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.

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Portal wonders

As a pendant to my previous post about the little church of Ampney St Mary, which sits in a field between Cirencester and Fairford, here’s a post about things one can miss near doorways. Eager as always to get inside and look at the wonders within, I pushed open the church door and stepped inside to look at the wall paintings in the nave. When I had examined those I went into the chancel where I was immediately struck by the lintel above the small priest’s door in the south wall. Above the priest’s head as he enters is a profusely carved stone that is obviously recycled – the carving continues at either end into the mortar joint. This seems to be part of a cross slab, although what has survived does not include the cross that would have been carved on the stone, just the foliage that surrounded it.

How long has this been here? I don’t know. The chancel was extended in the 13th-century and as the carving looks early medieval, the lintel could have been fitted then. Maybe, however, it’s evidence of the church’s late-19th century restoration (again, see my previous post for more on this). Whatever the case, it’s a lucky survival that preserves a layer of history and adds a touch of charm. If I’d been less hasty when entering, I’d have seen a piece of a different cross slab at the church’s main entrance. Here it’s set in the floor and this time the cross is on the part that has been kept. Here the carving is very worn – it must have been trodden on many times – and looks as if it was always in much shallower relief than the other example, but the arms of the cross, with their decorative lobes, are plain to see (see image at the end of the post).

And there’s one more thing at the same doorway, among so many small and telling details in this building that many people will not notice. Incised on the door jamb one can make out graffiti – a pair of initials, a series of overlapping circles, and a design of a branched structure, perhaps a stylised tree, perhaps something else. The overlapping circles are almost certainly medieval and form the kind of design used to make a ‘daisywheel’ – a circle containing several overlapping arcs that seem to form the petals of a flower. Except in this case the circles are inscribed in their entirety, so the flower design Is hard to see. Seeing this at all is not easy in a photograph, but clicking on my image to enlarge it might help. 

Daisywheels are usually interpreted as apotropaic (or protective) marks. Designed to keep out evil spirits, they are often found at or near entrances; in houses, one can also see them near fireplaces, another potential entrance for malevolent forces. I posted about a clearer example of a daisywheel here. Ancient graffiti are fascinating, and one of the insights that buildings can give into the way religion and the supernatural were regarded in the Middle Ages. But they take some spotting. Here, they’re just one more reason to stay alert when you visit an ancient building.  

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* Why did the graffitist do it this way, then? I wonder if they intended to highlight the daisy wheel by colouring in this relevant lines.  

† For more on medieval graffiti, it’s worth seeking out Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (Ebury Press, 2015) 

Lavenham, Suffolk

In plain sight

Back in 2015 I read Matthew Champion’s fascinating book Medieval Graffiti and was alerted to the interesting array of ‘unofficial’ marks and inscriptions in English churches. This has inspired at least two posts on this bog – one on overlapping Vs, said to refer to the Virgin Mary (‘Virgo Virginum’, Virgin of virgns), another illustrating the outline of a human hand and some initials within a shield. A further common motif used in church graffiti is what is now widely known as the daisywheel, a series of arcs drawn within a circle, which combine to create an image resembling a six-petalled flower. When staying in Lavenham, Suffolk, just before Christmas, I was intrigued to come across such a daisywheel not in a church but on a wooden beam above a fireplace at Lavenham Guildhall.

The usual interpretation. of such marks is that they provide protection from evil spirits. In churches they are often placed near doorways or arches, suggesting that they prevent or discourage evil spirits form entering the building. Drawing a ritual protection mark above a fireplace suggests that it stops such spirits entering the building down the chimney.

Fireplaces are of course important places in a building – they’re the source of heat for comfort and cooking, of course, but in addition are focal points and symbols of the house and home, and of the people who live in the building or use it. For these reasons as well as the fact that the chimney offers a potential way in for evil forces, they’re a place to look out for protection marks in secular buildings. The famous ‘witch marks’ I have seen in a Worcestershire pub are also located in fireplaces – in this case on the hearth itself.

