CROUCHING DRAGONS

A cathedral is basically a very large carving. Look closely, and you'll see that the whole thing is carved. The fluted columns are carved fluted, and the windows are carved windowy. If you spot a plain, flat bit, it's been carved plain and flat. The whole place has been laboriously hacked out of bits of rock and wood.

In any decent cathedral, you'll find fully fledged sculptures and figure carvings. But when you've finished admiring the staggering craftsmanship of the medieval chiselwielders, see if you can spot the smaller sculptures and carvings that the public was never really intended to see. The hidden carvings are often the fascinating ones.

To see them, you'll need to look in areas that were inaccessible in medieval times, because that's where carvers were let loose on off-topic subjects. You'll often find lovely miniature scenes embedded in the lofty tracery of the ceiling. Look at the places where the stone ribs of the ceiling meet; the stones that cap the joined ribs, called roof bosses, were often carved and painted. To see them properly, you might need to lie on your back in an aisle, somewhere where people won't trip over you, of course. Unless the authorities are really stuffy, they'll leave you alone and appreciate your interest. Or you could make less of a spectacle of yourself, remain upright, and goggle at them through a pair of binoculars.

Forgot your binoculars? Try the choir. This was off limits to the unwashed masses in the Middle Ages. It was reserved for chanting monks, although a cook or a swineherd might just get a glimpse of the stunning ornamental woodwork through gaps in the wooden screen that separated the laypeople from it. Nowadays, you can usually wander through the choir unless there's a posh wedding on. To see the really interesting carvings, though, you need improvised kneepads and permission from a verger to do a bit of crawling around the misericords.

What's a Misery Cord?

"Misericordia" is Latin for "mercy." The aforesaid monks, if they followed strict rules of monkery, chanted their way though 10 church services every day, including one in the middle of the night. They couldn't sit and chant, because it's disrespectful and bad for the diaphragm, so they stood and chanted, which was a bit hard on the legs of the old and doddery ones, especially as they were expected to do work as well. The kindlier bishops installed misericords-mercy seats. These folded down, so that weary monks could sit and doze through the boring bits, standing only when there was serious chanting to do. Better still, there was a clever miniseat carved into the front edge, so that even when the seat was flipped up, monks could perch their posteriors, chant away, and look as if they were standing.

The mercy seats were cathedral furniture, and so, of course, they were carved. You can't have people sitting on anything too holy, so many misericords just got standard leaves, flowers, or flutes. Others, though, apparently got carved according to the whim of some inordinately twisted individual, and the range of subjects goes way beyond the bounds of theological relevance.

There are lots of exotic beasts for a start, including dragons, wyverns, griffins, unicorns, lions, pelicans, anthropophagi (headless cannibals with faces on their chests), and woodwose men (wild men of the woods). These all existed in medieval times, of course. They must have done, because they appear in stories, in illuminated manuscripts, in coats of arms-they're all over the place. Then there are obscure and gruesome Bible stories, funny little domestic scenes, a few deadly sins, some kings and bishops, various blokes fighting, and sundry castles.

On a decent misericord hunt, you'll find at least one green man. Look for a bloke's head with foliage growing out of his mouth, his ears, or any other convenient orifice. He shouldn't be in church, because he's a pagan symbol, but he crops up in all sorts of places anyway. Nobody really knows what the green man is or what he signifies, but he's old. There are green man carvings going back to pre-Roman times, so he must be some sort of holdover from the Druids.

Finally, there are the cautionary examples that demonstrate that carving wasn't a healthy profession. The vibrations from the constant hammering flowed back up the arms and eventually caused malfunctions in the brain. You can see this from the substantial number of misericord carvings that are just totally bizarre. It wasn't only the seats that flipped.

Paul Baker is a Tudor hurdy-gurdy player who often spends his spare time peering into the dark recesses of Britain's cathedrals, looking for demons and little green men. Most people assume he's a harmless lunatic. They're probably right.

Copyright Carus Publishing Company Jan 2004
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