Introduction
The wodewose
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Who - or what - is the wodewose?
Like Esau, or Elijah the Tishbite, he is a hairy man. The hair on his head, and his beard, are long and unkempt; the hair on his body is thick and curly enough that he has no need of other clothes; he almost invariably carries a rough club, sometimes a stick with leaves still attached.
There is no mystery about where to find him. Look in any late-medieval church in East Anglia (basically the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk) and you are likely to find him somewhere.
There are around 1,000 such churches and the majority of them have ornate stone baptismal fonts of a kind so popular in the region in the 15th century that the style is called simply East Anglian. These fonts stand on elaborate pedestals upon which are invariably carved figures - perhaps saints, perhaps symbols of the evangelists, but more commonly stylised lions. And alternating with the lions, or perhaps instead of them, are wodewoses like this one at Orford.
It has been supposed that the wodewose - like the not-to-be-confused green man, or Jack-in-the-green - was the survival into Christian iconography of a pagan character. You may find him associated with the satyr, the faun, even the yeti or bigfoot. If so, why does he make his appearance in East Anglia at just the time he does - centuries after the green man, but too early to be influenced by voyagers to the New World or the Himalayas?
The answer to this question might lie with the greatest invention of the 15th century - printing.
The greatly increased availability of books after William Caxton's press started up in 1450 was to wreak wide and fundamental change on the world, not least on Christianity. In Caxton's edition of Aesop's fables, published in 1484, "a wodewose named Satyre" confronts a pilgrim.
A little further back, a wodewose appears, confronting a lady, in a margin illustration in the recently discovered Macclesfield Psalter, which was written and illuminated by hand in Suffolk in about 1320. He is immediately recognisable, despite the strange fact that his bodyhair is blue.
When the East Anglian fonts were new, 500 years ago, they were brightly painted. It is rare now to find even faint traces of colour - but at Acle in Norfolk is this blue wodewose.
Wherever he is found he is usually wielding a club. Not infrequently he crops up in one of the spandrels above an entrance door, most likely confronting a wyvern, a fabulous beast with wings like a dragon, two legs, and a long, curling tail. Wodewose and wyvern oppose each other in terrible, fantastical combat over the porch entrances at Cratfield, Sweffling, Ufford and a number of other places: due to the effects of weathering, they may often be mistaken for St George and his dragon.
A variation on this theme is to be found at Yaxley, where a wodewose on the right is balanced on the left by a man, perhaps a giant, in contemporary 15th century dress fending off a wyvern with a club.
The ever-fanciful Arthur Mee, writing in 1941 in his popular King's England series of county guides, identifies the figure as St Blaise, patron saint of woolcombers - presumably on the dubious assumption that the object he raises is a comb - but undermines his credibility by glossing the symbolism utterly implausibly as "the triumph of Christianity over paganism".
The wodewose, for his part, defends himself against his familiar font-companion the lion. His red appearance is due to lichen, not paint.
On some other porches of the period, stone wodewoses may be found, clubs resting on their shoulders. This one at Pulham St Mary in Norfolk sits above the main entrance to the church - taking pride of place even over East Anglia's patron saint Edmund, whose martyred head, guarded by a wolf, is cast in stone on the side of the porch.
So some of the mystery of the wodewose remains - his origin, his exact character, his popularity in late-medieval East Anglia.
Even his name has ambiguities. You may find him called wodehouse or woodhouse: you may read that all these forms derive from the Anglo-Saxon wudewasa, or man of the woods. But is it significant in any way that Chaucer, writing in the 14th century, used the word "wode" in the sense of mad?
Were there wild, hairy men - perhaps mad? - living in the late-medieval woods of eastern England? If so, were they blue?
Most of the fabulous creatures carved in late-medieval exuberance - including the wodewose's conventional foes the lion and the wyvern - clearly derive from the popular quasi-Christian books of the bestiary. There are passing references to wodewoses or wild men in some versions of the bestiary, but they are by no means among the commonest characters to be found there.
I can find no explanation of any religious significance of the wodewose, or any source for his antagonism with the lion.
But at Norton, on a misericord carving that may well have come from the choirstalls of the great demolished abbey at Bury St Edmunds, the lion appears to have won. Life in the woods was not easy for a pagan survival - if that is what he was.
