[Bell Historians] Vandalls?

Wed Apr 10 09:54:04 BST 2019

The spread of the use of Arab numerals seems to vary widely.  When I was looking at Wiltshire Churchwardens’ accounts between 1559 and 1642 it was interesting to see the variation.  Marlborough St Peter, despite, or because of, the town’s grammar school, stuck to Roman numerals. In the very rural south of the county Dinton was using Arab numerals in 1559 and 1560, and Sutton Mandeville, used Arab numerals in 1614. I ‘think’ there are Arab numerals in the roof timbers of Salisbury Cathedral dating from the 14th century.

Anne

Anne

From: bellhistorians at yahoogroups.com [mailto:bellhistorians at yahoogroups.com] 
Sent: 10 April 2019 00:16
To: bellhistorians at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Bell Historians] Vandalls?

I remember quoting this entry as suggesting the existence of a Society called the Scholars of Cambridge or the Cambridge Scholars when I was writing about 40 years ago - and I haven't really thought about it since!

You are working I suspect from the printed transcript of the accounts.  If you look on p 484 there is the suggestion that what is meant is Randalls, perhaps roundels of iron.  Whatever it is, it is nothing to do with vandals in any sense in which we understand that word.

The difference between 18s and xviijs is just because the scribe is content to write what comes naturally to him (apparently Arabic numerals) in his text and explanations, but reverts to the custom of Roman numbers for the actual entry in the column of expenditure.  In fact most of the years around this time use Roman numerals in columns for pounds, shillings and pence, but the scribe for 1629-30 must have been a bit more old-fashioned.  So he was not the person who wrote out all the other accounts around that time.  That also suggests he may not have been entirely familiar with his subject-matter, and he may have read the Vandalls word from the bill in front of him in some mistaken way that it is not easy to reconstruct.

There was an active band of ringers at the time, who were regularly paid amounts of between 1 and 5 shillings for ringing on days of celebration.  These payments, at lesser amounts, go back to the 1570s (see eg p 177) and perhaps earlier.  I doubt if we need to think of them as suggesting change-ringing.

It is, though interesting that the 'Schollers' paid half of the cost of this particular work and not for any of the other work done in that year or for anything else that their efforts seem to have caused, in particular the ropes, all of which seem to have needed replacing or at least splicing ('shooting') once a year.  It may be that the ringers were learning that a bigger swing meant a bigger noise, for which the parish was prepared to pay, but that the ringers, who were going to be the beneficiaries of the payment, needed to make an investment themselves in whatever it was that was going to enable the bigger swing.  The relevant fittings are referred to as wheels throughout, going back 100 years before this entry, so that is not diagnostic of a movement to change-ringing either.

Mark

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