Wynkyn de Worde Hath a Blog

Wynken de Worde Hath...Another Blog?

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 07:57:18 GMT

It's true, I now blog about Music and Culture at the Huffington Post. I may decide to mirror my HuffPo writings here at stevewinick.com, but until then, please follow me on HuffPo!

The Newfoundland-and-Saskatchewan Squid-and-Bigfoot Mummers Play and Mock Wedding.

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

For those following posts about my various performances, how about me playing Bigfoot...in a Mummers Play...with a Squid...at the Library of Congress? If you find this intriguing, please join the fun at this page!

Wynken De Worde Interviews Grammy-Winning Artists!

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:14:36 GMT

Hello, gentle readers!

One month ago, your humble scribe Wynken De Worde had the honor of conducting an on-stage interview with the Grammy-winning folk band The Carolina Chocolate Drops! Rather than write an extensive blog post on the experience, I've folded it into an article about this remarkable band and their unique brand of old-time folk, based on little-known African-American string band music. Read the article here!

Wynkyn de Worde sings in a Great Big Rock Concert

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:20:00 GMT

Years from now, my niece and nephew and once-removed cousins are apt to ask me: “Weird Uncle Steve, what’s it like to sing in a Great Big Rock Concert?”

Luckily, I will now be able to tell them, in my usual articulate manner: “It's, uh, pretty awesome.”

But I get ahead of myself. First of all, where do I get off calling the show on December 27, 2011 at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, a "Great Big Rock Concert?" It was certainly a triumph of electric folk and a watershed moment in Celtic-Andalusian Solstice observances, but a “Great Big Rock Concert?” Really?

Photo by Glyn Collinson

Okay, stay with me here. Monster bass player Rico Petruccelli and drum maestro Robbie Magruder were on the stage throughout the show, and Zan McLeod teased out screaming electric guitar solos every so often. With these dudes on a gig, whatever you do becomes a Rock Concert!

We had over four hundred people in the house…which means that (by my calculations) we played to hundreds AND hundreds of people. I call that Big! Plus, we had, at one time or another, over forty-five people on the stage during the evening. That's Big, baby!

Finally, as an interested party, I can’t say that it was "Great" myself, but I can at least refer to audience reaction. So, here goes: Michelle Erica Green of The Little Review wrote that it was “wonderful in every way.” Robert Garofalo called it "brilliant" and said we "performed magnificently." Anita Burkam called it “fantastic,” Roland M. Fry said that he and his guests “left the show in utter awe and amazement,” and Milan Pavich called it "Really, really fun...the energy was amazing." My personal favorite of all the comments came from Marty Summerour, who wrote: “It was a magical night...Steve Winick is great too.” She is rivalled for the "closest comment to my heart" by Mark Chello, who wrote (in part): "The fabulosity was, like, in the red...I was chortling like a happy toddler. It was epic. Ludic. Carnivalesque -- if carnivals had really, really good music. The harmony of the cosmos was temporarily re-established. Flabbergastingly good stuff."

"OK," I can hear you saying, "but was it Great?" Well, Andrew Teter called it a “Great concert,” Frank Cassel called it a "Great show," and Henry Lefkowitz wrote, simply: "Holy crap, it was Great!"

So there you have it folks: a Great…Big…Rock Concert!

So what the heck was it? In short, it was a collaboration of the Ocean Orchestra with singers from Washington Revels. In addition to the blokes called out above, the Ocean Orchestra is bandleader/ keyboardist/ accordion player/ songwriter Jennifer Cutting; angel-voiced singer extraordinaire/ guitarist/ whistle-player Lisa Moscatiello; fiddle wizard Robert Spates; Highland Bagpipe virtuoso Tim Carey; and, uh…me. (I sing, recite poetry, play various tinkly and shakey percussions, wear funny but impressive clothes, and, in this show, carry a big stick.) Together, we perform Celtic folk rock that Jennifer likes to call “Celtic Music for Ancient Moderns.” This particular gig was a release concert for Ocean's latest CD, Song of Solstice, which is an album of traditional and original winter music for all faith traditions.

Washington Revels, on the other hand, is an organization of people who have dedicated themselves single-mindedly to their hobby: being upstaged by diabolically cute and talented children. (They also like “reviving and celebrating cultural traditions -- music, dance, storytelling, drama and ritual -- that have bound communities together over the ages and across the globe.”) This year, Washington Revels learned songs from Spain in the time of the caliphs, when three cultures flourished – Moorish, Sephardic and Iberian. Combining that with Ocean’s repertoire, this gig was billed as “A Celtic-Andalusian Solstice Celebration.” (Now THAT’s marketing, folks!)

Since this whole Celtic-rock-band-plus-choir-plus-kids thing wasn’t complicated enough, we also had two guest musicians with Ocean (early-music woodwind player John Guillory and Celtic Harp genius Sue Richards), three guest musicians with the Revels (viol player Tina Chancey and guitarists Melissa Carter and Jake Hendren), a troupe of Morris Dancers known as the Foggy Bottom Morris Men, and a Mummers Play. (At the last minute, Jennifer decided against the live reindeer and the reenactment of Mithras slaughtering the cosmic Bull, which I now think was a good decision.)

The show opened with Ocean taking the stage, and a disembodied-voice-of-God reciting a poem that began:

“I open the door, I enter in,
I beg all favour for to win.”

As the poem went on, the speaker revealed himself by walking from the back of the hall up one of the aisles, and joining the band onstage, while reciting the lines:

“It’s Christmastime, and you shall hear
Music filled with hope and cheer.
Good songs, swift tunes and a little bit of verse;
We hope to do it better than the folks that do it worse!”

The speaker, now revealed to be none other than I, wearing an impressive Father Christmas getup and reciting verse I mostly wrote myself, finished with the lines:

“Welcome Ocean Orchestra
And Washington Revels too,
And Welcome Father Christmas,
And mostly, welcome…YOU…”

Photo by Thom DeCarlo

…and the band crashed into a thoroughly rousing set of bagpipe jigs to open the set. The band was tight and loud and brilliant; nothing beats Robert’s fiddle and Tim’s pipes propelling us through a traditional tune, while Jennifer’s organ adds its prog-rock flourishes and the rhythm guys kick out a vicious beat. (I can say this objectively, because I contributed absolutely nothing to this number…except for looking good in my costume!) Lisa followed this set with her beautiful version of “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a carol with lyrics by Christina Rossetti, music by Gustav Holst, and arrangement by Jennifer Cutting.

Betsy Miller and the Revels chorus and children then took the stage and did a magnificent job on the Christmas carol “Fum Fum Fum” and the Hebrew song “Hanukkah oh Hanukkah” from their Andalusian show. We continued with a mixed group of Oceaners and Revelers singing Jennifer’s original song “Light the Winter’s Dark,” which celebrates every religious tradition known to man, and some known only to woman. Being a Nice Jewish Boy, I usually sing the second verse, celebrating Moses, but this time I got the first verse, which is about another Nice Jewish Boy (Jesus). The other verses were sung by Lisa (Buddha), and by the Revelers Will Wurzel (Mohammed), Jane Bloodworth (Moses), and Betsy Miller (The Lady). I once coined the term “ecumaniacal” for this song, and I don’t think I’ll take it back!

The next piece was a traditional Hebrew round, “Shalom Chaverim,” which was sung in both Hebrew and Arabic. The Revels’ executive director and songleader, Greg Lewis, came to the fore to get the audience singing, and the round came out beautifully. When the harmonies were done resonating, Ocean launched into “Fall, Leaves, Fall,” Jennifer’s setting of Emily Brontë’s poem. On the Song of Solstice album, this one was sung by Annie Haslam, of the great Progressive Rock band Renaissance, but in this concert, lead vocals were by the incomparable Lisa Moscatiello, and spectacular high vocals were added by Elisabeth Myers, to duplicate Haslam’s amazing performance. We followed that with Jennifer’s hilarious original song, “Bah, Humbug,” which celebrates the age-old tradition of hating Christmas. Set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Tit Willow,” it describes all the worst parts of commercialized American holidays, up to the point where

“The dreaded day dawns and the in-laws arrive
Humbug, bah humbug, bah humbug
With their lime-jello-marshmallow-broccoli-surprise
Humbug, bah humbug, bah humbug.”

