X – The Wild Man

The name itself has wandered almost as much as the creature.

Wodewose, woodwose, woodhouse and several other forms occur in English sources. The British Library notes that the Middle English Wycliffite Bible even used wodewose in its translation of Jeremiah 50:39, while the Oxford English Dictionary definition cited by the Library describes the creature as a wild man of the woods, satyr or faun. British Library

But the wild man was not uniquely British.

Variations appear throughout medieval European art and literature. The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted an entire study to the subject, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism, tracing the figure through manuscripts, decorative arts, heraldry and other medieval imagery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The familiar medieval woodwose is unmistakably human in form but separated from ordinary humanity by his appearance. His body may be covered in hair or shaggy vegetation. His beard is wild. His weapon is usually not a sword, spear or other manufactured object but a club, branch or uprooted tree.

He possesses human strength without human refinement.

And then somebody put him in church.

Quite a lot.

East Anglia became particularly fond of woodwoses during the later Middle Ages. Surviving examples occur at churches including Halesworth, Orford, Saxmundham and Framlingham in Suffolk. The Association for Suffolk Museums notes that they appear on baptismal fonts and church porches, while a rare female example survives in stained glass at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Association for Suffolk Museums

The fifteenth-century font at Haughley is particularly wonderful. Wild men appear around its stem beneath a bowl decorated with Christian imagery. One is even shown attempting to preserve his modesty, which seems unexpectedly bashful behaviour from a man otherwise famous for wandering around hairy and armed with a club. Britain Express

There are female woodwoses too.

The fifteenth-century font at St Catherine’s Church, Ludham, Norfolk, includes both a male and female figure. Both carry clubs. The male has a shield. The female does not. Whatever medieval artists thought lived beyond the cultivated fields, apparently it was not exclusively male. Ludham Archive

Their presence inside churches creates an obvious question.

What on earth are they doing there?

There is no single agreed answer.

That uncertainty matters because it is tempting to turn every medieval wild figure into evidence for some surviving pre-Christian woodland deity. The evidence does not justify anything so simple.

Church carvings could perform numerous functions. They could teach, warn, amuse, decorate, caricature or illustrate the dangerous world beyond Christian order. Medieval churches contained an extraordinary assortment of imagery alongside explicitly religious scenes, including animals, imaginary creatures, devils, occupations, jokes and moral warnings. DigitalCommons@UNL

The wild man fitted beautifully into that visual world.

To medieval Europeans, wilderness was not simply somewhere pleasant to go hiking.

Cultivated land represented human order. Beyond it lay forest, mountain and uncultivated country where that order weakened. The wild man inhabited that boundary.

He was human, but not civilised.

He possessed enormous strength but lacked social restraint. He could be dangerous and violent, yet he could also represent freedom from the restrictions imposed by society. As the medieval image developed, the wild man became capable of carrying contradictory meanings.

Savage and innocent.

Threatening and admirable.

Human and animal.

Civilised society’s opposite, while remaining recognisably one of us.

By the fourteenth century he had also escaped from the margins and entered fashionable society.

English royal records from 1348 describe garments associated with Edward III decorated with wodewoses, while masks representing woodwose heads were produced for Christmas entertainments at Otford. The figure subsequently became familiar in heraldry, where wild men appeared as supporters holding shields. Kent Archaeology

Elsewhere in Europe, pretending to be wild men could go catastrophically wrong.

In January 1393, Charles VI of France participated in the infamous Bal des Ardents, when several members of the French court dressed as wild men in highly flammable costumes for a masquerade. A torch ignited the costumes. The king survived, but several participants died.

The imaginary inhabitant of the wilderness had walked straight into the royal court.

And yet the woodwose remained at home among trees.

This is where we need to rescue him from another famous figure.

The woodwose is not the Green Man.

They are frequently associated today because both involve humans, vegetation and ideas about wild nature. But they are different medieval images.

The woodwose is fundamentally a wild human figure, generally represented with a complete body.

The image we now call the Green Man is usually a head or face associated with foliage, sometimes with vegetation emerging from the mouth.

More importantly, the name Green Man itself is surprisingly modern in this context. Lady Raglan popularised it in 1939 when she argued that foliate heads found in churches represented an ancient vegetation figure. Her interpretation became enormously influential, particularly within later folklore and Pagan writing, but scholars have challenged the idea that all such carvings represent a single surviving pre-Christian deity.

The same caution should be applied to the woodwose.

We do not need to turn him into a forgotten god.

He is interesting enough already.

Because he represents an extraordinarily persistent question.

How much civilisation does it take to make us human?

Strip away the house.

The church.

The village.

Clothing.

Tools.

Law.

Language.

Status.

Put a person alone among the trees.

What remains?

Perhaps that explains why the wild man never entirely disappeared.

We still tell stories about hairy humanlike creatures living beyond civilisation. Bigfoot, the Yeti, European wild men and Britain’s own modern cryptid reports occupy some of the same imaginative territory.

That does not mean medieval woodwoses were records of an undiscovered ape or surviving prehistoric human. There is no good evidence for that.

But culturally, the resemblance is fascinating.

Again and again we place something almost human just beyond the boundary of the known world.

The medieval boundary was the forest.

Ours might be an isolated mountain, deep woodland or some last unexplored corner on the map.

And the creature waiting there is rarely completely monstrous.

It looks just enough like us to make the encounter uncomfortable.

Perhaps the wild man was never really about something living in the woods.

Perhaps he was about the suspicion that beneath everything civilisation has taught us, the woods are still living in us.

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The Meaning of the Card

The Wild Man is the card of instinct, freedom and the self that exists beneath expectation.

When he appears, something may have become too controlled. Rules, obligations or other people’s expectations may have pushed instinct aside until you can barely hear it.

The Wild Man does not tell you to abandon civilisation and disappear naked into Sherwood Forest with a large stick.

Tempting though that occasionally may be.

Instead, he asks which parts of yourself you have labelled unacceptable simply because they refuse to behave politely.

There is strength here, but also warning.

Instinct without judgement becomes recklessness. Freedom without responsibility can become isolation. The woodwose stands between human and wild precisely because neither side alone is enough.

When The Wild Man appears, ask yourself: What part of me have I tried too hard to tame?

Sometimes the thing waiting beyond the boundary is not a monster.

Sometimes it is you.

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Sources

British Library, Medieval Manuscripts Blog: A Field Guide to Wodewoses. An excellent introduction to the wodewose in medieval English manuscripts, including the Middle English name and appearances in biblical and legendary material. British Library

Timothy Husband with Gloria Gilmore-House: The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980. Major scholarly study of wild-man imagery across medieval European art and culture. The Metropolitan Museum makes the volume available online. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Association for Suffolk Museums: The Last Woodwose. Useful overview of surviving East Anglian woodwose imagery, including examples at Halesworth, Orford, Saxmundham and Framlingham and the female figure at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Association for Suffolk Museums

H. D. Ellis: The Wodewose in East Anglian Church Decoration. Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology. Early detailed examination of the concentration of woodwose imagery in East Anglian churches and particularly on fifteenth-century fonts. Suffolk Institute

Anne J. Krush: The Historical and Archaeological Significance of Medieval Bench End Carvings in Some Parish Churches in Suffolk, England. Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences, 1984. Useful context for interpreting the varied religious, moral, decorative and everyday imagery found in medieval Suffolk churches. DigitalCommons@UNL

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Haughley: surviving fifteenth-century font with several carved woodwoses, providing a particularly good physical example of the figure in an East Anglian church setting.