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Morris boards cut into churches and cloisters
Look closely at a stone bench in an old cloister and you may find a square scratched into it with a smaller square inside. Somebody sat there with a handful of pebbles and time to kill. The hard part is saying when, and which game.
Where they have been found
English cathedrals and abbeys. A leaflet from Heritage Ireland says boards have been scratched onto seats in the cathedrals at Canterbury and Salisbury and in Westminster Abbey, and shows a board from Norwich Cathedral. English Wikipedia adds Gloucester and a board cut into the base of a pillar at Chester Cathedral. Anthea Hawdon, who studies this kind of graffiti, lists Westminster, Salisbury, Gloucester, and, on another author's authority, Norwich and Canterbury. Treat the list as the usual suspects, not as a survey.
Scotland. Historic Environment Scotland's Engine Shed blog describes a large stone at Arbroath Abbey with a board carved into it, probably from around the 13th century. It turned up in the 1920s, when a wall built after the Reformation was taken down, and the wall had been made from much older stones. At Jedburgh Abbey, diggers found a mid-13th-century stone board in similar circumstances. At Dryburgh Abbey a board is carved into the foundation stone of the north wall of the nave, where you can still see it.
Ireland. At Glendalough in County Wicklow, a board was scratched into a flat piece of mica schist slate, found when the church at Temple-na-Skellig was excavated in the 1950s by Françoise Henry. The settlement was used in the 13th century as a place of retreat, reachable only by boat.
Italy. The same leaflet mentions boards scratched into the floor of the church of the Madonna della Libera, south of Rome.
Parish churches. Hawdon surveyed 43 churches in Essex and found merels boards, as she counts them, in 28 of them. Great Sampford has one in a spot where someone could sit and play. The commonest type in her survey was Three Men's Morris.
Nine Men's Morris, or the little game?
That last point matters. The big game is three squares one inside the other. Three Men's Morris, which the Romans played, is a single square crossed by lines (Wikipedia describes the board as a grid of 2 by 2 squares), and one version of it is also called Nine Holes. English Wikipedia says of the cloister seats that their boards used holes, not lines, for the nine spaces, and that a diagonal row did not win; that is the description of the small game. So when a website says "a Nine Men's Morris board in the cloister", it is worth asking what is actually cut there. The Essex numbers make the small game the safer bet for a parish church.
Who carved them, and why there
Nobody signed these. What we have is educated guessing, and it is worth keeping the guesses apart from the facts.
- Masons on a break. Duncan Ainslie of the Engine Shed blog offers it for Arbroath and is careful to call it a possibility: two masons taking a break from working on the abbey might have sat down to a game.
- Monks, clergy and schoolboys at monastic and cathedral schools. Hawdon says these have been suggested, though she does not claim it is proved.
- Sentries. The Heritage Ireland leaflet describes more lasting boards in sentry posts and church cloisters.
- Knights. Hawdon notes that the Templar rule allowed its brothers to play marelles, the French name for the game, for pleasure and no other game.
Hawdon's own rule of thumb is useful: a board cut on a horizontal surface where people could sit should be assumed to be for play unless there is a reason to think otherwise. Boards on walls and other upright surfaces are a harder case. German Wikipedia points out that many mill patterns scratched on vertical or hard-to-reach surfaces may have had a sacred or protective meaning. Its example is the marble throne of Charlemagne in the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, where a mill pattern is visible in one of the slabs. Whether it was cut while the slab lay flat, and whether it ever served as a board, is not clear.
There is a footnote from a court. In 1699, according to Hawdon, two men appeared before the church court in Lezayre on the Isle of Man for "makeing Nine-Holes with their knives upon Sunday after evening prayer".
Why dating is so hard
A scratched line carries no date. You can only bracket it from what surrounds it. The Arbroath stone sat inside a post-Reformation wall, so it is older than that wall; Historic Environment Scotland puts it around the 13th century. A board on a bench could have been cut on the day the bench was built or last Tuesday. The historian Friedrich Berger, writing about Roman boards, said they are very hard to date because the buildings have been easy to get at ever since they were built.
The one thing we can say with confidence about the game itself is that it is old enough to appear in writing. The 13th-century Libro de los juegos, compiled at the court of Alfonso X of Castile and dated 1283, shows a board for Nine Men's Morris. For what came before, see the history of the game.
If you want to look for one yourself
Try stone benches, steps, window sills, cloister walks and floor slabs, anywhere a person sat or knelt. Hold a torch low and sideways so the scratches throw shadows; flat daylight hides them. Photograph what you find and leave it untouched, then tell whoever looks after the building. If you want to draw a board for a game of your own, here is how.
Frequently asked questions
Are there Nine Men's Morris boards in English cathedrals?
Yes. Sources list boards scratched onto seats in the cloisters at Canterbury, Salisbury, Gloucester and Westminster Abbey, with a board at Norwich and one cut into a pillar base at Chester. Some of the cloister boards are the small nine-holes game.
Who carved the boards in churches and abbeys?
No record names anyone. Masons on a break, monks, clergy, cathedral school pupils and sentries have all been suggested, but none is proven.
How old are the medieval morris boards?
Most cannot be dated from the carving alone. The best-dated ones, such as the stones at Arbroath and Jedburgh, are of the 13th century, bracketed by the walls and layers they were found in.