On attention, pre-Reformation graffiti, and the patronising of the working class

Ely Cathedral really just showing off

I’m afraid this post is intensely niche and possibly quite dull. It’s an exploration of three of my very specific areas of interest: attention, medieval pre-Reformation graffiti, and how the working class continue to be patronised. I know, right?

In his fascinating book Curious, Ian Leslie reminds us that our curiosity is highly responsive to the situation or environment we’re in. We craft our lives around it, stoking that curiosity flame. Pretty much every school holiday I organise a trip to an ancient church, abbey or cathedral. Or sometimes to quite a few. If I don’t do this, and when there are those holidays when, for whatever reason, I can’t, life feels duller. It’s like living life in sepia, not technicolour. When I can’t go on one of my little journeys where I attend to the markings on 12th century pillars, I miss it intensely. This pilgrim’s feet become itchy. I need to go.

The scissor arches at Wells, possibly my favourite cathedral

My mother dragged me and my sister around ancient cathedrals when we were young. I probably shouldn’t say ‘dragged’ - I loved it. I loved them for their vast sense of space and moted light. I especially loved their soaring naves (probably still my favourite part of a cathedral. Well, that and its porch.) The markings on walls were waiting for me in the shadows but because I didn’t know anything about them and neither did mum, I didn’t notice them. (It’s only six or so years ago that Clare Sealy helped me understand what should be obvious: when you know more, you see more.) We only visited ancient cathedrals within a reasonable distance of where I grew up in Birmingham so we could travel there and back in a day by train - for most of my childhood we didn’t have a car. So I skittered around the cathedrals of Lichfield, Worcester and Gloucester. We never visited Tewkesbury Abbey. That was a recent, rapturous delight. I visited there for the first time in 2024 and am obsessed. I love it. It felt like Christmas Day when I unearthed a quiet etching of a medieval bird with my iPhone torch as I patiently scanned its 12th century pillars with 21st century light.

Tewkesbury Abbey in 2024

I only found out in recent years that Worcester Cathedral has a stunning pink giraffe in its Great West Window. I wish I’d known he was there, waiting for me to glimpse him, glorious and pink and eccentrically Victorian, when I was young. But for me, now, the pre-Reformation always trumps the Victorian in England’s cathedrals. (I told you this was dull. Soz.)

It’s funny how, now in the latter end of my 40s, things completely absorb my attention, probably more than when I was younger. I have always found this from Sylvia Plath both beautiful and sad and right: “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” It’s only really in my 40s that I started reading like the universe is imploding and its darkness chasing my heels. I have books piled high like knowledge-cranes, wobbling and waiting patiently for my attention. I have an intense desire to know more stuff. Loads of things interest me. I know I won’t get there completely, ever, and sometimes I do feel horribly limited: I know very little about food and drink, for example. Take me out of my comfort zone to a posh restaurant and I clam up like an oyster that I don’t know how to eat. That said, I’m not really that bothered about knowing more about food and drink. I just want it to taste nice. You can take the girl out of Brum, but you can’t take Brum out of the girl. I prefer scallops (these ones, scallop fans).

I reckon it was probably about four or five years ago when I decided I really wanted to know more about why ancient churches are covered in the scratchings of our forefathers whispering their prayers many centuries ago. It wasn’t just the desire to know, but the promise of getting a glimpse into what else was part of the picture - what was there, just out of a fingertip’s reach, that was perhaps speaking to me in the circles and Solomon’s knots and etched crosses? Why were they there? And what of that beautifully geometric compass mark? Is it a mason’s mark, or something else? And why do I keep seeing them there, right there, next to the windows and door frames and on the edges of ancient fonts? I learnt that many of these are ritual protection marks - apotropaic* marks - and speak to us of the fears and worries of parishes centuries past. There was a real, tangible fear of evil and the devil. Many of these compass drawn markings and symbols are in the form of an endless line - a concept that was widely understood by those at the time: an endless line was thought to attract demons that would try to follow it to its end. But these knots and compass designs have no end, and so evil was trapped. Whilst it might seem strange and bizarre in 2025, Matthew Champion reminds us that, “The world was a place full of dangers, both physical and spiritual, and these markings were made simply as a way to make the world a safer, less hostile place; the front line in the defence of the soul.” There is something so vulnerable and so human in those markings. They speak of humanity trying to make meaning out of a complex and threatening world and that is, I think, why I find them so endlessly fascinating and beautiful.