While giving this song my usual melodramatic treatment, I happened to notice three Jewish friends of mine (Riki Schneyer, Henry Lefkowitz, and Ken Roseman) sittng in a clump at the front of the hall. So when I got to the song’s final line, “I’ll be out with my Jewish friends for a movie and Chinese….” I gestured toward them with a flourish.

“Terrific,” I thought. “How clever of me!”

Sadly, my gesture was lost on the audience, because no one was looking at me; I was, in fact, being upstaged by diabolically cute and talented Revels children, who had snuck onstage to sing the refrain. "Bah, Humbug," indeed!

We ended the first set with “Green Man,” another of Jennifer’s originals, which is sort of my star turn with the band. It’s the song I sang on the Song of Solstice album, and one I’ve been doing with the band for a few years now. It should have been a no-brainer, but that night I was singing it with unusual trills and frills by John Guillory on recorder, and harmony vocals by twenty-four singers including the Revels children, so I needed to concentrate just a little. Luckily, just as I started singing, a cadre of bowler-hatted lunatics with loud bells on their ankles (otherwise known as the Foggy Bottom Morris Men) leapt up on the stage and began whacking at one another with sticks, in an impressive, energetic, and thoroughly distracting new dance choreographed by Andrew Marcus. Thanks in no small part to Rico and Robbie, the band held their end together and I held my end together, until we were all washed off the stage by the testosterone tsunami coming from the Foggs. Thus began the intermission.

I won’t be as detailed about the second half of the gig, since I actually missed a good deal of it (I had to be backstage preparing for the Mummers Play). However, I’ll say that Ocean’s highlights included Lisa and the band’s gorgeous rendition of the carol “Quel est cet odeur agréable” and their equally impressive “Time to Remember the Poor,” which teamed Lisa’s dark-tinged vocal with apocalyptic guitar solos from Zan and massed harmonies from the Revels. Revels highlights were “Tan Buen Ganadico” and “Riu Chiu Chiu,” two more gems from their Andalusian production. There was also a lovely set of solo harp tunes from our friend and guest musician, Sue Richards.

The harp solo was my cue to enter and begin the Mummers Play, about which I’ll write a separate blog post (stay tuned!) The play concluded with the mummers (who were me and a selection of Revelers) singing the Christmas carol known as “The King,” or "Joy, Health, Love, and Peace." It included my most obvious clam of the evening: it’s hard to teach an old mummer new tricks, and I forgot to sing the song “the Revels way,” which syncopates one line differently from the way I learned it. Thus, I was out-of-step briefly with the other mummers. That, as they say, is Show Biz, but I daresay few noticed! Immediately after the Mummer’s Play, Jennifer picked up her melodeon and the rhythm section kicked in behind me, and I led the hall in the traditional “Gloucestershire Wassail,” a Christmas song about white toast, brown ale, wooden bowls, bovine body parts, farmers, grain, pie, and girls (in that order).

We ended the gig with the title track of the latest Ocean album, Jennifer's original “Song of Solstice.” On the album it’s sung by John Roberts and Tony Barrand, but live it’s Steve Winick and Lisa Moscatiello…and we do a damn fine job of it, too. Once again, to make sure we could concentrate, Jennifer and Betsy arranged for us to be joined by all the guest musicians, fourteen singers from Revels, and the Morris Dancers, this time dancing an original Cotswold-style handkerchief dance by Jim Voorhees...thanks, guys! After this massive production, Tim struck up a pipe tune and we marched off the stage.

You may have noticed that no photos exist of me actually singing in this concert. This is because, let’s face it, I’m not much to look at. Also, every time I sang, photogenic children emerged to sing on the choruses, or else the Morris dancers leapt up and began their riveting antics. These goings-on distracted the photographer from the REAL action, so that there are hundreds of photos of children, thousands of photos of stick-wielding lunatics, and none of me singing. Luckily, there ARE photos of me adjusting my mic, which proves that I was there, and that they gave me a mic. (We packed so many onto the stage that it's hard to find even a recognizable photo of Zan or Robbie from the evening, so I'm counting my lucky stars!)

The whole evening went better than we could have hoped; it was not only a highlight of my performing career, but, judging from all the comments I’ve heard, a real audience-pleaser as well. All of those who performed owe thanks to Jennifer and Betsy, the principal architects of the evening, as well as to the extremely professional and talented staff of the Birchmere; their sound guys were unbelievable given the complicated nature of the show. I'm also very grateful to all the musicians and dancers, who made the evening such an unforgettable one. Thanks to the Birchmere also for photographing the event and sharing the pictures on facebook--all the photos in this post, except for those credited to others, are from the Birchmere.

For posterity (or perhaps posteriority), here is the lineup of the evening:

Ocean Orchestra:
Jennifer Cutting, director, accordions & keyboards
Lisa Moscatiello, vocals, guitar, whistle
Zan McLeod, guitars, bouzouki, mandolin
Bob Spates, fiddle
Tim Carey, Highland bagpipes
Stephen Winick, vocals, shaker
Rico Petruccelli, bass
Robbie Magruder, drums

Ocean Guests:
Sue Richards, Celtic harp
John Guillory, recorders

Revels Adults and Teens:
Jane Bloodworth
Glyn Collinson
Jim Eustice
Helen Fields
Nicole Gianuca
Peg Gianuca
Greg Lewis
Elizabeth Fulford Miller
Elisabeth Myers
Celia Murphy
Jason Noone
Peter Noone
Guenevere Spilsbury
Will Wurzel

Diabolically Cute and Talented Revels Children:
Elena Bachman
Abby Ehrenstein
Anna Grace Hosh
Emelie Jarquin Manegold
Sonia Krishan
Aiden Mattke
Madeline Merrill
Kirsten Wheeler
Khaya Imani Yankey

Revels Musicians:
Tina Chancey, fiddle
Melissa Carter, guitar
Jake Hendren, guitar

Foggy Bottom Morris Men:
Andrew Marcus, Foreman
Alan Peel, Squire
Jim Besser, musician
Nathaniel Brown
Alex Dennis
Meyer Kachel
Mike Livingston
Judson McIntire
Hal Rogoff
Rodger Sunderland

Revels Leaders:
Roberta Gasbarre, artistic director
Elizabeth Fulford Miller, music director
Greg Lewis, executive director
Jenni Swanson Voorhees & Kat Toton, children’s directors
Emilie Moore, children’s stage manager

My Season of Mumming

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:35:00 GMT

This year I once again adapted, directed, and performed in my office's Christmas Mummers play. Mumming, or disguising oneself, going door to door, and performing in neighbors' homes and in public places, is a very old and widespread custom in Europe, going back at least to the middle ages. However, the type of play we call a Mummers Play today may not go back any further than the eighteenth century, since earlier references to "mumming" either are vague about the exact type of performance, or are clearly a different kind of play.

Modern Mummers Plays typically involve a fight between two champions, one of whom is killed. A doctor then revives the dead hero. In their death-and-resurrection theme, they clearly resonate not only with Christian beliefs, but also with earlier pagan beliefs, leading some to theorize that they are vestiges of pre-Christian ceremony. My own feeling is that they reflect vesitges of pre-Christian thought within Christianity itself, making them pagan in flavor but Christian in origin. Plays of this type are widespread throughout the English-speaking world, including Britain, Ireland, Newfoundland and other parts of Canada, Kentucky, and St. Kitts and Nevis.

The American Folklife Center, where I work, is lucky to have a collection particularly rich in Mummers Play texts, the James Madison Carpenter Collection. During his fieldwork in Britain in the 1930s, Caprenter collected over five hundred texts of folk plays. In 2009, it occurred to Folklife Specialist Jennifer Cutting to adapt a new version of the Mummers Play from the Carpenter materials. She enlisted my aid, and the two of us produced the first script in that year. The following year, we changed it; since one of our actors happens to be from St. Kitts and Nevis, where an unusual version of the Mummers Play has been documented, I added her character, the dragon, from a Caribbean version. We also began to add topical references, which is a traditional aspect of Mummers Play performances. Ours centered around our lives as Library of Congress employees. This year, we continued that tradition, by adding more references to life in the Library.

