Little Green Men.....

Wherever I go recently I seem to keep bumping into little Green Men! They aren’t hard to find. It may be best known as a pub name but, in fact, if you visit a medieval church you’re quite likely to see one or two gazing down at you from the roof or doorways as a piece of mysterious carving. Grotesque, leering, and sometimes quite frightening, there are over a thousand in Britain’s churches and they are still being discovered. Typically it will be a man’s face either surrounded by leaves, or with branches spewing from his mouth, or his eyes, ears and nose.

Why are they in so many of our churches? The truth is that no one really knows, but many of the traditions, images and practises of the early church were probably borrowed from pre-existing Pagan ritual. The candles, bells and holy water inside and yew trees outside our churches were all revered by pre Christian worshippers. Many Christian festivals, for example Easter, are on or close to Pagan feast days and religious festivals. This probably means that, like the empire building Romans, the new religion incorporated existing cultural traditions wherever it reasonably could. Rather than waste energy and goodwill trying to suppress them it brought them into the churches and made them safe and respectable.

It’s a little easier to make a guess at what they represent and why they were so important to people that they needed to be accommodated. If you can imagine a world without electricity and all our modern comforts, the winters would be cold and bleak and the one thing everyone would really, really look forward to would be Spring! Warmer weather, new plants growing, new animals born, fresh food! It’s not difficult to imagine that this would be a cause for huge celebration. The Green Man festival that I bumped into in Shropshire is always held on May Day, Beltane in the Pagan calendar, and the central event is the Green Man defeating the Ice Queen in battle and then, with help of the new May Queen, declaring winter ended. Only then can the feasting, the drinking and the dancing begin!

It would be strange if these festivals were the only examples of pre-Christian ritual to actually survive alive, as opposed to those spooky wooden carvings hidden in the dark corners of old churches. But of course they’re not. The Green Man has many other manifestations such as Jack of the Green, who dances in front of many May Day processions, John Barleycorn in song, Shakespeare’s Puck in theatre, and maybe even Robin Hood; all are bringers of liberation and celebration, mischief and misrule. There will always be more questions than answers about something as odd and as old the Green Men. But one thing seems certain, a symbol that is as widespread and long lasting is neither trivial nor merely decorative. So next time you visit a church why not have a good look at the roof bosses and the doorways and the pew ends; see if you can find him (occasionally her) and if you do find one, or even if you don’t, have a drink and toast his health at the nearest (Green Man) pub.