The Bells of Stoke St Mary, Somerset

St Mary's Church, Stoke St Mary, stands as a largely 13th-century building, when masons and carpenters built a simple structure consisting of chancel, nave, and tower; its plain, battlemented tower survives almost unchanged after 700 years and is one of very few entirely 13th-century towers surviving in Somerset. The village's own roots reach further back still, to a Saxon charter of about 854, in which the West Saxon king Æthelwulf granted lands at "Stoc" to the minster church of Taunton, the mother church of the vale, with Stoke St Mary's early ecclesiastical links to that minster persisting in some form until the 16th century. Like most medieval Somerset churches, St Mary's benefited from the attention of 15th-century builders, who added a south porch, a Ham stone font (of which only the base survives today), and a series of new windows; the late-15th-century chancel windows remain fine examples of the period's work, though similar nave windows were removed in the Victorian era. That era brought the church's most dramatic transformation: a drastic restoration completed in 1865, overseen by the curate William Lance, nearly doubled the size of the building by adding a south aisle, linked to the old church by an arcade built in a mock 13th-century style, along with a south transept, a vestry, a new chancel arch, and gothic-style windows. The thirteenth-century tower was spared a proposed rebuilding, though the church's older 18th-century chalice and paten were sold off as unfashionable and replaced with a medieval-design set in 1872. More recently, the south aisle became the chapel of St Anne in 1972, and in the early 2000s three stained-glass windows by the celebrated artist Patrick Reyntiens — known for his collaborations with John Piper at Coventry Cathedral — were installed to mark the Millennium and the Queen's Golden Jubilee, the first windows he made for any Somerset church. Grade II* listed since 1955, St Mary's remains the active parish church of Stoke St Mary, its churchyard holding memorials to the village's long-settled families stretching back to the 17th century. The tower holds a ring of five bells, cast in five different years, by five different founders. The treble was cast in 1923 by John Taylor & Co, although is not physically dated on the bell. The second was cast in 1829 by John Kingston. The third is the oldest bell of the ring, was cast by Roger Semson in 1550, and is subject to a preservation order. The fourth was cast in 1779 by Thomas Pyke, and the tenor was cast in 1657 by William III Purdue. The back four bells have all had their canons removed, and hang in a timber frame constructed in 1923 by John Davis, and is one of only two frames by this maker (the other being in 1846!). The tenor weighs 5¾cwt and is tuned to B♭. The bells are rung from a ground floor ringing chamber. 5 bells, 5¾cwt in B♭.