In our version of the mummer's play, the action is introduced by the clown "Hind-Before," who appears wearing all his clothes backwards. Hind-Before also reverses some elements of his speech, which leads to comical statements such as:

She asked me to have a bite of her ale and a glass of her bread and cheese.
I said "Yes, thanks," but I meant "No, please!"

Hind-Before introduces Father Christmas, who in addition to calling for room, begins to reference current events within the Library this year, particularly the reduction in staff mandated by Congress's budget, which so far has taken the form of buyouts that resulted in many retirements. The whole year involved a lot of people trying to find out if they qualified for a buyout, and then a fair number actually retiring. We made reference to this in Father Christmas's lines:

Two thousand years and eleven is a very great age, I fear,
But I don't qualify for a buyout, so I'll work for another year!

We continue to emphasize the buyouts in the ensuing scene: Father Christmas requests a champion, calling out the name of a retired LC employee. When told by the rest of the mummers that his proposed champion has retired, he tries a number of other names, to find they have all retired. In desperation, he states:

Very well, then, very well
If we can't find a champion in the Library, we'll have to go to...

Before he can say "Hell," he is interrupted by the next character:

In comes I, Beelzebub
Over me shoulder I carries a club!

Beelzebub introduces the dragon, who threatens the room with her impressive claws and jaws, asking if there is anyone willing to fight her. Her challenge is accepted by the next character, St. George. The two exchange fighting words, during which the dragon threatens:

Marrow from your bones I'll squeeze
and suck your blood out by degrees!

The two fight, and St. George is victorious. Father Christmas and Beelzebub then have an exchange, in which Beelzebub reveals he has more champions. He calls on Captain Thunderbolt, a pirate who has spent time on Amelia Island (where our director, Peggy Bulger, is moving after her retirement in two weeks). Thunderbolt also introduces the recurring theme of Florida alligators:

Down in Florida, they allege I've done some crimes,
So I denied the allegations, and wrestled the alligators, not once, but many times!

Captain Tunderbolt and St. George exchange traditional fighting words, with St. George admonishing:

Mind your eyes and guard your blows
Or else I'll stab you through the nose!

The two fight, and St. George is slain. Beelzebub attempts to drag St. George off to hell, but Father Christmas calls instead for a doctor. The doctor arrives, and after making more references to Peggy's impending retirement to Florida, boasts that she can cure anything:

Low TSP, Momentum Wheezes, Continuing Resolution Freezes
And all other vandorious diseases

(The diseases she speaks of are all government-employee references: TSP is our retirement savings plan, and Momentum the software that controls our budget. Continuing Resolutions are the legislative method of funding the government at a previous year's level until a budget can be passed, which typically results in spending freezes.)

The doctor cures first St. George, and then the Dragon, making the other characters cheer with amazement. Hind-Before opines that

They're much as they were at the start of the play
So nothing has happened this long winter's day!

Hind-Before then introduces Jack Funny, but the clown who enters denies being Jack Funny:

Jack Funny's a fool, Jack Funny's a pest
My name is Clever Legs, a man of great request!

Clever legs plays "Lilliburlero" on the accordion, and the three fighters and the doctor dance to the tune. When the dance is over, Father Christmas sings "The Gloucestershire Wassail," with everyone joining in on choruses, to end the play.

We performed the play three times this year. First, we did it at our office holiday party, which doubled as a retirement party for Peggy. Then, we "invaded" the holiday party of the Associate Librarian for Library Services and performed it there. The audience included the Associate Librarian, Deanna Marcum, and the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington. This is the first time Dr. Billington has seen our play, and he was an excellent sport, even when Clever Legs mussed up his hair! Our third performance was In the Library's magnificent Great Hall, right in front of its massive, beautifully decorated Christmas Tree.

Although the office party season is over, my season as a mummer is not yet completed. December 17, I will be performing some of my Father Christmas speeches as "Captain Christmas," emcee of the "Season of the Sailor" concert featuring Bob Zentz and Calico Jack. (December 17, 7:30 pm, City of Takoma Park - Recreation, 7500 Maple Ave, Takoma Park, MD.) The concert is free, but donations are accepted...they'll all go to pay Bob's travel expenses, since the Calicos and I all live in Takoma Park.

Then comes the big show, which I'll write more about later: on December 27th, I will direct and perform a boisterous Mummers Play as part of the Song of Solstice release concert at the Birchmere! I'd love to see you there!

UPDATE 1: I was hurrying to get this post out in time for the December 17 concert, but I should have given credit to my fellow actors! Big thanks to Valda Morris as the Dragon, Joanna Russo as Captain Thunderbolt, David Quick as Beelzebub, Jennifer Cutting as Clever Legs, Todd Harvey as St. George, Stephanie A. Hall as Hind-Before, and Theadocia Austen as the Doctor. Also, Stephanie gets special mention as an amazing tailor (and "tailer"), for having designed and made our awesome dragon costume!

UPDATE 2: I'll be doing Captain Christmas one more time this season, December 18, 7:30 p.m., Annapolis Maritime Museum, with Bob Zentz and Calico Jack.

