Mythbusting Medieval Buildings

What is a leper squint? Are the marks scratched into the exterior walls of churches from damned souls trying to claw their way in? Join Matt Lewis as he welcomes back James Wright, a stonemason and historian with a passion for debunking myths about medieval buildings. Together, they explore the real stories behind architectural features like pentagrams, mason's marks, arrow stones and devil's doors. James's unique blend of practical stonemasonry experience and historical research offers fascinating insights into how these myths evolved and what they reveal about the societies that created them. Discover the hidden truths and vibrant histories once obscured by folklore in this insightful episode. Hear James Wright unravel more medieval building myths in our previous episode here https://shows.acast.com/gone-medieval/episodes/mythbustingmedievalbuildings Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:04Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:54Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. One of the most tangible connections that we have to the medieval world is the buildings that have survived. Some are famous, others are hidden away and might more easily be missed.

• 3:11Matt Lewis?

  James Wright is returning to Gone Medieval today for his third visit.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  It is indeed my third. Yeah, it's the second one I've done with you and I did another one with Cat Jarman.

• 3:20Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, absolutely. So previously, he's talked to us about some building myths and about the history of pubs. And if you haven't heard those episodes, you can dig back through our back catalogue to find them. They really are great chats. And that's why James is back again. James's fascination with the myths that surround buildings has now been distilled into a fantastic book, Historic Building Mythbusting: Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology is out now. And so James is back to shatter a few more of your and my childhood dreams and to challenge what you think you might know about medieval buildings. Welcome back, James.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate you having me back on. And it's a good opportunity today to be talking about more ecclesiastical things, churches and cathedrals and monasteries. I think previously on the podcast, I've covered much more secular buildings, castles, and as you say, pubs. So it's a good opportunity to have a natter about churches this time.

• 4:12Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, definitely. We thought we'd go into some local parish churches and things like that and see what people might be able to encounter in those buildings, what people have thought those things might be. And then James is going to shatter everything you ever thought you ever knew about anything in the world and tell you maybe what those things might actually mean. I wanted to start off, so the book is kind of the bringing together of all of these myths that you've encountered in your career and trying to to work out how we arrived at those myths and what the truth behind them might be. And I was struck by you talking in the book about your own time as a stonemason. And I wondered how important you thought that was to your approach to buildings now, the way that you encounter them.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  So the book has been a long time in the making. It's not just been the four or five years that it was spent when I was writing the thing, but is a summary of a lot of my thoughts about historic buildings over the last 25 years. But it's also building on the, I suppose, research or observations of everyone who's come before me that I've either spoken to or read. But I think in terms of a practical understanding of ancient architecture, one of the things that really set me on the right road to begin with was training as a stonemason after I'd done my training in archaeology. And it was kind of bringing together that theoretical archaeological knowledge with a more practical understanding,

• 5:35Speaker 04

  literally, understanding the the nuts and bolts of structure and the, I suppose you might say interconnectedness of the building trades. So the understanding that it wasn't just stonemasons who were responsible for the construction of parish churches, cathedrals, monasteries, chapels, whatever it be, they were working in very, very close proximity and also working very closely in terms of the discussions about the day to day running of the project with other building trades as well, whether they be carpenters or plumbers or carters even. How did the stone arrive at site? What did those discussions look like? Who was being paid what? What was the practicality of moving very heavy objects?

• 6:21Speaker 04

  And I suppose looking at that from a modern day perspective and seeing how stone was arriving on site at these conservation projects I was working at, got me interested in trying to work out, well, what was happening in the past? How did they do this? How did they do this without hydraulics, without the internal combustion engine? How were they actually shifting things around? So just looking at, say, in medieval accounts or even images of building sites and spotting the boatman with the barge and stone arriving on site, looking at cranes and seeing how they were using various lifting devices to then plonk the stone onto carts and then

• 7:01Speaker 04

  moving it to the site. So it's this sort of looking at how things occur in modern day building sites and then trying to find evidence to then explain what was going on in the past. And it's that kind of curiosity. Well, this is what I'm doing. How was it done 600 years ago?

• 7:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I think it's just that exposure and experience as well. It struck me that it's not dissimilar from medieval battle reenactors who will say, until you've put the armour on and you've tried to carry this stuff around and wave these weapons around in the air, you can't understand how it's done. And it seems maybe it's the same sort of thing for you working as a stonemason. It's almost like reenacting medieval building and it's getting in amongst it that would give you an insight that you might not otherwise have had into the way these things were done.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Well, it certainly enabled me to look at features in stone buildings in a new light and being able to observe things that I think previously with my experience from an archaeological perspective that I might have completely overlooked. And I was just sort of thinking about some of the things that I referred to in the book. And one of the first observations that I drew attention to in the book was actually from a secular site, but it's a medieval palace in Sherwood Forest, where looking at the ruins, building all of the fair-faced ashlar stonework had been removed and you can see the rubble core within. There was a clue to how many