A Solomon’s knot etching I found on the outside of St Michael’s Church, Yanworth

Scratching, scribbling, etching and drawing into the walls and beams of churches, including those crucibles of Christianity, our cathedrals, was commonplace. It was not seen as sacrilegious or wrong. Sometimes you’ll see pockmarks and holes bored into pillars and walls - possibly from pilgrims marking their visit and collecting some of the cathedral itself to take home with them. A pilgrim souvenir, if you will. Post-Reformation, you see the emergence of the swaggering etchings of names and dates, houses and flags. I prefer the faint, prayerful, undated marks of our pre-Reformation ancestors - those whose intention was prayer - and who dates a prayer?, not the equivalent of “Henry woz here” and “Check out my massive flag”. Or something.

So, as you see, this interest is niche.

Here’s another. What I find infuriating is the fairly widely held assumption in the media that the working class and disadvantaged and marginalised communities just can’t appreciate the arts, or ‘culture’ (whatever that is), or even museums or, dare I say it, cathedrals, unless they’re dressed up as ‘relevant’ or ‘engaging’. I’ve written about it before, here and here. It is a crass, patronising, damaging belief and I refute it entirely and completely from the very depths of my being. And I came across it again today, implicit and insidious and, I’m sure, unintentional. But still. There is a new art installation, “Hear Us”, at the mothership itself, Canterbury Cathedral, and it will be in situ from 17th October until 18th January 2026. It features modern graffiti-style graphics and questions displayed on the ancient walls on the cathedral. It is a project where marginalised communities were encouraged to respond to the question “What would you ask God?” In response to the installation, the dean of Canterbury, David Montieth, said, “There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. There is also an authenticity in what is said because it is unfiltered and not tidied up or sanitised. Above all, this graffiti makes me wonder why I am not always able to be as candid, not least in my prayers.”

I grew up in a marginalised community. I lived in the ragged edges of society. Where I grew up in inner city Birmingham was covered in graffiti. It wasn’t “disruptive” or “raw”, it was a blight on our working class community’s pride. Periodically, my parents and neighbours would scrub it away but it would reappear overnight. In my view, as a former disadvantaged child who lived in a feared neighbourhood, it is a misstep by the cathedral to make the assumption that this art installation somehow gives the marginalised a voice. It says - shouts - far more about the cathedral’s luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson argues that affluent people promote luxury beliefs because they know that the adoption of those beliefs will cost them less than others. He argues that luxury beliefs confer status on the upper class – or in our example, those running the cathedral – while inflicting costs on the lower classes – or in our example, lower classes and marginalised communities. And the cost here is the perpetuation of a caricature of the marginalised. It is incredibly patronising and insulting to the working class to place a luxury belief filter of “rawness” on what they think or do. Why should our voices be heard in spray paint and neon? Is that how we are seen? A caricature of modernity? A parody of culture? Do we only find art or poetry or architecture or - heck - theology ‘engaging’ when it’s stencilled in spray paint? Those holding luxury beliefs would, I’m sure, “be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed to seriously consider, their negative effects.”, as Yascha Mounk says. But perhaps I’m wrong.

There are, of course, stunning examples of street art - the recent Black Sabbath example in Brum is a wonderful one - but conflating the voice within scrawled graffiti with the voices scratched into ancient stones is insulting to marginalised communities, past and present. Those marks in church stones were prayers and wants from the devout, the lost, the marginalised, and everyone in between. The marks were not anti-social. They were normal. Please don’t confer your patronising 21st century rawness-lens to the working class. Our voice is more than scrawls and daubs, but perhaps it’s easier to think about us like that? You don’t need to think we only find something engaging by making it ‘relevant’ and neon and snazzy. We are more than that. We can learn, and know, the same - or more - than you.

Me in the Chapter House, Bristol Cathedral

*Of course I wanted to know this word’s etymology. It’s derived from the Greek apotropaios, meaning ‘to turn away evil’.

Works referenced:

Matthew Champion (2015) Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches

Ian Leslie (2015) Curious