Evensong: People, Discoveries and Reflections on the Church in England
by Richard Morris
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25, 336 pages
If you stand outside the former Augustinian priory of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London before evensong, twice a month, you can hear the sound of late medieval London. It is the only active church in the country to have a ring of five bells cast before the Reformation. If you do stop to listen, you will hear that medieval bells sounded different. When a church bell is struck it doesn’t produce a single note, but instead a family of sounds. There is the hum, an octave below the strike note (as the dominant pitch is known); the tierce, a minor third above the strike; the quint, a fifth above; and so on. Medieval bells, less perfectly tuned, sometimes placed the hum a seventh below the strike, a sound at once familiar and unfamiliar to modern ears.
