Ship Graffiti at St Thomas Church in Winchelsea

Learners on our MOOC ‘Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds’ will have already read in week 2 that iconography can be a valuable source of information for maritime archaeologists. It can provide details on ancient ships and boats and maritime-related activities, but what is more is that it provides an insight into the understanding of these maritime activities through the person who made them.

When the University of Southampton, just a couple of weeks ago, conducted the New Winchelsea Harbour Geotechnical Survey at the site of the ancient port of Winchelsea in East Sussex (United Kingdom), the recording of the ship graffiti inside St Thomas Church and in the cellar underneath Blackfriars Barn was an important part of this project. The graffiti, although admittedly very hard to date, has the potential to inform us about the sorts of ships that were docking at the harbour in Winchelsea while at the same time giving us some insight into the mindset of people in a medieval port town.

The graffiti was recorded using a technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). This method produces images in which light and shadow can be manipulated on a computer. This allows us to pick up on the minutest details. The way it works is relatively straight forward. A camera is placed on a tripod in front of the image and a mobile flash is used to take images from different lighting-angles. All of these pictures are subsequently fed into the RTI-software which builds a manipulable image.

The RTI’s of the ship graffiti from Winchelsea are still being processed and analysed, but already they are revealing some interesting insights into life at medieval Winchelsea.

The RTI-image above shows a ship lying at anchor, with two of its anchors deployed. This most likely means it is lying at a roadstead and not at a dock. This makes sense because we know Winchelsea was receiving very large ships with a deep draft, too deep for the Brede, the river at which the waterfront was located. We also have historical accounts that confirm the off-loading of tons into smaller boats for transport to the shore. Winchelsea would thus have been a harbour where lightering was a common practice.

Next to examining the structural components of the depicted ships, we can also start hypothesizing why they were carved into the columns of a church. A reasonable explanation is that they were the ‘poor man’s votive ships’. People with considerable funds could have a ship model constructed out of wood and gift it to the church to put on display. It is believed that this was done to put the journey(s) of a particular ship (or shipbuilder or merchant) under the protection of God. The Norwegian maritime archaeologist Christer Westerdahl has recently suggested that the carved images found in Nordic churches had the same purpose. It is not unlikely that this was also the case in Winchelsea.

If this interpretation is true, it gives us a wonderful insight into the mindset of people living in coastal towns in the middle ages. The fact that they felt the need to place a voyage across the sea under the protection of God does not only show the religious character of life at that time, but also the way maritime activities were inextricably interwoven with religion. Today, they are a permanent reminder to residents and visitors alike that at one point in time, Winchelsea’s inception and success was dependent on the ships floating in the Brede, something which is easily forgotten in a town that today is about two kilometres away from the nearest coastline.

More details on the ship graffiti recorded in Winchelsea will become available on my research blog over the next few weeks.

If you are interested in RTI, the software to make your own RTI-images is available for free on the website of Cultural Heritage Imaging.