Coursing Orders - some theory

Knowing coursing orders can help you understand and learn a quarter peal or touch better, follow what is going on and check other bells are right.

This will tell you what coursing orders are and how to work them out...
For Plain Bob and Surprise methods such as Cambridge and Yorkshire the coursing order before any calls have been made is always 7532468. That is, the odd bells first and then the even bells. Any coursing order is just a list of numbers like that one. It can be useful because it is fundamental to the structure of the method. Here I will deal with Major but if you want to look at another stage of method then you just need to miss out or add bells (so for Doubles you have 5324 and for Royal you have 975324680). Think about it for a moment and you can see that this is the order you would follow the bells if you were ringing the treble to Plain Bob, only you would start with the 2 of course which gives 2468753 (you can write a coursing order as any rotation of it, but it is conventional to write it as 7532468). This is also the order you follow the other bells from any bell in Plain Bob, allowing for slight blips when you dodge or make seconds. The treble also appears at different points in each lead.

Say you are ringing the 5. Then you can look at the coursing order and see that in Plain Bob you will follow the 7 down to lead and then the 3 will follow you down to lead. The 7 and 3 are your coursebells. In fact, you can say that the 7 is your coursebell and the 3 is your afterbell.

In Surprise methods the coursing order is not so clear to see but it is there all the same. For example in Cambridge and Yorkshire you dodge with your course bells every time you are at the back so this is a pointer which is good to know. In Yorkshire you often dodge with them on the front too.

In simple touches and quarter peals the tenors (the 7 and 8) are not affected by calls so we can ignore them and think of the coursing order as 53246. Now let us look at the effects calls have on coursing orders. We will look at the effects of bobs and singles at Home, Wrong, Middle and bobs at Before. If you are not sure already what these terms mean then you can find out on the Positions of Calls page.

Bob at Wrong Rotates first three bells in our coursing order. 53246 32546		Single at Wrong Swops first and third bells. 53246 23546
Bob at Home Rotates central three bells 53246 52436		Single at Home Swops 2nd and 4th bells 53246 54236
Bob at Middle Rotates last three bells 53246 53462		Single at Middle Swops 3rd and 5th bells 53246 53642
Bob at Before Last bell comes to the front 53246 65324

Now let us look at some examples...
1250 Yorkshire S Major
1344 Plain Bob Major
1250 Cambridge S Major

First the quarter peal of Yorkshire that I have talked about elsewhere. It honestly doesn't matter whether you can ring Yorkshire because this is a warm-up exercise for the Plain Bob composition anyway.

HHWWHHsW
First note that the calls are only at the Home and Wrong positions.

	53246
H	52436
H	54326
W	43526
W	35426
H	34256
H	32546
sW	52346

Now try and write this out for yourself.

Here is another quarter peal composition with only Wrongs and Homes, this time for Bob Major. As we saw above, a composition with only Wrongs and Homes will leave the 6 unaffected, so I have left the 6 out of the coursing order this time.

W H H H sW H H H repeated
"Wrong and 3 Homes, Single Wrong and 3 Homes. Repeated."

	5324
W	3254
H	3542
H	3425
H	3254
sW	5234
H	5342
H	5423
H	5234
W	2354
H	2543
H	2435
H	2354
sW	5324
H	5243
H	5432
H	5324

You can notice here that we return to the plain course coursing order - 5324 - at the end. This is normally the case but it isn't the case in the Yorkshire composition above because we get rounds at the snap after the Wrong instead of at the Home.

Now you might like to read an explanation of using these coursing orders to conduct instead of just call this quarter.

The final example is a 1250 of Cambridge Surprise Major, composed by Mark Davies:

M W H

2

- -

- s -

s s

s s

Round two blows later (i.e. at the treble's snap)

Here are the coursing order transpositions:

53246

H 52436

H 54326

M 54263

W 42563

M 42635

sW 62435

H 64325

sW 34625

sH 32645

sM 32546

sW 52346

On to Basic Conducting - a quarter peal of Plain Bob Major.

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