Insane Beard,

I see what you mean, but I do not think the bodies of the dolphins look identical to the bottom halves of the wild men/green men in the other bench-end. I think they look similar, but not identical.

Whether Dolphins have scales is, of course, irrelevant. Mermen do have scales, and if these are mermen, they should have scales covering their tails. At best, then, these are "men with dolphins' tails."

As I've pointed out, those leafy bits around the wild men's midriffs are clearly leaves, as they are identical to the leaves on the head of the foliate head. Other photos, such as the one in Basford's book, make this even clearer. They are also carrying clubs. So even if these figures were considered to be men with dolphins' tails, they would be a specific kind of men with dolphins' tails, that is, wild men/green men with dolphins' tails.

Mermen do not carry clubs (not an effective weapon under the sea!), but wild men/green men do. Mermen do not wear leaves, but wild men/green men do. These figures do. At the era in question (or at any rate, by a few decades later), a partly naked, hairy man with a club, wearing leaves, was understood as a "green man," and that's what we see in the bench-end, whether merged with a dolphin or not.

I also note that you yourself referred to these figures as "wild men," until I pointed out that at the time "wild men" and "green men" were synonymous. Then suddenly they weren't wild men anymore, they were mermen. (With clubs. And leaves.)

I don't dispute that the crowcrombe sequence has meaning as a sequence. But each individual bench-end also has meaning, and each individual element in each bench-end has meaning too. That's how meaning works. If you want to ask "what did the Green Man figure mean in the sixteenth century," you look for examples of a figure that conform to sixteenth-century descriptions of "green men," which these do, and you look at the contexts in which they appear, of which this is one. If you want to ask "what did the Crowcombe bench-ends mean," you look at each of them individually and all of them as a sequence. They are two different questions and require two different approaches.

I appreciate your combing your folklore books. The question of tracing the "Raglanite orthodoxy" is an interesting one. I'll see what I can find out, when I have time to look.

To really look into folklore that had vanished by the time antiquarians and folklorists began collecting the stuff, of course, we need to look into various primary sources. You won't find evidence in books on "folklore" per se. And, sadly, the primary sources are very unlikely to say "we see this figure as a nature deity," even if people did! But in any case, it was never my contention that people saw the Green Man OR the Foliate Head that way....