(Still on holiday, but briefly...)

It was Lady Raglan who first called the Ecclesiastical Foliate Heads after the Green Men / Man of folklore, pub names included - this amounts to a fairly significant coining, I'd say. Not only that, but it introduces a folklorist ideology into a non-folkloric setting. Further, the ideologies of folklorists are not folklore, but a secondary interpretative and entirely academic layer which itself gives rise to a tertiary quasi-religious (wiccan / pagan) layer, which is itself entirely bogus. It is the ideas of this tertiary layer that have coloured (green) our perceptions of The Green Man in every sense - linking the folklore, pub names & Ecclesiastical Foliate Heads to represent a single (and entirely modern) notion of Greenness=Goodness, even to the point where, with a few notable exceptions, Anglican churches & cathedrals heartily promote & encourage a pagan / folkloric / green-as-good interpretation of their Foliate Heads, rather than admit that they are part of the fabric of pre-Reformation Roman Catholic culture and theology (and post-Reformation too if their proliferation in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Norwich is anything to go by!).

With that idea of Greenness=Goodness in mind, have a look at the examples below:

Salle, Norfolk

Carlise Cathedral

Lincoln Cathedral

Norwich Anglican Cathedral

Chester Cathedral (Davros)

Maybe it's time we got rid of this daft notion of tree worship and fecundity. In the Ecclesiastical Foliate Heads we are not dealing with jolly Jacks-in-the-Green, rather images of a profound afflicting horror of nature at its most invasive & virulent. It is this, btw, that signifies the relationship the events of 1534 to the bench ends at Crowcombe which would certainly appear to be a bitterly Catholic reaction to the circumstances surrounding The Act of Supremacy, rather than some soppy depiction of carnival figures which makes no sense whatsoever in any sort of Ecclesiastical context. It's an interesting article though, which is why I drew attention to it; all articles & books on the so-called Green Man are interesting, often telling us more about the authors than they do about the subject in hand.