The creation, discovery, development or contacting of apparently new forms of non-Christian superhuman beings – the choice of term accords with one’s personal beliefs – did not cease with the coming of modernity. It has already been suggested that the Cailleach, as presented by some twentieth-century folklorists, was actually a product or perception of those same folklorists. This said, she was still a figure with a long preceding gestation which only culminated in the modern formulation. There is, however, one within the Anglophone world which seems to have appeared entirely in the late twentieth century, though composed of a medley of ancient, medieval and early modern components. It may also be a sign of changing times that, whereas all of the beings considered before have been manifestations of the divine feminine, this ultra-modern one is male, a belated counterpart to the Great Mother Goddess or Mother Earth figure who had long been a feature of European thought.
Lady Raglan’s Construct
Julia Somerset, wife of the fourth Baron Raglan, was a British aristocrat by birth and lifestyle, daughter of a lord from a famous Scottish noble house and spouse of one from an equally eminent Anglo-Welsh one. Her husband, having retired from a career as a soldier and colonial administrator, developed interests in archaeology, architecture and folklore, eventually serving as president of the Folklore Society. She shared the latter enthusiasm, and in 1939 contributed an article to the society’s journal which became her only notable publication.1 Its subject was a particular kind of carved decoration found in medieval British churches and cathedrals, especially in England. It was both widespread and common, and consisted of variations on the theme of a human head, viewed full-face, that was associated with leaves. Sometimes it was simply set among them, gazing out, while at other times the foliage comprised its hair and/or beard, or gushed out of its mouth, mouth and ears, or cheeks and lips. She suggested that the figure which had inspired them was the same as that represented by the Jack-in-the-Green, a man who took part in English May Day celebrations wholly or almost wholly hidden within a frame covered in greenery and flowers. She went on to suggest that the English outlaw hero Robin Hood, who was traditionally dressed in green and associated with the forest, and had been another popular character in May Day celebrations, was another version of the same being: she proposed that his original name had been Robin of the Wood. She associated with all three the King of the May, who traditionally presided over these celebrations, and at one community, Castleton in Derbyshire, still rode through the town carrying a wooden frame woven with leaves and blooms. She suggested that the accidental fact that King Charles II had escaped capture in the English Civil Wars by hiding in an oak tree had resulted in his assimilation to the same kind of figure, resulting after his restoration in the emblem of the ‘royal oak’.
All these were linked by her to characters found in folk celebrations of the coming of summer across central and northern Europe who likewise appeared covered in young foliage. She proposed that the same ancient pagan divinity lay behind every one of the English and Continental figures: a dying and reviving god who represented the natural world and its fertility, and who was represented in the ceremonies which brought in summer by a human male who was sacrificed in his honour to ensure the continuation of the annual renewal of the land. To this supranational entity she gave the name of ‘the Green Man’, taken from a popular pub sign which by her time (and long before) had conventionally shown a forester or gamekeeper, but which she held to have been taken originally from the central character in the primeval rite. She suggested that the regular appearance of the ancient god in medieval churches was yet another piece of evidence for the belief – which as shown above was something of a scholarly orthodoxy at this period – that an unofficial paganism persisted through the Middle Ages alongside the official Christian religion.
Her interpretation was based on previous publications, some very recent and others decades old. Lady Raglan had tested it in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science two years before, using slides of the medieval foliate heads made by C.J.P. Cave, a retired meteorologist with an interest and expertise in medieval roof bosses.2 He had studied these in England, France and Germany, and in 1932 and 1934 he had published essays in provincial journals which made the connection between the foliate heads and the Jack-in-the-Green and suggested that they both represented the same pre-Christian deity.3 The notion that medieval church carvings might represent a surviving attachment to pagan divinities was in the air at that time, because in 1934 another leading member of the Folklore Society, Margaret Murray, put an article into an anthropological journal which propounded it. Her interest was in the images of nude women depicted facing the observer with legs spread to emphasize their genitals, found on the interior or exterior walls of churches in Britain and Ireland. Scholars had come to give them the generic name, taken from Ireland, of sheela-na-gigs. She related these to similar figures from ancient Egypt and Babylonia, which were known to represent pagan goddesses or demi-goddesses, and suggested that the medieval examples also did, and that they may have been intended to stimulate the sexual desires of women. She proposed that churchmen had been forced to accept them in or on churches by popular demand.4 In the previous year Murray had published the second in her series of books expounding the view that the people prosecuted as witches in medieval and early modern Western Europe had been practitioners of a surviving pagan religion. In that, she had suggested that Robin Hood had been the generic name for the god of nature worshipped by them.5
Lady Raglan was thus developing ideas very much current among the company she kept in that decade; but behind them stood a greater figure whose influence she explicitly acknowledged in her article: the Cambridge University classicist and anthropologist Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. This was the most popular and celebrated work of comparative anthropology ever published, having gone through three successive editions, in an ever-expanding number of volumes, between 1890 and 1915. It drew on an idea mooted among British scholars in the late nineteenth century and based on the then still new theory of evolution. This held that, as human bodies bore the same similarity across the planet, so human minds must do too, and that therefore basic notions had developed in the same way throughout the scattered branches of the human race. If this were accepted then it could be argued that different societies had passed through the same stages in the development of religion, although at different rates, worldwide. Frazer suggested that one of these stages had been rule by sacred kings, representing the spirit of vegetation on which farming depended. These were, according to him, ritually killed and replaced, either when their natural powers began to wane or after a fixed number of years. His starting point for the investigation which led to this conclusion was a unique ancient Roman custom, observed at one sacred grove near Rome, whereby its priest, dedicated to the goddess Diana, took office only by killing the previous man to hold the job.
