24 October 2020
As Hallowe’en approaches many of us are wondering if the annual fright season can be any more terrifying than 2020 itself? However, this is genuinely my favourite holiday – I’m very partial to a bit of rock’n’roll and Hallowe’en is like Christmas for rockers. For one night of the year, everyone else catches up with our gothic aesthetics and the weird rules the world.
Another phenomena that rolls around with predictable regularity in October are media stories containing the word “witchmarks”. These are usually defined as symbols intended to ward off evil. Invariably, press releases including the prominent use of the phrase “witchmarks” in the headline are put out by heritage sites as an attempt to link in with the spooky season.
There seems to have been a higher that average number of these stories this year. In particular, a flurry of attention has been devoted to the discovery of two stones with curious circular designs cut into them from excavations linked to the High Speed 2 project at St Mary’s, Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire. This story has, to a limited extent, gone viral with details from the press release repeated by outlets such as the Smithsonian Magazine, Science Alert and World Post. The articles have then been widely shared and debated on social media discussion groups. One more cynical than I might even speculate that the beleaguered High Speed 2 project managers were trying to distract the public’s attention, with a seasonally spooky story, away from their budget spiralling out of control or from reports that they had just authorised the felling of a former Tree of the Year in Warwickshire…
Now, hands up here (in the name of accountability), I have been known to dabble in such press releases myself in the past. In 2015, my discovery of dozens of burn marks probably tied with evil-averting practises at the Tower of London was announced by my then employers in the lead up to Hallowe’en. The year before we did similar with regard to a story which connected marks found at Knole (Kent) with James I and the Gunpowder Plot, launching the story the day before Bonfire Night. The term “witchmarks” may have sadly become associated with the latter discovery too. I’m also aware that the suspicious among you might be pondering that I have written this blog to chime with the season too. Bite me.
Ultimately, I have no real problem with seasonal stories that link to the darker aspects of human history. At least those narratives are being related and it is always good to see graffiti studies represented in the mainstream media – we need to justify our funding somehow 😉 However, I do have issue with the phrase “witchmarks”…
Firstly, the word can be interpreted in a misleading manner – were these marks left by witches as part of their diabolical rites? No. Secondly, if the press article then goes on to explain that they were created to drive away the perceived threat of evil, the phrase rather limits that to just one group of malefactors – witches. In England the vast majority of witchcraft accusations took place from the mid-sixteenth century until the mid-seventeenth century – yet so-called “witchmarks” can be found in securely dated contexts both before and long after this period.
Alongside witches there is strong evidence in contemporary writings that people were also desperately afraid of evil spirits and demons too. Furthermore, it is likely that in many cases folk were not specifically protecting themselves against evil entities but were trying to avert bad luck whilst also bringing good luck to their buildings.
The phrase “witchmarks” is a releatively recent invention. Graffiti archaeologist, Matthew Champion, demonstrated at this year’s Vernacular Architecture Group winter conference that it may not be any older than the middle of the last decade and was specifically invented by journalists to act as an emotive word for use in attention-grabbing headlines. Journalists acting like this? Surely not…
The inaccurate term refers to a loosely associated group of marks which are found in historic buildings which include M’s and double-V’s, pentagrams, knotwork, meshes, circular designs and burn marks. More information on the subject can be found in my paper which I delivered to the Hidden Charms conference in 2016. Research by an increasing number of scholars, archaeologists and writers (sometimes all three in one!) has largely concluded that these marks were deliberately created by people across a wide period of time spanning the mediaeval, early modern and modern eras and that they may relate to the practice of averting evil or bad luck whilst also bringing good luck to the occupants of buildings (as well as other locations including trees and caves).
Although not absolutely ideal, some researchers have come to favour the phrase “ritual protection marks” to describe symbols that were apparently never referred to by contemporary writers. This term is still problematic as there is not certainty that the creation of the marks was ritualised and not all of them were protective – but it is much closer to the truth than the phrase “witchmarks”.
In lieu of a fully accurate term, it can also be stated that many of these marks were found in regular church art (as I pointed out in a paper given at the Making Your Mark graffiti conference). The double-V and M marks are repeatedly found as symbols associated with the cult of the Virgin Mary, as at Christchurch Priory (Dorset) and Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, Suffolk. The pentagram has connections to the Five Wounds of Christ and can be seen in the tracery of the great west window at Exeter Cathedral. Geometrical circular designs were routinely used as analogies for the Cross of Christ as at St Ethelbert’s Gate at Norwich Cathedral. Perhaps we might want to consider that such marks were holy symbols within Catholicism. Even then, their usage after the Reformation raises questions and their continuity probably resulted from folk traditions of bringing good luck and averting bad luck, rather than being evidence of covert Catholicism. The purposes of symbols change over time.
This uncertainty is personified by the tradition of burn marks – once thought to be simply the result of unattended lights, but now conclusively proven to be the result of deliberate human behaviour through experimental archaeology. Interpreting those behaviours is tricky as the burn marks may have been applied for a variety of reasons involving protection, prayer, healing, devotion or inoculation. We can never be dogmatic in our interpretation and every piece of graffiti must be looked at on its own merits – hence the difficulty of assigning a specific term to symbols that may not all derive from the same tradition.
A further problem with this season’s principal story from Stoke Mandeville is that I am not entirely convinced that the two cited examples are even related to ritual protection at all. One of them may be a gaming board and another is much closer in appearance to a mass dial – primitive sundials which may have been carved on the walls of parish churches as a time-telling device. Matthew Champion has even speculated that they may even relate to bellringers trying to work out when it was time to start ringing the church bells before services (Champion 2015, 157).
However, even with these apparently practical graffiti there are problems of interpretation. Gaming boards can be found on vertical surfaces and are sometimes hopelessly tiny – rendering them unplayable. Some dials are found internally or on the north face of churches, therefore away from the necessary sunlight – although it is acknowledged that many could have been reset. Other buildings feature multiple examples, beggaring the question of why so many were required. The Stoke Mandeville example was not only buried below ground but has rather too many spokes that drift above the horizontal line and would therefore be superfluous.
It is entirely possible that there was a ritual purpose behind the Stoke Mandeville graffiti, but we must look beyond the lazy journalistic term “witchmarks” if we are to reach towards archaeological truths. Perhaps the time has come to cease using it altogether – that would certainly do my blood pressure the world of good…
References
Matthew Champion, 2015, Medieval Graffiti – The Lost Voices of England’s Churches
About the author
James Wright is an award-winning buildings archaeologist. 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:
