Eastbourne’s Historic Graffiti: The Secret Marks at St Mary’s

A project born at St Mary’s

The Sussex Historic Graffiti Project set out to create a detailed digital record of historic graffiti across the county, using proper archaeological recording methods. And it began in Eastbourne — specifically, in St Mary’s Church in the Old Town, the town’s ancient parish church, before growing to take in sites further afield.

St Mary’s was an ideal starting point. It has stood for some eight centuries at the heart of old Eastbourne, and its walls, pillars and doorways carry the accumulated marks of generations of worshippers. As the project puts it, if you have ever stood in an old building and felt a sense of the past and the people who came before, historic graffiti is where that feeling becomes something you can actually see — each mark a small story of who, what, where, and, most intriguingly, why.

Not vandalism but voices

To modern eyes, scratching marks into a church wall sounds like vandalism. In the medieval period it was nothing of the sort. Marking the fabric of a sacred building was an accepted, even ordinary, way for people to express their beliefs, hopes and prayers in a tangible and lasting form — to leave something of themselves in the presence of the holy.

These were, for the most part, not the great and powerful. The people who left graffiti were the ordinary parishioners whose lives went almost entirely unrecorded — the farmers, fishermen, tradespeople and children of old Eastbourne. Their names appear in no history book, yet here, etched into the stone, is direct evidence of their thoughts and fears. In that sense, historic graffiti is one of the very few places where the medieval “silent majority” gets to speak.

The marks and their meanings

Surveys of medieval churches like St Mary’s typically reveal several distinct kinds of graffiti, each with its own story:

Devotional marks. Crosses in great variety are among the most common finds — some perhaps carved by pilgrims, some to mark a prayer, a vow or a bargain made with God.

Masons’ marks. The stonemasons who built and repaired the church often cut small personal symbols into their work — a kind of medieval signature, used to identify who had dressed each block, quite separate from the graffiti of worshippers.

Names and dates. As literacy spread, particularly from the 16th century onwards, people increasingly recorded their presence with initials, names and dates. Often dismissed as later scribbling, these are in fact a valuable source for local historians, tying real individuals to a place and a moment.

Ritual protection marks. Perhaps the most fascinating category of all — symbols carved not to decorate or commemorate, but to protect.

Marks against evil

Ritual protection marks — also known by the scholarly term apotropaic marks, and popularly as “witch marks” — were carved to guard a building and its occupants against evil, misfortune and malevolent spirits. They reflect a world in which the boundary between religion, folklore and everyday magic was far more blurred than it is today.

The most recognisable is the daisy wheel, or hexafoil: a six-petalled flower shape drawn with a pair of compasses, its endless interlocking lines thought to trap or confuse evil. Also common are compass-drawn concentric circles, and the “VV” or overlapping “W” marks, interpreted as appeals to the Virgin of Virgins — the Virgin Mary — for protection. Some marks take the form of tangled lines or knots, others of shoe or foot outlines. In each case, the circle and the unbroken line carried powerful associations of eternity, heaven and safety.

How the marks are found

Most historic graffiti is faint, shallow and easily missed. Centuries of wear, whitewash and ordinary daylight can render the marks all but invisible to a casual visitor. The key to revealing them is raking light — shining a light across the surface at a very low angle so that the shallow lines throw tiny shadows and suddenly leap into view.

Using this technique, together with careful photography and measured recording, survey volunteers can document marks that have gone unnoticed for generations, building up a permanent digital archive. It is painstaking work, but the results can be extraordinary: walls that appear blank in normal light are revealed, under raking illumination, to be covered in the layered messages of centuries.

Why it matters

Historic graffiti matters because it preserves the voices of people history usually forgets. Grand monuments and written records tend to speak for the wealthy and powerful; these humble scratched marks speak for everyone else. They reveal what ordinary Eastbourne people believed, feared and hoped for — their faith, their superstitions, their simple desire to be remembered.

By beginning its work at St Mary’s, the Sussex Historic Graffiti Project placed Eastbourne at the forefront of this quietly revealing branch of archaeology. Next time you step inside the Old Town church, it is worth pausing to look closely at the stone around you. The walls, it turns out, have been talking for eight hundred years — if only you know how to look.

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