The Green Man in Britain E-Book

Fran Doel

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 205

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2001

Beschreibung

The Green Man has many facets, many dimensions. He peers through his leaf mask in hundreds of church misericords and stone carvings. His innate link with the changing seasons and fertility is revealed in the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in summer folk customs such as Jack in the Green, the Castleton Garland and the Burry Man. Perhaps he even lurks in the legendary hero of the Greenwood, Robin Hood. The Authors have been running summer schools and courses on the Green Man for many years, and in this fascinating study they discuss his significance in medival times and explore the modern development of the concept of the Green Man. The book also contains a detailed gazetteer of over 200 sites, featuring almost 1000 carvings (many photographed by Felicity Howlett).

Leseprobe

The Green Man in Britain

Fran & Geoff Doel

Dedication: In appreciation of our parents — Tom and Isabel Gilmour, and Sidney and Olive Doel

First published in 2001 by Tempus Publishing

Reprinted 2004

Reprinted in 2010 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Reprinted 2012

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Fran & Geoff Doel, 2010, 2013

The right of Fran and Geoff Doel to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5313 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1The Green Man — invention or recreation?

2Greenness

3Ecclesiastical carvings

4The Spirit in the Tree

5Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

6The Jack in the Green

7The Man in the Oak

8The Burry Man

9The Green Man and the arts

10In my end is my beginning

Gazetteer

Notes

Bibliography

List of illustrations

1Cheshire, St Mary, Nantwich. Fourteenth-century sandstone boss

2Cheshire, St Mary, Nantwich. Fourteenth-century sandstone boss head

3Derbyshire, All Saints, Bakewell. Stone carving on apex of arch

4Devon, Exeter Cathedral. Late thirteenth-century roof boss

5Devon, Exeter Cathedral. Painted roof boss in south aisle

6Devon, St David’s Cathedral, Exeter. Tripartite representation on the corbel in nave

7Devon St Mary, Ottery St Mary. Fourteenth-century roof boss above the current interior church shop

8Devon, St Mary, Ottery St Mary. Fourteenth-century painted corbel

9Devon, Ottery St Mary. Fourteenth-century corbel

10Devon, St Andrew, Sampford Courtenay. Fifteenth-century wooden boss

11Devon, South Molton. Fifteenth-century chancel pier

12Devon, St Michael the Archangel, Spreyton. Fourteenth- or fifteenth-century death-head roof boss in chancel with mouth and eye foliage

13Glos, St Michael & All Angels, Bishop’s Cleeve. Twelfth-century capital

14Glos, St Peter & St Paul, Northleach. Exterior stone boss

15Glos, Tewkesbury Abbey. Green Man with a protruding tongue

16Hampshire, Winchester Cathedral. One of a series of fighting Green Men

17Hampshire, Winchester Cathedral. From the narthex

18Hampshire, Winchester public school. Stone boss in the porch

19Devon, Exeter Cathedral. Painted roof boss in the Lady Chapel

20Devon St Andrew, Sampford Courtenay. Unpainted rectangular fifteenth-century foliate wooden boss

21Devon, South Molton. Fifteenth-century stone capital

22Herefordshire, St Bartholomew, Much Marcle. Green Man on a capital of a pillar in the nave and dated to c.1230

23Kent, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury. Green Man on tomb of St Anselm’s Chapel

24Norfolk, St Margaret’s Church, King’s Lynn. Fourteenth-century misericord

25Norfolk, Norwich Cathedral. Green Man in the south cloister

26Oxfordshire, Magdalen College, Oxford. Exterior stone carving facing main street

27Somerset, St Mary’s Church, Bishops Lydyeard. A fifteenth-century bench end

28Hampshire St Cross, Winchester. Fifteenth-century foliate head

29Herefordshire, St Michael, Garway. Chancel arch twelfth-century pillar capital

30Herefordshire, Hereford Cathedral. Stone fragment

31Herefordshire, St Mary & St David, Kilpeck. Green Men disgorging branches and leaves of an abstract nature

32Herefordshire, St Mary & St David, Kilpeck. Carved detail from a twelfth-century doorway

33Herefordshire, Priory Church of St Peter & St Paul, Leominster. Green Man on a twelfth-century capital

34Kent, Parish Church of St Peter & St Paul, Tonbridge. Roughly carved Green Man dated c.1400

35The Maypole Dance at Dartford, Kent, c.1896

36The Maypole, Padstow, Cornwall, 1992

37Lincolnshire, Lincoln Cathedral. Finely carved late fourteenth-century misericord

38Midlothian, Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland. Fifteenth-century stone pendant, retrochoir

