Debate still rages to this day regarding the origins of the mysterious Green Man. Whether pagan relic or Christian innovation, one thing is for certain: in the eco-conscious, semi-spiritual 21st century, the bearded man of nature is here to stay.
Maurice Allington, patron of the eponymous pub in Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man (1969), is like most of Amis’ protagonists only faintly distinguishable from the author: self-centred, irascible, neurotic. His body grumbles with rheumatic ticks and pains that trigger fears of a growing cancer within him. He drinks, to the point of short-term amnesia and ‘hypnagogic jactitation’ – wakeful hallucinations. He is distanced from his daughter, neglectful of his second wife (the first fell victim to a car crash) and obsesses over plans to seduce his doctor’s wife and persuade her into a ménage à trois (with reliably incompetent results).
Colin Self, The Green Man (The Celts), 2008, drypoint
Maurice also sees dead people: terrified apparitions that seem to appear more frequently after his elderly father falls dead in the restaurant room. As it transpires, a former owner of the medieval building was the 17th-century scholar Dr Underhill, a deviant and serial abuser, murderer of his wife and countless victims hence, and a demonic sorcerer capable of conjuring lascivious beasts to stalk his favourite underage prey. The titular Green Man is one such conjuration: a hulking, humanoid assembly of branches and bark, whom Underhill bid butcher his wife – the gruesome crime he was suspected of, but never found guilty.
In this thorny, modern-gothic ghost tale, Amis’s portrayal of the Green Man throws up some of the kindling that still fuels the debate raging around its origins to this day. Is he the official invention of 12th century Christian architects and masons decorating their Norman patrons’ churches? Or was he an altogether more ancient pagan continuation, a cult hangover smuggled onto corbels, misericords and other church ornamentation by a peasant class secretly worshipping forest gods? And, perhaps more to the point: was he there, installed in the upper reaches of churches up and down the country and across Europe, to ward off evil, like a gorgon head hung above the porch? Or to represent and manifest it, like the engorged personification of the indulgences that uproots and takes form in Underhill’s insidious proxy?
Olive Wootton, The Green Man, resin bonded iron, edition 9
Who, or what, is the Green Man? Well, it depends on who you ask. The ‘original’ green men were ecclesiastical carvings, few of them ever green, as historians like to point out, and as often women, devils, cats, owls, gossiping couples and spewing monstrosities as they are men, sprouting foliage from mouths, eyes and ears or enwreathed, Arcimboldo-style, with vegetation. They join a coterie of apparently out-of-place grotesques in Romanesque churches from the 12th century on – from gargoyles to hunky punks, slick, strapping mermen to defiant sheela na gigs, fetish like figures engaged in provocative anasyrma, exposing their vulva to any onlooker who dares notice.
Then there is the Green Man of festive celebration, who gives his name to Maurice Allington’s pub. An altogether more mysterious, communal figure, depicted alternately as a woodland spirit or saviour, a savage man of the wild, or a trickster, dressed in a suit of hair or leaves. This Green Man had existed since at least the Elizabethan era, though apparently no earlier, in the form of inn mascots and men dressed in ghilly suits, whose job it was to wander ahead of seasonal pageants and bands of performing players, clearing the way for the procession with a swing of his Herculean, firework-tipped club.
John Piper, Foliate Head, 1983, etching and screenprint
Architectural historians wince to see the two conflated, for which the blame is squarely laid at the foot of Lady Raglan, who in 1939 published an article on the ‘foliate head’ carvings, to give them their ‘proper’ title, which she had admired for years in her churches up and down the country. She was not a historian, nor an architect, nor a medievalist, nor even a folklorist of any repute – but, with the amateur confidence only fine breeding can bestow, declared her theory that the carvings she found were the very same Jack O’ the Green of May Day celebrations and dubbed them her ‘green men’ – and the rest, as they say, is history (or is it myth?).
Her fascination with these carvings was anticipated by the work of C J P Cave, a meteorologist and photographer, who stumbled upon Green Men experimenting with a telephoto lens in Winchester Cathedral. Roof Bosses in Medieval Churches was finally published in 1948, but for close to twenty years Cave had been issuing his findings in architectural journals, determined to bring the distant carvings ensconced in roofs out of the shadows and into view once more.
David Suff, Green Man, 1977, mixed media
More important than any theory regarding their origin was the work Cave put into documenting those that had survived Protestant iconoclasm and later restoration – a national survey which has still not been matched to this day. The artist John Piper cherished his copy, and from the mid-1950s onwards developed the theme of the foliate head into series of prints and in stained glass windows – quite literally bringing the ecclesiastical motif out of the darkness and into the light, and transforming it from a projecting subject, dependent on harsh contrasts of shadow, into something flat, colourful and radiant.