One obscure Roman rite was, of course, not the real focus of Frazer’s interest. Instead, he was gunning for Christianity, by suggesting that Jesus Christ had been one of those sacred kings and that the whole story of his crucifixion and resurrection had arisen from a misunderstanding of this bloodthirsty, ignorant and pointless ancient pagan tradition. He had no time for religion in general, and his whole view of human mental evolution was based on the premise that people would develop out of the need for it, to enter a superior world ruled by scientific rationalism. However, he never quite had the courage or folly to spell this out in his published work. Instead, he suggested it in the second edition of The Golden Bough, and then mitigated it by stating that devout Christians could still see the ancient tradition as instigated by their God, to prepare the minds of people for the coming of Christ. This did not shield him, either from outraged Christians or from academic colleagues who pointed out weaknesses in his argument. In the third edition, therefore, he cut it out and left readers to make the association between his ancient vegetation cult and the Christian story if they wished to do so; but he never missed an opportunity to snipe at Christianity by drawing comparisons between it and pagan and tribal religious beliefs until the end of his life. His dislike of it, however, did not do anything to reduce his greater contempt and loathing for paganism, which he regarded as an evolutionarily lower and so more ignorant and savage sort of religion. He made his reconstructed universal archetype of it a medley of bloodshed, sex and falsehood – very much the view taken in the Bible.6
Frazer’s work initially gained considerable scholarly plaudits and influence, and he became the most heavily decorated anthropologist of all time. Ironically, however, by the time that writers like Julia Somerset and Margaret Murray embraced his ideas with such enthusiasm, they were already being rejected within his own discipline. When he died in 1941, the obituary notices in British academic journals mostly referred to them in negative terms, while the American Anthropologist did not even mention his passing. This was not entirely just. Some of his exercises in comparing data on a global scale still have merit, such as his perception of a worldwide tendency of humans to work magic in similar ways, especially by presumptions of sympathy (based on perceived connections between phenomena) and contagion (using objects which have been or are in physical contact with the target of the magic). More generally, the use of comparative data from across the globe has recently begun to revive among anthropologists after a long period in which close studies of individual societies were the disciplinary norm.7 However, two of the foundations of Frazer’s use of it were found to be defective. One was the assumption that human belief has evolved in the same manner all over the world just as human anatomy and language have done. In reality, beliefs seem to develop in much more independent, capricious, contingent and opportunistic ways. The other of Frazer’s questionable foundational assumptions was that rural Europeans mindlessly acted out the same customs century after century. It is recognized now that illiterate people are often more willing and able to change ideas and habits than those who have preserved them in writing. His methods were also found often to be as faulty as his preconceptions. His three bodies of source material consisted of accounts of pagan practices made by ancient authors, those made of indigenous peoples in the extra-European world by travellers, missionaries and colonial officials, and folk rites and beliefs recorded in modern Europe. He approached all three with a disregard both for the possible unreliability of these records and for the proper context of each, and often made dizzyingly speculative leaps to link them together.8
As a result, his theory of a universal ancient pagan fertility cult based on the sacrifice of a human being representing the dying and returning vegetation god was generally rejected, at the time of his death, by most academic scholars and especially those concerned with history and prehistory. Moreover, one of his main theoretical tools, the assumption that folk customs recorded in Europe during medieval, early modern and modern times were living fossils left over from ancient religious rites, was abandoned altogether by the developing professional disciplines of history and anthropology. This had the unfortunate effect of preventing folklore studies from becoming established in British universities as an institutionalized field of enquiry in their own right. Instead, they were left to independent scholars such as Lady Raglan, who did not so much reject the reasons that compelled academics increasingly to abandon Frazer’s theories and methods as remain unaware of them. The Golden Bough also made a tremendous impact on the general public, and on many novelists and poets including W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, John Synge, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, John Buchan, T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad: its concepts and arguments went into mainstream Western culture.9 Its informing myth, however historically wrong, was a powerful one, and one of its enduring virtues is that it is a magnificent compendium of customs and rites of different kinds, however dubious the accuracy of some of it.
Lady Raglan’s examples of central and eastern European folk customs centred on figures swathed in greenery, who featured in popular celebrations to bring in summer, were taken straight from Frazer, as was the interpretation that she placed on them as former rites of a vegetation god. He had found them recorded in accounts drawn from the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, though mostly from the final part of that, concerning Russian, Slovenian, Austrian, Romanian, Romanian gypsy, Swiss, French and German communities. The celebrations, like summer celebrations all over Europe, were usually provided by young people, and the leaf-clad figure was in most places one of them, decked out for the day. The custom occurred at a range of dates in April and May, especially on Easter Monday, St George’s Day, May Day and Whit Monday – which were the principal feasts at which northern European communities have celebrated the coming of summer in the past millennium. The person swathed in foliage was variously called the Green George (on St George’s Day), Little Leaf Man, Whitsuntide Lout, May King, Leaf King, Grass King or Wild Man. Frazer pointed out that the Jack-in-the-Green, on May Day, was the English equivalent to these.10 Their appearance across such a large area of Europe and range of ethnic groups, in scattered communities separated by other groups in which the same kind of festival was marked by different customs, indeed suggests that this was one of the ways in which it naturally occurred to Europeans to mark the return of greenery – whatever specific ancient rites may have lain behind it.
Behind Frazer’s treatment of it, in turn, lay another long development of ideas. Like so many of those that inspired the late Victorian British – including the great prehistoric goddess, witchcraft as a surviving pagan religion and the ‘Wild Hunt’ – it originated in Germany in the early nineteenth century. In this case the starting point was probably with the Brothers Grimm, who both encouraged European scholars to look to folk tradition in general as a trove of historical information and national identity and to treat modern popular beliefs and customs as timeless relics of ancient paganism.11 This latter suggestion was taken a great deal further by one of the Grimms’ most fervent disciples, the Prussian scholar Wilhelm Mannhardt, who carried out an impressive programme of systematic research among German peasant communities which he combined with the work of others. The results were published between 1860 and 1880, and the seasonal customs that played a prominent part in them were interpreted by him as survivals of ancient religion. As these customs were overwhelmingly concerned with the productivity of humans, livestock and crops – as was natural enough for farming people – Mannhardt tended to assume that the religion concerned was centred overwhelmingly on fertility rites. He provided Frazer not only with many of the actual examples of customs that the latter used as illustrations for his own ideas, but with the belief that the primeval rites from which they were supposed to derive were focused on an animating spirit of vegetation.12 Frazer fully acknowledged the impact that Mannhardt had made upon him, declaring himself to be following in his footsteps and quoting him to make particular points.13 Moreover, he was not the first British scholar to be swept away by the Prussian’s arguments: a dozen years before the first edition of The Golden Bough, an article in a widely read literary and scientific journal had drawn attention to the importance of Mannhardt’s work on customs concerning the bringing in of summer. This same author pointed to the Jack-in-the-Green as the English equivalent to those, so paving the way further for Frazer’s utilization of the German’s research and arguments.14
It is therefore clear that Lady Raglan’s identification of the medieval foliate heads with the characters in folk customs from the greening of the year, as representations of the same ancient vegetation god, had a very long gestation within European scholarship. She had not been the first to associate the foliate heads with the Jack-in-the-Green or the Jack-in-the-Green with other figures from European early summer festivities, or to suggest that the latter all represented the primeval deity, or to propose that medieval English church carvings represented still-venerated pagan divinities, or that Robin Hood had been a god of the greenwood. She had not even been the first to take the pub-sign name ‘the Green Man’ and apply it to a universalized pagan nature deity.15 Nonetheless, it was a novel step to bring them all together so comprehensively, under that charismatic and memorable name. The influence of her single short and sketchily researched, but clearly and boldly written, article was accordingly to be immense.
Lady Raglan’s Followers
At first sight it may seem curious that she should have made an impact at a time when the ideas of Sir James Frazer – on which hers were so extensively and explicitly based – were becoming unfashionable, at least in mainstream historical and anthropological scholarship. There were two principal explanations for this. One was that she did not employ or endorse those aspects of Frazer’s work that were incurring unpopularity: his reconstruction of a putative universal ancient religion and his piling up of evidence taken from a vast range of space and time. Instead, she appeared to provide a plausible explanation for a hitherto enigmatic medieval artistic motif. The second explanation was that, bereft of any competing explanation for it but also of any compelling proof of her suggestions, experts in medieval British religion reserved judgement, and so cleared the way for scholars and commentators in other fields to accept her construct if it seemed instinctually right to them. Given the still very widespread and respectable belief, during the mid-twentieth century, of the survival of paganism through and beyond the Middle Ages, it often fell on very fertile ground.
