Protection Marks
Some places have it all. This is a daisy-wheel, inside concentric circles and with a Marian mark carved over the top. There are deliberate burn marks in the next room. Ryedale Folk Museum, North Yorkshire.
One of the most common forms of magical house protection is to use protection marks. These can potentially be found in any building, the more history the more likely that you will be able to find some. Parish churches are often a good place to start. There are many types of protection marks which you can find in the menu above. Please note this is not a fully comprehensive list but is a guide to the main varieties of marks.
How to find marks. It's really important to have a decent, strong torch with you when you're out hunting for marks and it's also important to use raking light. That is, you need to shine the light obliquely across the surface of the structure you are looking at - this will cast a shadow wherever it comes across a mark making them much more visible. This technique can make marks which are otherwise invisible stand out much more clearly.
What isn't a protection mark? This isn't always clear but there are a few types of marks which were carved into buildings for entirely practical reasons or for devotional reasons and it's important to know the difference:
- In stone buildings it's fairly common to come across mason's marks - the main way to identify these is that they are usually carved fairly central to a block of stone, they are also fairly uniform and expertly carved. This is thought to have been a way to identify the work of individual masons.
- In timber buildings it's entirely normal to find carpenters marks - these are a numeric system where junctions between timbers are marked to make them easy to identify and know which ones to connect together. There are quite a few styles of these marks, if you book me for a lecture I'll show you some pictures :-)
- There are also marks known as merchants marks which can be quite complex. These were essentially business logos but people would sometimes carve them into churches in the hope that some of the sacredness of the building would flow into their business.
- There were also people who just doodled on the walls of buildings. Images of people, music, bell-ringing patterns, animals and birds are fairly common.
Why don't I call them witch-marks? I think this term can cause confusion. There are some people who believe all of these marks are made by witches because of this term, this is not true. There are also people who believe that all of these marks were created specifically to ward off witches, this is also not true. The term also gives the impression that all of the marks were created at the same time, this also isn't true. The truth is that each type of mark has a different story of origin and usually they were thought to protect against more than witchcraft. The difficulty is that they were all used a lot more during the period of the witch-trials, so most of the evidence appears to link them with counter-witchcraft despite them all being thought to work in different ways.
The main types of protection marks are, circles, daisy-wheels, Marian marks, mesh marks, deliberate burn marks and hand and shoe outlines.
Brian Hoggard, Magical House Protection - The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft, Berghahn, 2019.
Brian Hoggard and Alicia Jessup, ‘Llancaiach Fawr Manor: Fortified Against Evil’, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Magazine, Autumn 2017 , pp51-5.
Timothy Easton, ‘Scribed and Painted Symbols’, in Paul Oliver (ed), Vernacular Architecture of the World, 1997/8 (four vols), CUP.
Timothy Easton, ‘Ritual Marks on Historic Timber’, Weald and Downland Open Air Museum Magazine, Spring 1999, pp22-30.
Brian Hoggard, 'The archaeology of counter-witchcraft and popular magic', in Owen Davies & Willem de Blecourt, Beyond the Witch-Trials, 2004, Manchester University Press, pp167-186.
Dean, J & Hill, N. 2014, 'Burn Marks on Buildings: Accidental or Deliberate', in Vernacular Architecture, vol 45, 1-15.
How to find marks. It's really important to have a decent, strong torch with you when you're out hunting for marks and it's also important to use raking light. That is, you need to shine the light obliquely across the surface of the structure you are looking at - this will cast a shadow wherever it comes across a mark making them much more visible. This technique can make marks which are otherwise invisible stand out much more clearly.
What isn't a protection mark? This isn't always clear but there are a few types of marks which were carved into buildings for entirely practical reasons or for devotional reasons and it's important to know the difference:
- In stone buildings it's fairly common to come across mason's marks - the main way to identify these is that they are usually carved fairly central to a block of stone, they are also fairly uniform and expertly carved. This is thought to have been a way to identify the work of individual masons.
- In timber buildings it's entirely normal to find carpenters marks - these are a numeric system where junctions between timbers are marked to make them easy to identify and know which ones to connect together. There are quite a few styles of these marks, if you book me for a lecture I'll show you some pictures :-)
- There are also marks known as merchants marks which can be quite complex. These were essentially business logos but people would sometimes carve them into churches in the hope that some of the sacredness of the building would flow into their business.
- There were also people who just doodled on the walls of buildings. Images of people, music, bell-ringing patterns, animals and birds are fairly common.
Why don't I call them witch-marks? I think this term can cause confusion. There are some people who believe all of these marks are made by witches because of this term, this is not true. There are also people who believe that all of these marks were created specifically to ward off witches, this is also not true. The term also gives the impression that all of the marks were created at the same time, this also isn't true. The truth is that each type of mark has a different story of origin and usually they were thought to protect against more than witchcraft. The difficulty is that they were all used a lot more during the period of the witch-trials, so most of the evidence appears to link them with counter-witchcraft despite them all being thought to work in different ways.
The main types of protection marks are, circles, daisy-wheels, Marian marks, mesh marks, deliberate burn marks and hand and shoe outlines.
Brian Hoggard, Magical House Protection - The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft, Berghahn, 2019.
Brian Hoggard and Alicia Jessup, ‘Llancaiach Fawr Manor: Fortified Against Evil’, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Magazine, Autumn 2017 , pp51-5.
Timothy Easton, ‘Scribed and Painted Symbols’, in Paul Oliver (ed), Vernacular Architecture of the World, 1997/8 (four vols), CUP.
Timothy Easton, ‘Ritual Marks on Historic Timber’, Weald and Downland Open Air Museum Magazine, Spring 1999, pp22-30.
Brian Hoggard, 'The archaeology of counter-witchcraft and popular magic', in Owen Davies & Willem de Blecourt, Beyond the Witch-Trials, 2004, Manchester University Press, pp167-186.
Dean, J & Hill, N. 2014, 'Burn Marks on Buildings: Accidental or Deliberate', in Vernacular Architecture, vol 45, 1-15.