In a guest post, Prof Javier Garcia Oliva and Revd Prof Helen Hall look at the “Green Man” – the issue that arose in the recent consistory court case of Re St Edward’s Church, Kempley [2025] EEC Glo 1, in which their paper was cited in support of the conclusion that it is a Christian symbol.
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Introduction
This short paper seeks to examine:
- What has contemporary academic scholarship established about the origins, symbolism and interpretation of the Green Man image in English architecture, particularly in ecclesiastical settings.
- Why there are associations with the image and paganism in some parts of contemporary culture.
- Whether a Green Man image is permissible on a memorial headstone, in light of the applicable law and regulations.
Origins, symbolism and interpretation of the Green Man image
The Green Man symbol, in the sense of the “foliate head”, begins to appear in England in the early 12th century. The historian Ronald Hutton summarises its origins as follows:
“They were revealed to have been a motif originally developed in India, which travelled through the medieval Arab empire to Christian Europe. There it became a decoration for monks’ manuscripts, from which it spread to churches.”[1] Continue reading