Church Pew Graffiti
I went camping in Norfolk last week and between the campfires and the swimming I visited St Nicholas Church, Salthouse, where many of the pews have graffiti cut into them. The cuts and lines were mostly it seems the work of 17th and 18th century children, bored by the sermon. There are initials, names, dates, and – Salthouse having once been a port – a series of crude but detailed representations of ships. Here are a few examples.
My favourite church-with-graffiti is St Michael’s in Coxwold, North Yorkshire. The church stands nearly opposite the house of Laurence Sterne: the author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), and arguably the inventor of some fairly big if baggy literary categories, like the self-reflexive novel, and (maybe this is a push), the artists’ book. Not that Sterne would have used these terms. He was also, with less of a sense of the avant garde, appointed perpetual curate of Coxwold in March 1760, and preached in St Michael’s hundreds of times.
There are five pews which now stand in the raised gallery, bedecked with eighteenth-century graffiti, with names and dates cut into the wood: a striking roll call from the period of Sterne’s residency and writing.1
What do these names tell us? They give us a glimpse of a little community, located in pinpoints of time: 1716, 1722, 1723, 1725, 1746, 1771, 1773, 1774, 1776, 1782. Coxwold people who filed in and out of the church and who seem to stand now like ghosts arranged in space behind the pews.
That’s one way of responding to the graffiti: to read the names as a document of social history, like an informal, gouged-out version of a parish register of men and (perhaps, behind the initials) women: A.K., RALPH CLOSE, CH. OLDFIELD, F. BECKE, G. BARWICK, IOHN DAVIE (his name scratched furiously out – why?), T. WILKIN, R. NEWTON, R.K., T. WILLOUGHBY (the latter too long for the board, the final 3 letters scrolling beneath).
These otherwise-lost Coxwold names loom suddenly back out at us from the eighteenth century, like the past demanding that we take notice. There is even a STERNE: a record of someone listening to Sterne preach, or a document of his fame, or a namesake, or Sterne’s autograph cut with a knife?
What does it mean to cut one’s name and year in wood? Is this an expression of engagement in a lesson or a sermon, a mark of one’s commitment, a sign – because it’s laborious – of a sustained and concentrated presence in one place? Or does it signify resistance, transgression, boredom, hostility? Is graffiti an act of violence, or of care, or of both? The cultural status of graffiti is paradoxical: the word comes from the Italian graffio, meaning a scratch, suggests something trivial, but any scratched name can find an illustrious history of precedents stretching back to Pompeii and Rome. Is graffiti low or high culture?
But graffiti can help us think in other ways, too: ways we might even describe as Sternean. What would Sterne himself have made of these names carved in wood?
Sterne would have loved them – and perhaps did. Sterne’s earliest recorded act of authorship shows him a keen graffitist (with brush, not knife). In his memoir for his daughter, Lydia, Sterne recalls that his 1720s schoolmaster
had the ceiling of the schoolroom new-whitewashed, and the ladder remained there. I, one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush, in large capital letters, Lau. Sterne for which the usher severely whipped me. My master was very much hurt at this, and said … that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment. This expression made me forget the blows I had received.
Graffiti matters in Sterne’s intellectual biography: it is the first sign, and the guarantee, of his genius. ‘[N]ever should that name be effaced.’
Sterne would have also loved St Michael’s pew graffiti because in his literary work he is fascinated with the effects of text appearing across different, unconventional surfaces: not just on paper, but also in stone, in wax, in the margins of a book, across a face, on a title-page, as the flourish of a stick through the air. Sterne loved the idea, too, of ink spreading out across the surface of a page to create a mark that can’t be pierced, or passed through, or understood, or (to use a Sternean word), penetrated.
The famous black (but not blank) page in Tristram Shandy might be saturated with grief for Yorick but it is also a door we can’t open. We usually think of text in novels as something that leads us on, through the book, but the black page keeps us out: it stops us in our tracks. Each marbled page in Tristram Shandy, different in every copy, is a set of swirling signs whose purpose is to baffle: ‘you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions…mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.’
There is a rich tradition of poets describing the uncanny power of cutting text into wood, glass, or stone. Most brilliant is John Donne’s ‘A Valediction of my name, in the window’ (1633), which imagines, a century before Sterne, the poet’s name cut into the glass of his mistress’ window, perhaps with one of the diamond ‘writing rings’ popular at the time. Donne describes his name written in glass to play on ideas of absence and presence (his diamond-cut name is permanent, but we can also see through it – is he there, or not?), and he imagines his name layered over his lover’s reflection in the glass (‘Here you see me, and I am you’).
We might think, too, of John Keats’ nameless tombstone epitaph in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, 200 years later – ‘Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water’ – which plays a complex game with writing and time: the name writ in water is cut into stone, the grave letters a permanent expression of transience. This is always the paradox and power of gravestones: the monumental letters marking the brevity of life. (For more on Keats, water, and writing, you could try this.)
Perhaps the real power of the mysterious graffiti in St Michael’s Church is, like the black page and the marbled page, that mix of revelation and concealment: here are letters that record a person’s presence, but those letters also remain marks on a surface that won’t quite yield a story. Who was R.S? IOHN BROWN? CORNELIUS CAYLE?
The origins of these pews are uncertain: the box pews in the nave were installed 1760-68 when Sterne was curate, but these gallery pews may have been roughly constructed from old panelling, perhaps from the nearby grammar school. We can’t be sure whether the graffiti was added before or after the panels were converted into pews. But for now, let’s consider them as they are: as pews in St Michael’s Church, covered with names and dates from the century in which Sterne lived in Coxwold, and wrote his experimental novels
Thanks to Patrick Wildgust at Shandy Hall for introducing me to the pew graffiti at St Michael’s. Some of the above featured in a Humanities Knowledge Exchange collaboration with Shandy Hall from 2018.
Thanks for a provocative discussion and the link between grafitti to Sterne. I am intrigued about the idea that Sterne was making what we now call an "artists book".