This post has been long in the making. I owe huge thanks to CR. She hiked uncomplainingly to remote churches, collected photographic evidence of a vast tribe of creatures frozen in stone, then patiently waited for them to appear in print…and waited some more. Apologies to her for the delay, and gratitude to her for many of the images shown below. It has been a bit of a job to round these creatures up. They’ve been lurking in the shadows: in the recesses of my photo roll, on other history-hunters’ blogs, and in countless dusty files.
Once you start looking, you’ll stumble across them easily. Look at any medieval church in England, or indeed across Europe, and invariably you’ll find them. Stone carvings of humans, animals and weird creatures which reveal the mechanics of the medieval mind.
Vocabulary corner
The collective term for these strange stone figures is actually grotesques. The word comes from the 16th century Italian grottesca, and it means as found in a grotto. That Italian word came about, just as antiquarians were getting interested in the strange carvings and statues they were excavating from Roman ruins… otherwise known as grottos.
Now, a gargoyle is a specific type of grotesque – one that spouts water. You’ll usually find them at the corner of a church roof, channeling the rain. Their name comes from the French – gargouille, meaning a throat, but that actually comes from an older Greek word, meaning to gargle. Which is exactly what a water-channeling gargoyle does. Here are a few of the magnificent creatures…
And a hunkypunk ? It’s a type of grotesque, short and squat, found exclusively around West Country churches, especially in Somerset. Again, the word, this time in old English, perfectly describes the figures: hunky from hunkers, or haunches; and punk from punchy, meaning short-legged.
Les gargouilles de Paris
But before we start our hunt around the dusty corners of old churches, let’s revisit the most famous gargoyles of all. Meet Victor, Hugo and Laverne. These are friends of Quasimodo, the infamous Hunchback of Notre Dame, from the eponymous Disney cartoon. The novel on which it was based was of course by Victor Hugo, hence the first two names of the trio. Bizarrely though, according to Disney’s website, Laverne was named after one of the singing Andrews sisters. Go figure.
Full disclosure now: I introduced this Gallic trio, in order to talk about poor Quasimodo. I was fascinated to learn how Victor Hugo bestowed his name. According to Hugo, the tale started early one Sunday morning – actually Low Sunday, which falls a week after Easter. The wicked archdeacon of Notre Dame came across an abandoned baby on the steps of the cathedral. The poor mite’s body was broken and deformed, with a pitiful crooked back. Of course, the church was obliged to take in the orphan. But what to name him? Perhaps a religious name?…
Now, all formal Catholic church masses start with a designated hymn or a psalm, called the introit, and these are formalised in the church calendar. It so happens that the designated introit for Low Sunday starts with the words:
“As newborn babies long for the spiritual milk…”
Which is a translation from the Latin version, which starts,
“Quasi modo gentii infantes…”
The cruel archdeacon who took in the abandoned baby obviously enjoyed a pun. You could also translate quasi modo from Latin as meaning half-formed, referring to poor Q’s physical deformities. (I’ve been wanting to share this nugget of nerdiness for a while, and thought it would shoe-horn in nicely with all things grotesque and gargoyley. Thanks for your indulgence).
Shock and awe
So now we come to the creatures themselves. There’s no escaping the fact that so many of them are just plain weird. Yes, there are plenty of human faces around, staring out at us across the centuries, with faces much like our own. There are noble faces…
Or ordinary ones like this chap on the right, photographed at Romsey Abbey. You still see faces like this in any English pub on a Saturday lunchtime.
But most grotesques are disturbing and monstrous and blatantly non-human. You’ll find menageries of bats, frogs, lions, pigs and many other animals. Stranger to our eyes are mythical creatures such as goblins and dragons.
But the weirdest of all are the strange hybrid creatures, sometimes called chimera. They equal anything you’d find in a painting by the medieval painter Hieronymous Bosch, who infamously depicted what awaits sinners in hell.
What do you think of these chimeric creatures, which I photographed at Romsey Abbey? As mad as anything Bosch painted, you’d agree?
What’s going on? To answer, let’s look at the role of the church in medieval society. Its professed aim was to save souls, by saving people from themselves. There were two broad routes to this – through education, and through fear. How better to demonstrate to an illiterate population how to keep on the straight and narrow, than using these tools? Give them visual allegories of biblical references, and reminders of how easy are the routes to hell, and what awaits you there?
Seven Deadly Sins
In an age when the majority of folk couldn’t read, symbolism told the church’s message. I’ve no doubt that you know all seven of the deadly sins off by heart, but here’s how they often appeared in stone:
Lust – monkeys, rabbits, goats
Gluttony – pigs, wolves
Greed – toads and foxes
Sloth – snails, donkeys, bears
Wrath – lions and boars
Envy – snakes and dogs
Pride – peacocks and lions
A bestiary
How do we explain why real-life animals like pigs and lions are side-by-side with fantastic figures, such as griffins and imps? To understand why, we must let go of our modern way of looking at the world. Our viewpoint is (generally!) rooted in science. To us, a thing’s real only if it can be observed or logically deduced. But to the medieval mind, if a respected authority such as Aristotle, or even the Bible itself, said a thing was real, then there would be no arguments against that, despite a lack of any evidence. Assertions made by authority figures were taken as gospel, (if you’ll forgive the pun), without question.
And to reinforce the bible lessons, the church viewed all natural phenomena as a glimpse of the mind of God. Everything in nature was God’s exemplar.
You can witness this mindset in medieval literature too. Bestiaries, as the name suggests, were written descriptions of beasts, and often beautifully illustrated. I’ve been leafing through my own lovely replica of a Bestiary from the 13th century, copied from the original in the Bodleian library in Oxford.
