The Green Men of Warmington

If you own a pair of binoculars, take them with you next time you are near Warmington. They will enable you to fully appreciate the skills of the medieval woodcarvers who produced a set of nine bosses to decorate the splendid roof which imitates, in wood, Early Gothic stone vaulting. Such wooden roofs are characteristic of high-status churches and survive today usually only on cathedrals and abbeys - such as York Minster and St Alban's Abbey. 

All the roof bosses at Warmington depict human faces with strongly defined features, surrounded by naturalistic foliage. The leaves and branches sprout from the mouths, noses - even the eyes - of the faces. They are superb examples of what has become termed the 'Green Man'. They all date to 1180-1280, when the nave of Warmington church was last rebuilt.

Medieval decorative carvings in stone or wood which survive in the country's churches represent a vast store of art from this period. Unfortunately, almost none has been recorded or catalogued. The artistry of the sculptors, combined with often excellent preservation, would warrant their taking pride of place in major museum collections.

Instead, they are embodied in the often dark and inaccessible parts of our parish churches, all-too-often unmentioned in the guide books (although the brief notes available at Warmington do draw visitors' attention to the roof and its bosses).

Such carvings are not 'high art'. They are the product of masons and wood carvers who drew their inspiration from popular imagery and beliefs. This makes them all the more invaluable, as they offer a remarkable insight into the thinking of the non-literate population who are so conspicuously absent from the records of medieval life, written as they are by, or for, the nobility and the clergy.

The 'Green Man' is only one of a number of recognisable 'motifs' which regularly recur in Gothic decoration. Tongue-pokers, face-pullers, contortionists and, occasionally, explicitly sexual figures are all to be found on bosses, corbels, capitals, misericords and other places rarely left undecorated by the craftsmen of the time.

Striking as these grotesques are to those who care to look for them, they almost always lack their original visual impact. We look at them today as all-but monochrome carvings, as we are accustomed to seeing 'high' art. But their creators lavished considerable effort on adorning these sculptures with paint and gilding.

Written records of church-building expenses reveal that the painter was often paid as much as the sculptor. The last vestiges of these embellishments were assiduously scrubbed away during during Victorian 'restorations'. Those carvings which have escaped such rough treatment reveal decorative schemes which seem garish even to the modern eye.

If we today can readily admire the skill of the carvers, we have few clues towards understanding what these grotesques symbolised for their creators. Popular thinking in recent decades has perceived such foliate faces as being the last bastion of tree worship, a veritable pagan intruder into the Christian church. This is reflected in the Warmington church guide which opines that these bosses represent 'the pagan god of the woods'.

This idea was first suggested by the folklorist Lady Raglan in 1939, in an article for Folk-lore magazine. Indeed, Lady Raglan proposed the term 'Green Man' for these carvings. Writers such as William Anderson, in his book The Green Man (Harper Collins, 1990) and the related television programme, fully develop this stance. Incontrovertibly, since 1939 the Green Man has become paganised as a fertility figure.

Nevertheless, there is no historical evidence for this. The earliest Green Men can be found on Classical Roman tombs, although the surviving examples come only from the Mediterranean area and not from northern Europe (Kathleen Basford, The Green Man, Brewer, 1978). There are no known examples of the Green Man until about the eleventh century when Roman decorative motifs were revived and incorporated into what is now termed the 'Romanesque' style.

Anthony Weir and James Jarman in Images of Lust (Batsford, 1986) argue that the Green Man is part of the 'Romanesque package' of symbolism which spread along the Santiago de Compostella pilgrimage route from northern Spain into western France and soon after into Britain. Churches such as Kilpeck (Herefordshire) represent surviving examples of the earliest Romanesque churches in Britain and were readily copied elsewhere in the country during subsequent decades.

By investigating at first hand the Romanesque churches of northern Spain and western France, Weir and Jarman established that the carvings embody consistent motifs - often exceptionally explicit sexually. Originally they were intended to depict the Seven Deadly Sins, with the Green Man probably symbolising Luxuria or Lust. Later examples, including all those in Britain, rather lose contact with the origins of the imagery and take on an independent life of their own as vigorous decorative motifs.

Lady Raglan's idea that the foliage-covered figures found in May Day processions were directly linked with medieval foliate faces was demolished in 1979 by Roy Judge's book, The Jack-in-the-Green. Judge established that such May Day folk rituals had only appeared in the late eighteenth century. The most recent review of this debate can be found in Ronald Hutton's The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Basil Blackwell 1991).

Despite the widespread modern day belief in the survival of pre-christian beliefs among ordinary medieval people (based largely on the popularisation of the false arguments which make up Margaret Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Oxford, 1921), Hutton concludes that 'None of these images could have been a beloved pagan deity, placed in churches by popular demand.'

Whatever the Green Man meant in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, there are few examples so well executed as any of those at Warmington. As a series they are only equalled, but not surpassed, by the better-known examples in the Lady Chapel at Southwell (Nottinghamshire).

The writer would be pleased to learn of any other examples of medieval carvings. Please write to 2 Cross Hill Close, Wymeswold, Loughborough, LE12 6UJ.

Bob Trubshaw also has a forthcoming CD-ROM on gargoyles and grotesque carvings of Leicestershire and Rutland. For more information click here.