Thoughts on the Green Man 4: The Green Man and Calendar Customs

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:25:00 GMT

The Green Man and Calendar Customs From his earliest appearances among the characters of pageants, shows, and St. George’s Day observances, the Green Man has been associated with calendar customs, especially those of springtime. Yet, one of Richard Hayman’s specific claims in "The Ballad of the Green Man" is that the Green Man is “the latest accretion to the long cast of characters that have featured in annual May celebrations, like Robin Hood, Jack-in-the-Green, May Queens and Lords of Misrule.” He thus makes the suggestion that such connections are quite new, “invented traditions,” rather than genuinely old ones. It is therefore worthwhile to examine the evidence for a connection between the Green Man and calendar customs of the springtime, including May Day. In doing so, we quickly find that they extend back in time much further than Hayman suggests. We may begin by considering the pageant held for the visit of Prince Henry to Chester in 1610, described in part 2 of this post. We know there were Green Men present; but what are we to make of the date? April 23 is St. George’s Day. According to Simpson and Roud (p. 308) this was a major holiday in England since 1222. The observance of the day in 1610 was not only to celebrate the royal visit but also to observe the holiday; this is clear in contemporary references to it, which often mention St. George’s Day, as well as by the fact that it became an annual observance even when there was no royal visit. Interestingly, the connection of the festivities to the tradition of St. George’s Day was also made explicit in the show itself, specifically in the part the Green Men played. In addition to clearing the way, they served as the victims of the traditional St. George’s Day dragon: “an artificiall Dragon, very lively to behold, pursuing the Savages entring their Denne, casting Fire from his mouth, which afterwards was slaine, to the great pleasure of the spectators, bleeding, fainting, and staggering, as though hee endured a feeling paine, even at the last gaspe, and farewell.” (Quoted in John Nichols's The progresses, processions, and magnificent festivities, of King James the First, his royal consort, family, and court, Volume 2 [1828]) Centerwall states that it is tempting to see this dragon-combat as a ritual battle between summer and winter, but that the fact that it is mentioned in Amorye’s post-event description but not his pre-event description “makes clear that [the Green Men’s] original function was to do the usual whiffler work, until Amerie had the last-minute inspiration to make use of them in a crowd-pleasing skit.” This conclusion seems unlikely given the evidence; in the first place, the pre-event description, which Centerwall calls “the actual preparatory notes for the Chester triumph,” does not appear to have been a set of preparatory notes at all. Centerwall seems only to have read the part of the manuscript quoted by Larwood and Hotten, but in its full form (as quoted in T.F. Thistelton Dyer’s British Popular Customs, Present and Past) the manuscript does not much resemble “preparatory notes.” It begins: The manner of the showe, that is, if God spare life and health, shall be seene by all the behoulders upon St. George's Day next, being the 23rd April, 1610, and the same with more addytions to continue, being for the kyng s crowne and dignitie, and the homage to the Kyng and Prynce, with that noble victor St. George, to be continued for ever. —God save the Kyng. It ends: When all is done, then judge what you have seen, and so speak on your mynd, as you fynd the— "Actor for the presente " Robert Amorye." "Amor is love, and Amorye is his name That did begin this pomp and princelye game; The charge is great to him that all begun, Who now is satisfied to see all so well done." A beginning and ending like this hardly seem necessary if the document is a set of preparatory notes; obviously, it was published, and for the benefit of the very people who were expected to attend the event: they are invited to tell Amorye whether the event lived up to the description. It therefore appears to be an advertisement, perhaps intended to be read aloud at a previous civic event. Moreover, the document makes clear in two places that it is not describing everything that will happen: the “more addytions to continue” quoted above, and, toward the end of the document when the horse racing and general merriment are described, “gent shall be runne for by thirr horses, for the two bells on a double staffe and the cup to be runne for at the rynge in some place by Gent and with a greater mater of the showe by armes, and shott, and with more than 1 can recite” (emphasis mine). In other words, this document was meant to describe only some of the things that would happen, not all of them. Given this, it seems likely that Centerwall overreaches when he claims the dragon-combat is a “last minute” addition, or merely a “crowd-pleasing skit.” A fight with a dragon was for many people a defining feature of St. George’s Day festivities. Dragon effigies had been part of English St. George’s Day processions since at least 1408 (Simpson and Roud 331), and one was recorded at Chester as early as 1564 (Simpson and Roud 98). There is no reason to suppose that the dragon at Chester in 1610, including his fight with the Green Men, wasn’t always part of the plan, just a part that went unmentioned in the advertisement. It even seems possible that, as a particularly spectacular part of the show, it was left out of the advertisement on purpose, to increase the element of surprise. The Green Men being included in the dragon-combat scene, the element of the procession most strongly associated with St. George's Day in particular, makes them absolutely an element in the seasonal part of the day’s program. The seasonal importance of the Green Men’s appearance at St. George’s Day provides a spectacular example of the way scholars with different approaches to the Green Man talk past one another. Centerwall, as we have seen, dismisses the notion of a seasonal significance to the Green Men’s activities. He notes that the date of the 1610 event is St. George’s Day, but completely fails to note that this date has any seasonal significance! On the other side of this gulf stands Gary Varner, who has written an article about the connections between St. George and the Green Man, which appeared in his book The Mythic Forest, the Green Man and the Spirit of Nature, and subsequently online. Varner correctly portrays St. George’s Day as an important springtime holiday with many seasonal elements. Curiously, however, despite his great interest in the precise topic of the Green Man and St. George’s Day, he does not mention the Green Men’s appearance at St. George’s Day in Chester in 1610! (More precisely, although Varner quotes from Centerwall one of Robert Amorye’s descriptions of the event, he seems unaware that it occurred on St. George's Day.) It is as though Varner leaps past evidence that would have supported his case, to get to the profound meaning more quickly, while Centerwall feels safer picking at the minutiae of evidence without giving its meaning much consideration. As a result, neither of them makes this important connection: the Green Man is associated with springtime calendar customs as early as 1610. Although not much celebrated in England since the seventeenth century, according to Simpson and Roud (p. 308), St. George’s Day was an important springtime festival celebrated with parades, horse-races, jousting, and effigy dragons. When it ceased to be much celebrated in Britain, “popular customs were…transferred to warmer dates such as May Day….” Indeed, St. George’s Day falls just a week before May Day. Just as some of the same traditions are shared among Halloween, All Saint’s Day, All Soul’s Day, and Guy Fawkes Day, so St. George’s Day and May Day have traditionally borrowed customs back and forth. In countries other than England, St. George’s Day is an important springtime holiday serving many of the functions of English May Day. As the Estonian folklorist Mall Hiiemäe has noted, “the Greek form Georgius means a ploughman, a cultivator of land. And when trying to divine the ancient predecessor of the holiday, one should better consider such tradition that is connected with spring-time vegetation.” Hiiemäe also notes “such Russian proverbs as George will bring spring and There is no spring without George.” Moreover, in countries where St. George’s Day is still celebrated, in those years when it falls too close to Easter, the celebration is typically postponed until May 1 or May 2. What all this shows is that the Green Men in Chester in 1610 were participating in an annual seasonal festivity of the springtime, a festival related to May Day, with many of May Day’s meanings, and only a week before May Day. With that in mind, the association of Green Men with May Day begins to seem older than modern times. This feeling is strengthened by a further seventeenth-century reference. In Shirley’s Honoria and Mammon (1652), allusion is clearly made to the whifflers of the London Mayor’s Feast, who, as we have seen, were known as “Green Men” from at least 1578 to 1687. [1] But this time, Shirley refers to them as “Green Robin Hoods.” Robin Hood was famously associated with May celebrations during the period in question, so this again shows a connection in people’s minds between the Green Man and characters associated with Maytime in the seventeenth century. This seems to have continued into the following century. The famous Jack-in-the-Green celebrations in London and elsewhere, for example, occurred at May time. For many years, it was common knowledge that the Jack-in-the-Green was an aspect of the pageant Green Man. More recently, folklorist Roy Judge has dismissed that idea, stating that the similarity of the two traditions has value as a poetic insight, but that we cannot claim a historical connection, since there is no evidence showing a link between the Green Man and the Jack-in-the-Green until very recent times. He points out that the