• 8:26Speaker 04

  building seasons it took to actually construct what's left of the remains of this particular property, because They would cap off after each building season. And you can kind of get a sense of that through these very small, almost pebbly like layers of tiny little chips of stone, which have actually been put on the top of the rubble. And then they're putting straw and probably hessian or similar on top to kind of weatherproof it and to keep the rain and more importantly, the frost out. And then when the next building season starts again, they take off the hessian and the straw, but they're left with these thin layers of stones, which were the upper capping. And then they put the rubble core and the ashlar on for the next building series.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  And we were able to actually sort of measure the amount of what's called gallating, which are those tiny little stones that's called gallating. We were able to measure how many of those there were as the building went up and approximate how many building seasons it took to construct a medieval hall. And I wouldn't have spotted that if I hadn't have done that, if I hadn't have seen that in action. That's something that would have been complete anathema to me. It's just not the sort of thing that's taught in buildings, archaeology courses at all. And I think another example of that was was going to a property in Grantham with a with a number of other historians and curators and conservators. And them talking about a funny little row of timbers in a wall.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Now, the timbers that were visible were kind of flushed to the wall plane. They weren't projecting out and they were all sort of ruminating as to what this was. And I knew immediately what I was looking at. And it was basically pudlock holes, which is where dependent scaffolding was was was inserted into the wall as the walls being built. So the scaffolding is actually part of the construction of the feature. Nowadays, we have independent scaffolding with our, you know, tubes, steel tubes, et cetera. But this was actually the timbers were actually built into the wall and then they would sever them off as the scaffolding went off. Now, this seemed really obvious to me, but clearly it wasn't obvious because not everybody

• 10:40Speaker 04

  had had the training in stonemasonry. So no judgment to those people at all. If I hadn't have had that training, I wouldn't have known what I was looking at either. It's just that it's quite rare to see the timber still in situ. Normally, the the rest of the scaffold is. Is severed off at the end of the project and eventually that timber will rot out. Now, for whatever reasons, probably because it was a relatively recent stone building in Grantham, the timber was still there for us to see. I'd certainly never seen surviving timber in a Pudlock Hole quite like that, but it was a whole row of them there. It's things like that and it really is the minutiae, the detail.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  But it's that kind of thing which helps to give colour and vibrancy to the interpretation of historic buildings.

• 11:27Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think these episodes are great because what we can get from you here is an idea for the listeners of how can you read these buildings when you go in? How can you spot these things that you would absolutely walk past and pay no attention to normally? But we can kind of learn how to read all of these buildings. And as we mentioned, we're going to take a little roam around some ecclesiastical buildings. And one of the first things that I picked out that I wanted to talk about from the book is pentagrams. So these will be quite familiar to everybody. You see them around a fair bit. To start off with pentagrams, do we know what a pentagram meant in the medieval world? Because I think it probably has different meanings today than it might have had then.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was different ways that pentagrams were used and thought about and why you might find them represented in medieval buildings, and in particular within churches as well. There is a kind of a, an assumption that all medieval architecture was built on this sort of sacred geometry, that they were using what's called proportional geometry to underlie all of their structures. And one of those symbols or one of those shapes that has been posited to underlie the setting out of a medieval building is actually the pentagram. And there are a couple of examples where we can be fairly certain that pentagrams have been the foundational shape

• 12:54Speaker 04

  from which the, the rest of the appearance of these buildings are created. And one of which is Amiens Cathedral and another one, although it's slightly less likely, but there's a possibility that Salisbury Cathedral is based on the pentagram as well. So there might be the the need to understand pentagrams from the point of view of proportional geometry. Although that doesn't quite stack up because most buildings were not set out on proportional geometry, they were set out on procedural geometry. The difference there being is that proportional geometry is based on mathematics, stretching back to people like Euclid, which was understood in the medieval period, but stonemasons as a group do not seem to

• 13:38Speaker 04

  be cognizant of those very, very detailed mathematical procedures. And what they were possibly doing was simply using shapes which they could create themselves fairly simply, such as a six-pointed rosette, a daisy wheel, sometimes called a hexfoil, and then basing their foundational geometry on those, which can be created with no mathematical knowledge whatsoever. I say this quite frequently, but I've got a C grade in GCSE mathematics, and I really, really, really had to work for that. I'm not a natural mathematician at all. I just had a very good tutor and I went to a half decent school where they were able to talk me through these things. But even I can understand basic geometry.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  And I think that's what most medieval stonemasons had, is basic geometry. And we're creating their buildings from that, really just using a set square and dividers. You can design a cathedral just using those two tools. So I'm not necessarily sure that a lot of the pentagrams that we see are connected to this idea of geometry. But the pentagram was important within mainstream Christian art. It was one of these holy symbols. And you can see it represented in artwork at places like Holmminster, for example. High up, there's a carving of an angel holding a shield, and on that shield is a pentagram.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  And it's a reasonably common motif. It seems to be connected to an idea of strength, and it's seen to be protective. It has this idea of warding away evil. Endless line designs often. Do have that attribution. We know that that's the case from the poem Seguin in the Green Knight, for example, which tells us about the power of the pentagram as an endless line. But also there's Christian numerology in there as well, with lots of fives of fives. So the pentagram also has this attribution of protection. It's seen as an endless line, which is repeated in the poem Seguin in the Green Knight,

