26 September 2022
In 1517, a flamboyant new gatehouse was under construction at Canterbury Cathedral. Built in a late-flowering example of the Perpendicular Gothic style, the Christchurch Gateway features twin turrets flanking a gate portal and every facet is decorated with panel tracery, armorials, and figure sculpture. In among this decorative exuberance is a carving of a woman… but this is no ordinary female. She is shown, emerging from foliage, unashamedly naked with her head and spine provocatively arched backward. Her breasts are prominently pushed forward and upwards. Meanwhile, her legs are spread wide, and her vulva is clearly and unapologetically on display. Her form is deliberately voluptuous, and her posture is explicitly sexual.
The sculpture has caused some red-faced discussion by modern commentators attempting to rectify the apparent pornographic content with the sacred context of the building. Lauren MacDougall of Kent Live concluded that “It doesn’t feel very Christian” and went on to note that: “The story goes that the church were trying to get out of paying what was due the stonemason… He finally accepted a payment lower than what was originally agreed, but got his revenge by putting in this rude carving.”
Cathedrals and Churches
Canterbury is far from alone in housing such naughty imagery. At Norwich Cathedral the bosses of the rib vaulted cloisters feature religious scenes such as the Crucifixion, Christ’s Ascension and Mary the Queen of Heaven. Elsewhere, there are more earthly moments including a pair of raucous musicians, a group of gossiping townsfolk and a feast. However, dotted among these images of heaven and earth are altogether more disturbing views. A nude man disappears into foliage, a bearded fellow is openly presenting his bare posterior and a half-naked man is ripping at the clothing of a maligned woman.
It is not just cathedrals either. So many parish churches have figures engaged in all manner of grotesque behaviour. At Wiggenhall (Norfolk) a gargoyle has a visibly erect penis. At West Knoyle (Wiltshire) a monstrous chap is licking his own testes. Meanwhile, at Ewerby (Lincolnshire) a gurning man appears to be masturbating.
Speculation
In a self-published book, Demon Carvers and Mooning Men: The East Midlands School of Church Carving, Lionel Ward follows Lauren MacDougall’s misgivings about such imagery in a sacred context: “Why… would a church pay for this work? Well, the answer is that I don’t think they knowingly did. It is well known that the master mason would often be paid a fixed price for the whole job, even sometimes to include procuring the stone. If the master had labour being freed up towards the end of a project he could easily put men to decorative work. All the evidence is that it was mediaeval practice throughout the land to give the masons a free hand on decorative carving.”
Elsewhere, regular posts on social media forums such as the Medieval and Tudor Period Buildings Group draw attention to the plethora of scandalous images found in ecclesiastical architecture. Speculation on how naughty carvings came to exist inevitably follows. Many draw attention to the widespread story of the disgruntled stonemason who had not been paid properly taking sculptural revenge. Others point to the “well-known anti-establishment views” of craftspeople, masonic humour, pornographic intent and possibly even the survival of pagan fertility cults throughout the mediaeval period.
Sheela-na-gig
The latter is commonly assumed to be true. However, there is little-to-no evidence of genuine pagan beliefs during the high mediaeval period, outside of very limited areas on the extreme edge of north-eastern Europe. Reference is inevitably be made of the famous sheela-na-gig carvings of female forms which hold open exaggerated vulva. Candy Bedworth has asked if “Sheela Na Gig is generally believed to be a pre-Christian deity or fertility symbol… Is this the Earth goddess who both births us, and then takes us in death? The figures are often depicted in a birthing position. There are suggestions that they are a folklore talisman used for promoting a successful birth. They may have been comical in-jokes by stone-masons, or a magical protection used to scare away evil. Are these the last defiant images, left as a reminder of the power of women? Power stolen by the misogynist politics of the Christian Church?”
However, as the historian Francis Young has noted: “The Romantic notion of paganism as a cult of conscious resistance to institutional Christianity is not a meaningful idea in the context of the Middle Ages themselves.” Despite this, the sheela is certainly a contentious image which has given church authorities cause for ethical rumination. During the early twentieth century, the vicar of Easthorpe (Essex) removed one such carving, and donated it to the Colchester Castle Museum, as he thought it too obscene to keep in the church. Meanwhile in an essay on sheelas, the pseudonymous author, Nora Bone referred to the motif as “the undefinable terror twat” due to the mystery and moral panic that it is capable of provoking among excitable and prudish parishioners. However, these sculptures cannot be described as pornographic as they are far from titillating or arousing.