Jack-in-the-Green tradition seems to have been started by chimney-sweeps in the late eighteenth century, and claims that “E.K. Chambers seems to have been responsible for adding [the Green Man] to the range of interpretations [of the Jack-in-the-Green],” citing Chambers’s book of 1903. In fact, however, there are two fairly clear pieces of evidence that people saw and understood the connection between these traditions in the early 19th century. Since the phrase “Jack-in-the-Green,” and the peculiar character it refers to do not show up in historical sources until 1795, this means that we find a connection between the two traditions expressed almost as soon as the Jack-in-the-Green tradition emerges, by people who were alive when it did emerge. Unfortunately, Judge dismisses one piece of evidence on dubious grounds, and ignores the other. The first piece of evidence is an engraving of the Jack-in-the-Green, published in 1832 in William Henry Harrison’s book The Humorist. The engraving bears the caption “The Green Man.” This Judge dismisses, on the grounds that many of the same book’s other captions are bad puns rather than real descriptions. So, for example, a walking-stick that appears to be falling over is labeled “Falstaff,” and a woman whose body is elongated is captioned “Missi-Longhi.” However, Judge misses the fact that some captions in the book aren’t puns. So, for example, the book contains the narrative poem “The Two Adjutants” in which a young lady has both a suitor who is an Adjutant in the army and an adjutant bird, a situation which leads to amusing misunderstandings. As an illustration of the story, there is a picture of the woman, her soldier, and her bird, captioned “The Two Adjutants.” A picture of three soldiers in Napoleonic-era uniforms, apparently in their cups, is captioned “Waterloo Veterans.” A picture of a skinny knight approaching a windmill that appears to him to be dressed like a giant is labeled “Don Quixote.” These all appear to be “straight” captions describing what is pictured in the illustrations, not puns or jokes of any kind. Given that the book has some captions that are obvious bad puns and others that are merely descriptions of the pictures, one would have to explain how the caption “The Green Man” is a bad pun to put it in the former category. Judge correctly states that the Jack-in-the-Green illustration is associated with a poem called “The Balloon of the Famed Mr. Green”; this, however, does not make it a pun. Furthermore, the lines of that poem that immediately precede the illustration are the following: Twas served up in a tent or pavilion as gay As Jack-in-the-green upon chimney sweep's day The illustration seems merely to be a straight “explanation” of those lines for anyone who might not have seen a Jack-in-the-green. In other words, it is a straight caption, in which the editor is equating the Jack-in-the-green with the Green Man. The other piece of evidence on this point, which Judge ignores, is earlier still: Robert Southey’s letter to his daughter of May 4, 1820, in which he described the Jack-in-the-green custom. Southey wrote: “They have generally a green man in company who is also called Jack in the Bush because he is in the middle of a green bush which covers him all over head and all so that you can see nothing but his feet and he goes dancing with the rest.” Although Judge knows of this letter, and correctly points out that Southey is idiosyncratic in calling the figure “Jack in the Bush” rather than “Jack in the green,” he ignores the fact that Southey tells his daughter the figure is “a green man.” It seems from this that Southey saw a connection between “the green man” and “Jack in the green” in 1820, and that Harrison did so in 1832. To claim that this connection dates from E.K. Chambers is therefore erroneous; people contemporary with the emergence of the Jack-in-the-green custom (Southey was born in 1774, Harrison in about 1795) perceived that the Jack was a form of Green Man, and expressed this perception clearly. Judge’s central point, that the Jack-in-the-green cannot be assumed to be a survival of pre-Christian tree worship, is of course still valid, but its connection to earlier forms of pageantry seems more likely than Judge is willing to allow. Taken together, these two facts (that a character called “Green Man” was associated with Maytime festivals 150 years previous to the emergence of the similar Maytime character Jack-in-the-green, and that some people contemporary with the invention of the Jack-in-the-green called it a “Green Man”) strongly suggest that there was still cultural knowledge of the Green Man tradition available to ordinary English people, and that the Jack-in-the-green was modeled to some degree on that tradition. Thus, the decision of the chimney-sweeps to celebrate May by dressing in green leaves does not appear to be random, but rather appears to be based on the tradition of the Green Man. We also find a single interesting reference from America, though from a strictly Anglo-American perspective. In 1837, in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” a short story concerning Massachusetts Bay colonists observing seasonal May Day rituals in the seventeenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne has the priest intone: “Up with your nimble spirits, ye morrice-dancers, green men and glee-maidens….” Hawthorne mentions as his source for the description of the May Day festivities “Strutt's Book of English Sports and Pastimes,” but that book does not in fact associate the Green Man with May Day; Hawthorne must have gotten the association elsewhere. This corroborates the evidence from Harrison and Southey: in the early 19th Century, people apparently associated the Green Man with May Day. Another interesting facet of the Green Man is his connection with the annual Mayor’s Pageants in sixteenth-century London. The very first reference to the character comes from 1578, and specifically calls them "greene men at the mayor's feast." Although this celebration did not occur in May, it nevertheless occurred at a time of year generally marked by seasonal celebrations: October 29th, or two days before Halloween. If one were tempted to suggest a Frazerian meaning for the Green Man, his being associated with both the transition from April to May and from October to November, Saint George’s and All Hallows, could not be more apt; the battles between seasons described by Frazer and others typically occur six months apart at important feast days such as these. More to the point, it is generally accepted that the Lord Mayor’s shows were originally adapted from two basic sources, one of which was midsummer pageantry. As Withington notes, “in the middle of the sixteenth century, the pageants which had been connected with the Midsummer Show were absorbed into the civic procession [of the Lord Mayor’s Show].” It is at just this time, (1553) that the leafy, club-bearing Green Men first appear in the records of the Lord Mayor’s Show. Given that Shirley associates the Green Men with Robin Hood in 1652, and that elsewhere they are associated with St. George’s Day, it makes good sense to speculate that they, like many other elements, were imported to the Mayor’s Pageant from midsummer festivities. Finally, characters and activities associated with one seasonal holiday are frequently associated with more than one: St. George and Robin Hood, both associated as we have seen with the period around May Day, have also come to be important characters in many Christmas mumming plays; caroling door to door occurs at Christmas, May Day and All Soul’s Day; wren-hunting occurs at Christmastime or the Winter Solstice in Britain and Ireland, but six months away at St. John the Baptist’s Day, or the Summer Solstice, in France. Given that in the preponderance of his appearances he is associated with either Maytime or Halloween, it seems very likely that the Green Man had just such a general association with seasonal festivity. (If we allow related traditions from the Continent to be discussed, we find other seasonal associations for the Green Man, or at least for a character who exactly resembles him. In particular, a detail of a painting by Brueghel the Elder, and a subsequent woodcut by the same artist, show what is very clearly a leaf-clad, green-colored wild man with a big black beard and a club in a seasonal play at Carnival time, dated to the mid-sixteenth century.) Clearly, there are many associations of May Day in particular, and seasonal observances in general, with the Green Man. They date back to the emergence of the phrase “Green Man” and to the first descriptions of the club-bearing, leaf-covered wild man that the phrase originally referred to, in the middle of the sixteenth century. Given this, it’s clear that the Green Man is no recent addition to such calendar customs, but a longstanding participant in seasonal celebrations, especially those of Springtime. Hayman, in claiming that the Green Man is a recent accretion to this tradition, may mean the phrase “Green Man” in the limited sense of “foliate head,” although he is unclear on this point. In any case, since by the fifteenth century the web of associations around the Green Man also included the foliate head [See Part ii of this post], it seems that his statement about the Green Man being the “latest accretion” to Maytime customs may be off by several centuries at least. Notes [1] We know these are the characters being referred to for three reasons: the date is given as “the next day after Simon and Jude,” which is the date of the Mayor’s pageant; the location is given as Westminster, one of the pageant’s locations; and the description is given as men with fiery clubs—in other words, what are described as “Green Men” in 1578, 1594, 1602, 1610, etc. References Note: Many of the references are in the text above in the form of links to the relevant books and articles in their online homes. The references below are to those items that cannot be found online without a subscription. Judge, Roy (1979). The Jack in the Green, a May Day Custom. D S Brewer. Simpson, Jacquline, and Steve Roud (2000) Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press.