39Norfolk, St Margaret’s Church, Kings Lynn. Fourteenth-century arm-rest

40Norfolk, Norwich Cathedral. Fourteenth-/fifteenth-century stone boss in the abbey gateway

41Norfolk, St Ethelbert’s Gatehouse, Norwich. Fifteenth-century boss

42Norfolk, Norwich Cathedral. Boss in the cloisters

43Norfolk, Norwich Cathedral. A clean shaven Green Man

44Norfolk, Norwich Cathedral. Fifteenth-century misericord

45The Longparish Mummers, c.1930

46The Tonbridge Mummers performing the Bearsted Mummers Play

47‘May Day’ or ‘Jack-in-the-Green’

48‘May’ from the Illustrated Months of the Year, 1824

49Whitstable May Celebrations, Kent, with ‘Jack-in-the-Green’, 1910

50Hastings ‘Jack-in-the-Green’, Sussex, 1996

51Rochester ‘Jack-in-the-Green’, Kent, 1999

52Garland Day at Abbotsbury, Dorset

53Children with Cow Horns parading the May Garland at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, c.1820

54Norfolk, Norwich Cathedral. Fifteenth-century misericord

55Orkney, St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall. Capital of pillar in east end showing Green Man and lizards

56The Castleton Garland c.1930

57Making the Garland on Oak Apple Day, 1985

58The Castleton Garland being placed over the ‘King’, 1985

59The Castleton Garland. The ‘King’ and his ‘Consort’ are escorted round the town, 1987

60The Burry Man, South Queensferry

61The Burry Man, South Queensferry, 1994

62The Burry Man, South Queensferry, 1994

63Orkney, St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall. Drawing of a Green Man on the back of an ancient wooden chair

64Oxfordshire, Dorchester Abbey, thirteenth-century capital

65Oxfordshire, Brasenose College, Oxford. Eroded sandstone exterior stone carving

66Oxfordshire, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Green Man with fierce animal-like head

67Oxfordshire, Merton College, Oxford. Stone head inside quad

68Powys, Pennant Mellangel Church, near Llangynog. Green Man with huge bulging eyes and emaciated skull

69Shropshire, St Laurence, Ludlow. Sixteenth-century misericord

70Somerset, St Mary’s Church, Bishops Lydeard. Fifteenth-century bench end

71Somerset, Church of the Holy Ghost, Crowcombe. Sixteenth-century bench end with a Green Man disgorging fruiting and leafy branches

72Somerset, Church of the Holy Ghost, Crowcombe. Sixteenth-century bench end

73Suffolk, St Peter & St Paul, Clare. Highly stylised Green Man

74Sussex, St Mary’s Hospital, Chichester

75Steyning, Sussex. A rare secular and domestic example of a Green Man

76Wiltshire, All Saints, Sutton Benger. Naturalistically carved early fourteenth-century Green Man

77Wiltshire, All Saints, Sutton Benger. Early fourteenth-century

78Worcestershire, Pershore Abbey. Thirteenth-century stone roof boss

79Worcestershire, Pershore Abbey. Thirteenth-century stone boss

80Worcestershire, Pershore Abbey. Thirteenth-century stone roof boss

Acknowledgements

We would particularly like to thank our photographer Felicity Howlett for providing most of the photographs of cathedral and church carvings. We would also like to thank the organising bodies of cathedrals and churches for allowing the photographs to be taken and for their use in this book. Our thanks go to Davyd Power for providing the illustration of the Green Man in Tonbridge Church, for Peter Kemmis Betty for providing the illustration of Pennant Mellangel Church Screen, to Archie Turnbull for the photograph of the Hastings Jack in the Green, and to Stuart Beattie for sending us a photo and a carving of Green Men in Rosslyn Chapel. Our thanks also go to the photographer Antonio Reeve and the Rosslyn Chapel Trust for permission to use the photograph on the front cover and in the book. With grateful thanks to Liz Johnston, Assistant Custodian, St Magnus Cathedral, Orkney for sending us a photograph of a Green Man head from St Magnus, a map of the locations of other Green Men in the cathedral, an original sketch of a Green Man in the cathedral and a photo of an antique chair kept in the cathedral which has a Green Man carving on its back, and for permission to use them in the book. Most of the modern photographs of the folk customs, and some of the Green Men carvings, were taken by the authors.