• 15:42Speaker 04

  where we're told in that poem that the pentagram has this Christian virtue of being a very strong endless line. But also that there's numerology in there as well. So the poem refers to the five flawless senses, the five faultless fingers, the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of Mary and the five knightly virtues. So these are essentially important and the image of the pentagram, which can be found in medieval buildings such as Holminster, where you've got a carving very high up of an angel holding a shield which has the pentagram on it. This image is seen as an important holy symbol and it's one that you might find repeated in mainstream art.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  But I think also, thirdly, it has an impact on graffiti as well. So people are essentially copying what they see in the churches and pentagram graffiti is fairly common. And in most cases, it seems to have the impact of warding away evil there as well. They've seen it as a holy sign in mainstream art, so they're using it and scratching it onto the walls. And it's a fairly common symbol that one can find during graffiti surveys in churches, but also in some secular buildings too. It's a useful symbol. It does lots of things in society and there's not necessarily one interpretation of it. It must also be said that it can be found in stonemasons' marks as well.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  They do use the pentagram during their construction process to actually mark up their stones, which we'll maybe talk about in a moment.

• 17:16Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, definitely. So I think today we would tend to think of a pentagram as being a bit more witchy and a bit more occult than an actual Christian religious symbol of protection. And I guess there's a danger of us projecting our understanding of a symbol today backwards onto the people who were putting it there. It strikes me that for people like you, for someone who works with these things all day, every day, something like the Da Vinci Code must have been. I love The Da Vinci Code, it's a great book. But it must be frustrating for someone like you.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I agree. I've read it, I've read it too. I couldn't put it down. It's absolute trash. It really is trash. But when I read it, I couldn't put it down. I read it in one sitting, finished it about half four in the morning. And then the film, equally, I've watched that two or three, four, five times and thoroughly enjoyed it as well. It's just that kind of pulp fiction, really, isn't it? And it sold a lot of copies because it's a gripping read.

• 18:09Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's so well written. You must feel like it turns everybody into an amateur kind of symbol sleuth that we can now go around and understand all these things because Robert Langdon's told us what they all mean. And there's clearly some mythical thousands of years' worth of secrets hidden in every symbol. That must be slightly frustrating for you. And I guess it's part of where the myths come from.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  And I used The Da Vinci Code as a deliberate case study a couple of times in the book itself. And you're right to say that sort of the character, Tom Hanks' character in the film, of course, Robert Langdon, who's this symbologist, which is a discipline that doesn't actually exist in academia, was interested in symbols and how to read them. And he has this sort of infallible interpretation of any image that he comes across, any motif. And the pentagram is one of those. I think very early on in the book, he encounters a murder. And it's a monk, isn't it? Or a priest. And on the chest of the victim is inscribed, you know, in the flesh, through blood, is a pentagram. And he interpreted it as a pagan symbol.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  And it's the attribute of nature and the feminine, which I think Dan Brown had done a bit of reading to come to that conclusion. But it seems to be more connected to late 19th century mysticism, really. Things like the Order of the Golden Dawn, who would have viewed it that way? But that's kind of coming out of the neo-pagan movement. Or in fact, it's an early iteration of the neo-pagan movement, which then goes on to have an effect on early Druids, but also Satanists as well. So Aleister Crowley picks up on that too. And Anton LaVey in particular. And they have this idea that if you come across something which is inherently good as this symbol was.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Certainly in the medieval period, and then you turn it upside down, you essentially turn it into a symbol of evil and temptation and sin and the like. So I think a lot of people are more given towards that because they encounter that in popular culture so much. But this was a very, very old symbol, which was essentially what you might call a Christian holy sign in the medieval period. The idea that the pentagram has many meanings, though, is important. I subscribe to several online history discussion groups on social media, and one of them, a pentagram incised on a stone in a Somerset church turned up a few years ago. And the amount of different interpretations for this particular motif

• 20:35Speaker 04

  was off the scale. You know, yes, we had, it could be a Mason's symbol, but there was people saying it was a benchmark, or it was to do with Solomon's naught, or that it was to do with builders' signs to show structural uncertainty. Or then there was the more outlandish ones, that it was Satanism, or it was the Knights Templar, or it was the Illuminati, and you could kind of get a sense of Dan Brown coming in there. So it is a symbol which there is, I think, a lot of doubt about, certainly in popular culture. But we can get a fairly close understanding of what the pentagram did by looking at the records and also looking at the archaeology of these things to understand the livreality of the medieval period. Yeah, yeah, fascinating. You mentioned Mason's marks a couple of times then as