Thoughts on the Green Man 3: The Green Man and the Foliate Head

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:50:00 GMT

The Green Man and the Foliate Head In Part 2, I showed that the idea of a man covered with leaves, as well as the name for that man, “Green Man,” existed for a long time, in the same cultural milieux as the carved foliate faces on churches. However, it is not clear that these two artistic traditions were related. Although scholars like Lady Raglan in the early twentieth century, and Terri Winding in the early twenty-first, identify the Green Man with a variety of practices going back to pre-Christian times, in fact we can only trace the name “Green Man,” as applied to such a figure, back to the sixteenth century. The foliate faces were, for the most part, older than this; according to Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud's Oxford Dicitonary of English Folklore, they exist as decorations on manuscripts as early as the tenth century, and as carvings in English churches as early as the twelfth. While it is impossible to say whether people commonly connected the two prior to the twentieth century, we can certainly say that people sometimes connected the two, long before Raglan did so. In his article “The Name of the Green Man,” published in the journal Folklore, Brandon S. Centerwall showed three examples of this connection. I will recap them briefly, and add two more examples. Probably the weakest of Centerwall’s examples comes from the spandrel of a choir stall in Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire. According to Centerwall, it was carved by William Lyngwode in 1308. It shows a figure with a sword in one hand and small shield in the other, whose head is a classic foliate face disgorging leaves. Centerwall argues that in this carving, the ‘Green Man’ of church architecture and what he calls the “combatant Green Man” (i.e. the club-bearing, leaf-wearing wild man of the pageants) are a single figure. He goes on to note the principal weakness of this example, however: “Unlike the later representations, this one is dressed in conventional clothing and carries a sword and buckler.” In other words, it is more a man-at-arms than anything resembling the Green Man of the sixteenth century. Fortunately, his two other examples are stronger. One comes from Germany, which had a tradition similar to the English Green Man, and which in some regions called that figure Der Grune Mann, “The Green Man.” It is a mid-fifteenth century engraving by the Master of the Nuremburg Passion, showing a leaf-clad wild man defending his woman and child from a lion, using a club and a shield. The shield is fashioned in the shape of a foliate head. Here, then, we have both types of Green Man closely juxtaposed. Centerwall’s third example is a bench-end from the Church of the Holy Ghost in Crowcombe, Somerset, which was carved in 1534. It shows two wild man figures, brandishing clubs, emerging from what look like seed-pods, which in turn emerge from the ears of a foliate head. The leaves encircling the wild men’s waists are clearly the same type of leaves that cover the top of the foliate head from which they spring. It is interesting to compare these figures with the first description of the Green Men of the London Mayor’s Pageant, which dates to just a few years later: “ij grett wodyn, [armed] with ij grett clubes all in grene, and with skwybes borning, with gret berds and syd here, and ij targets….” In other words, they are two wild men with clubs, squibs, beards, side whiskers, and small shields. Although the Crowcombe figures do not have burning squibs, they are otherwise rather exact representations of the Lord Mayor’s wodyn, which may already have been called Green Men, and which were certainly so called within a few years. The fact that they emerge directly from the foliate head in this carving, at almost the same time that the name “Green Man” begins to be applied to them, is very suggestive, and to Centerwall is the clinching evidence that the foliate head and Green Man are one and the same. We may be more cautious with Centerwall’s evidence, and note only that people in the sixteenth century, fifteenth century, and possibly the thirteenth century, clearly associated the Green Man with the foliate head. The fourth example of a direct association between the foliate head of church architecture and the wild man or Green Man occurs in a misericorde originally from Whalley Abbey, which is now in St. Mary’s Church, Whalley, Lancashire. It was carved between 1418 and 1434, and shows a club-bearing wild man hovering over a lady’s shoulder. From the corners of the scene grow two vines, which terminate in foliate heads. The points on the leaves of the foliate heads are carved to closely resemble the spikes of the wild man’s beard and hair. The carving bears a motto in the form of a proverb: “Penses molt et p[ar]les pou (think much and speak little),” although there is seemingly little connection between this proverb and the scene illustrated in the carving. The fifth example of an association between the foliate head and the wild man/green man comes from the title page of the only known original edition of The Cobler’s Prophesie (1594), which contains the second known occurrence of the term “Green Man” in English. The page is marked by two interesting decorations. At the top of the page is a pair of wild men, facing away from one another and surrounded by leaves and flowers. From the mouth of each wild man issues a vine, which grows to bear a puffy leaf. From the hairy legs of each wild man grows another vine, which curls around and bears leaves and flowers. These figures are wild men that disgorge vines and sprout leaves and flowers—in other words, a creature halfway between the wild man and the foliate head. In the center of the page is a figure clearly derived from the disgorging foliate head, but which seems to sprout not only leaves, but also architectural elements. Taken together, the two images combine the wild man, the foliate head, and architecture, in a sixteenth-century book that also refers to the Green Man by name. Once again, this is very suggestive of a conscious link between the figure then known as “Green Man” and the foliate head in architecture. As with any body of evidence that covers a wide sweep of history and geography, these occasions on which the Green Man/wild man was pictured alongside the foliate head may be dismissed as individual associations of the two characters with no historical connection to one another. Centerwall takes the opposite tack, and concludes that the Green Man/wild man and the foliate head were considered to be one and the same figure. I think both positions are rather extreme given the evidence. As I commented in part 2, Lady Raglan’s equation of the Green Man with the foliate head was “a reasonable analogy between similar figures from traditional art.” The similarity in question was a combination of greenness or leafiness with humanity, a combination which imbues both the Green Man and the foliate head with a similar range of traditional meanings. This would naturally tend to make people associate the two figures, as each of the artists in question did in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and as Raglan did in modern times. One of those traditional meanings seems to have been that humanity, like vegetation, must follow and adapt to the changing seasons. It gave rise to a connection between the Green Man and calendar customs, which will be explored in the next part. References The references are in the text above in the form of links to the relevant books and articles in their online homes.

Thoughts on the Green Man 2: What Was the Green Man?