We would like to thank the large number of people who have helped us with information on ecclesiastical carvings, including priests, curates, churchwardens, cathedral guides and students and friends who over the years have most helpfully supplied us with information. Regretfully, it is not possible to list all of these individuals, but we are most grateful for their kind and invaluable assistance and fruitful discussions. However, we would particularly like to thank the following: Alan Austen, Brenda Bamford, Rev Paul Botting, Fr Dominic Dougan, Deborah Hutchinson, Keith Leech, Alan and Renella Philips, Alan and Judy Schneider, Margaret Slater, Rev Philip and Valerie Tait and Archie Turnbull.

We should also like to thank Keith Leech for information on the Hastings Jack in the Green Folk Custom and its revival, Gordon Newton for information of the revival of the Rochester revival, and George Bramhall for help and information over many years when we have taken groups to see the Castleton Garland celebrations.

We would also like to acknowledge the help and interchange of ideas with fellow lecturers with whom we have shared courses on the Green Man and associated folk customs, particularly William Tyler, Mike Spittal, Alan Austen and Tom Brown. We have been particularly indebted to books on the subject by C.J.P. Cave, Kathleen Basford, William Anderson and Clive Hicks, and amongst the many local books we have consulted we have particularly drawn on Thirlie Grundy’s The Green Man in Cumbria as we have not so far been able to personally visit all of the Cumbrian sites.

Introduction

A range of articles and books from the 1930s to the present have explored the significance of foliate disgorging heads in ecclesiastical carvings and whether they might be associated with Christian symbolism and/or to a wider range if images from traditional culture, such as folk customs and legends. As we show in the opening chapter of this book, the term ‘Green Man’, both as name for the disgorging foliate heads in ecclesiastical carvings and as the name for a more broadly based symbolic or quasi-mythical figure whose aspects were celebrated in literature, legends and customs, as well as being carved in cathedrals and churches came increasingly to be used in the latter part of the twentieth century.

One avenue of scholarly inquiry, which traced the influence of the genre largely from Roman carvings in Temples of Bacchus through to carvings in French churches and from there into England, Wales and Scotland, reached its climax in the acclaimed book The Green Man by Kathleen Basford, which was published in 1978, just as we were beginning our lecturing careers.

The second avenue of inquiry, which was to try to connect the ecclesiastical carvings with other aspects of culture, including the environmental concerns of the late twentieth century, was cogently and excitingly explored by William Anderson in his influential Green Man — The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth, published in 1990. William Anderson was a European, a man of wide cultural knowledge, and to interpret his wider vision of the Green Man, he enlisted the aid of two cultural gurus from the early twentieth century — the anthropologist Sir James Frazer and the psychologist Jung. Whereas Jungian archetypal studies were all the rage in the period Anderson was researching his book, his use of Sir James Frazer was singularly daring, as Frazer’s anthropological vision was (and still is) suffering a remarkable eclipse in anthropological and folklore circles. There was bound to be a reaction against the uncritical admiration of earlier generations for Sir James and his vision of comparative interrelated mythology and rituals, particularly when modern scholarship got to work on his sources, but the extreme hostility to what some academics now term ‘The Golden Bow-Wow’ has always surprised us in its uncompromising intensity. It was of course one of William Anderson’s great virtues that he was able to stand clear of scholarly in-fighting and trends in his quest for truth.

William Anderson’s book had a great influence on us in that it gave a focal point and coherence to many topics we were exploring individually. We were both teaching the increasingly popular medieval text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on literary syllabi and summer schools; we were researching traditional customs and organising educational courses and visits to customs such as the Jack in the Green at nearby Hastings and Rochester, the Castleton Garland, the Burry Man, the Padstow Hobby Horse and the Helston Flora; and we were running a local Mummers team which featured both Midwinter and Robin Hood Plays. We began to group these topics together under a ‘Green Man’ title for adult education courses and Summer Schools for the Universities of Kent, Exeter, East Anglia and Birkbeck College in order to explore possible interconnections with our students. In the past decade we have been involved in countless fascinating debates with fellow lecturers, students and other friends as to the precise significance of both the medieval Green Man (if indeed there was one) and what he stands for today and the reason for the extraordinary interest in him at the present time. Some of our feminist students argued that there must be a green woman as well; other people wondered why the images were male. And the fundamental debate as to whether the ecclesiastical carvings were related to figures in folk customs and legends, or whether his significance was entirely Christian (his present significance is clearly more than Christian) continues.

And so we have written this book:

(i)

to provide a history of the development of the term and concept of the Green Man and what it has come to signify today

(ii)

to explore the significance of the Christian carvings

(iii)

to provide information on the wider cultural associations claimed for the Green Man in literature, folk customs and legends

(iv)

to provide a large collection of photographs of ecclesiastical carvings and associated folk customs

(v)

to provide a selective and accurate gazetteer of Green Man ecclesiastical sites for readers to visit

Photographing church carvings is a very skilled task. Only a few of our hundreds of Green Men photos are of a good enough standard for publication, so we have been very fortunate to acquire help from a skilled photographer, Felicity Howlett, who has provided most of the ecclesiastical photographs for the book as well as alerting us to several Green Man carvings we were unaware of. Our own photography is hopefully adequate for the folk customs we have visited and described in the book. For further information on the customs we would refer readers to Brian Day’s A Chronicle of Folk Customs.