• 21:20Speaker 04

  well. How easy is a Mason's mark to spot amongst other graffiti? And what do we know about what they looked like and what they were for? So Mason's marks are obviously very close to my heart with having been a stone mason. I have my own, it's an eight-spoked wheel, and you can find it on the beds of stones at places like Nottingham Castle and Warrington Hall and Euston Abbey. From projects that I worked on, in the modern age, a mason's mark tends to be reserved as an artist's signature and it tends to be put on the stones that you're particularly proud of, you know, the difficult pieces that you've accomplished. And they tend these days to not be visible. So you put them on the beds or the joints. In the medieval

• 22:02Speaker 04

  period, they seem to have been doing rather different things with masons marks. And the reasons for carving them onto stones changed somewhere in the post medieval, probably in the 18th century or maybe later 17th century. So we can spot them archaeologically because they're often, in fact, almost always very, very neatly cut. They're usually either cut with very clean, easily identifiable strokes of chisels, or they might have done them with scribers, which are sort of sharp pieces of metal and straight edges. So they're very neat and they replicate across the building as well. And you can see them on the faces of stones. They are also found on the beds and joints as well, which gives

• 22:44Speaker 04

  us this indication that they weren't always seen. Now, most medieval stone buildings were plastered over and then painted and you wouldn't see those marks at all. That's one of the things that as a result, the Victorian interpretation of medieval churches that perhaps a lot of people are no longer aware of. So they're not acting as artist signatures because no one's seeing these things. But they do seem to replicate. So if you've got a part of a medieval church that you know is 14th century, you will tend to find the same mark or marks appearing throughout the building. And they tend to be quite simple as well. You can cut them usually with between two and perhaps six or eight strokes of a chisel. They don't take long to do. They're not mucking around

• 23:24Speaker 04

  doing these things. And the story is that these are, if not artist signatures, then they're passed down from father to son, and that there's a register kept, and that they're there so that the mason can be paid per stone. So he puts the mark on so that the foreman knows to pay that person for that particular piece. But that's the popular myth. That's what tall guys, churchwardens, guidebooks and the like will tell you. But it doesn't quite stack up to how medieval.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Building sites actually operated. Sometimes they were being paid by the piece, but that tended to be for very complicated sculptures, carvings, that kind of thing. Most often, they were being paid for the length. So you will you will chop out so many pieces of ashlar and it will be X foot long, or X perches long, or X chains long, or whatever unit of measurement they were using. So it doesn't seem to be within the building accounts that there's a way of tying these towards payment per stone, and we're not seeing that. I think if we were seeing that, the building accounts would actually refer to such and such a mason was paid for a hundred stones, or whatever it happened to be. But it tends to be they were paid for the length

• 24:38Speaker 04

  or for a period of time. I think there's also a bit of an oddity here as well about this idea that it was an artist's signature. Because this is a period of time where there isn't a way of maintaining a database across even a country, a loan across international boundaries, and so masons were certainly working all over the place. How would you ensure that your mark was the only one in existence for all time? So you can't really follow career using these things. What I actually think they're doing, because they're not on every stone, is that it's a way of assessing productivity. So has that particular mason on that particular job knocked out enough stones?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  So he maybe puts a mark on every so many stones. It might be one in ten, it might be one in a hundred. We don't quite know how that worked out because we don't have the the literature to explain the rationale there. But I think their productivity, and then there's another route into this, because some stones are double coded, i.e. they have two masons' marks on them. And the second one is almost always an X mark. And I think that is the foreman's mark to say, yes, that batch has passed. So I think what they're actually doing is probably being given the masons' marks for that project and that project alone. And then they go somewhere else and they're doled out a mark there. It's also the possibility that it might be gangs of masons as well, rather than individuals.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  So there's a, it's a bit like trying to catch smoke sometimes explaining masons' marks. But there are certain inns through the building accounts and through archaeological recording of these things, which give us a bit of a notion as to what they were doing with them.

• 26:28Matt Lewis?

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• 27:54Matt Lewis?

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• 29:51Matt Lewis?

  Another kind of myth that has attached itself to particularly churches is the idea of an arrowstone. So can you tell us a little bit about what the widely held misconception is about arrowstones? And then what they might possibly actually be?

