These had a dual use. In the first place they were used by mortals as a protection against fairies and other evil spirits. The church bells, the gargoyles and the weathercock — the symbol of sunrise and day — were popularly supposed to be the three defences against the Devil. The fairies were also repelled by the sound of church bells. Jabez Allies's anecdote of the fairy who was heard lamenting

Neither sleep, neither lie,

For Inkbro’s ting-tang hangs so high

is the first of quite a number that record the fairies' dislike ofchurch bells. Another protective use of bells was that of the Morris Men, whose legbells are generally supposed to drive anti-fertility spirits from the neighbourhood.

In the second place, the fairies themselves used bells. No account of the fairy rade is complete without a mention of the jingling bells ringing from the horses' harness. We hear of it, for instance, in Young Tamlane and in the Galloway account of the Fairy Rade. It is never explained why the fairy bells rang, unless it be from their great love of music, but it is generally supposed that these fairies, in spite of their general habit of kidnapping human beings and purloining human food, belonged to the seelie court, and it might be conjectured that these bells rang to scare away the evil creatures who made up the unseelie court.