Churchdown, Gloucestershire

 

Who did that?

Many people see graffiti as a modern phenomenon. It’s the young, you’ll hear, who do it – they have too much time on their hands, they have no respect, they should do something useful, and so on. Against that, others will put forward the graffiti of artists such as Banksy, who make social and political points by painting on buildings – this is graffiti that means something, that makes important points. ‘It’s art,’ people will say. ‘It’s fine…I agree with it…provided it’s not “enhancing” my house’...although some, valuing the work of Banksy (aesthetically, or financially, or both) welcome the artist’s interventions on their property.

But graffiti has been with us for a long time. The Romans had it, it exists in medieval churches. People who study medieval buildings are finding more and more ancient graffiti, and treating it seriously for what it might tell us about the interests of medieval and later people, and their religious beliefs. The marks made by scraping shallow lines on ancient stone can be hard to see, but they have their fascination. There’s an excellent book on the subject, Medieval Graffiti by Matthew Champion (see my review of it, here), and there are some good websites about the subject too.

In this post I want to give just one example of a piece of graffiti in a church not many miles from where I live. This is St Bartholomew’s, Churchdown, a church that’s often locked, but volunteers currently open it on Saturday afternoons in summer. There are quite a few graffiti marks around the doorway in the north porch, and one of the most remarkable depicts a mermaid. The image is indistinct, but not hard to make out once you get your eye in. I have increased the contrast in my photograph so that some of the details are a little clearer. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you may be able to make out the mermaid’s head and one eye, her strands of sticking-out hair, a narrow neck, an upper body in which one breast is still clearly visible, and a scaly tail that narrows and curves away to the left, getting less distinct at the end. As our eyes follow the mermaid’s stick-arms, we see that she holds a square mirror in one hand and a comb with two rows of teeth in the other.

Churchdown is nowhere near the sea, although not far from the inland port of Gloucester. But you don’t need to live near the sea to have heard about mermaids. Tales of such creatures were known widely in the Middle Ages and later. Medieval mermaids were generally portrayed with long hair and a mirror and comb. In folklore they were symbols of vanity, pride and the perils of lust, and woe betide any man who fell in love with a mermaid and pursued her. He’d most likely be captured and come to a watery death. There are quite a few ‘official’ images of mermaids in churches – in wall paintings, for example, and on bench ends. Here someone long ago – who knows who? – has added their own.

Scratching away

As the streets outside get back to normal after my town’s annual pre-Christmas festival and knees-up (everything from Santa’s Grotto to the Mummers’ Play, plus food and presents galore) I realise that it’s once again the time of year when English Buildings becomes a book blog for ten days or so as I review some recent publications. As usual, I’ve stuck to books on subjects in some way related to the main subject of this blog, and to books I especially like, in the hope that some of my readers might find something they’d like to give or receive for Christmas. I begin with a book on a subject I’ve been intrigued by for years: the graffiti scratched on the walls of England’s parish churches, much of it done hundreds of years ago…

Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches
Published by Ebury Press

There’s quite a lot of ancient graffiti in England’s medieval churches. It’s usually not immediately obvious, but once you get your eye in, you see more and more. Ships, animals, abstract designs of various sorts, bits of heraldry, images of people and fish: all these appear frequently, scratched into the stone, and when you add masons’ marks and mass dials, it adds up to a formidable body of imagery that ought to tell us quite a bit about the people who made it. Matthew Champion’s book aims to describe this material and, where possible, to explain why it was made.

It’s a fascinating account of a phenomenon that passes most people by because, scratched shallowly into the surface of the stone, much of the graffiti is difficult to see. The book does a good job of describing it and pointing us towards it, drawing on lots of original research, especially that done by the Norfolk and Suffolk Medieval Graffiti Survey, of which the author is Project Director. Other parts of Britain have been researched less thoroughly. There’s clearly a big job waiting to be done.

The text is lively and ranges widely across the evidence – archaeological, documentary, contextual –  that can help us understand the graffiti. The book is often inconclusive – we simply don’t know why a lot of this stuff was produced – but no worse for that because the text is absorbing, asks fascinating questions about the material, and makes illuminating distinctions. Champion distinguishes between the consecration crosses that were carved or painted on church walls for use in the ceremony of consecration and the many cross-like graffiti which are sometimes confused with these. He worries away at the simple little sundials, known as ‘Mass dials’, seen on so many churches, and asks what they could have been for, since so many of them are impractical for people to use to tell the time of upcoming Masses (many of these dials are on north-facing walls, for a start, a number of churches have several such dials close together on the same wall, and anyway most churches had bells). He talks about marks attributed to merchants, pilgrims, and other groups, untangles charms and curses, and suggests sources of symbolism and metaphor. Along the way he has some entertaining examples of how difficult these markings can be to interpret. One of my favourites involves a verbal inscription (few of these marks actually include words: they were mostly done by the illiterate). This line has been translated by one scholar as ‘In AD 1381 was the insurrection of the common people’ and by another as ‘In the year of our Lord 1381, five plough lands belonging to the church were exchanged’.

Fascinating stories and images emerge from such ambiguities. And not only this. The sheer volume and variety of graffiti lead Champion to a modified view of the parish church in the Middle Ages. Parish churches were not, or not only, places where the common people stood and watched the priest uphold the rituals and traditions of the church and celebrate Mass. It was a more interactive space in which parishioners not only responded to the dazzling array of statuary and stained glass (actually, it has to be said, we do not fully understood how they interacted with those things either) but also added their own contribution, making marks in the stone in which we can hear the distant echoes of their lost voices. Medieval Graffiti fascinatingly makes some of those echoes clearer, while modestly and rightly not trying to cover up the remaining mysteries.