Insane Beard,

I still can't see the smaller dolphins. They look like leaves in that picture. However, I will take your word for it, since you have seen the better pictures, and I imagine, the bench-ends themselves, and I haven't. I would say that most likely, if there are fishy things coming from his ears, they are probably fish. The ones on top of his head look like medieval north-European dolphin iconography, the others look quite different. Still, that makes little difference to your overall argument. Or to mine, which was really about a different bench-end.

I think we're at an impasse, where you will continue to give reasons why the bench-end figures on the other bench can't be "green men," and I will continue to give reasons why they can. The same evidence that makes you think it's impossible makes me think it's possible!

I will point out that the leaves on the "wild men" in the other bench-end cannot be seaweed, again because they are identical to the leaves on the foliate head.

I will also point out that your introduction of a spandrel with a wild man and a foliate head from 150 years before we have a literary reference to a "wild man" as a "green man" does not at all invalidate my argument. The fact that wild man figures were associated with foliate heads, and that such figures were sometimes called "green man," merely shows (as I have been arguing) that these two traditions (the foliate head and the wild man/green man) were connected long before 1939. The earlier you show me the two figures connected, the earlier I will believe the connection was made.

I have not given this the interpretations that either Centerwell or Raglan gave for it, but you continue to argue against me as though I had. But even for Centerwell's argument, your picture is not an impediment. Indeed, as you say, the figure you showed might well have inspired the pageant "Green Man." What bearing does this have on whether people might have called the leafy head "green man" as well? "Think much, say little" was already a common proverb at the time, and continued to be for hundreds of years. I don't see how its occurrence with the figures relates to whether they represent a connection between leafy heads and a figure that looked like what people called a "green man." I've never argued that these figures DON'T occupy "the moral & theological context of the time," and neither has Centerwell. You seem to think one of us made that argument somewhere.

The person you're REALLY arguing against is Raglan. Which is fine, but both Centerwell and I agree with you on all that.

So let's move to your other question, as to when the Raglan Orthodoxy took over.

I haven't seen the Pevsner book I recommended, but it is the one cited by Johnson in his notes to the Green Man poem, which is why I thought you should look there. However, I had another reason for recommending him in general. In Simpson & Roud's Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, in the entry on "The Green Man," they say:

Despite the fragility of Lady Raglan's argument, her term was adopted for foliate heads in several books on church art by M. D. Anderson in the 1940s and 1950s, in the authoritative series of Buildings of England guides by Nickolaus Pevsner, and finally...by Kathleen Basford.

So, I guess if you want to find out when he started to use the term, you'll have to line up his books from earliest to latest, and look through them! Sorry I can't be more help there...

The same may be true for Grigson. Johnson says elsewhere in his notes that he'd read all of Grigson's books, and he specifically cites An Englishman's Flora as well as Farmhouse. So I'd look in those two first.

Because of the way Johnson quotes him in my post above, it's hard to tell whether Grigson uses the name "Green Man" or not, but the quote about him being sacrificed annually and the name "Green George" indicates that, either he had read Lady Raglan's take on Frazer, or he had read Frazer directly.

Another thing to keep in mind: a good deal of "The Raglanite orthodoxy" preceded Raglan's 1939 article, even the connection between foliate heads and "Jack-in-the-Green." The only piece of the puzzle that she adds in 1939 is applying the name "The Green Man" to the Foliate Head. But the connection of the Foliate Head itself to the whole complex of pagan nature-myth had already been accomplished.

I'll quote from Lord Raglan's 1936 treatise The Hero, in the bit about Robin Hood:

"It is probable, as we have seen, that Robin Hood is Robin of the Wood. Now according to Skeat the original meaning of 'wood' was 'twig', and hence a mass of twigs or 'bush'; if this is so, then Robin Hood is Robin of the Twigs, or the Bush, which suggests connections with another well-known figure of the Spring festivities, Jack-in-the-Green, and with the carved faces, with twigs protruding from their mouths, which are a feature of so many of our old churches."

I hope that's helpful!