We hope that our book will encourage readers to form their own opinions based on the evidence provided. Information is provided on the iconography and locations of the ecclesiastical heads disgorging vegetation, and on the folk customs and legendary and literary figures that many scholars have associated with him, and there is also a summary of previous interpretations of the significance of the figure. We have tried to retain open minds on the subject whilst writing the book, but our own tentative conclusions are given in the concluding chapter. We hope that the reader’s quest for the Green Man will be as enjoyable and illuminating as ours has been.

Fran & Geoff Doel

Owl House, Tonbridge

1 The Green Man — invention or recreation?

In 1932 C.J.P. Cave published an article ‘The Roof Bosses of Ely Cathedral’, which compared foliate head carvings on those bosses to the Jack in the Green, a man appearing in May Day ceremonies in the south of England covered in a wooden frame filled with greenery:

It would be interesting to know the meaning of these heads . . . Those cases where the face is hidden except for the eyes . . . remind me of the Jack-in-the-Green.

In 1939 Lady Raglan published an article in the 1939 Folklore Journal on the subject of ‘The Green Man in Church Architecture’. This suggested a connection between a foliate head church carving in Llangwm Church in Monmouthshire and figures of folklore, custom and legend:

It seemed to me certain that it was a man and not a spirit, and moreover that it was a ‘Green man’. So I named it. . . . This figure is neither a figment of the imagination nor a symbol, but is taken from real life, and the question is whether there was any figure in real life from which it could have been taken. The answer, I think, is that there is only one of sufficient importance, the figure variously known as the Green Man, Jack in the Green, Robin Hood, The King of May, and the Garland, who is the central figure in the May-Day celebrations throughout Northern and Central Europe.

This article appears to be the birth of the popular modern usage of the term in regard to church carvings and green clad figures in folklore and custom.

In his 1948 book Roof Bosses in Medieval Churches, C.J.P. Cave again drew attention to possible links between some of the carvings and ‘the Jack-in-the Green which was a familiar figure on May Day in England fifty years ago’. He acknowledges that ‘Quite independently Lady Raglan came to the same conclusion as to the origin of what she calls “the Green Man”’ (p68). The coinage of the concept and terminology of the Green Man by Cave and Basford was quickly adopted by the establishment and ratified by its adoption in descriptions of carvings in Pevsner’s architectural works, including the famous and highly influential ‘Buildings of England’ series.

1Cheshire, St Mary, Nantwich. Fourteenth-century sandstone boss head. The nose and furrows of the brow and eyebrows form a tree. Foliage sprouts from the mouth and the beard may be a curling leaf. Felicity Howlett

2Cheshire, St Mary, Nantwich. Fourteenth-century sandstone boss. Grinning human head sprouting branches and leaves from a nose which is itself a stylised representation of a tree. The furrows of the brow are also a simplified tree and the hair is vegetative. Felicity Howlett

3Derbyshire, All Saints, Bakewell. Stone carving on apex of arch. Wide branches force their way into a grimacing mouth. Felicity Howlett

4Devon, Exeter Cathedral. Late thirteenth-century roof boss in the ambulatory outside the Lady Chapel depicting two wide-eyed Green Men on the one boss. Their mouths disgorge luxuriant stemmed foliage which encapsulates the pair in a circle of greenery. Anderson identifies the greenery as artemisia (wormwood). Felicity Howlett

German culture has a term, ‘der gruner Mensch’, which refers to figures in folk customs covered with greenery. The French equivalent, ‘l’homme vert’, seems to be more recent than Lady Raglan’s coinage. The term ‘Green Man’ has become a convenient cultural shorthand to describe the most prolific non-Christian symbol to be found carved in or on British medieval religious buildings and their counterparts in parts of France and Germany. So widespread is this symbol that there may be a Christian significance. Useful as the term ‘Green Man’ has become, the widespread use of heads in association with foliage has meant that no two writers mean specifically the same thing by the term. In this book we will broadly take the term as meaning that there is a head disgorging vegetation from eyes, nostrils, ears or forehead, or a foliate head where the cheeks are depicted as leaf-like.

