The tradition traces back to 1434, when Sir Thomas de Soothill, a local knight remembered locally under the considerably less flattering nickname Black Tom, flew into a violent rage after learning that a servant boy had failed to attend church as required, and in that fury threw the boy into a pond, where he drowned before anyone could save him, a genuine act of casual medieval cruelty with fatal, irreversible consequences. As an act of atonement for what he had done, de Soothill is said to have donated a tenor bell to the parish church, now known as Dewsbury Minster, with the specific instruction that it be rung every single Christmas Eve from that point onward, in perpetual memory of the boy whose death he had caused. The bell itself, recast in 1875 but said to retain some of its original medieval metal within the new casting, has carried his own grim nickname, Black Tom, ever since, the instrument of atonement named for the man whose crime made it necessary.
The custom itself, known as the Devil's Knell or the Old Lad's Passing Bell, involves tolling the bell once for every single year that has passed since the birth of Christ, a count that now runs into the thousands, carefully timed so that the very last toll falls at the precise moment of midnight, on the deep-rooted belief that the Devil himself died the instant Christ was born, and that the ringing itself keeps the whole parish safe from his mischief for the entire year ahead.
Continuous ringing is documented from at least 1828 onward, an unbroken run of nearly two centuries that makes this one of the best-attested pieces of genuinely living protective folklore found anywhere in West Yorkshire, a custom still actively performed rather than a static legend merely remembered and retold. Dewsbury Minster continues the ritual every single Christmas Eve to this day, the bell's slow, accumulating count still marking out, year by year, both a medieval knight's centuries-old penance and the parish's own ongoing protection against the Devil he is said to have briefly, catastrophically, let loose among them.
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