• 30:06Speaker 04

  So sort of sticking with this idea of mark making in churches, and we've talked about this with relationship to graffiti in terms of pentagrams and then latterly in terms of Mason's marks. There are these funny linear grooves, sometimes gouges, which are found on the walls of churches. Mostly they're found on the external walls of churches. Some of them can be quite big. They can be up to a foot in length. Some of them are just a few centimeters. Some of them can be quite wide. They tend to be found on the south side and sometimes a Round the porch, the main porch door into the church. And historically, these have been interpreted as sharpening marks.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Sometimes it's said that it's agricultural tools or kitchen knives. But mostly it has a kind of a martial tone. So sometimes it's swords. So I know you're big into your Ricardian history. Bosworth, for example, the nearest parish church, or one of the nearest parish churches is Stoke Golding, some Margrave Antioch. And there there's a window, a 14th century window, which has these marks on the sill and then creeping up the jam. And there it's interpreted as the soldiers sharpening their swords before going off to fight in 1485. But most commonly, it's said to be archers. And these are the marks left by bowmen who are scraping their bodkin arrows or broadhead arrows

• 31:36Speaker 04

  on the walls of churches before they go and practise at the butts, the village butts. And this is being done because on Sundays, every man in the country was commanded to go and practise archery by Edward III so that he had a ready supply of archers for the Hundred Years' War. And some of that is based on truth in that there was a requirement for archery in certain counties, particularly London and Kent. And there was obviously a tremendous number of people who were proficient with bows. But kind of the story doesn't stack up from there, to be honest with you. And one of the problems here is that I've spoken to some blacksmiths. You mentioned earlier about how it's important to get this kind of experimental aspect to research

• 32:21Speaker 04

  with regard to knights earlier. Well, when blacksmiths have looked at these marks, sort of squint their eyes and then they laugh at you. Because their point is that actually, if you were trying to sharpen something to such an extent that you created these very deep grooves in churches, you would actually blunt your edge. It would take the keenness off the weapon or off the arrow because they go so deeply. And what you actually want is a nice flat surface. And many of these marks are carved on stones which just wouldn't create or hone an edge. That they're on very soft limestones or sandstones and actually they wouldn't create sharpening. I was gonna say, if the stone is soft enough that it's it's been marked by the weapon, then it's unlikely to be affecting the weapon's blade to make it sharper.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly that. But the the real death knell for the story, which is so popular in churches, this is one that you see a lot on the handboards at the back of churches. Sometimes you'll even see an interpretation panel. St Wilfrid's in Nottingham has this, an interpretation panel, almost but not quite next to the marks, is that they didn't actually sharpen their arrows when they were practising in the medieval period. This is because they used what are called blunts, which are either horn tips or wooden tips, or if they were metal tips, then they were rounded. They had no requirement for sharpening at all. And the reason for that is that if you were loosing arrows at the the hempen butts, then if you're

• 33:49Speaker 04

  using what you might call battle-ready tips, they're just gonna destroy those butts and you're gonna get through it in in half an afternoon. The other thing is that the warbows had such a tremendous potential for launching these projectiles that you would actually need to be standing a minimum of 200 metres away from the butts, and probably more like 300 or 400 metres away. So they actually went out into the fields to do this. Dominic Mancini refers to the the village lads going out into the fields in the 1480s. This was how you did it. And that's why we get the Butt Fields in a lot of place names, field names, because that's where they were going and doing it, where they got large, open fields

• 34:33Speaker 04

  and the space to actually go and practise. So the story doesn't quite stack up, but it is a really common one, a really, really common one, this idea of mark making churches, which was created by archers. Do we have any idea then what those marks might have been? Are they a mystery? But almost certainly not? Arrow stones? Took me quite a while to get my head around this one, and I had to read some really quite odd things. This would have been one of the joys of the book, that I've read journals, or I've read articles, or I've read the works of disciplines which I would never have encountered beforehand. The route into this particular one comes from a very obscure American archaeologist and anthropologist called Charles Rao, who was travelling throughout northern Europe

• 35:17Speaker 04

  in the later 19th century. And he noted that parishioners

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Which were often in Catholic countries, were still actually mark making on church walls. And he was asking people, well, what are you doing here with these funny linear grooves? And they were telling him, well, what we're doing is we're collecting stone powder. We're harvesting it and we mix it up with holy water or wine. And then we drink it and it charms away the fevers. It's a, it's what you might call Christian white magic. And Raoul wrote about this in the 19th century. And this led me to think, well, okay, that's the story then. But does that necessarily stack up in the medieval period? So I started thinking about this idea of harvesting of, of, of stone back in the, in

• 36:04Speaker 04

  the, well, certainly the late medieval period, but also the early medieval period. And lo and behold, I was able to find examples of this practice occurring as early as the works of the venerable bead, who describes the collection of dust from holy buildings. And even that having a kind of a, a power and a belief in the power of stone dust associated with holy buildings in association with holy people, for example, it's there in the early medieval period. But moving kind of into that 14th, 15th, 16th century world, there's also records of people carving into the stones at places like the tomb of Simon de Montfort at Evesham, who was an unofficial saint for a short period in the late 13th century,