It’s obvious from its descriptions of animals that in the majority of cases, the writer has no first-hand knowledge of them at all. But crucially, the sources that the writer relied on probably had no first-hand knowledge either! They were also relying on prior authorities. And the writer was determined to shoe-horn biblical allegories into these unreliable hand-me-down descriptions.
Of course, misunderstandings and half-truths and spurious anecdotes mutated and multiplied, much like a false story spreading on Twitter, or X today.
Bodleian Lions
Take for example, this passage on lions, in the Bodleian Bestiary. In it the writer confidently states that a lion, when the scent of a hunter reaches them, wipes clean the ground behind him with his tail, to hide his tracks. This, said the writer, emulates how Jesus, “the spiritual lion of the tribe of Judah”, hid his tracks until he descended into Mary’s womb, to redeem mankind.
Further, our writer asserts that lions sleep with their eyes open. Similarly, Jesus appeared to sleep when on the cross, but “his Godhead kept watch, as it says in the Song of Songs: I sleep but my heart waketh”.
What’s more, lionesses, according to our writer, give birth to dead cubs, but three days after their birth their father comes and blows in their faces, to breathe life into them. I leave it to you to work out that Christian analogy for yourselves.
For people who would never witness a lion in real life, it would be impossible to refute these assertions. How could a medieval Christian know if they were true or not? Why would they doubt such revered authorities? So, the description of, say, a lion, would merit the same consideration as a description of a unicorn or a phoenix or an imp or a goblin. Why would you doubt the existence of any creature, if a learned source told you of its existence? The unknown world must have seemed a mysterious and terrifying place, full of unknown creatures. And the church directed the stone masons under its jurisdiction to depict these creatures to dramatic effect in its churches.
Shout Out to Lionel !
But talking of stone masons, let’s examine the work of these skilled craftsmen in more detail. I’d now like to introduce you to the wonderful website of Lionel Wall: https://greatenglishchurches.co.uk/index.html Lionel has made it his post-retirement life’s work to visit the parish churches of England. He records, in entertaining and scholarly detail, the marvellous architecture, carvings and artefacts found in them. What an undertaking! There are over 12,000 Anglican churches in England, 40,000 churches when you take into account other denominations.. As he says, his efforts so far have just scratched the surface.
I found his website by chance a few years ago, meaning to do some quick research and then exit and carry on writing. Hours later I was still there, intrigued by the weird and wonderful images he’d captured.
Lionel wrote a marvellous article, which you can also find on his site, titled Bums, Fleas and Hitchhikers.
He describes a series of grotesques he found on churches around Rutland and Leicestershire (he’s from Lincolnshire himself). Lionel thinks the visual evidence very strongly points to a local band of stonemasons, all using common themes and motifs. He kindly gave me permission to use photographs from his site, and I’ve posted some below, to illustrate the themes he identified.
Builders’ bums
The bums? Well, suffice it to say, our trusty band of local masons had a typically ribald medieval sense of humour! In fact, you could say that they were, like a car load of adolescents on a boozy Saturday night, obsessed with mooning. Look at the screenshot below, taken from Lionel’s site…
What was going on here? We’ll hazard a guess. It was a world where your lowly place in society was fixed, inescapable, and the local overlords from church and state held all the power. A mooning figure, out of immediate eye level, would be a fine subversive way of figuratively sticking up two fingers to authority.
My partner, Mr. Albion (after having a good snigger at the mooners), suggested that there could be a connection with the Caganers that you can find across the Iberian peninsula, but especially in Catalonia. A caganer is a figure of a squatting person who is, ahem, passing a motion. Mr A told me that you often find them as a peripheral figure in nativity scenes. On a recent trip to Bilbao – which is of course a Catalan stronghold – we actually came across an entire shopful of the little squatters.
Although not known (in the written records at least) until the 1800s, folkologists suggest that one explanation for a merry band of defecators is to inject an element of humility and earthiness into serious, profound, and often pompous, church proceedings. And isn’t this also a possible motive of our brotherhood of carvers and their mooners?
Band of brothers
In his church travels, Lionel also noticed that many of the churches in the vicinity of the jolly mooners contained carvings of some very strange creatures indeed, and in some cases, the mooners and the creatures shared the same sacred space. After much speculation,(were they lice, turtles, frogs, he wondered?) Lionel concluded that the weird creatures were in fact fleas. After all, there were plenty in medieval England. What about the anatomical inaccuracy? Well, no medieval stone mason would have had the chance to view a live specimen under a microscope.
So, what’s the significance of these creatures? You might argue that they were some sort of biblical allegory, like a lion representing the sin of pride. Or that they were an attempt to contrast the terrifying solemnity of the medieval religious machine, with the everyday realities of peasant life. Lionel proposes another explanation, which is perhaps more compelling. He thinks the fleas represent the brand of a band of masons, operating in the Midlands. It’’s evident that they were not all carved by a single carver. The collective work of the band of masons would be immediately identifiable, even by an illiterate peasant churchgoer, by the use of their unique flea motif.
Hats off to Lionel.
Hiding in plain sight
Truth be told, they’re not even hiding. Yes, you may have to crick your neck, to spot them high up in the church roofs. But they were installed to be seen and studied by a compliant congregation. What’s really hidden is the meanings that the figures represent. Nowadays, we might spot them, and just wonder at their strangeness. But we should really be questioning, for each one of the creatures we bag, what’s the sermon that the church was trying to tell us, using the craft of the stone mason?
