Bell 41 in my list has a rim diameter of 419 mm, a waist that thickens more abruptly than I expected, and no founder's mark anywhere on the shoulder. I measured it twice on 12 March with a folding rule laid across the mouth, then again in June with proper calipers, and got 419 both times, which is more agreement than I usually manage. It hangs in a farm chapel about nine miles north of here, and nobody at the chapel knows where it came from.
Attribution on an unmarked bell comes down to habits rather than signatures. A founder who worked out of a yard behind his house for thirty years developed a particular way of finishing the crown loops, a particular thickness at the lip, and a particular set of letter punches that got chipped and worn in a traceable order. None of that was meant to identify anything. It just happened, the way handwriting happens.
My register currently holds 58 bells. Twenty-two carry a founder's name or initials. Fourteen I have attributed with reasonable confidence. The remaining twenty-two sit under a heading I have labelled UNPLACED, and some of them will stay there.
Inscriptions on these small bells were almost never freehand. The founder pressed individual letter punches into the clay of the cope, so every bell from one yard shares a set of letterforms. Bell 41 reads PEACE BE WITHIN THY WALLS 1834, and the R has a straight leg with a small flaw at the join, a nick about half a millimetre deep. I have that same nicked R on bell 17, which is signed, and on bells 29 and 44, which are not.
Punches got sold, though. When a yard closed the tools went somewhere, often to the nearest surviving founder, who kept using them for another twenty years. That is the trap. A matching R proves the punch travelled, not that the bell did. I now require two independent traits before I write an attribution down: a letterform match plus something structural, usually the crown loop count or the profile at the shoulder.
Bell 41 has six crown loops arranged in the wide-set pattern I associate with the Nettlebridge yard, and the nicked R. Two traits. I have written it down as probable rather than certain, and noted the date of the decision, which matters more than I used to think.
Something I keep noticing: the 1830s bells are noticeably thinner at the lip than the ones from the 1790s, by two or three millimetres on comparable diameters. Metal was expensive and the yards were competing on price. It changed the sound, and not for the better.
Next entries to make: bells 52 and 53, both in a barn near the old turnpike, both filthy. I need a stepladder and a dry afternoon.