Within a single year it had been accepted by two respected scholars, one an expert in English medieval art and the other a Cambridge classicist who had been a member of the group which included Frazer.16 In 1948 Lady Raglan’s collaborator C.J.P. Cave at last published his book on medieval roof bosses, the product of decades of work, and naturally enough restated the belief that the foliate heads that often appeared on bosses were a pre-Christian fertility image.17 In the 1950s the name Green Man was given very wide currency as that for the medieval carvings because of its adoption by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his county-by-county guides to the buildings of England. That decade also established another character in the cast of those swept under the umbrella of the Frazerian vegetation god: the Green Knight, a man laid under an enchantment who appears with flesh, hair, beard, clothing and horse all of green, and carrying a holly bush, in the famous fourteenth-century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He had been long identified with Frazer’s putative deity by scholars persuaded by Sir James’s arguments,18 but it was the work of a leading expert in medieval English literature from Exeter University, John Speirs, which gave widespread credit to this idea. Especially influential was his textbook, published in 1957, which declared of the Green Knight that he was ‘surely a descendant of the Vegetation or Nature God of almost universal and immemorial tradition . . . whose death and resurrection are the myth-and-ritual counterpart of the annual death and rebirth of nature’.19
Lady Raglan’s construct entered the 1960s with the endorsement of an eminent retired professor of the history and philosophy of religion and former president of the Folklore Society, Edwin Oliver James. He had always been deeply influenced by Frazer, and published a study of seasonal festivals in 1961 in which he linked together the foliate heads (called ‘the Green Man’) Robin Hood and the Jack-in-the-Green to represent Sir James’s annually reborn vegetation spirit.20 Something of the currency which the figure was enjoying in British culture in general may be illustrated by three very different works of creative fiction published in the second half of that decade. One was a novel by Henry Treece, a successful and prolific author of popular fiction, set in fifth-century Britain and Scandinavia and entitled The Green Man.21 It portrayed European paganism in Frazerian fashion as a barbarous religion carried on by humans who seem to know no love, fidelity or compassion. This religion – which the author makes clear was once carried on universally throughout the continent – is centred on a divine couple, the Green Man and the Earth Mother (who is the deity discussed in the second chapter of the present book), the union of whom makes the crops grow. The second work was a novel by a yet more famous writer, Kingsley Amis (later Sir Kingsley), with the same title. Amis’s satirical humour did not lend itself, however, to grandiose vistas of Treece’s (or Frazer’s) kind, and confined itself to contemporary settings. He makes the vegetation spirit of Lady Raglan’s vision rematerialize at a modern pub of the same name, as a mischievous and destructive entity which haunts the place until banished again.22 Finally, another future knight, and cultural leader, the composer Harrison Birtwistle, provided as one of his first major works an opera based on the then current idea that the English Mummers’ Play was a surviving prehistoric rite, centred on death and resurrection. To underscore this belief, he represented the character who carries out the act of resurrection as the green spirit of vegetation.23
Through all this, experts in medieval religious belief and practice continued to reserve their judgement on Lady Raglan’s identification of the foliate heads, and the accompanying notion that such medieval carvings represented a continuing cult of pagan deities. They accordingly drew an indignant reproach in the mid-1970s from Anne Ross, the former pioneer of research into British Iron Age religion, who had now commenced her campaign to convince people of the persistence of that religion into modern times. She published a book in partnership with a photographer friend that was devoted to a range of decorative motifs in medieval churches that had no clear Christian relevance, including Green Men and sheela-na-gigs. She asserted that all of them were representations of pagan deities still dear to the common people which the Church was unable to eradicate and so allowed to subsist alongside the Christian Trinity and saints. Her evidence of this was analogy: with religious imagery in parts of South America that combined elements of Roman Catholicism with some from older native traditions. She accused specialists in medieval religious history of ‘almost a conspiracy of silence’ on the issue.24 Her call made little apparent impression on either academics or the public, and what followed instead, in the 1980s, was the beginning of the integration of Lady Raglan’s concept of the Green Man, represented visually by the medieval foliate heads, into the rapidly developing awareness of the global ecological crisis that was now in progress. It was adopted by some of the responses to that crisis as a label and symbol of the endangered natural world, with which humanity needed urgently to remake its relationship. This step seems to have been taken first by Common Ground, a London-based arts and environmental charity founded to celebrate the connection between people and place, and to empower the former to care for their local environment. In 1986 it started a project to raise awareness of the importance of trees, called ‘Trees, Woods and the Green Man’, the third of these being represented as the animating spirit of the first two and linked to Robin Hood and the Green Knight. It concluded in 1989, when the Green Man was made the central motif of a national celebration held by the charity.25
In the following year the key work was published which turned the character and the motif (now standardized as a medieval foliate head) into a late modern environmental icon. It was a book simply entitled Green Man, by a London poet with a passion for medieval buildings, William Anderson, and was lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by a professional, Clive Hicks. It hailed Lady Raglan’s construct – a deity personified in the foliate heads, Jack-in-the-Green, Green George and Green Knight – as our best symbol of the union of humanity and the vegetal world. It then set the construct in a much wider frame of reference by pointing out that many human cultures have had deities or spirits of the forest associated with foliage, and using the theories of Carl Jung to suggest that they all represented the same primal archetype. This archetype was, the book argued on the basis of ideas drawn from Frazer and James, and from Michael Dames and Marija Gimbutas (for whom see earlier in this book), that of a young vegetation deity born to the Sky God and the Earth Mother who is constantly sacrificed and reborn. It then asserted that faith in him, as the greatest source of living power on earth, had been too strong to be repressed by Christianity, which instead brought him into its churches and so under the sway of Christ.
Most of the book then consisted of a detailed account of the development of the motif of the foliate head through the Middle Ages, and through successive styles of architecture, in France, Germany and Britain. It suggested that a further source of influence for it had come from Islam, the figure of al-Khidr, the Green One, in Muslim literature, and that it had been subsequently assimilated to the Tree of Life of Christian allegory and the figure of the Creator. It therefore made the concept an instrument for the harmonization of pagan past and Christian present. William Anderson had too good a knowledge of medieval art and architecture to be unaware that there is no actual evidence of what medieval people themselves called the heads, or that any of them regarded them as images of a pagan deity. Here, however, his reliance on Jungian psychology came into its own, because in his formulation the churchmen who commissioned and housed the carvings did not need to realize their true nature: instead the power of the ancient archetype, working through the collective subconscious, was manifesting in them whether they knew it or not. Likewise, it did not matter if the same clerics thought that sheela-na-gigs were images of sinful desire, designed to deter lust: they were really proof that ‘the archetype of the Great Mother was stirring in the dreams and thoughts of men’ once more. So the Earth Mother and her green son had returned at the same time, and it was quite probable that the common people had never lost their pagan beliefs and turned to these figures for fertility and prosperity in the old way. Anderson went on to suggest that the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, icons of whom were (occasionally) associated with foliate heads, had been another remanifestation of the Great Goddess.