• 36:47Speaker 04

  of Saint Hugh at Lincoln, carving into his shrine there, and even doing this at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And this seemed to be a pretty widespread practice, which quickly gets forgotten in England, and is not remembered at all. And by the post medieval period, it's been reinterpreted as essentially something connected to a martial activity, which tells you everything you need to know about post medieval England, really. This obsession with war and conquest and empire and this pride in the military victories of the past. But on the continent, the story is completely different. So we know that it clung on as a tradition, but then there's also-

• 37:31Speaker 04

  So the folklore as well. So in France, it's apparently the result of pilgrims rubbing the building for a blessing. In Italy, it's the devil's claw marks. And in Poland, and this is my favourite piece of folklore to explain these marks, it's the souls of damned sinners trying to scratch their way back into the church for salvation, which is a brilliant story, quite frankly. I feel like there's a Gothic horror novel in there somewhere. Definitely. You've got these three things going on, really. You've got what actually happened in the medieval period, this Christian white magic. You've got the reinterpretation in England and Wales and Lowland Scotland, this archery story. And then you've actually

• 38:13Speaker 04

  got the post-medieval European folklore as well. So there's different layers, there's different ways of going at it. I would say that they all hold importance and they all hold significance. Understanding folklore is fundamentally important. That's why the tagline of the book is uncovering folklore, history and archaeology, because I think the folklore is every bit is illuminating as the reality of what happened in the medieval period. So I do try and balance the two. Yes, I set up the stories. Yes, I do try and debunk them, but also I'm asking the question, well, where did these stories come from? And what do they tell us about the communities that created them? And I think what we're seeing here is that kind of Victorian world. I couldn't find an earliest citation beyond the later

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Victorian period for this particular story of the weapon sharpening. And I think it tells us that that was their principal fixation here when they encountered history. They wanted to try and localise those big stories of the Battle of Asincor or the Battle of Cressy, and to say, well, look, our boys went and fought at those battles. Here, you can see the marks that they made while they were practising before they went off there. And it tells you everything you need to know about the Victorians and their empire and their notions of conquest and English history. Yeah, I think it's almost more interesting, though, to be thinking about these ordinary people who've turned up to church with a cold or a sore throat, and they're thinking the way to fix this is just scrape a little bit of this religious building into my wine,

• 39:41Speaker 04

  ingest that, and I'm somehow tapping into the power that this building has on my door.

• 39:47Matt Lewis?

  That's a really interesting way of approaching.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really do think that brings you down to the personal, that somebody's had a problem and this was their solution. And it's a way into understanding ordinary history as well. It's quite rare for the absolute ordinary to end up in a historical record. Normally, if you end up in the medieval records, it's because you've ended up in court, isn't it really? You know, something's gone disastrously wrong for you. That's how working class people end up in medieval records as a rule. Whereas this, it's not a written record, but it's a way of using archaeology to kind of give you a glimpse into a moment in someone's life. Now, we don't necessarily know the names of those people, but we can understand it as a social phenomenon.

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• 42:05Speaker 04

  There's a whole section in the book as well about parish church myths. And so these really are the buildings that are on everyone's doorstep. You can, in this country at least, you can walk into your local parish church and maybe try to spot some of these things. So what is some of your favourites? I mean, I was really interested in the idea of the leper squints. Yeah, so we've already covered arrow stones, which are reasonably common in parish churches. Lepers squints, yeah, I looked at those because they kept coming up on discussion forums. And again, you see them interpreted in parish churches quite a bit. I spotted one only recently in a window in a church in Herefordshire,

• 42:44Speaker 04

  which had this little sign next to it and said, this is a leper squint for, you know, the lepers who were not very well. And so couldn't come in, interact with the rest of the community because they were seen to be contagious. So they kept them at arm's length, but there was a need for them to hear the mass and to see the elevation of the host at the moment of transubstantiation. It's an important moment that you should be able to see. And so that the church authorities started cutting these windows or squints or apertures so that lepers could see that moment from the outside. And again, you know, this is something which is repeated fairly commonly across the assemblage of parish churches.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Really any unusual opening in a building that kind of defies explanation. It's not a standard door. It's not a standard window for illumination. Gets pulled into this explanation of leper squints. But a lot of these, when you look at them individually and then as a group, don't tend to stack up. Also, this idea that lepers were just sort of hanging around in churchyards. Having a look at a mass doesn't really hold water either, because we know that there's tremendously large amounts of leper colonies, which have been set up by elite patrons, and that they have their own chapels and churches. And I did a little bit of a

• 44:05Speaker 04

  look at how common these laser houses were, and I found that every single county in the country had about eight or nine of them throughout the medieval period. Now, they might not have all been operational at the same time, and of course, leprosy declines as a problem in the later medieval period. But if you've got eight or nine laser houses in every county, there's not that many lepers. So this idea of a gaggle of them peering through the windows of a normal parish church is a little bit off, I think. It doesn't quite stack up. And also, a lot of these things, they're badly sighted. They're not really doing the job that is proposed. They're not actually looking at the high altar. But

