Peals (and Quarter Peals) at Norbury

What is a "Peal"

This needs a little background. In change ringing, each bell sounds one after the next. A single "change" is when the order of the bells changes:

For example:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (the smallest bell (the "treble") sounding first and the largest (the "tenor") last could move to:
2 1 4 3 6 5 8 7 and then to
2 4 1 6 3 8 5 7 and to
4 2 6 1 8 3 7 5 and so on

A "Peal" is (in simple terms) over 5,000 unique changes (i.e. no single change is repeated). Such an exercise typically takes about 3 hours to undertake, although this depends on the weight and ease-of-ringing of the bells.

What's in a name

The name of the "method" rung to peal (e.g. "Bristol Surprise Major " or "Kent Treble Bob Major ") provides the instruction to the ringers as to how each change is to be made. There are several different classes of method (determined by the structure of the method) such as Plain, Surprise, Treble Bob and this is also reflected in the method name. The final part of the name describes the name of working bells in the method - Major indicates 8 working bells and given Norbury (only) has eight bells, it is unsurprising that many of the methods rung to peal are of this class. Triples (7 working bells) often has the tenor remaining at the end of each row with the front seven bells involved in the method.

Since 1847, There have been over 500 peals rung at Norbury. These are listed in the Felstead archive which you can reach by clicking this link.

Peals at Norbury

Click this link to see a full record of the peals rung at Norbury including the full band information. One day this may become searchable, but until I find a way to do this easily, you'll just have to work through the information as it is!

Quarter Peals at Norbury

Full peals take a rather long time which makes them less easy to fit in around other events in the church whilst not upsetting the local residents. However, it is often said that the best ringing occurs when ringing for longer periods. A compromise is the Quarter Peal length which, as the name indicates, runs one quarter of the length of a full peal taking about 45 minutes at Norbury. We try to ring Quarter Peals on a regular basis (e.g. for Sunday Evensong) and in the early days of this website these were detailed in the News section. However, due to the increasing number of them, they now have their own page, here.