He concluded his book with a clarion call to readers to recognize that both archetypes were resurgent once more in the present time, in the environmental and feminist movements. In his vision, the Green Man had returned, after being almost buried by the Industrial Revolution and the spirit of scientific rationalism, as the living face of the earth, offering a new understanding between humans and the universal, and as the mouthpiece of the inspiration of ‘the Divine Imagination’, calling on nature and humanity to become one once more. All in all, the considerable power of the book lay in the fact that it was essentially a religious text, illustrated with medieval art. Even its apparent anchoring in psychological theory was really a profession of faith, as there is no objective evidence for the existence of Jung’s archetypes or collective subconscious. Its impact was immediate and was signalled by a British Broadcasting Corporation television programme screened a few months after its publication to celebrate its message. Entitled The Return of the Green Man, it included contributions not just from Anderson himself but from Sir Kingsley Amis and Sir Harrison Birtwistle.26 By the end of the decade the Green Man had become established among contemporary British Pagans as one name for the god of the natural world whom most of them venerated, partnered with a great goddess in the manner portrayed by Anderson.27
His book, and the interest in and passion for the figure that it embodied, also generated a literary genre of books which treated the Green Man broadly in his way and with his message.28 Most of them likewise were profusely illustrated and included a guide to or gazetteer of examples of foliate heads. Most related those heads to the Jack-in-the-Green, Green George and other Continental festival characters, the Green Knight and Robin Hood, sometimes including King Arthur as another alleged example of a dying and (prospectively) returning hero associated with the prosperity of the land. Most were clearly dependent on Lady Raglan’s construct and beyond it on the ideas of Sir James Frazer. All were attractively packaged and presented, to appeal to a general readership, and most adopted the popular (and very old) format of a quest romance, a personal journey by the author to discover the truth about the subject. Almost all the authors were British, with one American. They differed among themselves in size and erudition, in tone, in geographical range (comprising Britain, Europe and parts of the rest of the world as well) and in their knowledge of the possible limitations of their evidence and of possible counter-arguments to theirs (and in the degree of courtesy with which they attempted to see off those). Despite all these variations, they were very clearly further manifestations of Anderson’s approach, source base and message: a distinctive subset of writing in the field of spiritual ecology, peaking around the year 2000 but continuing to the present. That article by the noble lady in 1939 had inspired a remarkable, and long-lasting, progeny. Moreover, it was one which was written distinctively in English: despite the almost universal recognition of the current ecological crisis, the traditional affection of many Continental Europeans for their forests and the prevalence of the medieval foliate heads and of foliate characters in folk festivals across most of Europe, there has been no comparable adoption of the Green Man figure outside of Britain and (to a much lesser extent) the wider Anglophone area.
Alternative Views: The Folk Figures
Readers of this book will have recognized the Raglan construct as part of a pattern of ideas considered in its first chapter: produced under the Victorians, developed and elaborated through the first half of the twentieth century and reaching an apex in the middle of it. In the case of this construct, its suitability for appropriation by the ecological awareness movement gave it a new lease of life at the end of the century. It might therefore be expected that it would also be vulnerable to the revisionist scholarship which commenced in the 1970s and 1980s; and that is exactly what occurred, setting up a countervailing stream of literature to that subsequently started by William Anderson. The contrast between them was emphatically not one between hard-headed professional scholars and starry-eyed amateurs. Some of those who wrote books in the Anderson tradition were themselves academics (though not historians or archaeologists).29 Conversely, most of the key figures in the revisionist school were independent researchers. The division was, rather, between two different approaches to the role of the past, and of historical evidence, in late modernity.
A key work in the process of revisionism was the study of the Jack-in-the-Green, the wooden frame covered in flowers and greenery and carried in procession in English May Day celebrations, published in 1979.30 It was written by a schoolteacher and local college lecturer called Roy Judge, and was one of the landmark products of the new wave of research by folklorists based on sustained scrutiny of historical records. Like most of the publications of late twentieth-century revisionists, across disciplines, it was not undertaken in a deliberate spirit of aggression or iconoclasm, but from a straightforward spirit of enquiry, to make a proper examination of the actual evidence for received ideas and see how well based they were.31 In this case, the results came as a general surprise, as much to the author as others. The Jack, which had been taken as the supreme British example of a folk representation of an ancient vegetation deity, was essentially a nineteenth-century custom carried on by chimney sweeps in southern English towns to collect money against a summer season in which they would be largely unemployed. There was no certain record of it before the period between 1775 and 1800, when it had appeared in a similarly urban setting, apparently London.32 Judge left open the possibility that it might have existed before then without being recorded, but he made clear that he thought this very unlikely; and subsequent research has reinforced this opinion.33
He also provided the backdrop to the development of the custom, which lay in a very old tradition, found across much of Europe, of celebrating the coming of summer in late April or May by carrying garlands of flowers through the streets and often setting them up on poles or frames, or in churches. In London, by the early to mid-seventeenth century, this had produced a distinctive local spin-off, in which bands of milkmaids danced in the streets on and around May Day, each with a pail decorated with flowers, to collect money from passers-by and customers. In the later seventeenth century the pail was replaced by a pyramid of (usually borrowed) silver objects, still called a ‘garland’, and during the eighteenth century other low-grade occupational groups in the city – the rag-pickers and chimney sweeps – began to put on similar shows in the street. The rag-pickers carried a similar ‘garland’ and staged a performance, and the chimney sweeps donned fancy dress and danced, sometimes with their own ‘garland’ of the same kind. During the last quarter of the century the sweeps replaced this with their distinctive construction of the Jack-in-the-Green.34 Judge ended this summary of its origins with the declaration that ‘one may conclude quite simply, that this name and this leafy structure appeared together at the end of the eighteenth century in a context of May-day begging. They make adequate sense within that context and there is no evidence for any earlier history or other interpretation’.35 That was an absolutely plain, if oblique, refutation of the use made of them by Frazer and Raglan.
This book made Roy Judge a celebrity among folklorists, and he duly served as president of the Folklore Society in the 1990s. By that time he was becoming aware of the view of the Green Man launched by William Anderson and uncomfortable with it. In an address to a conference published in 1991, he pointed out that Anderson’s approach rested directly on the work of Lady Raglan, which had produced a modern myth, a ‘case study in the invention of tradition’.36 In the second edition of his book on the Jack-in-the-Green, in 2000, he made an extended study of the development of the use made of the figure by Frazer, Lady Raglan and their successors, especially Anderson. He was too much a gentleman to deal roughly with it, commenting (correctly) in particular on the beauty of Anderson’s book and the high quality of its illustrations. Nonetheless, his attitude was plain. He started by establishing that his latest research confirmed all the conclusions of the first edition and prefaced his discussion of the Frazerian tradition by stating flatly that Frazer had been wrong to use the Jack as evidence for vegetation spirit worship and regretting that The Golden Bough had dominated discussion of the subject ever since. He added that any interpretations of the Jack as being ‘linked with a pagan and mythological past . . . had no evidence to support them other than intuition and poetic insight’.37 He then noted that the concept of the Green Man, with the Jack as an important component part of it, now seemed stronger than ever, despite all the solid work that had been done to separate the two.38
Lady Raglan had made much of a second English folkloric figure in forming her construct: the Castleton Garland described earlier, which she had taken likewise to be a survival of ancient pagan ritual. In 1984 this was submitted to a proper historical study by another independent scholar and leading figure of the revisionist movement in folklore studies, Georgina Boyes, which was eventually published in 1993.39 She proved from local records that it was no older than the Jack, having evolved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It had developed out of the older and widespread north-western English custom of rush-bearing, in which fresh rushes to cover the church floor were ceremonially gathered and taken by cart in a procession to the church in summer. At Castleton a garland had accompanied the cart, and this was retained during the nineteenth century when the cart was replaced by a morris dance, led by a man in ribbons and another dressed as a woman. In the 1890s the growing importance of the little town as a centre for tourism brought a desire to glamourize the event, and the morris was replaced by schoolgirls clad in white, while the two leaders were costumed as a king and queen; from 1933 the latter was represented by an actual woman. The ‘king’ rode and carried the garland.