• 44:46Speaker 04

  also, if you think about regular church congregations, they're all in the nave, and they haven't got a clear view of the moment of transubstantiation either, because of pulpitums or rude screens. There is this air of mystery about what goes on in the chancel. It's not intended to be for everybody. So there is this idea of the concealed that is important. So if not everybody is being offered a clear view of the host being elevated, why would you do that for lepers? Why would you give them a visible glimpse? So actually, on many levels, this story doesn't stack up. Then you start looking at what these apertures are actually

• 45:27Speaker 04

  doing in reality. And broadly speaking, three types of apertures which are interpreted as leper squints. Firstly, a number of puddle of holes, which we've already covered at the beginning of our chat, are sometimes associated with leper squints. But of course, they don't go all the way through the buildings. They're said to be blocked up leper squints in those instances. But we can spot a puddle of hole a mile off, because they tend to be in rows, they tend to have little lintels, and they don't go the full thickness. We know what they're doing. It's to do with scaffolding. But sometimes they get misinterpreted. The other thing that it might be is what's called a hagioscope. So this is where you've got a, an aperture which goes the full distance through a, through a wall,

• 46:11Speaker 04

  but they tend to be internal and it tends to go from a transept, a chapel or a side chapel, so that the priest there can see what's going on at the high altar, so that he can elevate the host at exactly the same moment as the principal celebrant. And so they're internal, so they don't quite stack up either as leper squints, but are often interpreted as such. And then this is really odd class of feature in a parish church, which is referred to as a low side window. So these are not the great big windows for allowing light in, which are full of the beautiful tracery and stained glass, but they're fairly squat, square or low windows in the, in the side walls of churches,

• 46:56Speaker 04

  quite often in association with the chancel. And there's been all sorts of explanations as to what these things are. There's, there's a whole great big essay in Francis Bond's English Church Architecture book, or volumes of books, for example, which includes all sorts of explanations that they're to do with ventilation or that allow people to hear the ringing of handbells. And one of the things that is proposed is that they are leper squints, but I don't think that we can agree that that's what they're doing, because most of these low side windows, again, do not actually look at the high altar in any way. There's so much debate about them, but I tend to think that they are probably for ventilation. Think about a hot summer's day in a parish church.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Think about the amount of candles, think about the amount of bodies huddled in there. Think about all of that warmth. You need a window that you can open to ventilate these buildings. And I think that's probably what's going on with them. But again, they have been interpreted as leper squints. I just don't think that that story necessarily stacks up.

• 47:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, so we should always be a little bit wary when churches are telling us about these things because it's not necessarily always correct. One of the other interesting ones I just wanted to cover as well, because of the name really, you know, is a devil's door. Why would you get a devil's door in a church?

• 48:12Speaker 04

  This is one that I only became aware of about 10 or 15 years ago, when I was working in a Nottinghamshire church with a colleague doing some stone survey. And they pointed out that there was a blocked door on the north side of the nave and that this was the devil's door. And I didn't really think too much about it there. And then I was too busy recording stonework and the like and just got on with it. But it kind of stuck in my head. And I went and did a bit of reading about it. And the story goes that these were doors which were blocked up in the post medieval period because they no longer had a use. And their original uses on the north side was so that pagans could get into churches, that they

• 48:52Speaker 04

  would have their own separate access. So it was a way of allowing curious pagans, I suppose you might call Christian curious pagans into buildings, which really didn't strike me as as being likely, given as Francis Young, the ecclesiastical historian, has pointed out, on many, many occasions, there's, there's no realistic evidence for paganism beyond the mid Saxon period in this country. And many of these doors date to the High Medieval period. So that never struck me as that likely. And the other story is that the door was originally left ajar during baptism, when there is an exorcism of the child, and the devil is cast out, and the devil then needs to actually be able to escape from the building.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  And I go, that one didn't really ring true for me either, because the church never officially recognised baptism as an exorcism to begin with, although it may have been popularly believed that that's what was occurring in the in the medieval period. But that moment where the devil is cast out from the child, or rejected, actually happened outside the church anyway. And it would happen at the principal porch door. So are we then to expect, say this is a south door? The devil is rejected, and we then to expect his infernal majesty to then flee through the bottom end of the nave and then out through this north door. Remember, this is

• 50:18Speaker 04

  a sanctified building. Why is he not just gonna flee straight out of the south porch door? So the story didn't really stack up for me. And you start thinking about it, and there's other layers to the myth as well, which sort of say that the north door was never the principal door to the church, so they could afford to block it up. But again, that doesn't work because there's lots of really quite big churches where the north door is the main access, and the north door is still accessible. Southern Minster, for example, which is an absolute cracker of a property, its principal access from the town is via the north. The south door actually goes out towards the bishop's palace. So again, this idea of the north door lacking in function after the medieval period is

