Iron Hand-Bell
The origins of this bell are uncertain, but the main use of hand bells in the British Isles from the sixth to the tenth century (when this bell is estimated to have been used) was in monasteries.[1] In Ireland especially, there have been many hand bells discovered in monasteries; it appears they were used for marriages, keeping time, and even alerting the monastery to a threat.[2] These hand bells were the precursors to the large church bells, but clearly crafting a hand bell would be a less difficult engineering task. Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure if hand bells were used in the same manner on the East coast of England. However, given that there was also glass and hundreds of pins and stylii at the site where this bell was found, and those objects would most likely be used by the well-educated monks, we can expect that the bell came from a monastery on the East coast of England.
This bell poignantly reminds us of accounts of the early Viking raids on monasteries along the coast of Ireland and England. While we don’t know necessarily if the Vikings came across the monastery that this bell inhabited, it brings to mind the desecration of both the well-known monasteries such as Lindisfarne, and the less-known, undocumented and forgotten raids on smaller monasteries throughout the British Isles, such as the Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey in Northumbria.
