ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 221 



Celtic, the Mediceval, and the Modern. In Scotland, 

 as throughout Western Christendom generally, the 

 earliest church bells were not cast but hammered. 

 Composed of thin plates of iron, bent into a quadrilateral 

 shape, they were held together with rivets then brassed 

 or bronzed, with perhaps no fixed clapper. Paulinus, 

 Bishop of Nola in Campania, about 400 A.D., is usually 

 credited with the invention of those large bells now so 

 general in churches. They are mentioned by the Venerable 

 Bede as in use in Northumbria, about the end of the 

 seventh century. Like many another sacred art, bell- 

 founding had a home in the monasteries of the twelfth 

 century. Just as travelling Guilds of masons built our 

 great Border abbeys, so probably Guilds of bellfounders 

 went about the land casting bells. Indeed, the state 

 of the mediseval highways, coupled with difficulties of 

 transport, must have made local casting almost a necessity. 

 The only example found in the South of Scotland, so 



far as I am aware, is the so-called Ednam 

 Celtic Bell bell. This bell was discovered about sixty 

 found years ago. Its previous history is uncertain. 



near Kelso. According to one legend it once played the 



ignoble part of a footscraper at the door of 

 the mansion-house of the Edmonstones, lairds of Ednam. 

 In the catalogue of the Edinburgh Archaeological Museum 

 (1856) it is set down as "found at Hume Castle near 

 Kelso." In any case, the credit of rescuing this venerable 

 ecclesiastical relic belongs largely to the schoolmaster at 

 Ednam, John Gibson Smith, author of a volume of poetry, 

 and a man of some antiquarian instincts; still more 

 to James Douglas, a Kelso banker, secretary to the 

 Tweedside Antiquarian Society, and member of a family 

 which has furnished two Presidents to this Club. He it 

 was who gifted the bell to Kelso Museum, its present 

 habitat, although probably with little conception of its 

 value, since it figures in their catalogue as — "An old 

 metal instrwment, use unknowa." The Secretary of the 