A more measured view has been taken by Theresa Oakley. She offers us a mediaeval context in which to view sheela-na-gig imagery and points out that they may be material evidence of a form of Christian theology known as negative mysticism: “which consciously employed a strategy of disarrangement as a way of finding God… to find God, therefore, one has to enter darkness. This is a darkness caused by excessively blinding light, a darkness of deep knowledge rather than of ignorance” (Oakley 2009, 65). Essentially, the further from the sanctified, the better the chance of finding salvation and redemption. In Biblical terms, this is the equivalent of Jesus heading to the desert to fast for 40 days and 40 nights prior to his temptation by the devil. Notably, he apparently came back from the nadir stronger and even more convinced of his message to the world (The New Testament – Matthew, Chapter 4: Verses 4-11).
Oakley (2009, 84) goes on to state that: “sheelas are part of the sacred. They alert us to that which cannot be seen and hide a complexity of meaning which cannot be accessed by the limited view that they are fertility symbols, images of lust, or were intended to scare off the devil.” So, if it is possible to find the spiritual in the very antitheses of Christian imagery, can this help us to explain why highly sexualised artwork was so very popular in the sexually repressed mediaeval church run by (allegedly) celibate clerics?
Popularity
Most church buildings probably had at least one example of sexual imagery, and some had many. Not all survive, but there is still no shortage of examples spanning the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. There is a man clutching his toes and presenting an exaggerated anus at Easton-on-the-Hill (Northamptonshire). Another man is simultaneously dancing and masturbating at Bratton Clovelly (Devon). The example of the lad exposing his genitals, by lifting his legs far above his head, at All Saints Hereford became an internet viral sensation in 2021.
Was the church aware of the proliferation of such carvings? Are we to believe Oakley’s assertion that sexual sculptures were part of a now-obscure branch of Christian thinking? Is it not the case that the prosaic explanation that they were the result of crafts-people peeved at their treatment by the church more likely?
Well, most of these figures are highly visible and would have been even more so when they were still brightly painted during the mediaeval period. Yet there is not a single archival reference to a complaint or court case involving a resentful stonemason who was prosecuted for carving such an image. Given that the Catholic church was (and remains) notoriously litigious, this lack of evidence for legal cases against such frequent imagery stretches the story of the angered mason to breaking point.
Mediaeval Artistic Commissions
Sexual imagery must be put into the wider context of how artwork was patronised and commissioned by the church in mediaeval Europe. During the Second Council of Nicea, in 787, it was decreed that: “the composition of religious pictures is not left to the inspiration of artists, but depends on the principles laid down by the Catholic Church and religious tradition. Art alone is the painter’s province, the composition belongs to the Fathers.” This meant that the church’s own people picked the themes which were to be represented in their buildings. Artists were left with narrow parameters in which they could express themselves according to the media of their chosen trade.
This eighth century practice was still alive and well, in 1306, when Ralph Baldock, the bishop of London, ordered the prior of Holy Trinity Aldgate to lead an enquiry as: “We have heard on trustworthy authority that one Tidemann of Germany hath sold, some time since, to Geoffrey, Rector of St. Mildred’s in the Poultry, a certain carved crucifix with a cross-beam, which doth not represent the true form of the cross” (Coulton 1956, 473). Here, a German merchant had sold a non-conformist representation of the Crucifixion that was causing some alarm for the authorities. The church duly sprang into action – it was not going to stand by and let something like that be placed within one of its buildings. So, if a carving of the Cross could provoke such a response, why do we never hear of outrage by clerics at apparently pornographic carvings in their buildings – many of which were in plain sight?
Licence and Encouragement
The answer to the last question is probably that there were no complaints. Sexual imagery was liberally and gladly patronised by the mediaeval church. The notions that stonemasons were knocking out last-minute rude carvings because there was a bit of money left over in a project; that they were anti-establishment members of a covert pagan fertility cult; or that they had been diddled out of wages, just do not stack up.
