What is a church belfry? The bell chamber, the bellcote and the small bell tower

A church belfry is the chamber near the top of a tower where the bells actually hang, its walls opened up, often with slatted louvers, so the sound can travel while rain and snow stay off the metal. In everyday English the word also covers the whole tower, which is why "belfry" and "bell tower" get swapped so easily. Churches that never built a tower still have a belfry of a kind: a bellcote on the roof, a bell gable on the end wall, or a cupola over the ridge.

A bell needs height to be heard, not necessarily a tower. This note works from the bell outward, so that on any sanctuary, in Waco or elsewhere, you can tell which part does the ringing.

Is a belfry the same thing as a bell tower?

Not quite, although the two overlap. A bell tower is any tower that contains one or more bells, or that was designed to hold bells even if its frame is empty today. A belfry, in the stricter sense, encloses the bell chamber, the room where the bells are housed, and its walls are pierced so the sound can get out. A separate room below it may hold the ringers.

So a belfry is usually the upper stage of a bell tower or steeple, while the tower is the whole shaft of masonry that lifts it up. In continental Europe the word names entire towers attached to civic buildings, like the belfry of Ghent beside its cloth hall, and a group of historic belfries in Belgium and northern France is inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List. A third word completes the set: in English usage, campanile tends to mean a free-standing bell tower, one that stands apart from the church.

The tower at 1300 Austin Avenue is the attached kind, holding the corner of its sanctuary, and the note on downtown bell towers and their sound follows how towers like it were rung.

Where does the word belfry come from?

In its origin the word has nothing to do with bells. It comes from the Old North French berfroi or berfrei, a movable wooden siege tower, which goes back to the Middle High German bercfrit, a protecting shelter. Watchmen kept lookout from towers for fire as well as for enemies, and their towers often held alarm bells. Between the late thirteenth and the mid fifteenth centuries English speakers came to hear it as a bell word, and the spelling drifted through bellfrey and belfrey before it settled as belfry.

That kind of change is called folk etymology: a word reshaped to fit the meaning people already expect from it. The church bell chamber borrowed its name from that civic tower, not the other way round.

What is inside a church belfry?

The walls of a bell chamber are cut open on several sides, and the openings are commonly filled with louvers, horizontal slats set at an angle in a framed opening. In a bell tower they let out as much sound as possible while the bells stay sheltered from the weather. Some belfries leave their openings bare.

Inside, the bells sit in a bell frame of timber or steel, and the way each bell is mounted decides how it can be sounded. A bell hung dead is fixed in place and chimed, struck by an external hammer or by a rope tied to its clapper; clock chimes work this way. A bell hung from a pivoted headstock swings, so the clapper strikes the inside of the rim as it moves.

Towers rung in the English change ringing style go further. Each bell hangs from a headstock fitted on trunnions, with a large wooden wheel and a rope. A stay limits the rotation to a little less than 370 degrees, so a ringer can swing the bell through a full circle, from mouth upwards round to mouth upwards and back. The rope drops through any sound chambers below the bell chamber into the ringing chamber, where the ringers stand.

That stacking, bells at the top and ringers below, explains why a tall tower often shows a different pattern of openings at each stage. As of 30 June 2018 there were 7,141 rings hung for English style ringing in ringable condition, 6,695 of them in England and 48 in the United States. Full-circle ringing is rare on an American street; most American church bells that still sound are swung or chimed.

How do small churches hang a bell without a tower?

A small bell tower is often not a tower at all. Three smaller shelters do most of the work, each lifting a bell high enough to be heard without the cost of a full tower.

The bellcote, also written bell-cote or bell-cot, is a small framework and shelter for one or more bells. It may rest on brackets projecting from a wall or sit on the roof of a chapel or church that has no tower, and it appears on schools as well as churches. The cote is the old word for a shelter, as in dovecote. A bell hung in a bellcote at the apex of the nave roof was traditionally the Sanctus bell, rung at the Sanctus and at the elevation during the Eucharist.

The bell gable, espadaña in Spanish and clocher-mur in French, crowns the upper end of a church wall, usually in place of a tower: a gable end of stone pierced with small arches, with the bells hung in the openings. It spread through Spanish Romanesque building from the twelfth century, partly through the Cistercian call for simpler churches and partly because it was cheaper when many churches had to be raised quickly. Iberian colonizers carried it to the Americas and the Philippines; Mission San Juan Bautista in California carries one.

The cupola is a small, usually dome-like structure on top of a roof, its name taken through Italian from the Latin cupula, a small cup. Cupolas often serve as a belfry, a belvedere or a roof lantern. Barns have them too, for ventilation, so a cupola alone does not prove there is a bell inside.

Belfry, bellcote, bell gable: the forms side by side

Form	Where it sits	What it holds	Where you tend to see it
Bell tower	A tower built into or beside the church	One or more bells, or an empty frame	Parish and city churches
Campanile	A free-standing tower apart from the church	One or more bells	Italian churches, campus towers
Belfry	The bell chamber at the top stage of a tower	The bells and their frame, often behind louvers	Wherever a bell tower stands
Bellcote	On brackets from a wall, or on a roof	One or more bells	Chapels, small churches, schools
Bell gable	The top of a church wall, pierced with arches	Bells hung in open arches	Spain, Portugal, Latin America
Cupola	A small dome-like structure on a roof	Sometimes a bell, sometimes only air	Church and barn roofs

How do you read an old bell tower from the street?

Look for the stage with the biggest openings. On an old bell tower the belfry is almost always the highest enclosed stage, and its openings are wider, taller or more numerous than the windows beneath. If they are filled with slats, those are louvers, and the bells, if any remain, hang behind them. A lower stage with small windows may be the ringing room, or simply the shaft the ropes once passed through.

Then look at the top. A spire, a parapet or a pyramid roof usually caps the belfry stage; a small dome or open lantern on a roof is more likely a cupola, and a little open frame on a gable end or a wall bracket is a bellcote. Old bell towers that no longer serve their first purpose are often kept for their historic or architectural value, so an intact belfry stage is no promise of a working bell. In the Gothic Revival churches of downtown Waco the tower gathers the design into one vertical element with a belfry stage near the top, and the guide to Gothic Revival brick churches follows those towers stage by stage.

What does the Austin Avenue tower show?

The sanctuary at 1300 Austin Avenue, designed by R. H. Hunt and built in 1925, is described in its Texas Historical Commission marker text, dated 1990, as having a prominent bell tower, and the same record notes that the original tracery detail in the tower was removed by the 1940s. That is as far as the public record goes: it does not describe the bell, its frame or the way it is hung, and this note will not guess.

A belfry stage that has lost its tracery still shows where its openings were cut, and a corner tower that holds the facade together is exactly where the bell chamber sits. The photographic walk around 1300 Austin Avenue starts at that corner, and it is the best place to test this vocabulary against a real building.

Questions readers ask

Is a belfry always at the top of a tower?

No. The belfry is usually the upper stage of a bell tower or steeple, but a church without a tower can house its bell in a bellcote, in a bell gable on the end wall, or in a cupola on the roof.

Why are belfry openings covered with slats?

The slats are louvers. They are angled so that sound escapes the bell chamber while rain and snow stay off the bells and their frame. Some belfries leave their openings uncovered.

How many bells does a small bell tower hold?

A bellcote holds one or more bells, often a single one, and a bell gable holds as many bells as it has open arches. Larger sets belong in a full belfry, where a frame of timber or steel carries them.