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A small angular monogram identifying who cut the stone.
Also known as: Stonemason mark, Angular symbol carved in stone, Letters cut in a church wall
A few straight strokes, cut where they can be seen once the stone is set. It identifies a mason or a workshop, and it exists because masons were paid by the piece and someone had to count.
Primarily an accounting device: masons were paid by the piece, and a mark let completed work be counted and attributed. That practical origin is why the marks are on load-bearing structural stone and not on the decorative carving.
Made of straight lines almost without exception, because a straight cut is fast in stone and a curve is not. That constraint, rather than any symbolic scheme, is why the marks look like an alphabet.
Tracing the same mark across buildings can establish that one workshop worked on both, which is how the movement of masons between major projects has been reconstructed.
Not connected to freemasonry, which is a later fraternal organisation that adopted the imagery of the medieval building trades. A mark on a thirteenth-century pier is a workman's signature.
The commonest misreading of these marks by some distance.
A small figure of three to six straight incised strokes meeting at angles, like an angular monogram or an arrow with extra bars, a few centimetres across.
The mason's mark is one of the builders' marks.