Weather Eye yesterday advised the Archbishop of Dublin that the new bells for Christ Church Cathedral, suitably dedicated, might be efficacious in protecting the building from lightning, thunder, storm and hail.
Indeed there is patently a need for such protection; as recently as 680 years ago, or thereabouts, in November 1316, the belfry of the cathedral was blown down in a severe gale, and many other buildings in the vicinity destroyed.
A simple preventive pealing of the bells might well have saved, not just the belfry, but the entire Liberties and the surrounding countryside as well.
There are however other potential uses for the Christ Church bells. As they did in days gone by, they could regulate the pace of Dublin's daily life.
The better disciplined among us nowadays try to organise our daily chores by clocks, or by various forms of electronic gadgetry, but long, long ago, the order of the day was kept by tintinnabulation: it was the bell that ruled the world.
Life in a medieval monastery was a case in point. The monks noted that David, in his long litany of self-justification recorded in Psalm 119, was able to boast to the Lord: "Seven times a day do I praise thee, because of thy just ordinances."
Naturally, since the devout brethren had only a sundial or a water-clock for guidance, the times - by our reckoning - were approximate.
Secular life had bells as well. in England anyway. Each evening about eight o'clock, a bell was sounded to tell everyone to go to bed, a custom enshrined in law by William the Conqueror as "curfew" - or cuevrefu, the Norman French for "cover fire".
As the name implies, mandatory bedtime was a precaution against fire. Dwellings were built of wood and the curfew reduced the risk of houses catching fire - an occurrence which, by spreading, could quickly devastate a town.
Indeed, in many parts, the curfew bell was rung in the late evening long after its original purpose was forgotten, so that as late as the middle 1740s, Thomas Gray, for example, could bid us listen while "the curfew tolls the knell of parting day".
Not to be outdone, the monks' daily routine was duly organised around the sounding of the chapel bell for prayers on seven occasions every day.
Matins were between midnight and the break of day; Prime, Terce, Sext and Nones were respectively the first, third, sixth and ninth hours, measured from a starting point of 6 a.m.; Vespers, the evening prayers, were said at 6 p.m. and Com- pline - to "complete" the day - took place at bedtime about 9 p.m.