Sculpture was (and remains) expensive. In the mid-1250s, the sum of 53s 4d was paid out, probably to the master mason William Yxeworth, for two life-sized statues of Mary and the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation. They still stand in the spandrels above the door into the chapter house of Westminster Abbey. At this period, a master mason might expect to be making somewhere around £10 per annum and those two statues would have constituted around 25% of Yxeworth’s annual income (Lethaby 1906, 155). Although most sexual imagery is not of the same size and intricacy as the Westminster statues, it does still represent a significant investment in time, labour, and materials. These pieces were not created rapidly or in secret. They were deliberate commissions.
Functions Within Churches
We’ve already seen that sheela-na-gig sculptures have been linked to negative mysticism and may have been part of an intangible spirituality. There is no reason why similar notions cannot be applied to other sexual sculptures. Equally, there may be further explanations that can be proposed in certain cases.
The village of Laxton (Nottinghamshire) is famous for its substantial motte and bailey castle, and for being the last manor in Europe to be farmed on mediaeval open field principles. It also has a very fine fifteenth century parish church dedicated to St Michael the Archangel. Between the clerestory and the parapet of the north elevation of the nave is a cornice dotted with seven grotesque carvings. The fourth from the west is perhaps my favourite sculpture from the entire mediaeval period.
The carving is of a demon with an oversized head featuring pointed ears, a bulbous nose and distended brow ridges. Its clawed fingers are pulling open the centrepiece of the sculpture – a wide mouth… and a figure lies within it. The individual is, unequivocally, a male figure shown from the waist down and from behind. He is bending over and parting his bum cheeks with his hands to reveal his open sphincter, a pendulous pair of testicles and an engorged member. Subtle, it is not!
The Laxton demon is a variation of a type of carving known as a “mouth-puller”, in which the figure hooks its fingers or claws into the corners of its mouth to open it widely. Alex Woodcock (2012, 34) has noted that interpretation of “mouth-pullers” varies. Some could be the pained expressions of one suffering toothache. Others may be connected to personifications of the vices, such as lust or anger. Anthony Weir and James Jerman (1986, 102) thought that they were a visual reference specifically connected to lust and adultery as mentioned in a passage of the book of Isiah: “But draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the whore. Against whom do ye sport yourselves? Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue? Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood. Enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the cliffs of the rocks?” (The Old Testament – Isiah, Chapter 57: Verses 3-5).
The motif could be read as a visual warning to parishioners not to behave like the adulterous pagans in Isiah. Similarly, another common mediaeval sculptural motif was the wild man. He was frequently depicted as a very hairy human with long hair, beard and a club, and represented the uncivilised barbarism that should be avoided by the chivalrous and the godly (Hayman 2010, 11). Mouth-pullers, wild men and carnal or scatological nudes were perhaps part of a normal sculptural tradition to show the reverse of what was expected of the virtuous Christian in sculpture. Here, negative mysticism may meet moral teachings.
Other examples of “mouth-pullers” are known, regionally, at Clifton (Nottinghamshire) and Oakam (Rutland) but neither of these feature a naked man within the mouth. Remarkably, the Laxton sculpture faces directly onto the main village street and is highly visible. The fact that the demon seems to be consuming the naked man is reminiscent of the Mouth of Hell – an essential image in Doom paintings.
This scene was familiar to mediaeval folk as commonly illustrated over the chancel arch in churches. Surviving examples can be seen at Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire), Salisbury (Wiltshire) and Coventry (West Midlands). The image of sinners being consumed by demons or in the fires of Hell may have acted as a moral warning: do not engage in licentious behaviour or you will be sent to Hell for all eternity (Woodcock 2012, 36).
Satirical Comedy
So far, the elephant in the room has been humour. In fact, humour is altogether absent from most po-faced academic literature on the subject. Instead, many sculptures, including the Laxton carving, could be described as extremely funny. To the rakish or scatological person, the mooning man at Cottesmore (Rutland), the exhibitionist grasping his testicles in both hands with a tongue lolling out at Colsterworth (Lincolnshire), and the man licking his own sphincter on the soffit of the tie beam at Stoke Golding (Leicestershire) are absolutely hilarious.
Much mediaeval humour was very earthy, and this kind of visual imagery should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer:
“This Nicholas was risen for to pisse,
And thoughte he wolde amenden al the jape;
He sholde kisse his ers er that he scape.