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Part 2: What Was the Green Man? So what DID the term “Green Man” refer to before 1930, and how did the term come down to modern times, to Lady Raglan’s day and beyond? To answer this, we can rely partly on Brandon Centerwall’s “The Name of the Green Man,” a crucial article that is almost never cited by writers such as Hayman, who wish to downplay the deep history of the Green Man. We will also rely on a source that is even more seldom consulted on the matter (which is curious indeed): the Oxford English Dictionary. Both provide a wealth of quotations from early sources that elucidate what a Green Man was. Finally, we’ll rely on my own historical and lexicographical research, which has turned up a number of references unknown to Centerwall or the editors of the OED, and which goes beyond those sources to show that this understanding of the Green Man persisted to Lady Raglan’s day. It is clear from historical evidence that by the sixteenth century, the term “Green Man” signified a man covered in leaves, who was part of a parade, pageant, or other ritual enactment. Often the Green Man was a whiffler, who carried a club made of fireworks in order to clear crowds out of a space so that a play could be performed or a parade or procession could pass. The first clear reference to these figures that uses the name “Green Man” comes from 1578, in George Whetstone's play, The Second Parte of the Famous Historie of Promos and Cassandra: Actus. I. Scena. 6. Phallax, Two men, apparrelled, lyke greene men at the Mayors feast, with clubbes of fyre worke. Phal. This geare fadgeth now, that these fellowes peare, Friendes where weight you? First. In Jesus Street to keepe a passadge cleare, That the King and his trayne, may passe with ease. From this brief scene, we learn that Green Men were already well-established figures in the local pageantry of the time, so much so that one can simply state in a stage direction that characters should be “dressed like Green Men at the Mayor’s feast.” (Unfortunately, this also leaves the playwright at liberty not to describe the Green Men very well, since everyone apparently knew what they looked like!) The fact that Green Men carried fireworks is important to the second known reference to them, from 1594, when Raph Cobler, the main character in the play The Cobler’s Prophecy by Robert Wilson, prudently promises to give the Green Men a wide berth so as to avoid his clothes catching fire: “Comes there a Pageant by, Ile stand out of the greene mens way for burning my vestment…" The fiery element is also stressed in an account book of 1617, discovered and published by John Heath in an appendix to Some account of the Worshipful company of grocers of the city of London (1829); the book records a gratuity payment for the Green Man at a pageant, under the heading “The Foist and other Fire Work”: “Payde and given in benevolence to the fierman or greeneman over and about his agreement the some of 0 11 0” [i.e. the sum of eleven shillings]. (p.329) Sadly, these references, too, are unhelpful in determining just what manner of creature the Green Man was. Luckily, a fairly thorough seventeenth-century description of Green Men survives in two accounts of a Royal Entertainment staged at Chester for the visit of Prince Henry, the heir apparent to James I, on April 23, 1610. According to British Popular Customs, Present and Past (1900) by Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer, this event was the first of what became an annual St. George’s Day observance for the city, but was staged by a private individual, Robert Amorye (an ironmonger and former sheriff of Chester), rather than by the Mayor or the town. The Green Men were described, without being called “Green Men,” in a preview of the event prepared by Amorye ahead of time: “ii men in greene leaves set with work upon their other habet with black heare & black beards very owgly to behould, and garlands upon their heads with great clubs in their hands with fireworks to scatter abroad to maintaine way for the rest of the show (Harl. MS. No. 2150, fol. 356; quoted by Centerwall) They were described again in Amorye’s account of the event after the fact, this time specifically called “Greene-men”: “Two disguised, called Greene-men, their habit Embroydred and Stitch'd on with Ivie-leaves with blacke-side, having hanging to their shoulders, a huge black shaggie Hayre, Savage-like, with Ivie Garlands upon their heads, bearing Herculian Clubbes in their hands…” (Quoted in Centerwall.) Taken together, these two descriptions give a good sense of what the Green Man was and what he looked like. They also drive home the fact that while sometimes people used the phrase “Green Man” to describe these characters, at other times the same people called them something else. Given this tendency, several scholars including Robert Withington, in English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (1918), have noted that an earlier description from a London Mayor’s Feast exactly resembles the Green Man as described in 1610: “ij grett wodyn, [armed] with ij grett clubes all in grene, and with skwybes borning, with gret berds and syd here, and ij targets a-pon ther bake,” who appeared at the 1553 Mayor’s Pageant in London. These descriptions together reveal what Green Men were like: savages or wodyn, dressed in green and particularly in leaves, with shaggy hair and beards, ivy-garlands on their heads, big clubs in their hands, and squibs or firecrackers, with which they scattered crowds and maintained the “way,” i.e. the open path, for the rest of the procession. (They also had a feature described in one place as “black-side” and another as “side here,” which some scholars take to be a description what were later called “side-whiskers,” but which now on a bearded man would be considered part of the beard.) The Green Men so described were obviously familiar figures in England throughout the seventeenth century. Withington notes the appearance of the phrase "Green Men" in contemporary descriptions of pageants from 1602, 1629, 1635, 1686, and 1687, in addition to the references above, from 1553, 1578, 1594, and 1610. And those do not exhaust the seventeenth-century evidence. In 1638, John Kirke mentions Green Men in The Seven Champions of Christendom, a play that contributed significantly to many of the Christmas mummers’ plays performed in Britain and Ireland: "Have you any squibs in your Country? any Green-men in your shows ...?" (Kirke 1638, sig. H2). In 1652, in a play by James Shirley called “Honoria and Mammon,” the character of Maslin refers to the Green Men at the London Mayor’s pageant in these words: “I am not afear’d of your green Robin Hoods that fright with fiery club your pitiful spectators…” (This is the earliest example I have found of an association being made between the Green Man and Robin Hood.) Several seventeenth-century references are instructive in showing that “Green Men,” “wild men,” and “savages” were understood interchangeably at the time. Matthew Taubman in his Lord Mayor's Pageant, London's Yearly Jubilee, wrote: "In the front of all before these, twenty Savages or Green Men, with Squibs and Fire-works, to sweep the Streets, and keep off the Crowd" (Taubman 1686, 12- 13; quoted in Centerwall). One of Amorye’s descriptions of Green Men called them simply “savage-like,” and the 1553 reference, while not calling them “Green Men,” describes exactly the same figures and calls them wodyn, a Middle English name for wild men or savages. The connection of Green Men and savages was also made by others in the seventeenth century, particularly those discussing inn or tavern signs, on which the same figure that was earlier known as the Green Man was coming to be known as the Wild Man by the later part of the century. John Aubrey, in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, 1686-87, includes a description of “The Signe of the Wild Man” in which they describe one wild man as “a kind of Hercules with a green club and green leaves about his pudenda and head, as we use to paint the signe of the greene man.” An undated quotation by John Bagford (1651-1716) makes the same point, that the sign of the Green Man was coming to be known as the sign of the wild man instead, and that only professional sign-makers still used the older term “Green Man”: “They are called woudmen, or wildmen, thou' at thes day we in ye signe [trade] call them Green Men, couered with grene boues: and are used for singes by stiflers of strong watters ... and a fit emblem for those that use that intosticating licker which berefts them of their sennes (Quoted by Larwood and Hotten in The History of Signboards,1866, 367)." The Bagford quotation demonstrates something else as well: the “Green Man” developed an important new meaning during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Because the wildness of the Green Man’s antics suggested intoxication, the Green Man came to be a symbol for both distillers and pubs. Hence the sign of the “Green Man and Still,” and the many pubs called “The Green Man.” This is key, because it was the very existence of pubs called “The Green Man” that gave Lady Raglan the idea to name the foliate head a “Green Man.” In other words, the term she used came directly from this tradition of leaf-covered wild men. References to the Green Man did not stop in the seventeenth century. Indeed, in the hundred years leading up to Raglan’s work on foliate heads, we find numerous references making it clear that “Green Man” still meant principally a savage wild man, and that many English people would have understood the reference. The Green Man's connections to sixteenth-century pageants, to strong drink, and to tavern-signs were not forgotten; an anonymous 1838 essay on “Manners and Customs: Fireworks” states: “These men fantastically habited were called Green Men. …These green men attended the pageants to clear the way; they were disguised with droll masks having large staves or clubs headed with cases of crackers. Do we not recognise the strange fellows in “the Green Man” tavern signs of our day—as “the Green Man and Still,” in Oxford street?” “Green Man” was also used for artistic representations of this character, including carvings. A November, 1833, description of Grove House, Woodford, Essex, by Mr. A.J.K. [1] in the Gentleman’s Magazine (pg. 394) stated: “On the pediments with which the balusters of the staircase were connected stood two representations of those giant green men or hombres salvagios which either in pasteboard or wood were the marshalmen of every pageant….” A drawing of one of the “giant green men” was provided as well. Kempe made the connection between the carved Green Men of Grove House and the living pageant characters even more explicit in 1834, in a review of The History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies of London by William Herbert, Librarian to the Corporation of London: “Of the sylvan giants or savage green men...we have the following corresponding notice by Mr. Herbert: The most curious part of the land procession at the Lord Mayor's show near this time was the sort of character called fire-men or green men, and in the coronation pageant of Anna Boleyn ‘monstrous and horrible wild men.’ These were fellows habited like savages, in having dresses partly covered with green leaves, who marched before the procession flourishing large clubs to keep off the mob, and who were assisted by others, whimsically attired, and disguised with droll masks, having large staves or clubs headed with cases of crackers.” (The folklorist George Laurence Gomme was also interested in the Grove House carvings, and wrote in a preface to volume 15 of The Gentleman’s Magazine Library in 1893: “I am inclined to consider the carved figures of giant green men at Grove House, Woodford, Essex, to be a contribution to folklore, and it would be interesting to know what has become of these figures.” ) Llewellyn Jewitt, writing in The Reliquary in 1869, refers to “the green, wild or wood men of the shows and pageants.” Charles Hindley, in Tavern Anecdotes and Sayings (1881), writes: “The Green Man, as he was termed, was at one period of our history an indispensable object in the civic pageantries; the Orson of our day, bearing, like Hercules, a huge club.” An anonymous letter-writer to Hampshire Notes and Queries wrote in 1883: “The Green Man…is not derived from a gamekeeper turned publican but from the men who, fantastically dressed in green with masks and wreaths of green leaves on their heads, always formed part of the pageants in which our ancestors delighted, and preceded the procession to clear the way." James John Hissey wrote in Over Fen and Wold (1898): “It may be remembered that green men—that is men with their faces arms and hands stained that hue and their bodies covered with skins—were frequently to be found amongst the processions and pageants of the sight-loving Middle Ages, such a get up being intended to represent a savage, and constant mention of them was made in the old writings and plays.” These references show that the antiquarians, editors, and folklorists of the nineteenth century, including some of the leading figures in each category, were well aware of the meaning of the term “Green Man,” and comfortable using the term to describe a wild man bedecked with leaves. The Green Man was also defined in exactly this way in many nineteenth and early twentieth century dictionaries, including A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century (1850), The Encyclopaedic Dictionary: A New Original Work of Reference to All the Words in the English Language, with a Full Account of Their Origin, Meaning, Pronunciation, and Use (1884), The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1897), A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames: with Special American Instances (1901), The Reader's Handbook of Famous Names in Fiction, Allusions, References, Proverbs, Plots, Stories, and Poems (1902), Anglo-American Encyclopedia and Dictionary (1904), and, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary (1928). It was apparently in 1931, only three years after the Oxford English Dictionary published its definition of “Green Man,” that Lady Raglan first began using the phrase “Green Man” to describe the foliate head in her local church. As the above references demonstrate, the phrase at that time still meant “wild man dressed in leaves” in English, and had meant that for three hundred fifty years and probably longer. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, authors of The Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, claim in their article on the Green Man (one of the better and more balanced pieces to be written on the figure in recent times) that Raglan was “unaware of the Tudor and Stuart references to leaf-clad masqueraders in pageants.” This may be; she does not specifically refer to those references. But in referring to the common inn or pub signs, she was showing that she was still aware of contemporary manifestations of the same venerable figure. Simpson and Roud also state that Raglan’s theory conflated “items with widely different functions and histories…on the basis of a single visual trait, leafiness.” It may seem a rather obvious thing to point out, but in fact, the Green Man and the foliate head were equated because of at least TWO shared traits, more thematic than visual: greenness or leafiness (hence, green) and humanity (hence, man). While this does not prove any of Raglan’s theories regarding pre-Christian worship, it does clarify the thematic relationship seen by her and others between the foliate head and the earlier figures known as “The Green Man”: it is the combination of greenness or vegetation (which is associated with wildness, wilderness, or nature) and humanity (which is associated with society, culture, and intellect) that seems to define the idea of the Green Man [2]. Thus, while we may usefully debate whether Raglan’s application of the term “Green Man” to the foliate head was appropriate, whether it was “a good idea,” we should not make the mistake of thinking it was random, meaningless, or ill-thought-out. It was, as Roy Judge points out, a valuable poetic insight, but it was also defensible as a reasonable analogy between similar figures from traditional art. The fact that this connection had been made before Raglan will be explored in my next posting. Further questions, such as whether the Green Man can really be said to be connected to seasonal customs or pagan deities, will be discussed in future articles in this series. Notes [1] Presumably A.J.K. was Alfred John Kempe, a prominent antiquarian who frequently wrote for The Gentleman's Magazine. [2] One might, in fact, consider crediting Raglan with noticing four traits her church’s foliate head had in common with the previous idea of the Green Man: leafiness, humanity, maleness, and adulthood. The fact that the Green Man is an adult male is increasingly important in modern interpretations of the figure, which often consider him an archetype of the adult male. Given this, Simpson and Roud could be accused of trivializing Lady Raglan’s insight by ignoring three of the four things her “Green Man” shared with the existing Green Man idea. References: The references are in the text above in the form of links to the relevant books and articles in their online homes.

