In Search Of The Old Green Man

One of the exhibits in the Madchester Mysterium

This piece was written for my website section on The Green Man - there are lots more photographs there at www.mikeharding.co.uk. There’s also a long out of print book called A Little Book Of The Green Man that exists now only in 2nd hand copies - available from people like World of Books.

Here be the article……

His face stares down at us from the roofs and pillars of our great cathedrals and churches. He is found all over England, some parts of Wales and Scotland and a few rare places in Ireland. His roots may go back to the shadow hunters who painted the caves of Lascaux and Altimira and may have climbed through history via Robin Hood and the Morris Dances of Old England to be chiselled in wood and stone even to this day by men and women who no longer know his story but sense that something old and strong and tremendously important lies behind his leafy mask. He is the Green Man, Jack in the Green, the Old Man of the Woods, Green George and many other things to many other men.

I first came across him fifty odd years ago in the Folk Shop in Cecil Sharp House in London where I had gone to buy some guitar strings and plectrums. Amongst the pipes and tabors and the John Pearse guitar tutors was a curious plaque, a resin cast of a wo oden carving of a human head, with branches bearing fruit sprouting from the mouth. The man who ran the shop didn’t know where the cast had come from or when, though he knew that it was ‘a Green Man,’ which he said was ‘some kind of fertility symbol or other’ and would cost me seven pounds ten shillings. I bought him and took him home. My family were used to me turning up with strange things and when I put the Green Man up on my study wall they tapped the sides of their heads and regarded it as yet another of my aberrations, to go along with my attempts to make wine from dandelions and soup from nettles, both of which had filled the house with the smell of dead and rotting vegetation and had almost poisoned them.

Over the years, traveling the road in my day job as journeyman comic-cum-folk singer, I kept bumping into the Green Man, in tiny churches and great minsters, hidden in corners and blazoned on the bosses. One day in Exeter Cathedral I worked out that images of the Green Man outnumbered those of Christ by about five to one and it seemed to me that something as ubiquitous as the Green Man must have a story waiting to be told, and that if only I could dig deep enough I might be able to discover that story.

Well years later I’m still digging and I still haven’t come to the bottom of the story. I have discovered almost five hundred sites where the Green Man can be found. Some of them like Exeter and Southwell Minster contain numerous heads so that the actual number of Green Man images that I alone know of is probably at least two thousand. A church like St Boniface’s in Bunbury which only lists one Green Man in it’s official handbook has in fact five as well as a Green Lion spewing branches from its mouth. Driving through Humberside and Lincolnshire a few weeks ago I found myself in a lovely village called Saxilby. Though I have never found any reference to Green Men appearing in the @ church there, I thought I might as well have a look since I’d plenty of time to spare. I found three fine Green Men on bosses on the wooden roof of the aisles.

I’m often asked who he is and whether there is a Green Lady. The answer to both those questions is that I don’t know, though I do have a several theories that I’m working on. There is a strong reason to believe that the Green Man, as an image, is extremely old. Paintings on cave walls showing shamanic dancers may be depicting an earlier form of the image. Temple columns from Roman sites in the Mediterranean show him as a leaf mask on the capitals, and in this country from the eleventh century on he appears in the churches and cathedrals. The only pattern I have found so far is that he seems to appear in his greatest concentration wherever there are stretches of old rel ict woodlands. Thus the biggest collections I have discovered seem to be in Devon and Somerset and on the edge of the great forests of Yorkshire and the Midlands. Southwell Minster for example which has some wonderful Green Men in the Chapter House is on the edge of one of the great old forests. It could be that the images represent the God of the Woods, the Life Spirit, the Spirit of Death and Resurrection, and as an image the Green Man has his counterpart in one of the oldest English Folk images, the Corn or Barley God whose beginnings stretch back to the camps of the Neolithic farmers. An old English Folk Song collected in the early years of this century tells of such a god, John Barleycorn who was cut down by three men who ‘came out of the West their fortunes for to try’. They let the dead Corn Spirit

 ‘lie for a  long long time ‘till the rain from Heaven did fall

Then little Sir John sprung up his head which so amazed them all.’  

The Green Man has other manifestation s such as Jack in the Green, the character who dances ahead of the May Queen in many May Day processions such as those at Hastings and Knutsford. A lord of misrule figure he may be also linked to Robin Hood, Robin Goodfellow and Puck.

Christianity today is strictly monotheistic, since the Reformation even the Saints and the Virgin Mary have been consigned to a lesser circle of the pantheon. It is possible (though no documentary evidence exists to support this idea) that no such clear definition existed before the fifteenth century and that in order to get followers of ‘the Old Religion into church, cult figures such as the Green Man were brought into the Churches. A great number of the images and practices of the modern church have a Pagan origin. – yew trees and holy water, candles and bells, the dates of most of the major religious festivals, all have a pagan origin. The fact that many of the oldest churches are on pagan sites (some even within stone circles) and that saints like Brigid or Bride are Christian ver sions of the pagan Goddess Brid, all indicate a stronger pagan influence on Christianity than the Church has cared to admit. The Green Man therefore may be just another example of a pagan image brought into the Church to be made safe.

As to the Green Lady, well there is good reason to believe that the cult of the Virgin Mary which was suppressed with such vigour by the Reformation and by the Puritans was related to the worship of the Green Man’s female counterpart. One of the Green Man’s manifestations was as Robin Hood, the Lord of the Merry Greenwood. This Robin Hood had nothing to do with the bows and arrows and Sheriff of Nottingham stories. He was an older and more powerful figure and the Robin of Loxley figure was grafted on much later. Robin Hood was a lord of Misrule as well as the King of the Wood. His lady was Maid Marion ( Mary?) and thus the Merry Greenwood and Merry Men become Mary’s Greenwood. Mary’s Men and the Morris Dancers who danced on May Day perhaps got their name not from the Moors or Moriscoes but from Mary - they were Mary’s dancers and their dances when they leap into the air are a symbol of Life triumphing over death.

Since I began my search for the Green Man I have discovered that for every answer there are at least a dozen questions, and I am no near a firm understanding of this mysterious figure than I was when I started. I do know one thing though, a symbol that is found all over Western Europe and which appeared in Christian churches and cathedrals over a four hundred year period was neither something trivial nor purely decorative. The Green Man has a story to tell, if only we could hear it.