In England the term ‘Green Man’ is also associated with hundreds of pub names, some dating back as early as the sixteenth century. But the evidence that has so far come to light as regards early inn signs suggests a virtually exclusive use of depictions of a forester, originally Robin Hood or some other outlaw, although many of the pubs have switched to wild Green Men type pub signs in recent years to fit in with modern perceptions.

The two outstanding modern studies in book form on the subject — Kathleen Basford’s The Green Man and William Anderson’s Green Man — The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth represent two distinct approaches to the subject. Kathleen Basford’s book is a study of one of the ‘fantastic images’ which abound in ‘the medieval churches and cathedrals of Western Europe’ — ‘the foliate head, a face or mask with leaves sprouting from it’. Basford sees the Green Man as ‘probably the most common decorative motif of medieval sculpture’ and points out that the Jack in the Green does share one characteristic with the Green Man — ‘his power of revival and regeneration’. In her study, however, she considers that the origins of the Green Man are artistic, deriving from the Roman art of the first century AD, in religious memorials associated with the gods Okeanus and Bacchus, using carvings of acanthus and vine leaves.

In support of Kathleen Basford’s ideas is the rarity of Green Man carvings on secular sites. She finds the carvings in the medieval English churches sinister rather than life-evoking, symbolising the ‘horrors of the silva daemonium’ rather than the ‘personification of Springtime’. However, there is an inconsistency in her thesis which on the one hand stresses the links with antiquity and on the other interprets the iconography as diabolical; Dionysus, Bacchus and Okeanus are not diabolical figures and do not attract diabolic iconography.

There is also a limitation in Basford’s assumption that quizzical or unsettling expressions given to Green Man carvings by medieval masons and stone-carvers are expressions of Christian devils. Although the carvers are of course likely to be orthodox Christians, they could still possibly be portraying something that is neither a classical copy, nor something from the confines of Christianity; in some cases where vines and grapes are associated with the image, inebriation (whether or not related to Bacchus) may be depicted. The power of the recurring symbol of the Green Man in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may also relate to figures from the shadowy region of folklore and legend. Thus, while acknowledging the obvious mutual influence of the carvers in reproducing a striking and effective symbol, we may need to look wider than Christian thought and iconography to interpret the Green Man’s full significance. It is this wider quest that is much indebted to William Anderson’s book.

5Devon, Exeter Cathedral. Painted roof boss in south aisle. The nose is a tree which branches into spreading oak leaves from the tear ducts and the nostrils. Felicity Howlett

6Devon, Exeter Cathedral, Exeter. Tripartite representation on the corbel in nave. The Coronation of the Virgin, the Virgin and child as radix jesse standing on a Green Man c.1350. Geoff Doel

7Devon, Ottery St Mary. Fourteenth-century roof boss above the current interior church shop. Head spews forth thick branches of greenery which form an ‘inhabited’ bush with backward facing biting birds and grape clusters or cones. Felicity Howlett

8Devon, Ottery St Mary. Fourteenth-century painted corbel. Stone death-head, with gold foliage and berries. Foliage issues from mouth, sides of nose and centres of eyes. Felicity Howlett

9Devon, Ottery St Mary. Fourteenth-century corbel. The Green Man wears a hat and has neatly dressed hair and beard. The mouth is O-shaped and disgorges leaves and flowers which encircle a pillar cluster. Felicity Howlett

Anderson uses a Jungian interpretation of why there has been a sudden development of interest in recent years amongst writers, artists, musicians, art historians, architects and environmentalists: ‘It was as though a sleeping archetype was waking up’. In addition to exploring the role of the Green Man in the past, he poses the question ‘why is the Green Man returning to our awareness now and what does he want from us?’.

Anderson concludes that, in line with Jung’s theory of compensation, ‘the Green Man is rising up into our present awareness in order to counterbalance a lack in our attitude to Nature’. His suggested Jungian interpretation is that:

An archetype such as the Green Man represents will recur at different places and times independently of traceable lines of transmission because it is part of the permanent possession of mankind. In Jung’s theory of compensation, an archetype will reappear in a new form to redress imbalance in society at a particular time when it is needed. According to this theory, therefore, the Green Man is rising up into our presence awareness in order to counterbalance a lack in our attitude to Nature. (pp17 and 25)

This view is shared by Susan Clifford, the Director of the environmental organisation ‘Common Ground’, who said on the excellent Omnibus television documentary ‘The Return of the Green Man’ (1995) that:

People are feeling more and more beleaguered by what is being presented as the ecological crisis and it is absolutely convergent with the arrival of the Green Man. He seems to be coming back into the picture either because he’s propelled himself or because we’ve called him to in some way walk with us through what seems to be very difficult times.