Why Do Church Bells Ring When Someone Dies?

For centuries, the sound of a slowly tolling church bell told a whole village that someone had died. The custom has faded, but it left words and phrases we still use. This article explains how it worked.

What were the three bells?

Wikipedia says that in England, an ancient custom was to ring church bells at three times around a Christian’s death. The passing bell was sometimes rung while the person was still dying. The death knell was rung at the death. The lych bell, also called the corpse bell, was rung at the funeral as the procession approached the church. The bell ringers of Wells explain that the passing bell was rung to request prayers for the soul, and to warn of demons.

Why ring a bell at all?

Partly to ask for prayers, and partly to tell people. Hone’s Every-Day Book, from the 1820s, says the passing bell came from an idea among early Catholics that the sound of the holy bells drove the devil away from the soul of the departing Christian. The word “tolling” comes from the English custom of “telling” of a death with a bell, according to Wikipedia.

What did the number of strokes mean?

It could say who had died. Wikipedia says that in many churches the age was sometimes shown by the number of strokes, and that “tellers” were used almost everywhere to indicate sex: in Kent and Surrey, three times three strokes for a man and three times two for a woman. Other sources say three strokes were used for a child. After the tellers, the bell often tolled the person’s age. The word “tellers” became “tailors,” the origin of the phrase “nine tailors make a man,” and of Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel The Nine Tailors.

Where does “for whom the bell tolls” come from?

From John Donne. Wikipedia notes that the phrase is part of a longer line from his 1624 work Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which says never to send to know for whom the bell tolls, because it tolls for you.

Is it still done?

Sometimes. The bell ringers’ association says the last of the three, the corpse bell, is the one most often still used, with very slow tolling, often one stroke every 30 seconds, and often the number of strokes equals the age. Wikipedia adds that Big Ben has been tolled since 1910 at the funeral of a British sovereign, with strokes equal to the years of the monarch’s life.

For related customs, see Christian Funeral Traditions, Catholic Funeral Traditions, and Why Do We Light Candles for the Dead?.