05/09/2026
Everybody in Margate half knows the rhyme about John Daundeleon and his great dog. Almost everything usually said about it is wrong, and a bell historian proved it in 1887.
There is a rhyme about Margate that people still half remember, usually with a laugh, usually not quite right. It goes like this:
John Daundeleon with his great dog
Brought over this bell on a mill cog.
It is a good rhyme, and a strange one. It is about the tenor bell of St John the Baptist, Margate, and about the medieval family who gave it, the same family who built the fortified gatehouse that still stands at Garlinge. Almost everything usually said about it is wrong, in three separate ways, which is how I came to spend a fortnight on thirteen words and a dog.
Start with where the rhyme is supposed to live. Edward Brayley, writing his History of Thanet in 1819, said the lines were on the bell. G. P. Bevan, in his Tourist's Guide to Kent, said it more firmly still.
In 1887 a man called J. C. L. Stahlschmidt was compiling The Church Bells of Kent, and he did the thing neither of them had done. He went to Margate and read the bells.
The rhyme is not on the bell. It never was. It is a spoken thing, passed round the town, and the two books had simply copied each other. Stahlschmidt's comment has been rattling round my head ever since I found it:
"Here are two cases of copying without verifying. It is a pity that compilers of books don't take a little more trouble to ascertain the correctness of the facts they detail."
A bell historian, in 1887, complaining about exactly the habit I have spent this whole project unpicking. I could have used him months ago.
So what is actually on the bell? Stahlschmidt writes it out: the tenor, fifty-two inches, cast by William Mears of London in 1785, with the churchwardens Thomas Wood and John Brooman named, and above them a single word. Dannddeleon.
That is the second wrong thing. Because the family spelled itself Daundelyon in its deeds, and Daundelyon is what the brass in the church says over the grave of the man who died in 1445. The bell of 1785 says Dannddeleon. And the medieval bell it replaced, which Brayley describes from an older account, said Daundeleon, above a line of Latin asking that in the Holy Trinity this bell be blessed.
Three spellings of one family name, on three objects, and not one of them agrees with another. I have found a fourth in Archaeologia Cantiana, which reports that same 1785 tenor as Daunddeleon and gets it wrong, because Stahlschmidt was the one standing underneath it.
The third wrong thing is the mill cog, and this one I liked.
I had always pictured the toothed wheel of a mill, and a bell somehow rolled or hauled along on it, which never quite made sense. Stahlschmidt puts one dry note at the end of the entry. Cog, or cogue, is an old English word for a small boat.
He brought it over by sea. Of course he did. Everything came to Thanet by sea.
And then, having taken the rhyme apart, Stahlschmidt quietly hands you something back. The medieval tenor, he thinks, was probably cast by a founder called John Sturdy, who was still working in 1449. Which makes the bell, in his careful words, quite likely to have been the gift of the John Dandelyon who died in 1445, and whose brass is still preserved in the church.
Probably. Quite likely. He will not push it further than the evidence goes, and neither will I. But if he is right, then the man in the brass, the man who built the gatehouse you can still walk past at Garlinge, is also the man who paid for the bell. Gatehouse, grave and bell, all one person.
Here is what strikes me, now the whole thing is written up. This research has been one long lesson in the same mistake made over and over.
Two manors, Dene and Dent-de-Lion, merged into one. Five women called Juliana in a single family, of whom two, a grandmother and her granddaughter, have been merged into one for the best part of a century. Two men called Henry de Sandwich, a knight and a bishop, probably merged into one — probably, because even that rests on a seventeenth-century scholar quoting an annal, and I have spent too long this month learning not to claim more than the paper in front of me says. Two Garlinges, sixteen miles apart, still waiting to be muddled by somebody. And a rhyme that everybody repeats and nobody checked.
The Julianas are my favourite, because somebody noticed long before I did. Planché, writing in 1864, remarks that the first of them must have been a woman of consequence, since "the name of Juliana being cherished by her descendants, and much wealth apparently derived from her". He was right, and he still could not keep them straight.
None of it was hidden. It was all sitting in print, some of it for two hundred years. It only needed somebody to go and look.
I have written the whole thing up properly. Twenty-odd pages, and an appendix that transcribes the records in full, in Latin with translations, every one with its reference, so that nothing has to be taken on trust. It is in the shop for £5, which goes back into the subscriptions and archive copies that make this kind of digging possible.
The story is free and always will be. The £5 is only if you want the records behind it.
And if you have a house or a family you have always meant to look into properly, I take these on. Just ask.
Katherine
Researched and written for the Society by Katherine, Katie Did
