Les, you may confidently declare that the "small collection of green men" you speak of are of "relatively recent origin," but in fact you don't know when they originated, because nobody knows. What we do know is that they were well-enough known by 1578 that one could instruct a company of players simply to "dress like green men" and they would know what to do.

You may add a hundred exclamation points after "Germany," but in so doing you reveal only your own parochialism. Neither the foliate head nor the combatant green man are native English traditions; both seem to be pan-European. Therefore, evidence about the origin and development of both the foliate head and the combatant Green Man tradition, and of connections between those traditions, may be (indeed must be) legitimately looked for outside of England.

Finally, you may pooh-pooh all this evidence as completely inconsequential and unworthy of consideration. In so doing you claim that you know more than the editors of the journal Folklore, who thought the article revealed enough new evidence to be worthy of publication. I know the editors of Folklore, and have published a paper there myself. They and their reviewers are pretty tough.

Finally, I've read the paper, and I find the evidence interesting myself. I don't know if you've bothered to read it or not. If so, of course you may disagree. But I find the tone of "is that it?" rather combative, as though you have something invested in the belief that there is no connection between these traditions.

I will repeat my position from above, and you can see if you really find it all that objectionable:

I think this connection is rather tenuous for suggesting that the two figures were always and everywhere equated...but it does show that as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and possibly even the early 14th, SOME people thought of the whiffer figure and the foliate head as connected. Since the whiffer figure was in some times and places called "The Green Man," and since the Green Man as a pub sign did come from this figure, there was already a web of connections among all the meanings of Green Man, including the foliate head, in the late middle ages and Renaissance. The idea did not originate with Lady Raglan. She merely was the first to directly apply the name "Green Man" to the foliate head and have it recorded for posterity.

It is possible, of course, that many people in olden times did NOT perceive a connection among these figures, but this is the kind of thing that tends not to leave much evidence.