The Face That Grows Leaves

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire, early autumn

In the chapter house at Southwell the light comes in low through the lancets and falls across stone leaves that have been growing, motionless, for seven hundred years. The masons who worked here in the thirteenth century carved oak and hawthorn and vine so precisely that you can name the species, and out of that foliage, again and again, a face looks back. Leaves push from the corners of the mouth. Leaves stand in for eyebrows, for beard, for hair. Nobody wrote down, at the time, what these faces were supposed to be. That silence is the whole difficulty of the subject.

The name most of us reach for — the Green Man — is not medieval at all. It was given to these carvings in 1939, by Lady Raglan, writing in the folklore journals after she had gone looking at churches and found the same leaf-mouthed head turning up in nave after nave, county after county, in France and Germany as well as Britain. She reached for the vocabulary of May Day to explain it: Jack in the Green, the garlanded figures of English spring custom, the King of the May who is dressed in leaves and paraded and sometimes, in the older accounts, ritually cut down. It was a persuasive connection and it stuck, so thoroughly that it is now almost impossible to see the carvings without her name for them in mind.

What the stonemasons themselves intended is a separate and older argument. Foliate masks appear in Roman decoration, in the leaf-crowned faces that flank Bacchus on wine-country mosaics, long before any English church was built on the site. It is entirely possible the motif travelled into ecclesiastical carving as ornament first and meaning second, a decorative habit inherited from workshop pattern-books rather than a deliberate portrait of a woodland god smuggled past the priest. Church authorities of the period were not, on the whole, in the business of letting pagan deities sit in the roof bosses of their choirs. And yet the carvings persist, in corbels and misericords and font rims, from the twelfth century through into Victorian restoration work, as if each generation of masons found the face worth repeating whether or not they could have told you why.

What can be said without much argument is that the figure sits at a genuine seam in British folk life — the seam between the church calendar and the older year, Rogation and Whitsun sitting close beside May Day and its garlands. Jack in the Green himself is well attested: a chimney sweeps' custom, a man near-buried in a wicker frame of leaves and flowers, paraded through town on the first of May, revived in living memory in towns like Hastings after the practice had lapsed. Whether that custom descends from, borrows from, or simply resembles the church carvings is a question the sources will not settle, and I have stopped expecting them to.

I stood a long while under the Southwell heads trying to decide what expression to give them. Not benevolent, quite. Not threatening either. Something closer to patience — the face of a thing that has outlasted every explanation offered for it and is in no hurry to correct the record. The oak leaves keep growing out of the stone mouth. The wood, whatever else it is, has not stopped speaking.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.