The overall historic model for seasonal customs stated in the first chapter of the book holds good here: while specific forms of them change over the centuries, and most of those recorded by Victorian and Edwardian folklorists were relatively modern, the basic nature of a custom often remains constant. Thus, as said, processions carrying garlands at the opening of summer are recorded across Europe since records begin, and are therefore certainly older than history. They are one obvious way in which to celebrate the return of flowers and greenery and the warmth and long light that support them.40 The Jack-in-the Green and the Castleton Garland, as wooden frameworks covered with foliage and blooms, are therefore quite accurate modern equivalents of those borne in medieval and early modern festivities, even if there is no continuity of tradition in their cases. The garland-carrying custom would almost certainly also have been associated with religious rites in ancient times, though it seems too widespread and diversely enacted to have been associated with one particular deity or cult, as Frazer would have had it. In that sense, it could legitimately be called a pagan survival, although only in the most generalized sense, and it could equally be called a timeless way of welcoming summer which could be combined with any religion. Likewise, it is quite possible that some, at least, of the greenery-covered characters who featured in the Continental spring and summer festivities collected by Mannhardt and Frazer are actually descended from ancient rites. They need detailed individual histories – if the records allow – of the sort now given to the English equivalents.
Alternative Views: The Literary Characters
Two characters from literary sources had become swept up into the concept of the Green Man by the mid-twentieth century, and continued to feature in it in some of the recent books on him inspired by William Anderson: Robin Hood and the Green Knight. Both likewise became the subject of revisionist scholarship in the latter part of the century – first Robin and then the Knight – but this time within the academy. The medieval outlaw and his legend were made the focus of a succession of works by distinguished professional historians and literary scholars.41 The idea that he had originally been a supernatural being – a woodland fairy, spirit or deity – long preceded Margaret Murray, having been first popularized by the Victorian writer Thomas Wright. This was based largely on his undoubted popularity in English May celebrations during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, which seemed to assimilate him, along with his close association with the greenwood, to the foliate characters in Continental festivities at that time. It was a theory finally abandoned by professional scholars in the 1970s, because of new research.
That revealed that Robin Hood’s legend long pre-dated his appearance in the May games, which is first recorded in 1474.42 Plays in those which featured him, sometimes joined to processions and dances, then rapidly spread across southern England, especially to market towns, peaking in popularity in the early sixteenth century and declining in the second half of that century so that they had almost vanished by 1600. The plays did make a significant contribution to his legend, because it seems to have been in them that he met his female companion, Maid Marian, who had most probably arrived from France in a separate story performed in the games, as a shepherdess with a shepherd lover called Robin. The outlaw was originally made famous by ballads that celebrated him, and the earliest of those are now dated to the late fourteenth century, with material in them dateable to the 1320s, while Robin himself was already a well-known character by 1262. He did not, therefore, emerge from the May celebrations, but was added to them after enjoying an already long development as a character; and the ballads are the best evidence for his original identity.
Their tone is generally, and sometimes grimly and grittily, realistic. There are no mythological elements in them – no supernatural beings, impossible feats or magic – of the sort so abundant in medieval romances. There are indeed no real equivalent figures in actual pagan tradition or medieval folklore, across Europe, from whom he could have developed. His nearest equivalents in medieval literature are historic English outlaws such as Eustace the Monk, Fulke Fitzwarren and Hereward the Wake; and there is a good chance that Robin was a real person himself, an outlaw recorded as operating in the Yorkshire district of Barnsdale in the 1220s. He is certainly presented as a woodlander, but as a real human being, a yeoman, the most prosperous and independent sort of medieval peasant. He and his band are hostile to specific rich and corrupt churchmen, especially greedy Benedictine abbots, but they themselves manifest a fervent Christian piety, with an especial devotion to the Virgin Mary of a kind both common and conventional in the later Middle Ages. The early stories of him are deeply socially and politically subversive: Robin belongs to the woods which were on the edge of the medieval civilized and literate world, rejects royal service in order to return home to them and consistently violates the social distance that separated medieval commoners from the upper classes and deals with the latter on his own terms. They therefore carry a genuinely radical message – but not a pagan one.
The Green Knight waited longer for revisionist attention, until 1994, when a specialist in English literature from Southampton University, Bella Millett, posed the question of how green he actually was. She noted that he was not explicitly linked to nature, but to the world of knightly chivalry, and that green was a hue of enchantment, transgression and wildness in medieval culture. His colouring is compared in the poem to enamel rather than vegetation. He is also handsome and dressed in courtly fashion, and has well-tended hair and a richly decorated weapon; and King Arthur accordingly treats him as a knight and not a monster. Observers link him with the supernatural and not the natural – a phantom, fairy or elf – and he indeed turns out not to be a forest spirit but a gentleman under a spell. The natural world itself is treated as an adventure playground or an unpleasant wilderness, and the knight’s (initial) colour is just part of his ability to shock. The tone of the whole poem, as of other work by the same poet, is both very courtly and very Christian. Such, at any rate were Millett’s conclusions, and her article does not seem to have been answered; and, since its publication, acceptance of the Green Knight as manifestation of a vegetation spirit seems to have quietly disappeared from studies of the poem.43
Alternative Views: ‘Real’ Green Men
In much of the excitement over the Green Man in the second half of the twentieth century, sight was almost lost of the fact that the actual name had been taken from a pub sign. In 1997, however, an American academic epidemiologist, Brandon Centerwall, drew attention back to that.44 He dismissed Lady Raglan’s article with the comment that it displayed ‘what was then a fashionably Frazerian Catholicity (or, as we should say today, lack of discrimination)’, and with it any pagan context for the foliate heads. Nonetheless, he also argued that, effectively by accident, she had actually got the name for them right. He did so by tracing back the pub sign to its origins in the seventeenth century, when it first appeared. The green-clad figure on it seems to have been taken from the distilling industry, where it was used commonly from 1630 until the eighteenth century to advertise and symbolize alcoholic spirits. What the motif showed then was a man with a club, a body covered with leaves and leafy hair and beard, also called a wood man or wild man.45 A commentator at that time suggested that this was because strong alcohol made men into wild savages, but there is an old and very widespread association between alcohol and greenery, perhaps because wine comes from vines. A leafy bough has been used in different parts of Europe as a sign of drink for sale, a fact immortalized in Shakespeare’s saying ‘good wine needs no bush’.46 This was itself a translation of the ancient Roman tag Vino vendibili hedera non opus (in which the bush is specifically of ivy, the plant associated with the wine-god Dionysus), which has been rendered into modern French parlance as Au vin qui vend bien, il ne faut pas de lierre.47 The ‘wild man’ figure on the Green Man sign was subsequently replaced by a forester, gamekeeper or (in the nineteenth century) Robin Hood.