The Green Man encompassed all that Piper was interested in: church architecture, particularly the elaborate ‘primitivism’ of Romanesque design; an icon that combined man, building, landscape all into one, and lent itself to depictions of seasonal change; the fanciful illusion, or the illogic, of soft, wilting greenery wrought in cold stone, or of exuberant and overabundant growth carved from dead wood. Curiously, and despite the currency Lady Raglan’s nomenclature gained after her article was published, Piper always referred to his creations in the formal language of ‘Foliate Heads’. Perhaps he was more intrigued by their example of British eccentricity than their folkloric past, for when approached by Susan Clifford for interviews for her Omnibus documentary The Return of the Green Man, a rather austere Piper could only manage to voice that he found them ‘Nice and friendly’ – not exactly the haunting, Neo-Romantic vestigial mask that inspired his contemporaries Sutherland and Ceri Richards, and which seemed to contain ‘the force’ of Dylan Thomas ‘that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.’
Green Man From The Forest, oil on board
So what do the experts have to say? The architectural historian Richard Hayman believes that, like the dense, serpentine foliage that enwreaths the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts, the Green Man spread to architectural details through the Norman patrons whose tastes in literature were applied to the commissioned private chapels that later became parish churches. Here they served a double function: to terminate florid carving displays, but also as mnemonics warning an illiterate congregation against inebriation, lust, idle tongues, poisonous words, and foolish gossip.
Certainly they were impressive: carvings as ornate exhibitions of wealth, influence, and power. Dr Susan Andrew, chronicler of Devonshire roof boss carvings, makes the intriguing case that far from simply intimidating congregations, the Green Man head sits within the ‘medicinal’ mission of the medieval Christian church, the foliage that disgorges from every orifice a symbol of both bodily disease and spiritual sin – a ‘sickness [that] had to be expurgated by bringing it out through the mouth in confession.’ But like the outrageous marginal decorations of manuscripts – tendrils winding round mythical beasts – many defy simple, functional interpretations. Birds are occasionally found feeding on the berries that sprout from Green Man vines, nourished by his gifts. Nature as symbol of corrupting or subsuming influences is rarely as straightforward as would seem – and like marginalia, there their creators apparently revelled in the intricacy of their design and the absurdity of what they could depict.
The Green Man mystery opens up wider questions about our conception of medieval society: whether we define it as one witlessly repressive, hectoring, and obsessed with sin, or something more multi-cultural, with a church that could tolerate cults of personal Saints, and whose art appears to emerge from a melting pot of past influences – from the curling leaves and vines on late Roman carvings associated with Bacchus or Oceanus, to the imaginative toolboxes of Romanesque stonecarvers, many of them pilgrims, who brought with them a catalogue of pre-existing motifs and fused them with the tendrilled, intersecting arts of Saxon and Celtic culture.
Norman 'Green Man' carving, Kilpeck Church, Herefordshire
The truth is probably somewhere in between – and is perhaps less interesting than the revisionism that seeks to rewrite it. While historians warn that fabrications of the present threaten to entangle all that has been uncovered, the persistence of myth can tell us as much as the truth it obliterates. Why should the idea of subversive pagan survival, of nature worship resisting Christian uniformity, thumbing its sprouting nose at Norman lordships, be so popular even now in the 21st century?
For answers, we might turn again to Kingsley Amis’s tale, written in the high noon of 1960s counter-culture and which blends the prevailing social malaise of that period with his own preoccupations. There are the broader, typically Amis themes at play: of death and corporeal decay and dysfunction, self-loathing, the betrayals of addiction, and the ‘cancerous’ pains of Maurice’s own body, a psychosomatic sign of the illness in his soul, all of which would find a place in the Green Man iconography. But Amis also toys with an undercurrent of secularism and a loss of faith, or even lay-spiritualism, in the materialist post-atomic age, perfectly skewered in the portrayal of the young atheist priest, Revd Sonnenschein, who does not deal in ‘the supernatural’ and only reluctantly engages in the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ of the novel’s pivotal exorcisms, and in the appearance before Maurice of God himself – not an all-seeing, omniscient creator, but a slick, dry-witted cynic, entirely aware of the futility of his creation. But no reveller in the Green Man mythology, hungry for a new kind of spiritualism in this cynical world, would recognise the creature that emerges from Amis’s text – a satanic sex beast, raised from the earth to terrorise the innocent – as their free and loving spirit of the forest.
The New Age counter-culturalists that woke the Green Man from its long slumber did so as we collectively woke to the increasing annihilation of the natural world. Looking for symbols, they found the old Green Man there for the appropriating – and the idea that here was a vestige of an ancient, pre-Christian world fed the lie that a continuation that had been broken: that our abuse of the land was an unnatural perversion of what was once a harmonious existence.
This curious sense of detachment, and abuse, of the natural world is a late phenomenon: a division between man and nature that would never have occurred to the working people of medieval Britain, whose lives were dictated by the call of the seasons and natural mechanism, at a time when the fragile balance between man and field tipped heavily in the favour of nature’s whim. And they knew as well as any who has had to work the land or forage that Nature can been as a cruel and wilful a beast as it can be bounteous. The Green Man of John Farrington’s art, who lives not far from Shropshire Clun Festival, bears little resemblance to the jolly modern day figure pitted against the Ice Queen in mock seasonal skirmish. He joins bird catchers, deermen, and green knights decapitating men and beasts, at times violent and proud huntsmen, at times a fearful, fleeing spirit. For him, the green is transformative, cyclical, unpausing, unshifting, forever eluding definition.
