A long time ago, in 1991, I came up with the method Vincula Surprise Royal (diagram on the right, from CompLib.org). It's Cambridge Major extended to royal by adding two more hunt bells, the 2nd and the 3rd, one coursing ahead of the treble and one coursing after the treble. The effect is that below the hunt bells, the work is exactly Cambridge Major, and above the hunt bells the work is shifted upwards by two positions. Every set of Cambridge places splits into two sets of Yorkshire places. Passing the treble turns into passing both extra hunt bells and, in between, dodging with the treble.
Another way of thinking about the method is that it's Prittlewell, a somewhat standard method, with 7th place instead of 9th place at the half lead and 4th place instead of 2nd place at the lead end.
We rang the first (and so far only) peal of the method at St Peter ad Vincula, Stoke-on-Trent, which is where we got the name from. Vincula is Latin for chain, so St Peter ad Vincula means St Peter in chains. According to legend, St Peter was chained to a rock in order to be eaten by a sea monster, and was rescued by Perseus and Andromeda. Or something like that. A few years ago I went to a conference in Rome, and next door to the conference venue was a church that claimed to have the original chains and displayed them prominently.
Anyway, back to the method. In the original peal we used 6th place bobs and didn't vary the hunt bells, so 1, 2 and 3 were all treble bob hunting throughout. I don't have a record of the composition, but it might have been something like this:
5040 Vincula Surprise Royal M W H 234567890 ------------------ - - - 87654 - - 65874 - 2 3 57486 - 3 85476 - - 3 74658 - 3 57648 - 3 45678 ------------------
Last week I rang a quarter of Vincula with one of the online bands, this time with a different style of composition that changes the extra hunt bells (but leaves the treble alone). The bob is place notation 12, and the single is place notation 1234. At a bob, the hunt bell ahead of the treble makes 2nd place and becomes the hunt bell behind the treble; the hunt bell behind the treble dodges 3-4 down and becomes 4th place bell in the method; and the bell that would have made 4th place dodges 3-4 up and becomes the hunt bell ahead of the treble. At a single, the two extra hunt bells swap with each other. This is the composition:
1282 Vincula Surprise Royal Simon J. Gay W H 23456 ------------- - - 54326 s 45326 - - 23546 s 32546 s (23546) -------------
The little bells (2, 3, 4, 5) all go into the hunt in various combinations, while the back bells are unaffected throughout. We rang it quite well once we got into it, although I confess that I became rather lost for a lead after failing to exit the hunt cleanly with one of my bells. The band said they enjoyed it. I might try to find a composition in which more of the bells go into the hunt, maybe even all of them, and perhaps we will ring it again one day.
To my surprise, a search on BellBoard revealed three previous quarters of Vincula. One was again at Stoke, in 2014, a 1280 conducted by Ray Daw, but the composition isn't shown. The other two were at Lockington in 2018, a 1282 composed and conducted by John Heaton, with the same bobs and singles as my 1282 but a different calling: sW 2H 2W H W.
I found myself ringing Vincula by converting from Cambridge Major, which worked most of the time. The band includes two blue-line ringers (myself and Cara), two place-notation ringers (David and Tom), and a grid ringer (Jeff). The place notation of Vincula is an easy one to remember: 5, 6, 7, 8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (omitting external places) and then reversed. There are no double internal places because the 1258 and the 36 from Cambridge Major become separated by adding the extra hunt bells. The grid is also a relatively simple pattern with places moving upwards in consecutive steps.
While writing this article I used CompLib.org to get a diagram of Vincula. One feature of CompLib is to show all the compositions for a particular method. As well as the quarter peal above, the other composition involving Vincula is a peal of cyclic 14-spliced by Richard Weeks. It's a composition with no bobs, using two link methods to change the coursing order to give a cyclic part end. One of the link methods, occuring in the middle of the part, is Fyne Surprise Royal, which has previously appeared in a few compositions by Alan Reading. The other, at the end of the part, is Vincula. I'm pleased that Richard found a new use for Vincula, and I will write about that aspect another time.
