Archaeologists claim for church bells a certain value in regard to the inscriptions which they nearly always bear, and which serve as so many guide-posts directing to facts belonging to past ages. Each great bell-founder (and many of them belonged to monastic institutions) had his own particular style of ornamentation, and his own favorite inscription, monogram, or epigraph. Sometimes it was only his own name; sometimes a name and a date; sometimes a pious ejaculation. The towns of Norwich, Lynn, Colchester, Salisbury, etc., had all celebrated families of bell-founders, in the days when the later Gothic cathedrals and churches were built. { 33} The earliest known _dated_ bell is at Fribourg, bearing the year 1258, and the inscription: _"O Rex Gloriae, veni cum pace; me resonante pia populo succurre Maria."_ The oldest in England is supposed to be that at Duncton in Sussex, dated 1319. London can boast one a little over four centuries old, at All Hallows Staining, Mark Lane. The inscriptions on the bells, in the days when saints patronized them, were mostly in Latin, in most cases including the entreaty, _"Ora pro nobis_" (Pray for us). Sometimes the mottoes adverted to the many uses which church bells subserved, such as:
"Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum, Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro."
Even this did not exhaust the list; for we meet with an enumeration of nearly twenty purposes answered by church bells--some of which we should be little disposed to recognize in these scientific days of ours. The following is not an actual motto on a bell, but an elegy on the subject:
"En ego Campana, nunquam denuntio vana, Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum. Defunctos plango, vivos voco, fulmina frango, Vox mea, vox vitae, voco vos, ad sacra venite. Sanctos collaudo, tonitrua fugo, funera claudo, Funera plango, fulgura frango, Sabbatha pango, Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos."
Occasionally, some of the more peculiar of these uses were expressed in English:
"Sometimes joy, sometimes sorrow. Marriage to-day, and Death to-morrow."
They generally lose their point when they lose their Latinity.
The mottoes on old bells, other than those which were dictated by the reverential feeling of the middle ages, comprise instances of vanity, ignorance, and silliness, such as would hardly be expected in these matters. Sometimes a kind of moral aphorism is attempted, with more or less success.