Thoughts on the Green Man 1: Introduction

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 10:45:00 GMT

Introduction:

Both before and after Lady Raglan’s landmark 1939 essay "The Green Man in Church Architecture," in which she applied the term “Green Man” to a carving of a foliate head in her local church, much has been written about the strange creatures known as “Green Men.” References to them in English go back to the sixteenth century. In the twentieth century they captured the imaginations of many people, from architectural historians to neopagan worshippers, and from folklorists to participants in Renaissance fairs. They have been even more appealing to folks in the twenty-first century, who have given new and interesting meanings to the Green Man. Books, articles, and websites on the Green Man abound, each of them looking at the venerable figure from its own perspective. In this series of posts, I will discuss a variety of issues that surround and emerge from the Green Man, like leaves sprouting from a smiling face.

Raglan’s essay, drawing on Frazer’s The Golden Bough, equated the foliate head with a wide variety of European customs, and postulated the origin of those customs in pan-European, pre-Christian fertility rituals. For many years, her intellectual heirs have seen the foliate head as a pagan deity, and interpreted modern folk customs as remnants or survivals of pagan festivals. Thus, in her online article “The Green Man and the Green Woman,” Terri Windling is able to describe several nineteenth-century customs (all of them mentioned by Frazer) and claim that they are “the debased remnants of pre-Christian rites and festivities.”

Neither Windling nor Raglan, nor for that matter Frazer, actually demonstrates that the rituals they describe are surviving pagan practices, or even that they have any connection to the Green Man (or Green Woman) per se. Intuitive connections were drawn by Frazer and some of his predecessors (principally Mannhardt) among practices that seemed similar, and a further intuitive connection was made between those practices and the Green Man by Lady Raglan. Because they are more concerned with profound mythological meanings than with day-to-day details, poets, artists, and spiritual seekers who admire the Green Man tend to follow this previous scholarship of intuition rather than exhaustively examining the rather mundane evidence surrounding such practices, which may be a description written by a visiting clergyman or a bare entry in a municipal account book. In the absence of a firm presentation of such evidence, they are vulnerable to the charge that there IS no very good evidence for the connections they are drawing. [1]

Wherever such vulnerability is found, sooner or later those who disagree will exploit it. In this case other writers, such as the architectural historian Richard Hayman, completely dismiss the notion that the Green Man might be connected to seasonal customs, pagan deities, or indeed anything other than medieval church architecture and medieval church doctrine. “The medieval populace was devoutly Christian, not defiantly pagan…” he asserts in the 2010 article “Ballad of the Green Man.” “Green men in Britain therefore belong to Christian rather than pagan iconography.” Eager to discount any connection between pagan practices and later Christian ones, he states that “antecedents in classical art exist but are unhelpful since meanings changed from pagan to Christian societies.”

Hayman may be right that a strong form of Lady Raglan’s theory is no longer tenable. But on the other hand, neither is a strong form of Hayman’s; no one would deny that meanings change over time, but the proposition that older meanings are unhelpful in understanding more recent ones would surprise any scholar who works with meaning over time, whether in history, linguistics, or literature.

Surely, then, there is middle ground to be explored. Are there connections between the Green Man and pagan deities to be found in medieval culture? I believe there are, but they are few and fleeting, and they may fail to convince the skeptical. However, an area that seems potentially more fruitful is the question of seasonal festivity. Many of the examples of green-man-like figures discussed by Frazer, Raglan, and Windling are parts of seasonal observances around May time, and it is because of this that Frazer initially connected them to pagan deities and tree-spirits; quoting Mannhardt, he stated that in these figures “the spirit of vegetation is blent with a personification of the season at which his powers are most strikingly manifested.” Hayman, on the other hand, states that the Green Man is “the latest accretion to the long cast of characters that have featured in annual May celebrations,” suggesting that the connection between May time and the Green Man, and hence between the Green Man and the similar figures discussed by Frazer, Raglan and Windling, is a recent idea. I think a careful examination of the evidence will show that Hayman is wrong, and that Frazer, Raglan, and Windling are at least partly right: the Green Man is an aspect of seasonal May celebrations, and has been for hundreds of years; given this, he may well be connected to the similar figures described by Frazerian scholars, whether or not such figures are pagan in origin.

Since both sides in this argument tend to skip over the step of carefully presenting evidence (rather than previous scholars’ opinions or their own poetic insights), I intend to begin this work with some evidence…specifically, evidence as to what the term “Green Man” traditionally meant. Before we can determine if “the Green Man” is a seasonal figure, we need to know what “the Green Man” is. Interestingly, Hayman begins his exploration with an overstated claim about the term “Green Man,” stating that the term was “coined in the 1930s for a medieval image of a face sprouting foliage.” [1] In fact, as both Raglan and Windling implicitly recognize, the name “Green Man” goes back in English much further: at least until the sixteenth century. As it turns out, the term referred originally to various characters in parades, pageants and plays. These characters were obviously similar to the foliate face christened a “Green Man” by Lady Raglan, in that they were human beings covered with leaves. Thus, while it is true that Lady Raglan first applied this name to the foliate head of church architecture in 1931 or 1932 [2], she did not “coin the term,” and her application of it to the foliate head was only one incident in the long history of the “Green Man” idea.

Part 2 of this post will examine the meaning of the term “Green Man” before 1930.

Notes

[1] They sometimes even contribute to this impression themselves, in the way they handle their evidence. Windling, for example, speaks of the French tradition of the “loup vert” and the Bavarian tradition of the “pfingstl” in the present tense, without giving any sense of when such traditions were current, making them appear at once ancient and timeless. This flattening of history makes such Frazerian works resemble anthropological studies of a country that never existed, where the practices and ideas of people widely separated in space and time seem to be located side-by-side for the anthropologist to study. This can be inspiring, but also misleading.

[2] In fairness, this claim may not have been written by Hayman. It comes form the abstract that precedes the article, and such headlines, abstracts, and summaries are often prepared by a magazine’s editorial staff. In any case, the claim is false and should be corrected.

[3] Windling gives the date 1939, which is an understandable mistake. Lady Raglan’s article applying the term “Green Man” to the foliate head did appear in 1939. However, in it, she claimed that it had been eight years since she had begun calling the foliate head in her local church “The Green Man.” This is corroborated by a letter to the journal Folk-Lore published in 1932, in which a Miss Durham writes of the same foliate head described by Lady Raglan: “There is also a couple of corbels carved with a face—in the mouth is a sprig of foliage on each side, moustache-like. It is thought to be a ‘green man.’” Clearly, she had either spoken to Lady Raglan, or Raglan’s name for the face had caught on with the local clergy. In any case, it shows that the foliate head in Lady Raglan's church was known as a “Green Man” by 1932 at the latest.

References

Note: Many of the references are in the text above in the form of links to the relevant books and articles in their online homes. The references below are to those items that cannot be found online without a subscription.

Centerwall, Brandon S. "The Name of the Green Man." Folklore 108 (1997), 25-34

Miss Durham. "The Dragon and the Vine." Folk-Lore 43 (1932), 360

Lady Raglan. "The Green Man in Church Architecture." Folk-Lore 50 (1939), 45-57