A door was afterwards fitted to the aperture, but the
entrance was abolished later by a more reverent Vicar.
The belfry was decorated with various bones of legs of mutton and of
joints of beef, hung up to commemorate notable weddings of prominent
parishioners--perhaps, too, as a hint to future aspirants to the state
of matrimony--when the ringers had enjoyed a substantial meal and
gallons of cider at the expense of the bridegroom. There seems to have
been a traditional connection between church bell-ringing and thirst,
for Gilbert White relates that when the bells of Selborne Church were
recast and a new one presented in 1735, "The day of the arrival of
this tuneable peal was observed as an high festival by the village,
and rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble
bell should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with
punch, of which all present were permitted to partake."
The Vicar of Badsey told me that at the neighbouring church of
Wickhamford, then also in his jurisdiction, that when he first came,
in the early fifties, it was customary, as the men entered the church
by the chancel door, to pitch their hats in a heap on the altar. Also
that on his home-coming with his bride, he was, the same evening,
requisitioned to put a stop to a fight between two drunken reprobates
outside the vicarage gate.
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