Village of the Green Man - Pagan folk traditions and a wild man etched in stone

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]A traditional May celebration in an English village led by this jovial-looking fellow, Jack-in-the-Green, the Green Man. These archetypes have closely related roots and appear in scores of English village May fair festivities.

[00:00:15]>> [music] >> But this village also has a permanent version of the character carved in stone and afforded pride of place in the local church. This is Aubrey, the village of the wild man.

[00:00:41]There is a long-standing thread in English folklore that ties together the Green Man, the Woodwose, and the customs still seen in May celebrations. While they come from varying contexts, they all circle round to the same idea, the pull of the natural world and the sense that, however settled life becomes, something older and less controlled is never far away, the call of the wild.

[00:01:04]The Green Man is most often seen in stone. His foliate visage peering out in churches across Britain, sometimes tucked away in corners, sometimes in plain sight. But the Green Man is still mysterious. His vine-spewing face looks out, still recognized, but as an image that people do not fully agree on what he means. Some see the Green Man as a sign of growth and return, a reminder that life does not simply move forward, but comes back around, the endless cycle of nature anthropomorphized. Or is he an alchemical illusion or a progenitor of Rosicrucian mythology? His presence in religious buildings suggests he was absorbed rather than invented there, a familiar figure given a place rather than a new one created. The Woodwose is an altogether more rustic and rougher archetype. He turns up in medieval writing and art as a wild man covered in hair and sometimes leaves, living outside of society, often armed with a club, the heraldic ragged staff. He is not often as ornate as the Green Man, but as Old Basing Church illustrates, he sometimes is. The carving can be found in the church's Verney Chapel on the tomb of Sir Robert Whittingham, who was killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.

[00:02:20]Medieval ideas about the woodwose related the entity to virtues like courage, strength, strength, and aggression. But the positioning at Sir Robert's feet appears like a demonstration of the taming of the wild, the conquest of base desires, and the ascent from terrifying nature. And nature was terrifying. Our modern view of the wilderness as a beautiful and peaceful place is very recent and not at all how it would have been perceived in the Middle Ages and earlier. Therefore, the woodwose and Green Man are not as separate as they might first appear.

[00:02:52]Both figures suggest a boundary between the settled and the untamed, and both show that boundary as being thin. We are only a degree of separation from the wild, the untrammeled, the untamed. That same tension carries into May Day customs. Many are still performed in towns and villages up and down the country, even if their meaning has shifted. The Queen of the May, chosen and crowned, is an obvious sign of the season turning. She stands for youth in the brief moment when spring feels complete, a liminal time of promise and bounty to come.

[00:03:24]The obviously phallic maypole with its ribbons and circular dances brings people together in a pattern that has no clear beginning or end. Again, a circular dance around this fixed and inescapable axis point. It is perhaps easy to see in it a celebration of growth as the buds and flowers bloom, but it is also simply something people do together, repeated because it has always been repeated. Its initial meaning lost and recalibrated through layers of history and myth. The often associated art form known as Morris dancing is a practice somewhere between this idea of performance and habit. The bells, the steps, and the set patterns are carefully practiced and choreographed, yet the effect is chaotic and redolent of misrule. Some performances include figures that feel closer to older imagery, such as leaf-covered characters like Jack-in-the-Green, who clearly echoes the Green Man. And the ancient and mysterious figure of the hobby horse, or Obby Oss, is It's important to note that none of these elements line up neatly, lost to the mists of time, and it would be misleading to claim a single unbroken tradition linking them all. But what does connect them is a shared way of thinking about the natural world as something active and close at hand.

[00:04:37]Nature is a resource to be sown, plowed, and enjoyed, but also fraught with danger and uncertainty, and the unpredictability of something which is very much alive. Are these activities propitiations to that wildness that lives underneath civilization's veneer?

[00:04:53]The woodwose, the Green Man, and the customs of May all point to the same idea, that even within ordered communities there remains an awareness of something older and untamed, returning each year, whether it is fully understood or not. One thing is certain, though, and that is that Old Bray is very much a village in the shadow of the wild man. Perhaps we all are. But that's it for this video. Don't forget to like, share, and most importantly, subscribe.

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[00:05:27]Bye for now.

[00:05:36]>> [laughter]