The Peal As An Extent
Following the discovery of Grandsire Doubles, the term peal or “full peal” was applied to the ringing of sequences including each permutation of the set of bells exactly once. On five bells (Doubles), there are 120 permutations taking about four minutes to ring on tower bells. These figures rapidly increase as more bells are added.
The term extent is now preferred to peal in this context, excepting performances on seven bells where the terms peal and extent are synonymous.
The extent on eight bells comprises 40,320 changes, and would be referred to today as a long length peal. Despite this, it has been successfully rung as a continuous performance both on tower and on hand bells, 17 hours in duration on tower bells.
Read more about this topic: Peal
Famous quotes containing the words peal and/or extent:
“Canst thou copy in verse one chime
Of the wood-bell’s peal and cry,
Write in a book the morning’s prime,
Or match with words the tender sky?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)