Centerwall, however, spotted the precise origin point for the figure used by the distillers and then the publicans: in characters fairly common in Tudor and Stuart English urban pageants and entertainments. These were known as green men, wild men or savages, and worked in teams to clear back crowds to the edge of streets so that the processions and parades could pass down them. They were costumed like the figure on the distillers’ sign, with leaves stitched onto their garments, shaggy hair and clubs, though they tended to use fireworks rather than the clubs to get people out of the way. The stereotype to which they relate is also quite apparent: that of the medieval Wild Man, a human entirely covered with hair, or sometimes leaves, carrying a club and living like an animal in the wilderness. Occasionally he was given a female mate and offspring, and he sometimes featured in groups. He featured in both literary texts and works of art, where he functioned as a repulsive and menacing antithesis to civilization, representing a humanity bereft of education, religion, morals and manners: a nightmare to a medieval and early modern world obsessed with religious and social order. He reached his apogee of popularity as a subject in the late Middle Ages but began to vanish during the sixteenth century, as growing European confidence and expansion made the noble savage seem a more attractive expression of primitive humanity. Although a distinctive medieval Christian creation, he drew on long and ancient roots, combining the beastly habits which Greek and Roman writers (such as Herodotus and Pliny) attributed to barbarian tribes and those associated by those writers with the amoral woodland beings called satyrs.48
Centerwall has performed a great service by reminding scholars of these figures, who after all bore the actual name ‘green men’. He went further, however, by trying to tie them to the foliate heads, using three pieces of visual evidence. One was a bench end at Crowcombe church, Somerset, carved in 1534, which showed two figures waving clubs and with bare torsos and apparently leafy skirts exploding from the top of a standard foliate head. The second was an engraving by the Master of the Nuremberg Passion, from Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century, depicting a figure wielding a club while carrying a shield apparently emblazoned with a foliate head. The third was a fourteenth-century carving in Winchester Cathedral of a foliate head with a body clad in normal clothing and holding a sword and shield. Centerwall proposed that, taken together, they reveal the evolution of the figure from a church carving of a head to a pageant character, retaining its name of the Green Man. This is fresh and valuable research, but the chain of evidence assembled may be illusory. For one thing, such a small number of very different images, spanning such a large amount of time and space, is a very slight basis on which to erect a large theory. Each may represent a one-off, of an artist combining different forms in an individual and experimental manner. For another, they can be read in other ways. It is not clear that the device on the shield of the German engraving actually is a foliate head, while the club-waving men erupting from the foliate head at Crowcombe could have scaly tails and not leafy skirts.49 Centerwall’s proposal is therefore possibly correct, but it remains unsubstantiated, and perhaps unlikely.
What he did demonstrate, on the other hand, was that the green men of the pageants were closely identified with the Wild Man by the end of the Middle Ages. An engraving from the 1460s by the German Master of the Housebook shows a nude Wild Woman riding a stag, with children, and opposite her a leaf-covered figure with a leaf crown riding a unicorn. A silver ewer probably made at Nuremberg around 1500 is surmounted by a Wild Man riding a dragon, with brown beard and hair and a rich green body. Further into the sixteenth century, Pieter Brueghel’s painting The Struggle of Carnival and Lent shows a troupe of actors performing a play which includes a green Wild Man. Centerwall took these as showing that the figures of the Green Man and the Wild Man converged towards the end of the medieval period, but another interpretation could be equally well advanced on the same evidence: that the pageant green men actually evolved out of the Wild Man, as leaves began more often to substitute for hair as a body covering for the latter. This would leave the foliate heads as before, a separate and apparently nameless motif.
It may be proposed, therefore, that the pageant green men are really just wild men with a change of colour and texture. This would explain why they have much the same associations in their pageant duties, as figures at once comical and forbidding. A convergence by them, in turn, with the old association of foliage and alcohol would carry them onto the inn sign and so provide a history of this motif, and the original name ‘The Green Man’, from the Middle Ages to the present. There is also a link to the foliate festival characters from central and eastern Europe, because it may be remembered that ‘the Wild Man’ was the name for some of these in particular areas (namely in German-speaking communities in Saxony, Thuringia and the Erzgebirge mountains on the Bohemian frontier). After Frazer’s time it became known that in other communities in Thuringia the same sort of figure was actually called ‘The Green Man’ as an alternative, reflecting the way in which the two had been versions of each other in late medieval and early modern northern Europe.50 While the central contention of Centerwall’s article may therefore be doubtful, it has done much to untangle other aspects of Lady Raglan’s construct.
Alternative Views: The Foliate Heads
Sustained research into the history and nature of the foliate heads themselves began in 1978 with the publication of the landmark study of them by a botanist and geneticist at Manchester University, Kathleen Basford, for which she adopted the now familiar name for the heads as the title: The Green Man.51 That was the only respect in which she followed the Raglan construct, instead devoting decades of patient research of her own to them which spanned much of Europe and supplied a large number of splendid illustrations. She pointed out that they were probably the most common decorative motif of medieval sculpture, found on roof bosses, capitals, corbels, fonts, tombs, tympana, screens and different parts of seats, benches and stalls. She traced the origins of this motif to pagan antiquity, where leaf masks appeared on carved faces in Roman art during the first century and spread during the second, being found throughout the empire in temples of many different deities. Especial associations were with the sea god Okeanos, who had hair and beard of seaweed, and the wine god Bacchus, who was commonly rigged out in vines. The leaf mask remained a popular ornament on secular buildings in the eastern, or Byzantine, part of the empire after its conversion to Christianity. None of these ancient versions had the widespread later medieval motif of foliage disgorging from the mouth, but a head on a fourth- or fifth-century Christian tomb at Poitiers, France, had leaves gushing from the nostrils.
