MAKING THEIR MARK

Today, graffiti is generally seen as both destructive and anti-social, and certainly not something that should be either welcomed or encouraged in our parish churches. However, that attitude is a relatively modern one. During the Middle Ages, graffiti appears to have been both accepted and acceptable, leaving many of our medieval churches and cathedrals quite literally covered with inscriptions.

Generally speaking, most of these inscriptions had been largely overlooked except by a very small handful of academics and scholars, and are still often described simply as the creations of ‘bored’ choirboys; paradoxically in many cases long before there actually were any choirboys to be found in church. In recent years, however, new surveys of these early inscriptions have revived interest in medieval graffiti, and have seen it become the focus of intense study.

So the question must really be – why study graffiti in the first place? The answer is actually a very straightforward one: if you walk into just about any one of the thousands of surviving medieval churches scattered across the English countryside,