And up the wyndowe dide he hastily;
And out his ers he putteth pryvely
Over the buttok, to the haunche-bon”
Which can be translated as:
“This Nicholas had risen for a piss,
And thought that it would carry on the jape
To have his arse kissed by this jack-a-nape.
And so he opened the window hastily,
And put his arse out there, quietly,
Over the buttocks, showing the whole bum”
(Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The Miller’s Tale – Lines 690-695)
Humorous, Chaucerian, imagery in churches could have acted as a soft conduit between the pulpit and the populace. Rather than hectoring parishioners in the nave, priests sanctioned the use of ribald imagery such as the Laxton carving. This imagery helped to instil mockery at the man misbehaving in the street whilst also gently warning that there could be punishment ahead in the afterlife. Satire has always been a powerful medium for diffusing serious abuses.
Conclusions
Although the story of the disgruntled stonemason, that carved rude sculptures to get one over on the church authorities, is extremely popular it is not based on verifiable evidence from the mediaeval world. The tale is perhaps predicated on three elements. Firstly, a lack of understanding at just how common sexual imagery was in the mediaeval church. Secondly, a lack of mediaeval theological and cultural context. Thirdly, assumptions of morality based on Victorian and modern concepts.
The fact that highly visible, carnal sculpture was so abundant in the mediaeval world can be coupled to a distinct lack of legal prosecutions brought against stonemasons and carpenters. This in itself acts as a significant piece of evidence that the imagery was sanctioned. Meanwhile, we have access to many actual edicts by the church which indicated that they monitored the content of artwork very closely indeed.
Instead, we must look to what functions such imagery played within the mediaeval church. Sexual motifs may have been related to negative mysticism and a sense of intangible spirituality – taking the viewer to a dark place to find the true light of Christianity. The sculptures could act as moral warnings – expressions of how not to behave. Equally, the use of satirical humour has always had a great strength in undermining behaviour: “Blimey! That carving of the naked man up there doesn’t half remind me of what happened after Old Baldrick drank all that strong ale! What a plonker!”
As ever, the mediaeval mind was extremely complex, and images could work on several levels at once. We must be careful not to bring modern morality to bear on mediaeval subject matter. As L. P. Hartley (The Go-Between, 1953) memorably stated: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
Postscript
Whilst compiling this article, it occurred to me that all of the cited sculptures lie within either Grade II* or Grade I listed buildings. The very fact that such carvings survive will be a strong part of the assessment of significance for these buildings. Rude imagery has literally helped to protect these structures!
References
Bedworth, C., 2020, ‘The Intriguing Tale of Shocking Sheela Na Gig and its Art References’ in Daily Art Magazine: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/sheela-na-gig-art/
[Accessed 26/09/2022]
Bone, N. [pseudonym], 1998, ‘Sheela-na-gigs’ in Towards 2012. Unlimited Dream Company.
Coulton, G. G., 1956, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Hartley, L. P., 1953, The Go-Between, Hamish Hamilton. London.
Hayman, R., 2010, The Green Man, Shire. Oxford.
Lethaby, W. R., 1906, Westminster Abbey & the King’s Craftsmen : A Study of Mediaeval Building. Duckworth. London.
Oakley, T., 2009, Lifting the Veil: A New Study of the Sheela-Na-Gigs of Britain and Ireland. British Archaeological Reports Series 495. Archeopress. Oxford.
Wall, L., no date, Demon Carvers and Mooning Men: The East Midlands School of Church Carving. Self-published ebook.
Weir, A. & Jerman, J., 1986 (1993 edition), Images of Lust – Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches. Routledge. London.
Woodcock, A., 2012, Gargoyles and Grotesques. Shire. Botley.
Young, F., 2020, ‘The Myth of Medieval Paganism’ in First Things
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/02/the-myth-of-medieval-paganism
[Accessed 26/09/2022]
About the author
James Wright (Triskele Heritage) is an award-winning buildings archaeologist who frequently writes and lectures about mediaeval building myths. He has two decades professional experience of ferreting around in people’s cellars, hunting through their attics and digging up their gardens. He hopes to find meaningful truths about how ordinary and extraordinary folk lived their lives in the mediaeval period.
He welcomes contact through Twitter or email.
The Mediaeval Mythbusting Blog blog is the basis of a forthcoming book – Historic Building Mythbusting – Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology which will be released via The History Press on 6 June 2024. More information can be found here:
