Look up in an English parish church and you will often find, carved into a roof boss, a capital or a misericord, a human face with leaves growing out of its mouth, nose or eyes. There are hundreds across Britain, mostly from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and nobody knows what they mean.
What they look like
The carvings fall roughly into three types:
- The foliate head — a face formed from or covered by leaves.
- The disgorging head — vegetation pouring out of the mouth, the most common and most striking form.
- The bloodsucker head — foliage emerging from the eyes, nose, ears and mouth at once.
Expressions range from serene to genuinely alarming. The best-known examples include those at Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire, Exeter Cathedral, Norwich, Rosslyn Chapel and Fountains Abbey, but they are so widespread that most old churches have one somewhere.
The name is modern
This is the crucial and frequently omitted point. Medieval documents give these carvings no name at all, and there is no surviving text explaining what they represented.
The term “Green Man” was coined in 1939 by Lady Raglan — Julia Somerset — in an article for the journal Folklore, in which she connected the carvings to Jack in the Green, May Day garland figures and the general run of English folk custom.
The connection has no medieval evidence behind it. It was an inspired guess, it was immediately appealing, and it has proved completely unshakeable — the name is now universal, and the assumed link to pre-Christian nature worship is repeated everywhere including on church guidebooks.
What they might mean
The honest answer is that nobody knows, and the leading possibilities are:
- A Christian symbol of resurrection — new life springing from a dead face, entirely orthodox and appropriate to a church.
- A warning — the sin of worldliness, or the fate of the unredeemed, consumed by nature.
- Decoration — a stock motif inherited from Roman ornamental art, which certainly used foliate masks, and reproduced by masons because it was in the pattern book.
- A survival of pre-Christian belief — the popular theory, and the one with the least documentary support.
The most likely explanation is dull: an inherited decorative form that different carvers and different churches understood in different ways, if they thought about it at all.
The afterlife
Whatever it meant in 1200, the Green Man has taken on a thoroughly modern life. It is a common English pub name, a fixture of contemporary paganism and folk horror, and a recurring image in British art and fiction.
It also appears in an unusual number of places once you start noticing — carved into Victorian buildings, on the coronation invitation of Charles III in 2023, and in gardens across the country as a plaque on a wall. The medieval masons would have no idea what to make of any of it.