Ludlow, Shropshire

 

Mermaids revisited

One morning recently the Resident Wise Woman and I, finding ourselves in the middle of nowhere in northern Herefordshire, realised we were not far from Ludlow. Lunchtime was looming so we decided to make our way there for refreshment. It was a no-brainer to pay a visit to St Laurence’s church, one of the largest and best in the country bordering Wales, while we were there. We’d visited this church before, but we knew there was more than enough there to make another visit rewarding.

I headed for the chancel, where the choir stalls have a lovely set of misericords, those seats that tip up to provide a ledge to lean on during the long periods of standing required during the medieval liturgy. Beneath the seats, invisible when they’re in the ‘down’ position, are delightful carvings, many of which are designed to make a moral point in an amusing or entertaining way. One of my favourites is a carving of a mermaid, the subject of my previous post about church graffiti.*

The Ludlow mermaid is in generally excellent condition. (Click on the picture to see her more clearly.) Nearly all the standard features of a medieval mermaid are intact – her long hair, exposed breasts, scaly, fishy tail, and the mirror she holds in her right hand. Only her left arm has gone, together with what it held, which would have been a comb. The mirror, though, is enough to remind the viewer that in the Middle Agers the mermaid was a symbol of vanity, and of the way she was said to use her physical attraction to lure men into the sea. A moral lesson in a visual form, carved with care and vigour – those tresses, those scales.

This misericord is also a reminder of the fascination of the sea. The mermaid was not the only monster to lurk there – think gigantic krakens ‘battening on huge sea-worms’,† sea-serpents, sirens, all threatening, rumoured presences, coming to get the unwary sailor or preying on one another, as Shakespeare said that monsters of the deep were wont to do.§ The pair of supporting carvings on either side of the Ludlow mermaid are chunky toothed fish who look as if they’d willingly chew on a mariner’s foot. ‘Stay away from the fishes’ realm,’ they seem to say. Yet their fascination, and that of the mermaid, endures.

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* On such graffiti, see also Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (Ebury Press, 2015)

† See Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Kraken’ (‘There he hath lain for ages, and will lie | Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep…’)

§ King Lear, Act IV, Scene ii (‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, | Like monsters of the deep.’)

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.

Adderbury, Oxfordshire

Fishy (2)

I always think the best part of Adderbury church is the exterior. It has a glorious spire, some outstanding window tracery (much of it renewed during a Victorian restoration), and a riot of 14th-century carving running around the building at cornice level. I wanted to highlight just one of these carvings (although I hope to return to them in another post and feature some more), because Adderbury has the female counterpart of the mermen I included in my previous post about Anstey in Hertfordshire: a lovely stone mermaid, showing off her bifurcated tail.

This mermaid, although somewhat worn in the six hundred years or so that she’s been here, still clearly has long hair, the feature emphasized in the typical medieval portrayals of mermaids holding combs and mirrors, and like those attributes a symbol of physical beauty and vanity. But Adderbury’s mermaid holds no comb or mirror, her hands are occupied grasping the two branches of her tail, like the mermen of Anstey. The branches stretch outwards and upwards, to fit exactly the moulding that contains the carving, so that the mermaid feels perfectly at home in her place high on the church wall. For the people of Adderbury in the 14th century, she must have been a lovely and intriguing hint of life in a place of which they knew little: the far-distant sea.