Woodwose

The font at Cratfield is cold to the touch even in August, and if you crouch at its base you find him: a hairy man shoulder to shoulder with a lion, worn shallow by five hundred years of hands and damp. His club rests against his leg. His face has been rubbed almost featureless. He has been standing there, holding up a bowl of baptismal water, since the fifteenth century, and nobody who commissioned him left a word behind explaining why.

He turns up everywhere once you start looking. Badingham, Orford, Woolpit, Mendlesham, Framlingham, Peasenhall, Walberswick, Chediston, Wissett, Covehithe. Suffolk alone holds dozens, carved on font stems and porch spandrels and the ends of pews, usually alternating with lions, sometimes locked in a slow stone struggle with a wyvern. The English called him a wodewose. The word is old and slightly damaged: the Old English form has not survived in any manuscript, but it can be reconstructed as something close to *wudu-wāsa, from *wudu*, wood or forest, and a second element that may mean simply “a being,” from the verb to be. There is a bleaker reading. The same syllable turns up in German *Waise* and Dutch *wees*, both meaning orphan. Depending which philologist you trust, he is either the thing that lives in the wood or the one nobody came back for.

The name is recorded in England before the picture is. A man called Robert de Wudewuse appears in a document of 1251, carrying it as a surname, which means the word was already ordinary. It surfaces in Middle English in the 1340s, in a Latin inventory describing a hanging in the Great Wardrobe of Edward III, so by then he was a decorative fashion as well as a fear. His most famous appearance comes around 1390, when the poet of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* sends his hero north through a bad winter and lists what tries to kill him along the way. Gawain fights dragons and wolves, bulls, bears and boars, giants that come at him off the high fell, and *wodwos þat woned in þe knarrez*, wild men who lived in the rocks. They get one line and no description. The poet clearly expected nobody to need one.

What the carvers and painters supplied instead was remarkably consistent. From the twelfth century onward the wild man is hair, all of it, sprouting thick over chest and thighs and back, leaving only the face, palms and soles bare, which is precisely the pattern that would let a viewer see he was a man and not an ape. He wears nothing, or a rope of ivy at the waist. He carries a club, and often the club is not a club at all but a young tree pulled up whole, the root ball still clotted with earth, which is a way of saying that he does not make things. Whatever he needs, he takes standing up.

Where he came from depended on who was asked. Learned opinion reached backward to the satyrs and to Silvanus, the Roman god of uncleared woodland, and the resemblance is hard to argue with. Preachers had a shorter and more frightening explanation ready in scripture: Nebuchadnezzar, driven out from among men to eat grass like an ox, and rendered in art with the transformation complete. In the Roda Bible around the year 1000 his nails have curled into claws and his hair falls around him like a horse’s mane and he goes on all fours. The desert saints supplied a third route. Hermits such as Onuphrius were pictured after decades alone with their beards to their knees and their bodies grown over with hair, holy and barely human, which meant the same silhouette could signify either damnation or sanctity depending on the caption.

The German-speaking lands loved him most. Through the fifteenth century, workshops in the Rhineland, Alsace and Switzerland turned out tapestry after tapestry of wild folk at their business: hunting, feasting, riding stags, tending children in the leaves. He walked in carnival processions. He was hunted through town squares in staged pageants and dragged in chains before an audience that had paid to see it.

That appetite killed people. On 28 January 1393 in Paris, at a wedding masquerade, King Charles VI and five noblemen had themselves sewn into linen costumes soaked in resin and stuck all over with flax so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot. The six were chained together. Someone brought a torch too close. Four of the dancers burned to death in the hall, and the evening has been called the Bal des Ardents ever since, the Ball of the Burning Men. It was also called the Bal des Sauvages. The king survived because a duchess threw her skirt over him.

The romances went the other way and made him redeemable. In *Valentine and Orson*, twin brothers are abandoned as infants; Valentine is raised at the court of Pepin and Orson is raised in a bear’s den, and the wild brother must be hunted down, beaten, and brought home before he can be anything else. Tamed is the operative word across the whole tradition. A wild man could be captured, led on a chain, put in livery, and taught to bow. Once the trick was established, heraldry finished the job. Two of them hold up the royal arms of Denmark, clubs grounded, hair neatly stylised, a pair of *vildmænd* domesticated into shield-bearers under the Oldenburg kings.

His strength was never in doubt. He needs no fire, no roof, no cloth, no company; he can wrestle a boar, uproot an oak, and outlast a winter that would strip a knight to the bone. What he lacks is everything on the other side of the line. He does not speak, or reason, or worship, or build, and the sources are unanimous that a single man with a weapon and a plan can take him. That is the whole point of him. He is a measurement of the distance between the settled world and the trees, and the moment the trees stopped being frightening, around the time the last woods were fenced and mapped, he shrank into an ornament on a gatepost. He was never a god. He was the argument for staying indoors.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a woodwose?

A woodwose is the hairy wild man of medieval European art and legend, a human figure covered in fur from head to foot, naked apart from a girdle of leaves, and carrying a club or an uprooted young tree. The name is Middle English, from *wodewose*, and he appears in English church carvings, tapestries, romances and heraldry from the thirteenth century onward.

Where does the word “woodwose” come from?

It comes from Middle English *wodewose*, reconstructed back to an unattested Old English form such as *wudu-wāsa*. The first element is *wudu*, meaning wood or forest. The second is usually read as a noun meaning “being,” though it may instead be related to German *Waise* and Dutch *wees*, both meaning orphan.

Is the woodwose in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

Yes. In the poem, composed around 1390, Gawain rides north through winter and fights dragons, wolves, bulls, bears, boars and giants, along with *wodwos þat woned in þe knarrez*, wild men living in the crags. The poet gives them a single line and no physical description, which suggests his audience already knew exactly what a wodwos looked like.

Why are woodwoses carved in English churches?

They appear on fifteenth-century baptismal fonts, porches and pew ends, especially across Suffolk and Norfolk, usually alternating with carved lions around the font stem and occasionally shown fighting a wyvern. No medieval document explains the choice. The likeliest reading is that a font marking a child’s entry into Christian life was a fitting place to show the untamed nature being left behind.

How is the woodwose different from the Green Man?

The Green Man is a face made of leaves, carved into roof bosses and capitals; the woodwose is a whole hairy body with a club. They turn up in the same churches and are constantly confused, but they are two separate motifs, and only the woodwose has a name recorded in medieval English.

Related Entries

Green Knight, Green Man, Wild man, Herne the Hunter, Moss people, Moss Maiden, Waldgeist, Grendel, Satyr, Faun, Silenus, Basajaun, Leshy, Enkidu, Almas