However, Basford noted a problem for any theory of a direct chain of transmission from antiquity to the Middle Ages: that the Poitiers carving seemed a completely isolated example of that motif, and when foliate heads became common in medieval art, in manuscripts and churches between the tenth and twelfth centuries, they bore little resemblance to the ancient leaf masks. Instead, they appeared demonic, and she thought that this made a neat fit with a textual source, written by the eighth-century Christian scholar Rabanus Maurus, who equated leaves with the sins of the flesh. The twelfth century saw the specific image of foliage running from the mouth and nose become widespread: Basford matched this to a Biblical text (Ezekiel 8:17), which said of idolators ‘see how they hold the branches to the nose’. She therefore suggested that an ancient artistic motif had been re-employed and redeveloped by Christian artists to deliver a new and hostile message. In the thirteenth century, France became the centre for further developments, as the style of head divided into two traditions: the leaf mask, now revived from ancient examples, and the disgorging head, which remained mostly demonic in appearance. These reached a peak of popularity in England and Germany during the later Middle Ages, the leaves associated with the figures becoming more naturalistic, and identifiable with particular species, during this period. From the sixteenth century, it became a popular ornament in a range of secular contexts.52
Basford concluded, therefore, that an ancient pagan artistic motif had become part of the symbolic language of the Western Church and evolved within it, serving a number of different messages: it might, for example, be used to symbolize resurrection, but equally well the transience and decay of all flesh. Like Roy Judge, she was too genteel to mount a direct attack on the idea that the heads represented a still-beloved pagan god, but, for those prepared to read her with care, her rejection of this idea was plain enough. Her early declarations that there was no one meaning to the heads, that many seemed to suggest death and ruin, not life and resurrection, and that a vegetation spirit would make no sense in a monastery church – the location of many examples – signalled her view of the Raglan construct. Later in the book she conceded that it was possible that some of the faces might allude to a May King or springtime foliage, but added that more often they seemed evil or anguished. She concluded that they conveyed an uneasy or hostile relationship between human and plant, and that the church Green Man was more likely to stand for ‘the darkness of unredeemed nature as opposed to the shimmering light of Christian revelation’. Conversely, she thought it ‘unlikely that he was revered as a symbol of the renewal of life in springtime’.53 The same mixture of caution, courtesy and readiness to question the Raglan construct characterized her review of Anderson’s book in 1991, where she compared him to Lady Raglan for his readiness to make ‘intuitive leaps’ which had immediate popular appeal. She pointed out that his interpretation ignored all of the darker aspects of the motif, and suggested that the Biblical view of the human relationship with nature, as one of responsibility for life on earth in enactment of the stewardship of Adam, might make a better one than Anderson’s to encourage an effective response to the current ecological crisis.54
Kathleen Basford’s book became the indispensable starting point for all future research into the medieval carvings, and as such she was honoured as a forerunner not only by William Anderson himself but by some of the authors whom he inspired, who dealt variously with her lack of enthusiasm for their standpoint by failing to notice it, by explaining it away or by believing that Anderson had answered her. She also, however, acted as an inspiration for a new generation of authors who rejected Anderson’s approach to the subject and were galvanized partly by the outpouring of works on it that did follow his tradition. It was a new generation indeed, because by 2001 Basford, Anderson and Judge were all dead and four other independent British scholars had come forth to tackle the question of the meaning of the foliate heads, most producing their work in formats, like those of the Anderson school, designed to reach a wide popular audience. The first was Rita Wood, who published an article in a history magazine in 2000 which examined more fully the possible Christian meanings of the motifs. It suggested that foliage had enjoyed a much wider and more various span of connotations among pious and orthodox medieval people than the association with fleshly sins expounded by Rabanus Maurus. The vine was a symbol of self-sacrificing love, sometimes identified with Christ, and the Tree of Life from the garden of Eden represented another potent and enduring Biblical motif which was identified with the Cross and also with the heavenly paradise. Leaves were used in all sorts of ways to illustrate themes of death and resurrection, and of both life on earth and eternal life. She allowed that the rare cases of disorderly foliage might represent sin, but thought this exceptional.55
The second was a museum curator who became a leading figure in the Folklore Society and notable author on history and folklore, Jeremy Harte, who in 2001 brought out a booklet on the heads in the Pitkin Guide series – beautifully illustrated short introductions to historical and archaeological subjects sold commonly in British tourist shops. He emphasized the amazing range of apparent moods covered by the heads and repeated Basford’s suggestion of multiple meanings, concluding that ‘there is no single, archetypal meaning to which Green Men have to conform’. This struck in itself at the Anderson hypothesis, and he went on to note that spring blossoms were never depicted in the foliage of the heads but fruit often was, so they were associated more often with autumn than May.56 The hairstyles were those of young men of the time, making the carvings unlikely to represent spirits of the wild. Harte stated directly that ‘it would be a mistake to think of carvings like this as the work of some underground movement of mystics or pagans. All church sculpture, grotesque or not, was commissioned by good Christians.’ He also noted that none of the many medieval pictures of Maytime revellers showed any wearing a framework of leaves, and pronounced Lady Raglan’s theory ‘almost certainly untrue’. On the other hand, he found that it was difficult to give the heads a clear Christian allegorical interpretation either, stressing again that they would have carried a range of meanings. He took notice of the Anderson school of literature on the subject, commenting that it had created ‘a composite god, who had never existed’. He concluded that ‘the Green Man began as a grotesque: it is we who have made him into a god’. Harte is however too genial a personality to regard this process with any hostility, opining that the modern world needed a symbol for the boundless vitality of nature, and that the medieval motif provided it and saved the modern world the effort of inventing one. He pronounced it to be now the instantly recognizable symbol of ‘a new green religion’.57
Two years later the first major advance in knowledge of the motif since Basford’s work was made by Mercia MacDermott, in a short book in the ‘Explore’ series published for a popular market (though to a high standard of scholarship) by the Heart of Albion Press. She and her photographer (who produced more abundant and high-quality illustrations) had themselves been friends of Basford’s. Her work provided a more comprehensive coverage than before of the evolution of the foliate head through the whole medieval and early modern period, and across Europe. She was directly dismissive of the Raglan construct, stating that ‘we have to reject the popular but anachronistic idea that the Green Man was smuggled into churches by recalcitrant, underground pagans’. She noted that nobody before the twentieth century seems to have thought the motif to be pagan, or even very significant. Instead, she emphasized that the locations in which it occurred indicate that it ‘entered the Christian world with the blessing of the Church’. She cited a range of further Biblical texts, to join that from Ezekiel, that provided associations for leaves of fruitfulness and success, and persisting life, or else of transience and decay. By contrast, she pointed out, although most ancient religions venerated trees and other forms of greenery, and all early civilizations of Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean had gods representing vegetation or crops, there was no evidence that the medieval heads were related to them. Nor was there any involvement of the heads in May or any other seasonal festivities. Al-Khidr, the ‘Green One’ of Islamic tradition, only wore green robes and had no connection to foliage.
Surveying the heads surviving from their Gothic heyday of popularity, between 1150 and 1500, she found no uniformity of design even for a similar purpose such as a tomb, and no single unifying theological concept for them. Going back into the Romanesque period, from 900 to 1150, she found the heads fewer and more uniform – of the kind disgorging foliage – and more limited in their positioning in churches, and most were not human but feline.58 They were also more likely to be found in other locations, such as manuscripts and ornaments. Before 900, foliate heads were very rare, and represented by Basford’s ancient Roman and Byzantine leaf masks, mostly associated with Okeanus and Bacchus. There was no Roman god who equated to the vegetation deity imagined by Frazer and so Raglan. MacDermott, in fact, found only one ancient image that provided the kind of disgorging foliate head, feline or human, which appeared in the Romanesque churches, and that came from India. A few authors in the post-Anderson tradition had noted the occurrence in south and south-east Asia of heads of similar kind to the European, and made this a prop of the Anderson idea of a universal archetype. MacDermott had a simpler explanation: that the Indian design, related to legends of Shiva and Vishnu, travelled to Europe through the Arab world and was adopted into European art from the tenth century onwards, as Christian and Islamic communities mingled and exchanged ideas in places such as Spain and Sicily. The earliest known occurrence of it in Europe was indeed in a Spanish manuscript from around the year 900.59 It is a suggestion which makes perfect sense and fits the known evidence. She concluded by agreeing with Basford and Harte that the medieval foliate head was primarily a decorative element, employed when required to deliver a range of messages (though none of these apparently pagan).
The fourth author was a heritage consultant, Richard Hayman, who published in popular history and archaeology magazines in the late 2000s, before bringing out a short book in the ‘Shire’ series of guides to different subjects, sold like the Pitkin set in tourist shops.60 His own research was conducted principally in England. He summarized the knowledge of the foliate heads to date, with a direct attack on the idea that they had any pagan associations in the Middle Ages. He also made a heavier emphasis on the fact that they had featured earlier, most often in ‘elite’ churches such as colleges, cathedrals and monasteries, and become most popular in parishes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He was inclined to stress the more negative apparent connotations of the motif, arguing that foliage was often depicted in medieval art and literature as a snare and entanglement, and that the heads mostly represented sin, death and decay. He also emphasized that they appeared first in manuscripts, produced in a monastic context, and so had no discernible connection with popular culture. He pointed out that the relevance of the foliate heads in ancient pagan art to the medieval kind was not securely proved, and ascribed the popularity of the motif in contemporary counter-cultural circles to the fact that it was a simple, vivid image attractive to the branding mentality of modern consumerism.
