The Green Man is believed to symbolise the cycle of life, death and re-birth. The symbol of Godhood within the male and its relationship with the transcendent life force of our Goddess, the female expression of divinity. He is a Pagan symbol who heralds Spring after a long winter and the renewal of lush vegetation.

Lady Raglan suggested that in antiquity, the Green Man was ‘the central figure in the May Day celebrations throughout Northern and Central Europe’. As the Green Man is also portrayed with acorns and hawthorn leaves, symbols of fertility in medieval times, this would seem to reinforce the association with spring.

It’s also interesting that in much of Europe, the figure often known as “the wild man”is depicted as either covered in leaves or simply green in color– This may explain why the figure was called “Green Man” in Britain.

The Green Man quite literally represents bringing the spirit of the natural world into our domesticated lives. To hang a Green Man image in a house is to invite the essence of nature into a place where we have to live mostly apart from it (in our modern brick and plaster abodes).

The Green Man appears in many forms, with the three most common types categorized as:

• the Foliate Head: completely covered in green leaves.
• the Disgorging Head: spews vegetation from its mouth.
• the Bloodsucker Head: sprouts vegetation from all facial orifices (e.g. tear ducts, nostrils, mouth and ears)

The green man symbolises fertility and rebirth. Examples are found across Europe: there is a green man in the 6th-century palace of Constantinople; others in the Freiburg Minster spire. One theory has it that the symbol emerged during the Neolithic period.

Depending on your particular view of the world, his inclusion is either an affront to Christian decency or a jolly salute to our monarch’s peculiarities. The green man is a playfully sinister envoy of the otherworldly. His face, either made entirely of leaves or a fleshy human screaming forth foliage, is carved into hundreds of parish churches.

The green man made his way into Celtic religion and perhaps the cult of Dionysus, whose adherents would daub their faces with wine and beards of ivy. There are stories, too, of green men in English history. In the 12th century, it is said that fishermen recovered a green man from the waters off the Suffolk coast. He was imprisoned in Orford Castle, a few miles from where radar was invented, and refused ever to speak. Nearby, in Woolpit, there is a tale of two green children who appeared in the village, speaking an unknown language and refusing to eat anything but broad beans. The boy died, but the girl eventually learned English, claiming to come from an entirely green world called ‘St Martin’s land’.

How did this peculiar symbol make its way into England’s churches? The author Paul Kingsnorth has an alluring theory. The Norman invasion did not end with 1066; Anglo-Saxon guerrillas spent years fighting against the invading force, kidnapping noblemen and attacking William’s soldiers. These fighters were known by the Normans as the silvatici, meaning ‘wild’ or ‘from the forest’. In English, they were called ‘the green men’.

When the invaders tore down the old wooden Anglo-Saxon churches, the native stonemasons charged with rebuilding them in the Norman style hid symbols of resistance in the medieval architecture. These green men would watch the new Norman lords, these foreigners who had destroyed the ancient rights of England. One rebel was a landowner known as Hereward, based on the Isle of Ely within the marshy fenland of East Anglia. He was eventually defeated in 1071. The Green Man is still a particularly popular pub name in that part of the world.