One of the other lists I'm on is a chat list of bell ringers. Most are from the UK but some are from the US and a couple are from Australia.
Change bells have been described for hundreds of years by an old imperial measure: hundredweights (112 lb), quarters (28 lb) and pounds. This is tradition and is just the way things are, and no this is not going to change anytime soon. For any tower, it is common to describe the bells in that tower by the description of the largest bell, called the tenor. In my home tower the tenor is 32-0-4, that is, 32 hundredweights (cwt), 0 quarters (qtr) and 4 pounds, or 3588 lbs, or 1629 kg. I rounded off to the nearest kg because it is quite likely that the bell is not exactly 32-0-4.0000. (And by odd coincidence there is a small sign at the entrance to the Cathedral stating its capacity as 3204 persons.) So - I posed a question to the list a few weeks ago asking what the history was of describing bells that way, and why it is still done, considering that few people under 40 in the UK have been taught imperial in school - especially not the older historical units that aren't used much anymore, even colloquially. Here's what people replied. Authors are from the UK unless otherwise specified. The posting I first sent: OK, I'm probably treading on sensitive ground here . but it was inspired by discussion on the other list about sound augmentation in towers when it's hard to hear some of the bells. The idea was to run sound pipes down to the ringing chamber, and all pipe dimensions were given in meters and millimeters. That said . I have an idea where hundredweights, quarters and pounds came from. Hundreds of years ago, large numbers were probably difficult for many people to comprehend. Our tenor, for example, is 3588 lb (or about 1630 kg). Expressed traditionally, it's 32-0-4. Three small numbers, easier for anyone to understand, even though there are three different names for one concept (weight, or mass) rather than just one name with a variable whole number (pounds, or kilograms). And I know tradition is important to many (at church I prefer the Elizabethan Common Prayer language, myself, as well as many of the good hymns that have stood the test of time). So why do we continue to use the old way of measuring bells? Is it so we can compare bells now to bells from the past? Is it because that's just the way it's always been done? Or is there another reason? This isn't to criticize - I'm actually curious. Carleton And the replies . I've put a card giving the weights of our bells in both imperial and metric on our tower wall. I was finding that the young learners didn't have any idea what a hundredweight was. Or inches, either: "Move five centimetres up the tail end". Dave Do the founders [this means the bell foundries that cast the bells] measure them that way? Both towers where I have been regularly involved in ringing that have bells cast relatively recently have cards from the founders giving details of the bells, and they cite the weights entirely in pounds, not cwts or qtrs. And the third tower I've been regularly involved in has 18th century bells for which we have no such card, but the record the church does have of the bells, from an 18th century shipping manifest, also cites the weights just in pounds. Though it still leaves open the question of why pounds and not kilograms, at least these days. (this from a US ringer) You have to be slightly careful here. Around that time, '00' was used as an abbreviation for (long) hundredweight. So you might find a description of a bell weighing 2700 (seemingly with no units specified) meaning 27 cwt or 3024 lbs; and the same bell might be described elsewhere as weighing 3000 lbs, also meaning about 27 cwt. If you go back significantly earlier, you have to contend with hundredweight of sizes other than 112 lbs. (And if the tower is in the US, I believe the 'short' 100 lb hundredweight has also in use, probably more recently; though I don't claim to know much about that.) In the 14th century, there's evidence to suggest that (in some areas, at least) copper was customarily weighed in 112 lb hundredweight whereas tin, the other major component of bell metal, was usually weighed using 80 lb hundredweights. The Sacrists' Rolls of Ely Cathedral for 19-20 Ed III (1345-7) which document the casting of the c.37 cwt ring of four for the cathedral provide an example of this. RAS This sounds quite like the approach that used to allow us to buy six pennyworth of sweets or chips. How much you actually got for your six pence depended upon the intrinsic value of the particular sweets. Is it possible that in the original context the "hundred" was related to a monetary unit. so you got a hundred crowns' (or whatever) worth of copper or of tin? Ted I guess it's possible, though I'm not sure it's all that likely. The OED says "prob. originally [equal] to a hundred pounds, whence the name". That said, the prices of copper, tin and "white copper" (which I think is possibly cupronickle, though J.J. Raven suggests in 'Church Bells of Cambridgeshire' that this is perhaps zinc) in the Ely Sacrist's Rolls are very similar, varying between 14s to 16s per cwt. Assuming Cu and Sn really were measured in different sized hundredweight, it would mean the variation in the size of the hundredweight coincides with the price difference. But with only two data points, it's difficult to know whether this is merely a coincidence. Reading the Wikipedia article on stone (the unit weight, not lumps of rock), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(mass) it seems that it was normal for different sized stone to be used for different commodities. We could hypothesise that perhaps a 14 lb stone was used for Cu, and a 10 lb stone for Sn. That said, the size of a pound has also varied (and still does between the US and UK, or within the UK for gold, where troy pounds are still sometimes used, and other things). So even supposing we trust the accuracy of the Ely records, and our ability to decipher the highly abbreviated mediaeval Latin used in them, we still don't really know how heavy the 37 cwt tenor was. RAS We recently had a visit to my tower by some Italian ringers. I had to convert the weight of our bells from cwt, qtr, lb into quintale for them. Bruce Surely we mainly use the weight of the bell to tell us whether it's heavier or lighter than the one in the church down the road. It doesn't matter what the unit of weight is as long as they're all measured in the same units. Changing my tenor weight into kilogrammes won't help anyone compare the 19cwt bell round the corner with my 1000Kg bell. The actual weight isn't terribly relevant except as a guide. DMG Indeed. Very brief email yesterday from a colleague - a brand new mum ... "just announcing the arrival of Adam William S_____ born Sunday at 4:42pm weighing 7 pounds 2" Though I think it's not so much that the new mums want to compare. They need to translate so the new grandparents have some idea. oz(m)erelda And finally, from the weekly Ringing World compendium of the various ringing chat lists: Why, enquired Carleton MacDonald, an American, on ringing-chat, were bells still weighed in hundredweights, quarters and pounds in the UK? Their weights were quoted in pounds alone in the USA. Richard A. Smith observed that different commodities used to be weighed in different kinds of hundredweight. Carleton was also curious about the use, in Australia (which went metric some years ago), of pounds and ounces for weighing babies. Margaret Callinan thought it was to help the grandparents. In our tower, we have a large bronze plaque describing each of the ten bells: its number, its note, who donated it, the inscription on it, the diameter of the mouth of the bell (in inches) and the mass of the bell (in pounds only). When visitors come to the tower and we give a talk, the bells are described only in pounds; however, if ringers come over from the UK, especially older ones, we have a chart on our website that enables them to relate the mass of the bells to those back home. http://www.cathedral.org/wrs/wrs.htm (No, kg isn't included; I'm not the webmaster. And yes, I know one column is headed "weight".) Conclusion: I'm not sure where hundredweight (cwt) is used any more. The only place I've found is in describing church bells. Apparently the tradition continues because it enables comparison with bells cast 200, 300, even 400 years ago (yes there are many that are that old). I don't know of any use of the hundredweight (either one), quarter (either one), or stone in the USA. Note that the stone is half of a quarter. Carleton
