[Bell Historians] 16th and 17th century tuning

[Chris Pickford]

Nothing significant to contribute on this issue, but I think two points are worth making:

1. There are now very few surviving examples of sets of bells that have not been retuned (and in the case of old scratch tuning and edging we don't actually know when this was done).

2. Before the conservation extremists say "told you so - we should never have allowed tuning" - we should remember that within the bellfounders archives of at least three of the main firms, there are detailed records of the pitches and tuning of bells prior to retuning or recasting.

In other words, the bells themselves may have been recast or altered, BUT if someone really wanted to do a serious study on this, some potentially useful stuff does exist. I imagine that access to the relevant foundry records could be negotiated for such a purpose 

CP           
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