A cursory google reveals that there are still many pubs in England called 'The Green Man' - and there's even a Green Man pub in Phuket. The pictures on their pub-signs often look simple, and not unlike the sweetcorn giant. The meaning behind the name, however, is ancient and anything but simple.
An historic explanation
All over Europe there are folk customs where a man dressed in lush green foliage is ceremonially put to death at Maytime to bring about regeneration. In Southern England it is 'Jack-in the-Green' who is slain to renew the world. Whatever he is called locally, the Green Man legend is essentially a rural tradition, celebrating the coming of the gowing season.
Perhaps allied to our greater interest in environmentalism, in recent years there has been an upsurge in interest in the Green Man . At the May Fayre at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, I came face to knee with a live one. His name is Laurence Wedge and in his magnificent foliage and stilts, he literally presided over this London May Day event. He told me that the Green Man is his favourite role, which he is employed to play at five or six May Day events a year, mainly in the West Country. The number is rising. The last popular revival of interest in British folklore was at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was all part of the rediscovery of 'Merrie England' myths from King Arthur to Robin Hood which so romanticised the days before the industial revolution.
What about the Green Lady?
Curiously, the Green Man doesn't seem to have an equivalent Green Goddess. The 'Queen of the May', as crowned at many a pageant, is usually too young and virginal to be an earth-mother figure. However, some scholars believe that the Green Man and the Queen of the May are the mediaeval farmworkers' version of the god Herne (a great hunter who provided plentiful food) and the huntress goddess Diana, re-imagined as a Lord of Misrule and a Guardian of the Crops. (Eugene W. Plawiuk subscribes to this theory as part of his a neat distillation of the legend).
Yearly events
In Hastings, Sussex, they hold an annual ceremony where Jack-in-the Green, a towering hollow framework of leaves, borne by a man inside it, is ceremonially killed to release the spirit of summer. The Hastings festival attracts 15,000 people or more. Bristol also has a Jack- in-the-Green Festival each year with a 9 foot tall 'Jack' processed through the city's streets accompanied by musicians and dancers, before his ritual slaying. London's Deptford, hardly a locale noted for its fields and forests, nonetheless has a keen troupe of Morris dancers, Fowlers Troop, who took their Jack-in-the-Green for a walkabout in the City of London this May Day. The Deptford 'Jack' was revived in the early 1980s. However, it is in the Southwest of England that the majority of May festivals are concentrated.
Celebrations of Summer's coming must go back to the earliest days of prehistory, but Jack-in-the-Green didn't join the May Day revels until the 18th or 19th century, when he became particular!y associated with boy chimneysweeps. The sweeps exploited the annual procession of 'Jack' through the streets to supplement their income by busking to the crowd. As boy chimneysweeps disappeared, so did the 'Jack' processions.The Kentish Mercury in May 1906 reported a "sad falling off" in the numbers of people upholding the tradition. At Rochester in Kent the annual Sweeps Procession was revived only in 1980, and is now the centrepiece of a full five day festival.
There is more to the Green Man that Jack-in-the-Green, however. The British singer and folklorist, Mike Harding, for example, devotes several packed pages of his website to his search for the real Green Man. Harding's survey of leaf-clad lords of misrule takes in not only European prehistoric cave-paintings and early Christian architecture but even finds similar characters in India and Borneo. At the heart of many different legends, Harding concludes, is a male figure, whether Jesus, Osiris, Odin, the Green Knight, John Barleycorn, the Holly King or Thamuz of the Mesopotamians, who symbolises the triumph of the green shoots of Life over Winter and Death.
Beverley Davies - Beverley Davies lives in London, England and has written professionally for many years. Her special interests are theatre history and ...
