Signs of Sailors: Ship graffiti in medieval churches....

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/12/2013/signs-sailors-ship-graffiti-medieval-churches

The last few weeks have once again shown us all exactly how vulnerable those living near the coast are to the power and force of the oceans. In East Anglia the North Sea smashed through sea defences, ate away whole chunks of cliff face, tumbling houses into the water, and inundated vast areas of land – and yet we were very lucky. It could have been far, far worse.

Seeing the destruction caused by a single event it isn’t difficult to understand just how ambiguous the relationship between the sea and coastal communities must have been throughout the Middle Ages. On the one hand those communities relied upon the sea for their very existence. They fished its waters, harvested the seashore and sailed across it to find markets for their goods. On the other hand it could swallow their loved ones, destroy whole economies and wipe entire villages from the face of the earth in the space of a few hours – and often with only the briefest, if any, of warnings. Each day, each voyage and each life a gamble, with the odds, eventually, stacked heavily against you. In a single storm in the 17th century the growing coastal settlement of Sheringham lost almost a quarter of its houses, scores of its people and dozens of its boats in a single savage, storm swept night.

This ambiguous and volatile relationship between the medieval coastal communities and the sea must have had a profound spiritual impact upon the individuals who placed their lives, and those of their loved ones, into the fickle hands of the ocean. It must have been one of the most significant single influences in their everyday lives. It was inescapable. However, the physical evidence of that relationship, the scars that it left across these communities, are hard to see. Beyond the fleeting glimpses of ships lost at sea that appear in the documentary record, or the countrywide appeals for aid for a stricken coastal community in time or dire need, the relationship is largely mute. Men died, ships failed to return and whole communities were ripped apart – and the records of their passing are few and far between. It is, perhaps, only on the walls of those coastal churches that a tangible link to this turbulent, fickle and violent past may be revealed.