Funeral toll
funeral custom
The funeral tolling of a bell is the technique of sounding a single bell very slowly, with a significant gap between strikes. It is used to mark the death of a person at a funeral or burial service.
The expression "tolling" is derived from the English tradition of "telling" of the death by signalling with a bell. The term tolling may also be used to signify a single bell being rung slowly, and possibly half-muffled at a commemoration event many years later.
Tolling is typically used for tenor bells in change ringing. It also applies to bourdon bells in a bell tower or cathedral.
Origins
Historically, a bell would be rung on three occasions around the time of a death. The first was the "passing bell" to warn of impending death, followed by the death knell which was the ringing of a bell immediately after the death, and the last was the "lych bell", or "corpse bell" which was rung at the funeral as the procession approached the church. This latter is closest to what is known today as the Funeral toll.
Today, customs vary regarding when and for how long the bell tolls at a funeral.
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This entry incorporates text from “Funeral toll” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.