Who rings the bells inside the Old North Church?

Wickedpedia

The bells inside the Old North Church were cast in 1744 and rung by a teenaged Paul Revere. Today, their iconic chimes are a staple of life in the North End.

Anyone taking an extended stroll through the North End is likely to come across the Old North Church, famous for hosting the lanterns that signaled the British were marching to Lexington and Concord in 1775. It is one of the most-visited historical sites in the city, and is Boston’s oldest surviving church building.

Those swinging by at the right time will embark on an audible excursion back to the Revolutionary era courtesy of the church’s famous bells. Hearing them is one thing, but that trip back in time is not complete without an understanding of what — and who — makes those bells truly special.

“They are such unique and historic artifacts, but they are also highly functional, they still ring on a very regular basis. They provide an opportunity to have a tangible connection with the colonial era and to imagine who has heard them and rang them over time,” said Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated, the nonprofit organization that operates the church as a historic site.

Who actually rings the bells inside Old North? That would be volunteers from the MIT Guild of Bellringers, a dedicated group who practice every weekend to master the complex and historic practice known as change ringing. The bells in the Old North Church are believed to be the oldest set of change ringing bells in North America.

Patterns and Permutations 

“When we in America think of church bells, we tend to think of melodic bells like at Park Street Church. Change ringing bells play a pattern,” Stewart said. 

Change ringing dates back to the 16th century in England, according to the The National Bell Festival. A group of ringers stand below the bells, pulling ropes attached to them through holes in the ceiling. Each ringer is responsible for one bell, which is attached to a wheel that rotates when the corresponding rope is pulled. 

As opposed to bells in most churches and schools in North America, change ringing bells rotate from a mouth-upward position a full 360 degrees until the mouth is facing up again. When ringers pull their ropes, momentum does a lot of the work in bringing the bells back around. This method was created so that ringers would have more control over the timing of a bell’s sound, and so that the sound would carry as far as possible, according to the Old North Church. 

Instead of creating a melody, change ringing creates what many equate to a river, or a cascade of sound. This is done by ringing them in set patterns that permutate in specific ways. 

There are eight bells in the Old North Church, each tuned to a specific note, creating a full scale. The smallest weighs about 620 pounds while the largest weighs about 1,500 pounds. 

Ringers typically start with a descending scale, and then move through a set of permutations, or changes, to that scale without repeating a change until they come back to the initial descending scale, according to bellringer Ricky Morse. 

A set of four bells would lead to 24 total changes. A set of five bells creates 120 total changes, which takes about five minutes to complete. A set of six bells creates 720 changes, which takes about 30 minutes to fully ring through, and so forth. 

Pre-set sequences of changes are known as methods, which are named and memorized by ringers. 

Morse and his fellow ringers perform short pieces most weekends, and sometimes attempt what is known as a quarter peal, consisting of 1,250 changes or more. This takes about 45 minutes. A full peal consists of 5,000 or more changes and requires ringers to work continuously for about three hours. Full peals are saved for special occasions, such as Easter Sunday and Feast of Christ the King Day. Completing a full peal is a major accomplishment for a ringer.

While the specifics of change ringing may sound complicated, the practice offers a tantalizing effect for those fully engaged in it. 

“It’s both mentally engaging and mentally relaxing at the same time in a weird way… It is kind of like a meditation,” Morse said. “You have to keep track of where you are, where the bells around you are, the physical aspect of it. You don’t have a lot of time to think about how you spilled coffee that morning, or what you said at that meeting yesterday. There’s an element of removing yourself from everything else to focus on this.”

The bells and their history

Change ringing also appealed to a young Paul Revere. 

The bells were cast in 1744 in England. They arrived in Boston a year later, but no one in the city was practiced in change ringing. The method was still mostly confined to the British Isles at the time. 

As such, the shiny new bells were mostly unused for years, with only one or two being rung for special occasions until 1750, according to the Old North Church. It was then that a 15-year-old Paul Revere formed a bellringing guild with a few of his friends and began learning the intricacies of change ringing. 

Not much is known about the other members of that initial guild, and change ringing at Old North appears to have fallen by the wayside during the later part of the 18th century and through most of the 19th century. 

In 1847, a new system was implemented where one person would simply strike the bells whenever a ringing was deemed necessary. A new guild of change ringers offered to bring the practice back in 1894 following a major renovation of the bells and the bell ringing chamber, but that guild was soon disbanded. 

Fast forward to the 1970s, when another major restoration project took place. Since change ringing had not occurred at the church for so long,  pipes for a fire suppression system were actually installed through the bell wheels. The pipes were removed, the wood was replaced, and ringers took up the mantle of Revere once again, continuing regularly to the present. 

Change ringing today

There are more than 50 locations across North America where change ringing actively takes place today, according to the North American Guild of Change Ringers. 

In Boston, Morse estimates that there are about 20 to 30 active ringers, and on a weekly basis somewhere between 15 and 20 of them ring at the Old North Church and The Church of the Advent on Brimmer Street. 

Anyone can learn how to change ring, but fully grasping the practice does not happen overnight. 

“There aren’t hundreds of people here, it would be nice if there were, but we are held a little back because learning to ring takes time,” Morse said. “Even once you’ve got the whole motion down, you’re still going to spend several weeks practicing it to get it ingrained as something you can do without thinking.”

After that, it typically takes several months before members of the guild consider a new ringer “safe” to put on a bell by themselves without having a more experienced ringer on hand to help if necessary. Then, it takes a few more months of practice to fully learn how to ring in a group, he said. 

Morse said he has conflicting feelings about current interest levels in the niche hobby.

“Am I concerned? Yes and no. We would love to have more ringers… There does seem to be a general sense of, ‘Oh, we’re not getting any new ringers,’ that is in the community,” he said. 

But, based on his experiences, Morse sees a cycle where interest seems to be waning until a new wave of people become interested in change ringing. 

Morse, who also works to maintain the bells and ropes within the Old North Church today, has been enamored with change ringing since his sister invited him to a practice in 2007. 

“She said ‘come ringing,’ and I came, and I sort of never left,” he said.