Chris Pearson from Shandy Hall has recently sent details about the work of Adam Smyth who has written about graffiti in various churches and gave a talk at St Michael’s to a Coxwold group in 2018. See https://adamsmyth.substack.com/p/church-pew-graffiti
Adam Smyth, professor of English Literature and the History of the Book, Balliol College, Oxford,.writes “ My favourite church-with-graffiti is St Michael’s in Coxwold, North Yorkshire. The church stands nearly opposite the house of Laurence Sterne: the author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), and arguably the inventor of some fairly big if baggy literary categories, like the self-reflexive novel, and (maybe this is a push), the artists’ book. Not that Sterne would have used these terms. He was also, with less of a sense of the avant garde, appointed perpetual curate of Coxwold in March 1760, and preached in St Michael’s hundreds of times.
There are five pews which now stand in the raised gallery, bedecked with eighteenth-century graffiti, with names and dates cut into the wood: a striking roll call from the period of Sterne’s residency and writing”
Large display boards about this graffiti will be on display at a Husthwaite History society event next year when Chris Pearson and Patrick Wildgust, curators of Shandy Hall have agreed to give a talk about recent finds there. (March 20 2024)