• 51:00Speaker 04

  questionable. But however, many of these doors are blocked up, and I think they're blocked up because they didn't genuinely have a purpose after the medieval period. But their purpose during the medieval period was to actually facilitate processions. So on Palm Sunday and Ascension Day, the entire congregation would process around the interior of the church, would then go out of the north door, process around the east end, and then come back in via either the south door or the west door, depending on the local remit there. And so when these Catholic processions are no longer necessary after the Reformation,

• 51:42Speaker 04

  you can sort of see these rather parsimonious, tight churchwardens thinking, well, that north door, we don't really want to have to pay to maintain that. We could take the porch down, we could drop that, we could block the door up, and then we won't have to spend all this money every 25, 50 years on repairing it. And so they get blocked up because they're no longer used. But their use was never anything to do with pagans or to do with the devil escaping. It was all about facilitating processions. What this story kind of speaks of is this kind of forgetfulness about Catholicism, namely that in the Reformation period and beyond, and particularly beyond.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  Essentially, communities have forgotten what bits of these buildings do. Again, we can look at that with regard to arrow stones or leper squints and now devil's doors. This Catholic ritual, if you like, this Catholic way of life is forgotten. So it has to be reinterpreted and the reinterpretation just happens to be rather skewed and to have nothing to do with the medieval livreality, but tells you kind of more about what was important or what was exciting in the moment when the stories were created.

• 52:54Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's fascinating how some of those things seem to have have fallen out of memory. But because we still have the buildings and we still have this, these tangible things there, we're looking for interpretations and maybe we're adding two and two and we're making five because we don't have that ability to reach back into our collective memory and grab at some of these things that have been lost when Catholicism was lost from England kind of thing. So the explanations are there. We just have to reach back a little bit further and look for them in the right places, I guess.

• 53:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think a lot of the explanations that we have been given do come out of the Victorian world time and time and time again in this book. And not just with regard to the ecclesiastical chapters, but also it's there in the vernacular architecture, it's there in castles and great houses, which is sort of the three sections that I look at in the book. We can see the Victorian world explaining what they see with reference to itself, which is a really, really dangerous version of history. If you look at your own world and then try and project that back into the past, that's never going to give you the answer because as L P Hartley said,

• 54:11Speaker 04

  the past is fundamentally a different place. They do things differently there, you know, it's so dangerous to cast back your own worldview into the medieval period because it's not going to give you those answers at all.

• 54:25Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  Well, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much, James. I hope that's given people a taster of what's in the book and a good reason to go out and grab a copy. So thank you very much for joining us. You're very welcome. I would like to say just one thing to finish on though, is that with this book, I've tried to treat the folklore with greatest respect. I've tried to understand it. I've tried to explain how it grew up. And I wouldn't want people listening to our chat now and thinking that this book is kind of a high-handed, sneering view of history that is some academic, and I'm not actually an academic, I must say, I'm a self-employed freelance consultant, but the sort of person with a lot of training, looking down his nose at these stories. The stories are fundamentally important to this book, and I treat them

• 55:09Speaker 04

  with a great deal of love and respect, sometimes with a kind of wry exasperation that they're still around. But nevertheless, I would say that folklore and storytelling and the rumours and the hearsays and the myths and the legends have been embraced. And I've tried always to see what they can tell us about the societies that repeat them, and to try and understand why people repeat them as well. I mean, in many cases, it's a direct result of the Victorian world. But a lot of these stories are being repeated by figures of authority as well. And if you go to visit a parish church and the church warden tells you that a leper squint is such a thing, or the local historian tells you that an arrow stone is such a thing,

• 55:54Speaker 04

  or the teacher from the village school tells you that a devil's door is such a thing, then of course, you're going to believe them. Because the vast majority of people are not like you and I, who are really nerdy about buildings. They want to believe a good story. The story probably confirms their worldview. So why would you question it? And it's just trying to peel away those layers and to try and understand why those figures of authority do repeat them, and what's underneath them, what's under the skin of them. And I think personally, for me, that has been the best thing about this book, and the most enjoyable thing about the research and writing of it, has been to try and explain the stories, and in effect, to give those stories new

• 56:36Speaker 04

  Life by actually understanding them in a, in a much more rounded way.

• 56:40Matt Lewis?

  The folklore stories are part of the memory, but it's just putting them in the, in the correct place in that memory so that we can understand the whole thing a lot better. I think that does come out of the book really, really well.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  Good. Thanks very much. I'm, I'm glad you've, you've spotted the context of it all and, and thanks again for having me back on the podcast for, for the third time. It's brilliant.

• 56:59Matt Lewis?

  It's absolute pleasure. We look forward to the fourth time.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  I'll have to write another book.

• 57:04Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, get, get on it. If you've enjoyed this chat, then James's book, Historic Building Mythbusting, uncovering folklore, history and archaeology is out now and you can catch his previous episodes on buildings and pubs in our back catalogue too. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, you can drop us a review or rate us everywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify. It really does help new listeners to find us. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.

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