While the pub’s ‘witch marks’ consist of white circles made with chalk, daisywheels are usually incised into the wood or plaster. Matthew Champion suggests that they were made using the points of shears, a tool much used in the late Middle Ages when it’s thought many of these marks were made. He has tried making them with shears himself, with successful results. For centuries these marks were unregarded because they are easy to miss when one is not looking for them. Now scholars such as Champion have alerted us to their presence, more and more are being rediscovered, hiding as it were in plain sight.

Little Comberton, Worcestershire

 

Mark-making

As I recalled in my previous post, we didn’t manage to get inside the church at Little Comberton the other day. But we could see the interior of the north porch, where we admired the doorway and looked at a small collection of incised graffiti on the right-hand side as we entered. Carved and scraped graffiti was once the bane of church visitors and worshippers. ‘How could they deface the building like this?’ we would murmur, and some people added disbelief to outrage when it became clear that many of the marks on walls, pillars, and even magnificent effigies, had been made in the medieval period, the so-called age of piety. Many of us now see these things differently, wanting to understand more about these marks – what they might mean, who might have made them, and why.

The marks in this porch are fairly easy to see* and apparently simple: the outlines of hands, a pair of initials, a date. Hand outlines have one of the longest traditions in art – there are prehistoric examples, and when it comes to church graffiti many date back to the Middle Ages. These are later, however, being in a porch that bears the date 1639 and they include the initials WD and a date inscription of 1733. Medieval hand graffiti (and also shoe graffiti) often seem to have been done by pilgrims visiting shrines – there are examples in Canterbury cathedral and also in churches on popular routes to notable shrines, where pilgrims might stop to pray or attend divine service en route. These 18th-century graffiti were made long after the age of pilgrimages in England, and they seem to be more akin to the initials and other marks made in the early modern period on effigies in churches. Many of these, although we may see them as marks of vandalism, were carefully made, with attention to the form of the letters and the shapes of fingers and thumbs.† They seem to record visits to the church, perhaps visits when a particular prayer was said that had specific importance for the person concerned. If to some they seem little more than the thoughtless scars left by modern tags or reminders that ‘BILL WOZ ERE’, for the graffitist, they may have had greater, and perhaps more reverent, significance.§

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* I have increased the contrast in the photograph a little to make the marks a little clearer.

† Some hand graffiti appear to have been made by tracing the outline of the maker’s hand, as if uniting person and building.

§ For the best recent general account of church graffiti, see Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti (Ebury Press, 2015), which I reviewed here.

Shorncote, Gloucestershire

Viva Maria!

A few weeks ago I injured a leg and for a while could hardly move and was unable to bend sufficiently to get in and out of the car – let alone drive it – without pain. By last weekend things had improved sufficiently for me to take my leg for a test drive, as it were, and, as things went well, I ended up a few miles beyond Cirencester and found myself in a tiny place called Shorncote, where I’d not been before.

The church at Shorncote is very small – just a nave, chancel, small side chapel and porch – but is full of the sort of things that I like: fragments of wall painting, an old timber roof, a tiny Easter sepulchre, a reading desk knocked together out of medieval panelling, and so on. As I was looking round, the sun came out and threw light on all this, and also on something I had not noticed until that point, a carved graffito on a window ledge, made up of a capital W or what this symbol is usually taken to be, a pair of overlapping Vs.

Matthew Champion’s excellent book Medieval Graffiti* is enlightening on this mark, which he and fellow graffiti-researchers have found in many medieval churches. He says that it is widely believed to symbolise the Virgin Mary, and written as two overlapping Vs is said to stand for ‘Virgo Virginum’ (Virgin of virgins), though it is also sometimes written upside-down, when it appears as a capital M, so it works that way too. Champion cites at least one place – a church at Fakenham, Norfolk – where the symbol is reproduced formally (i.e. not as graffiti), in the flint patterns on a late-medieval church wall, in association with the word ‘Maria’.

However, the symbol outlasted the Reformation, turning up in all sorts of places, including 18th and 19th-century secular buildings, suggesting that it might have acquired a significance beyond the church, as a kind of sign of good luck. In 20th-century Italy, incidentally, the symbol had an afterlife as an abbreviation for the word ‘Viva’ (long live).† There can be a lot to tease out of a small scratched mark on a church wall.

