wherever I went I carried on the work; but undergraduate life and residence in Dorset and Kent prevented the county of Suffolk receiving very much attention till my college presented me to the Mastership of Bungay Grammar School in 1859, when I attacked at once the north-east of the county. During these eleven years I had become acquainted with Messrs. Ellacombe, Tyssen, Spelling, Lukis, and L'Estrange; and our comparison of discoveries was throwing much light on the history and interpretation of bell-marks. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.