It may therefore be suggested that by the 2010s any member of the public interested in the subject had access to a wide range of possible reading on it, in very accessible forms and with excellent visual illustrations, and representing a polarity of viewpoints. It seems likely (and conforms to the present author’s ad hoc experience) that those already inclined to an environmental activist and counter-cultural set of attitudes would be both more likely to encounter and more likely to favour the books (and spin-off internet web sites) of the Anderson tradition. Those interested in churches and historic monuments in general have been more likely to come across and credit the works of those rejecting that tradition. In no case had the running been made in either stream of publishing by academic historians and archaeologists: the development of both had been powered by authors outside those disciplines, and generally outside of academia altogether.61 Neutral observers might readily conclude that in the last analysis nothing has been proved or concluded, and that the foliate heads remain a mystery, susceptible to differing interpretations.62
To some extent this would make a fit with the suggestion made by Kathleen Basford, Jeremy Harte and Mercia MacDermott that the foliate head was always a decoration which had no single meaning but could be made to carry a range. Thus, to different medieval artists, churchmen and congregations they could have represented fresh hope, eternal life, resurrection, salvation or abundance, or else sin, entrapment, menace or damnation. One might add another possibility here: that the old association between foliage and alcohol could have made the heads an effective symbol of the twinned pleasures and evils of intoxication. However, all these possibilities run up against the problem that there is no evidence that medieval people actually attributed any of these meanings to the motif. This is really very odd, because those people were very fond both of giving figures and symbols stock allegorical meanings, and of expounding these. We are sure, for example, of the standard associations that they allotted to Wild Men, unicorns, mermaids, panthers and many other species and designs. However, all the considerable work that has now been put into medieval sermons, conduct manuals, pastoral handbooks, conciliar and episcopal directives and ecclesiastical court records all over Europe has not turned up a single reference to the heads. When, uniquely, a surviving record describes them, being an illustrated architectural notebook by a thirteenth-century master mason, Villard de Honnecourt, it provides four different examples and sums up all simply as têtes de feuilles: leafy heads.63
This complete objectivity, a technical professionalism drained of all signifying content, may actually be the truth of the matter – and the agreement of Basford, Harte and MacDermott, that the foliate head was essentially just a decorative motif, is at the heart of it. It could be that it is a sphinx without a riddle, a figure used simply for its artistic and structural potential which had not only no fixed, common or agreed meaning, but actually no meaning at all. That would explain the silence in the medieval records with respect to its attributions, its popularity during the period, as a harmlessly decorative, entertaining and neutral figure, imported from outside Christian Europe or disinterred from classical ruins (according to the style), and the readiness with which it has been pressed into service by modern concerns.
Summary
The Green Man therefore seems to provide a very close, if much belated, modern counterpart to Mother Earth or the Great Mother Goddess, discussed in the second chapter of the present book. Like her, he seems to have been conceived originally as a literary figure, treated in the abstract, though the literature concerned was that of academics and folklorists rather than of philosophers and poets. He then took on life of his own as a religious figure, responding to modern needs just as the goddess did, and coming in some contexts to feature very much as her male opposite number and consort. It is perhaps telling that it was necessary to wait until late modernity, and the progress of feminism in actual human society, before a male entity of this kind was envisaged: until then the beings considered in this book have been female, the significance of which will be considered further in its conclusion. For now, it may be helpful to consider the implications of this story, if correctly assembled, for our view of history and of scholarship. The accumulation of research since the late 1970s strongly suggests that Lady Raglan’s construct was simply wrong: the foliate heads are not evidence of persisting belief in pagan deities through the Middle Ages and have nothing to do with the Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood or foliate figures from Continental European folk festivities to welcome summer. For that matter, neither the Jack nor Robin can be associated with surviving paganism either, and there seems to be no connection between them or of either with the continental figures. Nor can William Anderson’s use of Jungian archetypes do anything to alter this situation, because belief in them is a matter of faith and not a scholarly methodology.
On the other hand, it is perfectly legitimate to pick foliate or woodland figures from all over European and Near Eastern art, folklore and literature, across the ages, or indeed from all over the planet, and group them together now as expressions of the human relationship with green and fertile nature. Such figures are indeed found in many different religions and ethnicities, and there is no reason why the foliate heads in churches, the Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood and the Green Knight should not be included among them. It is also justifiable to regard this collection of characters, motifs and images as infused with a common spirit, the animating one of the vegetation of the world, and especially of that which dies or is harvested and then renews itself. In the Western context there is no reason why the name The Green Man should not be retained for such a being. There is no evidence that it was used of the foliate heads before 1939, but it was applied to figures representing wild nature, found in art, literature, pageants and folk customs. There should also be no reasonable objection if people then make this belief system the basis for, or a component of, a religion and/or a symbolism with which to approach the current global ecological emergency. As we know so little about how the divine operates – if it operates at all – it may well be that those who adopt or have adopted such a religion (or, in less structured form, a spirituality) are actually creating, empowering or contacting ‘real’ entities.
The trouble only starts if those who embrace such beliefs back-project them upon the past and declare that they are revealing an ancient mystery, or an eternal and universal archetype which once underpinned a global – or even just continent-wide – belief system, or else the truth about ancient or medieval religion. In many ways the story of the Green Man makes a parallel with that of other Victorian and Edwardian scholarly hypotheses which gathered support and momentum in the Anglophone world during the first half of the twentieth century, as that world thought and acted within cultural, social and economic parameters largely laid down during the nineteenth. Examples of those others considered earlier were the persistence of paganism through the Christian centuries, especially among witches, and the veneration of a universal prehistoric Mother Goddess. When those parameters shifted dramatically from the middle of the century, two very different responses were formulated to those hypotheses. One, concentrated among those concerned with sustained research into the past, was to examine and deconstruct them, and reject them if they were not found to match up to the apparent evidence. The other, concentrated among those concerned with responses to the problems of late modernity, and especially with those associated with counter-cultures, has been to appropriate the figures and beliefs embodied in those hypotheses and to remodel them for a new set of causes. Both have their value as reactions to a changing world, and it would be a very positive achievement if they could be diverted from clashing with each other.
The relationship between the two is not, however, the subject of this book, though it has been a recurrent theme in parts of it. What a history of the construct of the Green Man contributes to the main interest of the present work is a detailed, well-documented and recent example of the way in which new deities or spiritual forces can be perceived and established in the Western human mind which are neither straightforward survivals from ancient paganism nor anything directly to do with Christianity. There may be trace elements of both in the modern Green Man, the pagan because leaf masks were known as an architectural decoration in the ancient world, especially on temples, and the Christian because of Frazer’s project of undermining belief in Christ by assimilating him to a universal ancient cult of a dying and returning god. In essence, however, he belongs to neither, but is an effective enough representation of a divinity-like being who has appeared in response to modern needs and within a post-Christian society.