In search of the Green Man in the Cotswold countryside

I am the Green Man –

I grow therefore I am.

We’ve reached the midpoint of the year, the time when spring flowers and funky fertility give way to the heavy, indolent greening of summer. What better time to celebrate that still-controversial figure, the Green Man? Some years ago my good friend Kevan Manwaring composed a poem, ‘One with the Land’, all about the Green Man and his many green faces. That poem is the inspiration for this article.

The story starts in May with the dancing of the greenery-covered Jack-in-the-green, revived in recent years on May Day in places like Highworth and Winchcombe. Who is Jack? He’s the accidental hero, the lazy, good-natured everyman who wins the princess with wit, trickery, and animal helpers – or sometimes by just making her laugh. He’s Jack-in-the-pulpit – the arum lily; Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon – a salsify whose flowers close in the afternoon; and Jack-by-the-hedge – the abundant garlic mustard. He’s also, with his face turned back towards winter, Jack Frost. Is Jack the Green Man?

Jack in the Green procession at Hastings. Photo: Doyle of London/East Sussex/Creative Commons I’m the Green Man

And foliage frequents my face.

The Jack-in-the-green is a custom that developed in the 18th century, taking the place of other flower-fuelled spring festivals. But the Green Man we’re most familiar with is what art and church historians call the ‘foliate head’. We can find him in churches and on pub signs all around England. An early 12th-century one cheerfully spews green leaves on the tympanum at Elkstone, among innumerable other beasties. At Adderbury he appears in stone and wood alike, and a whole hedgerow of tortured faces in Tewkesbury Abbey’s roof disgorge snarls of leaves. He’s there in all our region’s cathedrals – in Oxford, Gloucester, and Bath – and in a good many of the parish churches, too. Sadly, there’s no Green Man pub in Gloucestershire. For that you have to travel to Fownhope in Herefordshire or to Mollington far into Oxfordshire. In Gloucestershire we must content ourselves with a different legendary figure – the Green Dragon!

A cheerful little head on the door at Elkstone, with leaves spilling out of its mouth, 12th century. Photo: Kirsty Hartsiotis

The term ‘Green Man’ as we use it today was coined by Lady Raglan in a 1939 article in the Folklore journal. She ascribes to this entity a pagan past, making him a naughty fertility figure sneaked into the church by still nature-worshipping rustics during the Middle Ages. It’s an incredibly, erm, potent idea, imbued with sap-rising heathen vigour and the kind of satirical poke at authority at which the English excel. Lady Raglan compares this Green Man to the festival Jack, conflating them into one: ‘the figure variously known as the Green Man, Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood, the King of May and the Garland King’.

The thread that runs through these green figures, seen in countless different folk celebrations and stories, is one of regeneration. The Green Knight loses his head – but is able place it back on his body. John Barleycorn is cut down in his prime to make nut-brown beer – but will grow into a man again next year. He can be found in the rising energy of the spring into summer.

Green man bench end from the 16th century in Christchurch cathedral, Oxford. Photo: Kirsty Hartsiotis However, these folk narratives, some very old, some much newer, bear little relationship to the Green Man we see in our churches. The latter is a different, rather darker figure – but maybe he has the seeds of hope on his tongue. Where did the medieval carvers in the 11th and 12th centuries get their ideas from? Faces made up of leaves were found all over the ancient world. The Romanesque style that blossomed in England after the Norman Conquest makes full use of a lexicon of Roman and Greek styles – even if not every carver understood the symbolism and or the forms of what they carved. There are two main types of these images: the face made out of leaves, the ‘leaf mask’; and the ‘disgorging head’, a man with foliage emerging from his mouth and sometimes from his nose and his eye sockets, too. They are indeed usually men, with fashionable male haircuts and sometimes headgear. You can find both types in stone and wood carving today, but even a cope made for Steeple Aston in Oxfordshire has little embroidered foliate heads. So, we know that they were everywhere!

Additional to the carvings came the idea of the wild man (and woman) of the woods, the woodwose. Trickier to find in Gloucestershire, such figures adorn fonts in East Anglia and battle their way, Hercules-style, across misericords in many churches. There’s a fabulous battle between a lion and a woodwose with his club in Hereford Cathedral. The woodwose is usually depicted as a hairy man, but sometimes his hairs are leaves – perfect woodland camouflage, in summer at least, for these shy creatures. Is the woodwose our real Green Man? Living in the woods, outside society, outside the law, he’s also Robin Hood and Edric the Wild and countless other outlaws fighting for the common folk.

Out of his nose at Chipping Norton, 14th century. Photo: Kirsty Hartsiotis When I see the disgorging heads in churches, their eyes full of fear – or, worse, of stems – I always think of the old ballad ‘Barbara Allen’, a border ballad sung everywhere in Britain. It was, for example, collected by Alfred Williams from James Mills of South Cerney in the 1910s. In this song, the two star-crossed lovers die, and ‘from out of his grave there grew a red rose, and out of hers a sweet briar’. It caught my teenage imagination; I made a drawing of a dead face with twisting rose stems and thorns issuing from it.

The Green Man

And I’m dying for rebirth.

Was the Green Man, as Lady Raglan thought, a pagan survival in the church? Very likely the carvings weren’t perceived in that way. The people who commissioned, created, and used them thought that everything they did was Christian, whether it were things specified in the liturgy or folk practices. There is a hint of an old Christian story in the disgorging heads that links them to ‘Barbara Allen’. After Cain murdered his brother Abel, Adam and Eve had a third son, Seth. When Adam was growing old – you know, when he was about 925 or so – he sent Seth to the Garden of Eden to beg for a branch of the Tree of Mercy from the Archangel Michael. When Adam finally dies, Seth buries him and plants the branch in his mouth. This branch grows into a tree and, in time, it is with wood from this tree that the cross is made on which Christ is crucified.

Does every church ‘Green Man’ or ‘foliate head’ refer to this story? I doubt it – the first examples even in Britain pre-date the first time the legend was written down by about a century – but the story gives us a hint of the rich veins of medieval storytelling about which we know very little. What I love about the Green Man is that he is, in the end, a mystery and can be constantly reinterpreted. He can, perhaps, be exactly what we want and need him to be.

Bug-leaved leaf-disgorger at Quenington, 12th century. Photo: Kirsty Hartsiotis Some of the churches where I’ve seen the Green Man:

• Elkstone and Quenington have perhaps Gloucestershire’s oldest examples.

• At Dumbleton he is a strange little foliate goblin – maybe a demon! – on the tympanum.

• More than one tortured Green Man can be seen on the roof bosses of Tewkesbury Abbey.

Peek-a-boo among the leaves at Bisley – but is this 19th-century coyness? Photo: Kirsty Hartsiotis • Ordinary men can be seen busying about the leafy corbels at Bisley.

• At Adderbury you can find many strange creatures both outside the church on the corbels and inside on the misericords.

• Ducklington has faces hidden in the leaves of an exceptional tomb.

• At Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford you can find a Green Man or two in the wooden choir stalls, and in New College on the misericords. And strange faces sport outside Magdalen College.

• Hereford Cathedral has a woodwose doing battle.

• A toothy Green Man looks down from a roof boss in Shurdington.

• How many more can you find?

Further reading: The Silver Branch by Kevan Manwaring; The Quest for the Green Man by John Matthews; and Green Man Dreaming by Lindsay Clarke.

Acknowledgement: Thank you to Dr Kevan Manwaring for permission to quote the three couplets from ‘One with the Land’ in The Silver Branch.

Spooky leaf mask at Christchurch cathedral, Oxford. Photo: Kirsty Hartsiotis