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A medieval church carries marks of two quite different kinds and the popular literature runs them together constantly. What the builders left is documentary: a mason's mark identifies a workshop and was cut for accounting, a consecration cross records an anointing on a known date, a squint solves a sightline problem. What everyone else left is inference — nobody who scratched a mark wrote down why, and every reading rests on where the marks cluster and what is beside them. The records say which is which. Two of the best-known motifs, the green man and the sheela na gig, are recorded with their proposed readings listed and none endorsed, because the medieval evidence does not settle between them and pretending otherwise would be the most confident thing on the page and the least supported.
Who made a mark is the first question, and it changes what it can mean.
A small angular monogram identifying who cut the stone.
A ringed cross painted or cut on a church wall, marking an anointing.
A scratched semicircle of lines on a south wall — a sundial for service times.
Ships, crosses and names scratched by people passing through.
A face with foliage growing from it, carved in a church.
One throws water off the roof; the other does not, and only one is a gargoyle.
A row of small carved heads under the eaves.
A carving on the underside of a hinged choir seat.
A female figure displaying her genitals, carved on a church or castle.
A single winding path set into a floor — not a maze.
The stair to nowhere, and the beam socket above the chancel arch.
A slot cut obliquely through a wall to see the altar.
A basin with a drain, and a cupboard recess — both beside the altar.
The building points east, and that is why 'the east end' means the altar.