Arrow Sharpening Marks - A New Theory

Restoring, Polishing, and Consecrating Whetstones

Much like grounding and polishing Neolithic stone axe heads, whetstones also needed restoring and polishing, in a similar but differing fashion to what we see with the above.

Again, whetstones may be polished with sand and water, so this may also be a culprit for these Arrow Sharpening Marks, when the sandstone of many churches has been gouged out to collect the quartz rich sand.

Once the sand is placed onto a wet hard flat stone or ceramic tile, the whetstone is soaked in water, and polished against it. The sand acts as an abrasive, grinding down the rough parts created from past sharpening, restoring the whetstone’s flat surface, as you rub it over and over again. This method is crucial to enable the whetstone to continue to sharpen knives, and would have had to be repeated over its life.

Everyone had a knife in the past, or many of them, for preparing meat, eating food, and going about their daily profession and business.

The added bonus of using sand from stone church walls was its spiritual protective abilities. What better way to bless and cleanse your whetstone, and your knife when sharpening, than to use consecrated powdered sandstone from a church?

However, there is a ‘hidden-in-plain-sight’ link to the original idea of these marks being used for sharpening arrows. Medieval Archers carried their own whetstone to sharpen their arrows, so collecting the powdered stone, to polish their whetstones would have been a common practice, as well as the added benefit of spiritually charging these weapons. This too can quite easily be applied to soldiers, also sharpening their swords, with the whetstones restored from the powdered stone, from the local church of wherever they were based, stationed, or fighting.

There is also some sparse evidence of stonemason apprentices sharpening their master’s chisels in doorways and porches of religious buildings. Again, this likely means they sharpened them indirectly, by scraping off sand from the stone, to then add water, on top of a nice flat floor slab or ledger grave stone. With all the ingredients and hard surfaces, they could then polish their whetstones, restoring them back to adequate states, to then sharpen the masonic tools, and keeping the work going, without having to even leave the building site.

Whetstones using the powdered ‘holy stone’, being restored on the flat stone surfaces in churches themselves, or even on the graves in the churchyards, gives even more evidence of why so many of these marks or gouges, appear mainly on churches, and especially on their exteriors, or porches, and the reason for their antiquated name, albeit an indirect reference for their creation.

Potions and Healing Remedies

The current reasoning for these Arrow Sharpening Marks is that the consecrated stone was collected to use in potions and healing remedies, because of its Christian spiritual charge. It has become known as ‘Devouring the Church’.

However, this reasoning may only account for some examples. Many churches have many gouged areas, far too much stone and often in rural settings, rather than urban, to account for the little use in volume, for possible cure-all folk remedies.

Alabaster was also used in these healing potions, as the many cut, marked, and gouged tomb effigies account for.

In this way, they might also have been used by apothecaries and surgeons, when treating wounds, or aches and pains, as a spiritual blessing to help heal each patient, by adding the ‘holy stone’ to the wound when bandaging, or again as part of a holy elixir, or holy food supplement. The latter of which, would have been well known in the medieval period from the sacrament at Mass, with the wine and bread being seen as a cure-all in itself.

Pilgrim Keepsakes and Holy Elixirs

Pilgrims were also known to take parts of saintly tombs, or even bones away, for their holy powers. Arrow Sharpening Marks may be a result of pilgrims collecting powdered consecrated stone to take away with them. Or to add to the holy water in the pilgrim’s ampulla they have just purchased from the said church, or from the font or water stoup, or even the holy wine, to again use for its healing abilities, by imbibing it.

However, again like healing folk remedies, the sheer amount of stone taken across the UK and in Europe, to result in the extensive collection of these marks, would certainly be unlikely.

Scouring Sand and Ritually Cleansing the Homestead

Another reason for the use of sand from consecrated church stone is the use of sand for scouring and cleaning kitchen utensils, floors and hard surfaces.

Before cleaning chemicals and soap, and scouring equipment; sand, or rather sand stone was used with water to clean and scour. Things like burnt food, stuck on grime, hardened grease, on floors, hearths, and hard surfaces, and even rust on iron cooking pots, could be cleaned with water and sand, when rubbed continuously onto those dirty areas, with a cloth or brush.

We all know about the broomstick, and we’ve all seen scullery maids, and other household servants in historic TV dramas, or historical re-enactment programmes, scrubbing away with a  brush or similar, removing stuck on grime. But has anyone thought about Arrow Sharpening Marks as another result of sourcing ‘scouring sand’ before now?

I always remember as a child, watching Hi-de-Hi! and the character 'Peggy',  laboriously scrubbing floors in many of the episodes!

Sand and cold water, sometimes with added Lye or soap was often used in the past to clean the home.

Yes, sand could be sourced from outcrops in local fields, or river and brook beds, but if you collected pulverised sandstone from the local church, it would then have had the added benefit of cleansing the home spiritually with the power of God, warding away any evil spirits, ghosts, or curses, which may have latched themselves onto the dirty surfaces, nooks and crannies.

According to the ‘Old & Interesting’ Blog’ (http://www.oldandinteresting.com/scrubbing-stones-sand.aspx), this scouring stone was known as ‘Scouring stone, Scrubbing stone, Fire-stone, or Hearth-stone’, and sailors cleaned the ship decking, with ‘Holystone’.

The latter, being a great description and possibly a remnant from the practice of using consecrated stone from churches, to clean, cleanse, and ward off evil, from unsightly and demonic dirt.

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The use for domestic purposes, as we have seen above, of polishing whetstones for the home; but also as part of building works, or even battle weaponry; or cleansing and scouring household floors, and surfaces; certainly helps explain why these Arrow Sharpening Marks can also in some cases, be found on secular buildings, like castles, halls, and farmhouses.

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So like the elusive and mysterious ‘greenman’, or ‘sheela-na-gigs’, and ‘spiritual protection marks’; Arrow Sharpening Marks have been made for a variety of reasons.

Yes, the actual sharpening of weaponry directly is not accurate, but the use of the powdered stone, indirectly for sharpening weapons and tools, by restoring whetstones, is very plausible, and rather likely. The practice probably got lost in translation, as the world evolved into musketry, and then guns. 

The use of the ‘holy stone’ for medicinal remedies is also very likely; as well as its use as scouring sand to clean homesteads, another use which died out long ago. 

But all those likely three reasons; have the added benefit to the user, of spiritually charging or cleansing, and therefore, the warding off of evil. So Arrow Sharpening Marks, under another name, like 'holy stone' may be necessary to invent, for its apotropaic uses. 'Whetstone Restoring Marks' may also be a term we may need to finally add to, or replace the historic and very misleading term, that was 'Arrow Sharpening Marks'!