Workshop Practice

While it is clear that workshop practice will have determined the way that masons' marks were used, and this will have varied from site to site, there are certain aspects that are universal. Marks can be used in several different ways and these can be separated out quite easily.

Quarry Marks

The first category of mark is the quarry mark. Stone sent out of the quarry in the recent past was given a mark to show where it was to be shipped to. This was usually painted on the roughly-cut block, and was part of the quarry-master's tally system.

The blocks sent from the Clipsham quarries in the Lincolnshire Limestone field in the 1950s for repairs to the Houses of Parliament had a clear 'HC' for House of Commons on the blocks. A version of this system is still in use and a huge block of stone being transported on a lorry along the M69 in May 2007 had 'Houses of Parlement' in red paint in large letters on its side. We know from stone recovered from Roman sites in England and in the Empire that masons had their name inscribed on the stone they wanted for their building projects once they had inspected it at the quarry.

Quarry marks are unlikely to survive the process of cutting up the stone and dressing it for use in the building, and indeed their purpose is served once the block has been delivered to site.

Assembly Marks

The second category of mark differs, these marks can often still be seen on the faces of the stone since they were part of the process of construction. This type is the assembly mark and it enabled complex sections of things like doorways, niches or other such work to be built up in the correct order.

The marks form a sequence in many cases and they are often still visible in the finished building. Sometimes the sequence was based on a version of Roman numerals, at other times a domino system was used in which the end of one block had the same symbol as the end of the next block, which in turn had a different symbol on its other end to relate to the next one.

Stone masons were not the only people to use these marks, they are almost universal and can be seen on anything constructed from parts which need to be put together. They can be seen on medieval altar-pieces; on the individual coloured pieces of glass that make up stained-glass windows; on the beams and joists in timber-framed buildings; on 18th-century gun mechanisms, and on the bearings of massive Victorian steam-engines, to give just a few examples.

Banker Marks

The third type of mark is the banker mark made by the highly-skilled stone masons who cut the stone into the regularly squared blocks or more complex sections of mouldings, capitals, bases and similar.

These people were always paid more than the masons who built with the stone and had to undergo a lengthy training before they were able to achieve the accuracy needed to do this work. These days it is still the case that a mason would need to train full-time for two to three years to be proficient, and for about six years to be able to do more intricate work.

Documents describe the different ways that masons were paid, with piece-work frequently the norm and it is this that accounts for the use of banker-masons' marks. Masons marked their stone to let the paymaster know how much work they had done.

Two documents make this clear, one for a building that has marks visible and one that does not. Lincoln cathedral contracted with a mason to build the upper part of the crossing tower in 1306 and specified that the plain work, that is the walling stone, was to be costed by measure and the more complex work by the day. The stone blocks of the tower are covered in masons' marks. Exeter cathedral, by contrast, paid its masons regular wages during the great rebuilding that lasted from c.1280 - 1350, and there are no marks to be seen on the masonry erected during that period.

Since there is no direct documentary evidence for the way that medieval marks were allocated we can only speculate, and look at later evidence. Masons may have chosen their own mark, or been given one when they joined the site, later masons sometimes based their mark on that of the master who trained them, and 20th-century masons often used their initials arranged in a pattern. Marks do sometimes form groups and this may indicate that they belong to a team of masons working together. An example of this is a mark like a capital letter W' which can be found in that form or with extra strokes across the ends of one, or more, lines. The marks are mostly drawn free-hand, although compasses are sometime used for marks based on circles, and consist of lines that meet or cross in a pattern. The marks are made with a chisel or a punch and a point is sometimes used to drill the ends of the lines. Although it was important that marks were not easy to confuse it is clear that masons did not spend a long time cutting elaborate marks made up of a large number of lines. Analysis of 13th-century marks shows that most marks from that period consist of between four to six lines and that marks of more than seven or eight lines are rare. There is the occasional mark of twelve or fourteen lines but these are not often found.

Much of this is taken from: Jennifer S. Alexander, 'Masons' Marks and the Working Practices of Medieval Stone Masons', in P.S. Barnwell and Arnold Pacey, (eds) Who Built Beverley Minster?, (Reading, Spire Books, 2008)