Wallshaveears,noses,ships
Is everything quite as it seems in our ancient churches? The monuments, inscriptions, old glass and ledgerstones speak of the wealthy–but there is little or no trace of the common people who met, prayed, grieved and rejoiced over the centuries. But that picture may be about to change. A groundbreaking social history project in Norfolk, undertaken by volunteers and using new technology, is putting generations of ordinaryworshippers back into the story of the English parish
church.Matthew Champion, the project director, reports on findings so far
F
ormost inhabitants of a medieval parish the church building was the focus for social and religious life. It was a symbol of local pride, of Church authority and religious salvation. For the commonality of the parish, life within the community
began at its font, marriages took place within its porch, and vigils for the dead were watched beneath its roof. Yet, despite playing such a fundamental role in the rights of passage of countless generations of commoners, we know little of how these individuals, the vast majority of the medieval congregation, interacted with the church on a physical level. The interior of the surviving churches, their
stained glass, alabaster tombs and monumental brasses, tell us only about those who created them or caused them to be created. In the vastmajority of instances this is the parish élite. The coloured glass of the medieval church window, and the dull brasses laid into marble upon the floor, do not carry images of peasants ploughing but of local lords in their finery. There are the donor images, kneeling before the Blessed Virgin, or martial figures lying stiff in
28 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 2 2011
coat armour. Where is the voice of those who worked the land, who paid their tithes, who worshipped in thismonument to their betters? One hitherto largely overlooked form of
interaction, medieval graffiti in parish churches, offers insights into nature of the relationship between ordinary people and their church. Surviving medieval church graffiti has long been
regarded as outside mainstream study. Its creation lacks the legitimacy associated with wall paintings, monuments and stained glass, and all toomodern connotations associate it with destruction and defacement. However, it is this patent lack of legitimacy, this distancing fromauthority, which can allow it to be regarded as a reflection of the relationship between commoners and church. In 2010, a volunteer-led community archaeology
project was established to attempt the first large-scale survey of medieval graffiti to be undertaken for more than half a century. The Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey (NMGS) aims to examine every one of the county’s medieval churches, more than 650 of them, identifying any
medieval graffiti and scientifically recording it. The impetus for establishing the NMGS was the
recent reissue of Violet Pritchard’s “English Medieval Graffiti”, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1967. Although Pritchard’s work was groundbreaking, and remains the only full-length work upon the subject, it had, even by the author’s own admission, a number of failings. The most obvious of these limitations was that Pritchard didn’t have access to personal transport; the vast majority of her study sites were, by necessity, within 40 miles of her Cambridge base. Further, Pritchard tended to concentrate her efforts on geographical areas that were already known to contain graffiti inscriptions, and the result was that only two Norfolk sites made it into the final work. The NMGS realised that Pritchard’s overlooking
of the county had left a vast corpus of material undiscovered and unrecorded. Further, since Pritchard’s original work, technology hadmade major advances, allowing surveys to be undertaken more thoroughly and with far better results. Where Pritchard was reliant upon rubbings and
NMGS
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