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* Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches, (Ebury Press, 2013). I reviewed this book here. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in these things.

† To go off piste for a moment: The American poet E. E. Cummings gave one of his collections the title VV [ViVa], with the Vs printed to overlap (and often, given the limitations of typography, as a W), in the ancient manner. Cummings liked titles that were unusual or difficult to pronounce. Another of his was XAIPE, which is Greek, and I’m told sounds roughly like ‘chiry’, with the ‘ch’ as in the Scottish ‘loch’ and the word rhyming with ‘wiry’; the meaning is ‘Be happy!’, as witness Lawrence Durrell in Reflections on a Marine Venus: ‘When you see the gravestones from the little necropolis of Cameirus . . . it is the so-often repeated single word – the anonymous Xaipe – which attracts you . . . . It is not the names of the rich or the worthy . . . but this single word, “Be Happy,” serving both as a farewell and admonition, that goes to your heart with the whole impact of the Greek style of mind.’

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.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

‘Peekaboo, peekaboo, here’s looking at you’

Long ago, in an era shrouded by those notorious meteorological phenomena the mists of time, I was working in the Covent Garden area of London as a publisher’s editor and the Resident Wise Woman spent her days as an arts administrator, working mainly with a group called Covent Garden Community Theatre (CGCT), which combined theatre and political comment and puppetry in a way that anticipated the more famous satire of Spitting Image, which hit the television screen soon afterwards.

Very much of their time, CGCT nevertheless found satirical targets that would not be out of place today. One of these was the prevalence of surveillance, nailed in an amusing song (we had it once, on a vinyl LP, long unplayed) called ‘Cunning B*ggers’ (I use the aposiopesic asterisk not out of mealy-mouthed prudery but due to my fear that today’s surveillance of the internet will penalize me in some way if I resort to what might be seen as obscenity). This song, of course, was about the use of listening technology. No mobile phones to tap in those days, but spies had bugs, and bugs could get anywhere: ‘We can put bugs in your clothes, We’ll put two bugs up your nose, And we cover other openings as well’, went the song. (I quote from memory, as I do in the heading to this post.)

I was reminded of all this today as I made the trip along Cheltenham’s Fairview Road to the junction with Hewlett Road, to see the new graffito, attributed to the artist known as Banksy. Here are trench-coated spies with their listening devices, and we are meant to remember that Cheltenham is home to GCHQ and that, across the other side of town, hundreds of highly trained linguists sit listening to and analysing the polyglot babble of the world’s airways – all in the interests of national security, you understand. The painting is amusing, alludes to an issue that’s rarely far from the headlines these days, and, in its positioning near a telephone box in Cheltenham, is clever and knowing. There’s also something curiously old-fashioned about it. The hats and coats, the big tape recorder and microphones – even the fact that it needs a public telephone to make its point – none of this equipment would fit up your nose, though it might get up your nose.

For many, though, the sinister side of surveillance takes a backseat in the presence of the Banksy. When I arrived at the telephone box, it was a case of joining a queue. Around twenty people were waiting to photograph themselves and their friends inside the box, surrounded by the spooks. We might resent the presence of the b*ggers, but we do not let let them get us down. The graffito has a similar demotic appeal to the 1970s work of CGCT. So form an orderly queue, and watch your language.

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Some further thoughts and links
The telephone box, by the way, is a KX100 kiosk, a type created by DCA Design and introduced in 1985. It was part of a modernizing move that came soon after British Telecom was privatized. Designed to be easy and inexpensive to clean and maintain, these glass, aluminium and steel boxes were installed widely but were never as popular as the older red boxes, perhaps because they're meant to blend transparently into the background rather than  asserting themselves as the much loved red phone boxes do.

Graffiti is, of course, controversial and illegal. In some cases, however, local communities embrace particular graffiti – because these actually enhance their setting or because people approve of the work or the sentiments it embodies. This particular example has already attracted defacement, swiftly followed by rescue by locals. There’s a news story about this here.

Another story highlights the hope that the Bansky will put Cheltenham ‘on the world culture map’.

And finally, for now, another report details a local plan to protect the work with perspex.