The Green Man

Last updated: 9 May 2005

The Green Man is a man’s face set in leaf. Sometimes the face is made of the leaves. Sometimes the leaves come from the mouth. Ours, in the chancel of the parish church, looks a little aside, as such faces do. It is the figure from which the trail and the summer Gathering take their name, and it is one of the reasons people come.

The card sold at the centre. Photograph from the centre collection.

Faces of this kind are found in a great many English churches. They came in with the Norman building, from the twelfth century, and they were carved in numbers through the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, on bosses, corbels, capitals and choir-stalls. They are found in France as well, and further. The masons liked foliage and they liked faces, and they put the two together. Oak, hawthorn and ivy are the leaves most often given. Ours is in a church of the colliery years; the figure is of the older kind.

The name Green Man, for a church face of this sort, is the one now in ordinary use. It is not a medieval name. It was taken, in the last century, from the Green Man of inn-signs and of May games, in which a man might walk covered in leaves. Visitors sometimes ask whether the carving is a pagan god kept in the church. We have no record that the masons thought so. The stone sits in the chancel with the rest of the work, and it has been there as long as anyone here can say. Most people who come take him for the life of the woods, and for the year coming round in leaf. That is a fair reading, and it is the one this parish has taken.

On May Day, in some English towns, a Jack-in-the-Green still walks: a man inside a frame of greenery. That custom is of the last two or three centuries, and it has been taken up again in recent years at places such as Hastings and Rochester. It is not our Gathering. Ours is in July, usually the second Saturday, a parish day: a morning on the trail, tea at the hall, and talk of the woods and of the pit. We do not keep a large festival. We keep the day, and we keep the name. See the Gathering.

The stone itself is under the carving. The church is open when the key is at the Heritage Centre, and at other times as announced on the board. Visitors are asked not to touch the face, and not to make rubbings. A card is sold at the centre when the centre is open, and it is a good card. We cannot send it by electronic mail.